good fonts for writing first draft fiction

I may not be willing to delve deeply into my emotional world at this time, but I’m not ignoring it completely. In all of this writing, I am processing and prodding.

I am writing posts again, and I have been journaling all this time. And second, notice I said, “I couldn’t write FICTION anymore.” I did not stop writing I have not stopped being a writer. I have ideas I want to explore and projects I want to complete.

I will write again, books and stories both. First, fear not - this is NOT a permanent condition. Because my entire existence outside of writing was about pain and grief and loss, and the last thing I wanted to do was a deep dive into my own feelings for the purpose of bringing life to new characters. Then our older daughter’s health took a dramatic turn for the worse, and that was pretty much it. I spent the first half of last year doing a bunch of editing, for myself and for others, figuring that when those projects were through, I would dive into a new book of my own. It is coming slowly, and because I am essentially playing in someone else’s world, the emotions I’ll be mining are somewhat removed from my own. I have recently started work on a tie-in project (I can’t really say more than that, right now), a novel. I haven’t written a novel since I finished The Chalice War: Sword, late in 2022. In the last year, I have written two pieces of original short fiction. The problem is, sometimes we don’t want to go there. And by drawing on our own emotional experiences and memories, we can bring authenticity and power to the emotions we impart to our characters. All of us have felt anger and contentment, fear and resolve, love and hate, sadness and joy.

But “write what you know” does have some relevance for emotional writing. If all of us ONLY wrote what we “know” the literary world would be a drab, boring place. As a writer of fantasy, I approach this bit of wisdom with a healthy dose of skepticism. “Write what you know,” writers are often told. But sometimes - for me right now - it can be an overwhelming challenge simply to mine our own emotions so that we can draw upon them in our writing. Writers spend entire careers perfecting the techniques. Infusing our prose with emotion, capturing and portraying the feelings of our characters, using emotion as a tool to propel our plots - all of these things are really hard to do well. As I said at the outset, these are points I make at every opportunity, because I deem them so important to the success of any story. And those of you who are writers have probably heard me talk about this stuff before. Why am I telling you this? Many of you aren’t writers, and probably don’t care about the craft of writing. Without it, we might as well be writing shopping lists, or relating our stories in bullet points. Emotion is how we connect with readers, how our readers come to love (or hate) our characters, how our characters give meaning and purpose to our narratives. On the other hand, imperfections in our world building and our prose and even our plotting can be overcome with believable, memorable, relatable character work.Īnd I would argue that successful character work demands that we tap into the emotions of the people about whom we’re writing (even if they’re not technically “people”). Every other element of our storytelling can be perfect, but if our characters are flat and our readers don’t connect with them, we can’t consider our narratives successful. And, of course, we want our plots to be twisty, unpredictable, fun, and, ultimately, deeply satisfying.Īt the end of the day, though, the key to a successful story, at least in my opinion, thirty novels and nearly as many years into my career, is character. We want to create fascinating worlds, imbue those worlds with breathtaking magical systems or mind-bending imagined technologies, and give those worlds rich, complex histories, cultures, and religions. There are so many elements that make a book or story effective. Whenever I work with writers who are at the outsets of their careers - whether I’m editing their work for freelance or for an anthology, or teaching them in a workshop, or just talking shop on a convention panel - I try to stress the importance of delving deeply into emotion when telling our stories.

Good fonts for writing first draft fiction