Your sins will find you out #AtoZChallenge – Peculiar ‘Pen fellows’ – Quirks only a writer can understand

 

Your sins will find you out 

Creating a whole new world can be incredibly gratifying. It can also be terrifying. You have a responsibility to all who live in it. The decisions are yours, you preserve the history, the governance – it’s all yours. And, okay, this might be an imaginary world so the consequences are different but think about all the influence you have among readers who enjoy to spend time there. Now, I’m not saying we’re gods, but we do hold a certain amount of power. A writer can educate, inspire, and reach people through their words. We make people laugh, offer them a place to escape and sometimes, find comfort. 

So, though our readers know the world isn’t real, they still invest, and feel disappointment if we get things wrong. That’s not to say they don’t forgive us our writing sins, because they do. They choose to ignore the errors in our timeline, the facts about our characters that don’t corroborate. We’re only human, after all, and we can’t focus on every character at once. 

There are ways for us to keep track, though it’s difficult to log every event that unfolds. We create complex systems and the notes we make can become a jumbled array of facts and information. Timelines need to be upheld, but also the strings that bind people (characters) together. This only becomes more complex if we have a number of series attached to the same world, each separate in their own right, but interlinked so that crossover is possible. 

It’s a lot. We might find a way to record every last detail pertaining to the world itself, and we still miss things. But as long as we stay faithful to the story, and not change the rules for the sake of changing them, any sins will be forgiven!   

Thanks for stopping by

Mel