Fiction Writer’s Toolshed · Practical Tools for Authors
Have you ever been excited about a story idea, then started sanding away the parts you love because they don’t seem to fit what readers, agents, or your genre expect?
I’ve been doing that, too. In this episode, I explore what I’m calling your creative core: the things that keep pulling at your fascination. Then I share a four-question audit to help you notice what you want to write -- and what you keep filtering out before it reaches the page.
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Fiction Writer’s Toolshed
What Should You Write? A Creative Core Audit for Fiction Writers | ep 020
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What this episode covers
- How trying to fit assumed expectations can strip the excitement out of an idea.
- What Mike Mignola’s work on Hellboy made me think about creative freedom.
- How craft and genre knowledge can help you express the things that fascinate you.
- Four questions to explore the stories you actually want to write.
What I mean by “creative core”
Think about the subjects, images, characters, questions, emotional tensions, and moods you keep returning to. Your creative core is the pattern in those fascinations. It doesn’t have to fit neatly into one genre, and it isn’t a fixed definition of who you are as a writer.
In the episode, I call the cost of filtering those interests over and over the “mediocrity of filtration.” Is this commercial enough? Literary enough? Genre enough? By the time an idea gets through all those filters, the thing that excited you may be gone.
Try the Creative Core Audit
Take out a notebook or the notepad on your phone. Give yourself room to sit with these questions. They aren’t meant to be answered quickly.
What keeps showing up in your ideas?
Look for subjects, images, and emotional tensions you return to again and again.
What do you secretly love but routinely cut?
Think about things you filter out before you even write them down because they feel too strange, too sentimental, or as though they won’t fit.
Which creators make you jealous of their freedom?
Set fame and sales aside for this question. Who seems completely free to be themselves in their work?
What story would you start tomorrow?
Imagine you didn’t have to prove that you belonged in a genre or write to market. Imagine you could execute your idea really well and a million people would read it. What would you begin?
The million readers are part of the thought experiment. Let yourself imagine that the pressure to find an audience has been taken care of, so you can see which story you’d choose.
This is my current best approach to a problem I’m working through myself. At the time of recording, I hadn’t tried the audit yet; I planned to do it that weekend. I’m sharing it as a tool to explore, with room to learn from what happens when we use it.
Where craft and readers fit
Craft matters. Genre literacy matters. Readers, editorial advice, and learning from other writers matter. I think those things should help you express your creative core.
That’s also how I’m thinking about voice here: as something that begins to emerge when your craft becomes sharp enough to express what keeps pulling at your attention.
Mentioned in this episode
- Mike Mignola (opens in new tab) -- the Hellboy creator whose work prompted part of this discussion.
- Hellboy (opens in new tab) -- the series discussed as an example of a creator making room for his own fascinations.
Make room for the story you want to write
Start with the four audit questions. Take your time with them, especially the things you’ve been dismissing as too strange or too much like you. What story keeps pulling at your fascination?
Fiction Writer’s Toolshed: Practical Tools for Authors is a Make Exist podcast hosted by Tim Kearney. It offers hands-on training for fiction writers to diagnose writing problems, build their skills, and finish more work.