Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34686
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Music is a performance art, it takes place in "real time." Writing does not. So while there is an inevitable trade-off between spontaneity and polish for a musician, the same is not true for a writer, whose spontaneity is always an illusion. Your characters can be smarter and wittier than you, if you need them to be, because you can take hours to think of (or research) what they have available at the tip of their tongues.

In a sense, that's all peripheral to your real question: Should you play it safe or take risks? However, it's deceptive to look at this as an "or" question. Great artists of whatever the discipline must take risks, and leave their comfort zone, it's the only way they grow and expand their powers. But their best and most lasting work may not necessarily come directly from these initial experiments, but from the maturity of their mastery of whatever it is. There is no great artist without some ambitious failures hidden in their catalog.

So yes, go ahead and "write scared" if that's what it takes for you. Go out on a limb, take some risks. But don't be distressed if this "risky" book isn't the bestseller you're looking for. You can't be a good writer until you come to terms with the fact that **not every word you write is directly for your audience**. Sometimes what we write enlivens the final writing, but isn't directly contained in it. To put it another way, sometimes you have to write a lot of dross (or writer's notes, or unpublishable backstory, or failed experiments) to get to that nugget of gold.

Original score: 14