Writing In the Dark

Several people I know have asked me how and where I get my ideas and truth to tell if you do a lot of reading, most ideas seem pretty well grounded in human experience. A few seem to go beyond experience and expand upon what we know and a few are far reaches of pure imagination yet even those rely heavily upon what we experience for their foundations.

A far more difficult question for writers is often ‘why’ do we write. And here there is an interplay of character and society because there is a difference between creative writing and artists, a difference between a Clancy and a Steinbeck. Creative writers do very well in the stable of the BBC churning out work to a given formula of time and content, artists write without much care for whether or not they will make any money though they do want to eat, but because they desperately need to write in exactly the same way as a photographer needs to photograph – it is about the innate desire to be historians of the human condition and by so being change things. Change thinking, change society’s mores, change the way people become insensate.

Sometimes creative writing for money becomes an art as in Balzac but such artists are rare, Liszt would be another. For the most part artists are bad with money even when they have it.

But they are brilliant with the conscience of the world.