You can use world-building to distract yourself during a never-ending catastrophe. But that same process can also help you (and others) imagine a path to liberation.

The best world-building contains the seeds of change, and allows us to see how things could be different. And conversely, a lot of mediocre world building contains the unspoken message that “This is the way things are, just because. And there’s no point in questioning any of it.” How things work is often not as interesting as how they don’t work. And the ways that they should work, if things were better. And the way things used to work, until something went wrong (or right).

Charlie Jane Anders in Never Say You Can’t Survive

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

Jack London

My best stories are usually the ones where I had a clear idea in my head of what I was exploring. Those are the stories where the plot and the story, and the concerns of the characters, are tightly bound up with the narrative’s thematic concerns. Likewise, as a reader, I get more wrapped up in a story that seems to have something specific on its mind.

Conversely, stories that I can tell were written without much introspection on the part of the author often feel mechanistic to me – things happen because they happen. The characters go through the motions, but none of it has much weight beyond the stakes of the plot.

Charlie Jane Anders, Never Say You Can’t Survive

[B]eauty impels us to pay a certain kind of attention. It startles you and prompts you to cast off the self-centered tendency to always be imposing your opinions on things. It prompts you to stop in your tracks, take a breath and open yourself up so that you can receive what it is offering, often with a kind of childlike awe and reverence. It trains you to see the world in a more patient, just and humble way. In “The Sovereignty of Good,” the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch writes that “virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.”

David Brooks

by Sarah Ruhl and from the Jan/Feb 2023 Poets & Writers.

Sometime I forget why I should keep writing. I hope you make a list of your own. Here is mine.

Write for God. The cave. The envelope.

Write for your mother. Your father. Your friend who is sick.

Write for the future. Write for the past. Write for the present, but sideways.

Write for the child who saw cruelty, and for those dispossessed of language.

Write for your daughter. Write for your son. If they don’t exist, write for the dream of them.

Write for your uncle to weep, for your aunt to laugh. For your babysitter to cover her face with recognition.

Write for the church you walked past with a sign that read: THEATER AT SACRAMENT. And you misread it as: THEATER AS SACRAMENT.

Write for the accountants whose eyes are too tired at night for numbers. For the farmers who grow your corn.

Write for your teachers. Write for every single hour they left off writing their own sentences so that they could read yours.

Write to thank the books you love.

Write for yourself.

Write for God. The cave. And the envelope.

“I usually had very few friends, and I was lonely,” [Octavia E.] Butler said. “But when I wrote, I wasn’t.” 

In other words, people naturally create stories, breaking up those clock-ticking seconds and replacing them with dramatic rising action, heart-stopping climaxes, and resolutions. Storytellers “lengthen time” with focus and careful description and contract time with descriptive brevity, summary, or even absence. The simple choice of when to start and when to stop the story imposes significance and value on certain events and diminishes others.

Kylie Nielson Turley

“Equally important, the scene is required for what it does to the reader’s emotional involvement with these two people. As they become friends, they win our friendship. As they impress each other with their warmth and generosity, they impress us as well” (107).

            –Wayne Booth on E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India

Some writers claim to extrude a book at an even rate like toothpaste from a tube, or to build a story like a wall, so many feet per day. They sit at their desk and knock off their word quota, then frisk into their leisured evening, preening themselves. This is so alien to me that it might be another trade entirely. Writing lectures or reviews – any kind of non-fiction – seems to me a job like any job: allocate your time, marshal your resources, just get on with it. But fiction makes me the servant of a process that has no clear beginning and end or method of measuring achievement. I don’t write in sequence. I may have a dozen versions of a single scene. I might spend a week threading an image through a story, but moving the narrative not an inch. A book grows according to a subtle and deep-laid plan. At the end, I see what the plan was.

Hilary Mantel

It’s appropriate to pause and say that the writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.… The not knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.… Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.

~Donald Barthelme, “Not-knowing”