Searching for a story: A look at my chaotic writing process.

Many of you may know that, in addition to being a historian and teacher—I consider YouTube to be an extension of my history teaching work—I write books on the side. This has never been a particularly lucrative sideline, nor do I ever expect it to be. Why I keep doing it is a fair question. I often tell people that writing fiction is mainly for my own mental health, to decompress my brain and get my head-space elsewhere than strictly historical subjects. To be more honest than that, while I find creative/fiction writing relaxing, often as not it’s quite frustrating. I thought I’d talk a bit about that process, even though it’s not a historically-based subject. I have shared before some glimpses of my writing life particularly at the paid-tier level, such as the introduction to the science fiction book I just completed, Faraway Star and its projected sequel Wild Among the Moons.

Since I just completed a book, I’m now in the often frustrating process of casting about for the next fiction idea to work on. I treat my teaching and YouTube video work as a day job and spend most of a working day on tasks related to it, so late afternoon, evenings and weekends are the most common times when I try to sit down and work on story ideas. Talk to any writer and they may tell you that it’s easy to come up with ideas—but good ideas, and especially those that have any chance of blossoming into a coherent, completed work that anybody in the real world would ever want to read, are as rare as hen’s teeth. Having written creatively for most of my life, only in the past 10 or 15 years have I been able to muster the life experience to notice what a colossal learning curve the process of writing a good story or novel really is. I’ve generally been pretty crappy at it for most of my life. One does get better at it, but unless you’re a preternaturally gifted genius at it—and there are such people—it may take decades, as it did in my case.