Writer’s Corner: The Writer’s Responsibility

To me, the greatest joy in writing is the ability to create your own world. Stepping into the shoes of Christopher Columbus, the Franklin expedition, Marco Polo, or Francis Drake and telling the stories of new lands and new frontiers is just so inviting, but the analogy isn’t perfect as a writer, it goes even beyond that. The thrill of new world discoverers comes from discovering new lands and cultures, but no imagination is required to create these civilizations: they’re already there waiting to be uncovered.

he analogy is better suited to an avid reader of these works, rather than the authors themselves, where the readers get to experience these vast and strange new worlds laid out for them by the extraordinary talents that write them. While I definitely land firmly into this category when consuming these works, my writer’s drive leaves me hungry for more.

One of the big reasons why I find Science Fiction and Fantasy to be such an important genre is because of the unequaled freedom of expression it offers to its authors. True, fiction stories based in this reality have a great deal of creative freedom in what they offer within our world, but I find that the most gripping escapes are within the worlds that feel hand-crafted just for you, the reader. Reading stories with a lot of love and attention put into the details feels like it’s a gift that has been given personally to you for your enjoyment. It is an unexplored frontier that is inviting you to be the first to explore it and uncover its secrets; a new world full of possibility that don’t have to be constrained by the events that have already taken place.

This world is a blank canvas. Endless. Open. Untouched and unguided. Free.

The exhilaration of opening these possibilities can feel daunting, and indeed, having so much freedom can have the same effect as widening your horizons for the first time and visiting new places. You feel small, insignificant, and perhaps unworthy to tell the story, because who are you to feel qualified to tell this story? It’s an easy mindset to slip into, until you realize that there isn’t anyone else who can. The world in your imagination is uniquely your own, and you are the only one who has ever seen it.

If you don’t tell the story, nobody will. That world will be lost forever.

If it helps to motivate you, consider it your duty to document this world and the events that occur in it, for without you, we would never be able to know or understand anything about it and everything that occurs there will forever be unknown to us. Imagine if we didn’t have the writings of old-world scholars to document what happens during the time of kings and conquerors, how much we would never know about some of the most powerful civilizations on the planet. Consider how little we know about prehistoric cavemen, since they barely knew how to document beyond the cave drawings of their time. Imagine just how much knowledge and understanding will never be retrieved.

To me, this is the greatest motivation to write creatively as an author. It empowers me to know that I am the authority on this world, the one and only expert that has all of the knowledge within me that I can either choose to share with my peers or let it be lost forever.

It certainly gives the famous quote “with great power comes great responsibility” a whole new meaning.