Insecure Writer’s Support Group: Fright Write

It’s the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG) post! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions.

The IWSG question for November is: Albert Camus once said, “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” Flannery O’Conner said, “I write to discover what I know.” Authors across time and distance have had many reasons to write. Why do you write what you write?

My reasons for writing fiction are to entertain and scare people. As a science fiction and horror writer, I try to write fiction that helps to change the world as well as entertain it. The ancient Greeks used to produce plays to teach morals. Other societies, primitive and ancient, told stories for the same reasons. 

Today they say you shouldn’t write fiction to teach anything whether it’s a moral or something else. However, I at least partly disagree. Yes, we need, and so I write, stories to entertain ourselves with. To live our everyday, relatively safe, ordered lives is boring. So we read stories about people’s whose lives are out of the ordinary. So, in a sense, I write fiction to give people adventures that they, like myself, wouldn’t take in real life. Many science fiction readers like myself like reading stories about alien invasions or supercomputers that take over the world and spy on an individual everywhere he or she goes, but we don’t want to be in those situations ourselves. 

However, we have a responsibility to help ourselves as a human race make a better life for all of us. Fiction can help us do that. Stories give us meaning. They give us a safe venue to learn how to handle the world’s problem’s without putting us in those problems themselves. And so, besides writing fiction to give readers a fun experience, I also write it to shake up readers to where they will hopefully think about the story a long time after they’ve read it. I write stories hoping they will make readers think that because a character made a big mistake a really terrible consequence occurred and that the readers will make extra sure not to make that or a similar mistake. 

An example of this kind of story would be one from my short fiction collection, “The Fool’s Illusion”.  In this story with the same name as the book, a character is so lust-driven that he has sex with a corpse. In doing so he disrespects the woman that corpse belonged to as well as her family who has tried preserving the sanctity of it. Because he does this, he finds out that the body is not the beautifully preserved woman he thought it was, a fact that will haunt him for the rest of his life if not longer. While this is meant to disgust and terrify readers from letting their self-centred passions control their actions, it’s also meant to entertain them simply because it is an event totally out of the ordinary and doesn’t involve them. The only way it involves them is the reading of the story. 

While I write to entertain readers, to give both them and myself a safe adventure into the extraordinary, I also write to warn them what can happen if we allow our own ambitions to go too far and, so, at the expense of other people. Yet, I don’t plan my stories around morals. I simply make them as convincing as possible with characters doing believable things which often result in believable consequences. In doing so, I hope that readers will understand how to avoid the mistakes that too much of this world is making, mistakes such as crime, racism, corporate greed and pollution. If the readers don’t make these mistakes to begin with then I hope they’ll discourage other people from making them.

Why do you write what you do?

Today’s IWSG is brought to you by these super co-hosts:, Jemi Fraser, Kim Lajevardi, L.G Keltner, Tyrean Martinson, and Rachna Chhabria! IWSG was founded by awesome author Alex Cavanaugh, writer of the Cassa Series of novels! 

Until next time . . .