Thoughts on Writing, for Writers. I’ve always thought about stories, and…
By: Mark Alvin Ligaya
Tags: Writers Life, Writers On Writing, Writer, Writers On Medium, Writing

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

I’ve always thought about stories, and writing them. At least since my interest in being a writer grew. As a storyteller, you can be very confident about your stories as you are writing them and they can still turn out to be too cheesy for some readers, or too boring or too cliché. The point being, stories will always have their fans and bashers, much like other crafts. Now imagine if writers stopped writing stories because they have been too afraid to be criticized. Could we have had a world with timeless and beautiful stories?

Stories are their own worlds, and some people relate more to specific type of stories than others. Writers must often succumb to the pull of being “marketable” and play it safe when writing stories and novels. It’s of course not bad, especially in a world where new stories, novels and movies are being created daily. Writing marketable stories make sense especially in a very competitive landscape, all the more if writing is something you get your main source of income from. The dark side of this is that the intent to “sell” as a writer overpowers the need to just write. This is understandable because being “marketable” is often associated with “good writing”, to which I humbly digress. Think about award-winning Hollywood movies as an analogy. Not all of them are necessarily box-office successes. One could even argue that most of them aren’t. Some writers write to “sell”. Some writers sell to “write”. What do I mean? Going back to the film/movies analogy, there are directors who are definitely known in the industry who can cleanly execute and direct movies which can sell and be a box-office success. They treat the craft as a business. These are formulaic movies, which when put under the “critique’s lenses” may not necessarily be “culturally important”. This classification is of course murky, in that it’s largely subjective. Not that there’s anything wrong with this. It’s actually smart. The risk here is if artists forget eventually why they want to “sell”. Some of them get too absorbed into just selling until they forget the heart of the craft. To write truly important stories. Stories that change the world. For me, being commercially successful must only be an initial stepping-stone into a “sustainable” process of creation. Writers, painters, singers, song-writers and other types of creative endeavors must eventually use their talents, hopefully after commercial success, to change the world for the better. Not that these two are always mutually exclusive, because sometimes, the world is also kind enough to reward talented artists to be both commercially successful and culturally important creators.

The wonderful thing about stories is that there might be similarities among them but each will be unique in its own way, the way how each person is unique. Identical twins will still tell the same experience as two different stories, because of the uniqueness of our perspectives and the richness of language with which we can use to tell stories. So if you are a writer who just happened to stumble upon this, and you have the same thoughts about stories, I am hoping that this can make you realize that you are not alone in your worries and hesitations as a writer. Writers write, and they write as often as they could. It’s not bad to desire to be “read” by as many people as possible. It’s human nature. But to stop trying because your initial body of work seems to be taken for granted, or did not initially get the attention you think it deserves, hopefully does not discourage you to still continue writing.

There are really no “official rules” or “creed” to writing. Like other art forms, the heart of writing is in the process of creation and reflection. It’s in the process of making sense of a beautiful, sometimes strange and dark world, and in the process contribute to the narrative of truths, to represent the specific story types you are in the best position to write about, because of your unique life experience, and perhaps change perspectives about it or maybe make someone feel less alone in their journey in the story called “life”.