What happens when you’re the odd one out – If ‘the man’ said no, you can’t do this thing that you’re born to do? What would happen if you did it anyway? And what about something else, like free-trade? Is it a good thing? If things never changed, how long would we survive? What are the strengths of anxious people or introverts and what if the world knew how to use them?
It turns out I ask a lot of questions. Fiction, whether it’s reading it or writing it, is one of the key ways we explore these ‘what-if scenarios’.
A few years ago, I attended a workshop on storytelling by a PhD candidate whose name I can no longer remember nor find. She was researching why writers write, and, overwhelmingly, it’s always about answering questions.
Being published was (and remains) always secondary to me. What I’m trying to do when a new story or character emerges is I’m trying to answer something for myself. Whether or not it gets published isn’t about whether the story itself is good (although knowing about how stories work helps), it’s whether the publisher believes that there are enough people in the world who are also trying to answer the same question. That, for me, is really the key to determining whether we reproduce an idea 10,000 times or not.