I recently noticed something strange while comparing two novels I’m outlining.
One began as a completely original idea.
The other grew out of a virtual tabletop RPG campaign.
I expected them to feel fundamentally different.
Instead, after months of outlining, they were starting to ask remarkably similar questions.
There is a whole school of writing advice centring around the idea that a story starts off from a premise. I personally never subscribed to that school.
For me, a premise is only the skeleton of a story. The twin sisters story began from the ashes of my old WIP but also from the idea of a kidnapping. The other story somehow became a story of half siblings who barely knew each other working together. Now, did I intentionally decide that I want to outline two works, both about sibling relationships? Not really. It was percolating in the back of my mind when I was outlining the twin sisters story of whether I wanted sisters versus a brother and sister relationship. In the end, they became twin sisters and perhaps the brother and sister relationship resurrected itself in the other story. I don’t know. I didn’t consciously steer it that way.
So I have been going through my previous and current works with GPT in order to analyse my writing craft and probe into what type of writer I am and my creative process. And one of the surprising discoveries is that I have a distinctive ‘voice’. Not in prose, dialogue or humour as we conventionally thought of it. But in the kinds of questions my imagination keeps returning to regardless of where the story begins.
I am aware that some authors have recurring themes that they return to. Just the other day, I was telling a friend in my gaming group that I think Guy Gavriel Kay’s recurring theme is loss and loss of beauty in particular and that much as I admire his prose and the ability of him to write authentic historical fantasy relating to other country/ethnicities, I simply cannot read his books back to back else I will be reading series on loss in perpetuity (well, I had only read 3 series of his but seriously that’s the only theme across them). It never occurred to me that the same thing might be happening in my own work.
But I think that makes sense. No matter who we are, there is something unique driving us. For some authors, that’s their prose. For some, that’s a theme that keeps rising to the surface because it is something that the author cares about beyond anything else, a single question or themes that remain unresolved or predominant that keep drawing their attention. For me specifically, stories slowly drift towards the questions I genuinely care about.
Moonlake's Fiction Space 