Last week I wrote about what it meant for me to aim high. A significant part of reaching for the stars is not grasping them. I believe that for me to be fulfilled as an artist, I have to try to hit some pretty difficult targets. I also acknowledge that for me to live as …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Aiming High Part 2 – Missing is Not Failure
I don’t know about anyone else, but I started writing stories because I had to. It, being a writer, was what I wanted to be, but more importantly, and far more primal, was the need to tell stories. I needed to write them down, the tales that flowed in fractured circles in my head; the …
For me, aiming high in writing is to simply try to do the best I can, write as well as I can, and try to express my ideas in a way that satisfies both my potential readers and myself. But of course, there is always more to it than that, or this article could start …
I think many writers spend some time forging their own writing identity: the what it is they want to write, and how they wish to present it to others. For many a young writer there is a phase of aping the things they love, and it can be a very conscious process. It certainly was …
Continue reading Why I Write Fantasy: Honouring Influences Without Being a Slave to Them.
All writing, it seems to me, begins in your own head. Sometimes it will be written as a strong spontaneous reaction to outside stimulus – protest songs, polemical essays, critical feuds, a satirical impulse to start telling a particular story in order to hit a particular target, but for me, the story starts as a …
Continue reading Why I Write Fantasy: The Travel Begins at Home Edition
For a long time I did not travel. My memories of flight were fuzzy – laying my jacket down on the floor and sleeping between the seats on a flight across the Atlantic in 1974. The weird sensation of the ground I walked on not being solid, the vague bounce I had never previously experienced …
In the late 2000s there were two years in a row when my sister sent me fantasy novels for Christmas. These are always welcome, and the choices both years were excellent and made a lasting impression on me, enough for me to consider them contemporary influences: books so good they raised the bar, made me …
Continue reading Why I Write Fantasy: The Christmas Presents Edition
The first love you wrote, I mean. Of course, many authors successfully publish their first loves, and do astoundingly well. For others there is another story, of a first, or first and second and more novels written and discarded, before a book is released to the reading world. I’m guessing that one of those discarded …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Letting Go of Your First Love
Last week, I wrote about the green suitcase in our garage that yielded two world-changing books, the first of which was Nine Princes in Amber. The second book I found in that fateful suitcase (and now that I write about this, it is such a strange happenstance to have so impacted an impressionable child) was …
Continue reading Why I Write Fantasy: A Suitcase of Treasures, Part 2
As I’ve said in other articles, I’ve known forever that I would be a writer, and that I would write fantasy stories. Apart from one cathartic journey into writing nursing fiction, which still had elements of the fantastical (how many nurses find themselves talking to the devil and questioning their own sanity?), all of my …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Being True to Your Instincts
Roderick T. Macdonald 