A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-And-Ninety-Seven

A great deal of my anxiety around fiction has been more about having an idea for a story than anything else, which I think is somewhat odd, if I consider it for a bit.  What I mean is that the concept for a story is not the thing that makes it work, the writing, the actually bulk of the effort is what matters more.  I can point at numerous works with identical, or nearly so, plots and there will be a great variety in terms of the quality of the work.  I suppose that a large aspect of it is that I feel quite comfortable with writing in general, and that is not something that changes so much when writing fiction instead of something else.  At the same time, I never really concentrated on fiction writing in this way, and so I have never really tried to come up with ideas for stories on the fly.  Now that I am beginning to feel more comfortable about that aspect of the work, I hope it will let me start concentrating on developing more understanding of the craft involved in writing good fiction itself.

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