“Why Did You Write This?”

     The news remains drearily predictable, and I have no high philosophical insights about politics or public policy to regale you with this morning (“Does he ever?” rises the mumbling from the peanut gallery), so I thought I might entertain you with some thoughts about why writers of fiction do what we do. It’s freshly on my mind anyway, as another writer who’d just finished Innocents asked me the title question about that novel.

     Fiction writers are as varied as any other walk of life. Our reasons for doing what we do range all over the motivational map. Many would take the title question as an affront, raise one eyebrow in a silent expression of haughty disdain, and stride purposefully away – and not because the answer is “obvious,” for whatever value of “obvious” you might care to apply. That having been said, the answers tend to cluster into categories:

• Money: Robert A. Heinlein maintained to the end of his life that he wrote “to buy groceries.” I never believed it, but it was his consistent answer to the question, and no doubt it would apply to many other writers.
• Entertainment: Many a writer simply likes to entertain, and likes being known as a capable entertainer. It’s the same motive that causes some partygoers to tell endless jokes and vignettes, thus becoming known as “the life of the party:” “You can’t throw a decent party without him.”
• Message: For all the scorn that’s been poured on “message fiction,” there are many writers who write to promote a particular view of Man and reality. Military SF writer Tom Kratman put it thus: “I write to illuminate eternal verities.”

     Those categories probably envelop the great majority of writers’ reasons for writing fiction. But there are some that don’t fit in any of them. My reason for writing Innocents was one of them: curiosity.

     I chose the critical plot element of the book before I wrote it, of course: the emergence of a biotechnologically enabled subculture of perversion and enslavement focused on futanari. But I didn’t want to make the story a simple crusade against this new evil. Instead, I decided to impose one of the “products” of that evil industry on a good man as his personal problem: “What do I do with this girl?” It was only then that I set my fingers to the keys and began to write.

     But even then, I had no clear idea of where the story would go. I had to write it to find out.

     I had a gaggle of useful characters already “in stock” from previous stories: Larry Sokoloff and Father Raymond Altomare, from Shadow of a Sword; and Dean Amanda Hallstrom and her students at Athene Academy, from “A Place of Our Own” and “One Small Detail.” I’d explored their motivations and reactions in those earlier tales, and I was curious how they would cope with the two new Marquee Characters: Fountain, the story’s “problem,” and Trish McAvoy, Larry’s seemingly “difficult” colleague.

     There you have it: I didn’t know how the characters I’d loaded into Innocents would proceed with this new problem. I wrote the novel to find out. To do so, of course, I had to get even more deeply into the mindsets, assumptions, preferences, and convictions of those characters than I’d gone before. I got to know them to a new and startling depth.

     Georges Simenon, who wrote nearly two hundred novels, had the same underlying motivation. He once spoke of his indispensable conditions for producing one: he had to be completely alone and undisturbed for a couple of weeks – often he took up residence in a hotel – and he had to have a problem whose solution he could not foresee: “Otherwise, it would not be interesting to me.” It spurred him to a degree of productivity few other writers have attained.

     While I don’t aspire to Simenon’s level of output, I can testify to the power of curiosity as a motivating force for a fiction writer. I’m unsure about recommending it widely – writers are as individual as snowflakes, and what works for one could prove poisonous to another – but it’s my necessary fuel, as critical as a good supply of coffee and Oreos.^® And for those of you contemplating giving “National Novel Writing Month” a spin, it might be worth exploration. I mean, if you know how the story ends, why bother to begin it, much less finish it?