Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "judge-dredd"
On writing of the future that may be, and the past that wasn't
It's hard to write cyberpunk.
Or any science fiction at all, for that matter, but cyberpunk's what I'm currently writing so it's the most relevant bit for this. It doesn't flow out of me as fantasy does: I keep having longer breaks, I constantly second-guess what I'm putting down to paper, my mind drifts to other things, and in the end I get out only somewhere around two thousand words a day at most. Really hard to obsess over, and feels a lot more like work.
A big part of it, I think, is the relative lack of works - books, comics, video games, films - to find inspiration out of. There's just so much more fantasy stuff available than scifi: I have to go actively looking for the latter, where I just keep stumbling at the former by accident - and then I read them and end up getting a couple ideas for some really great fantasy novels that I can't wait to get to writing. My head ends up bursting with all the wrong sort of thoughts. My focus is where it shouldn't be.
I feel like it's a sort of a vicious cycle. There's more fantasy than scifi - and so people get more excited by fantasy, and inspired to write more fantasy, and make the whole problem worse. A dark and nigh-inescapable mire of magic and dragons and wonder, spitting out more of the same, growing bigger and stickier with each new work of fantasy. The scifi equivalent is more like a puddle that you have to actually go looking for, and if you leave you will get lost and have a difficult time coming back... and the whole time you risk being swallowed by the great big fantasy swamp. You have to work a lot harder for that. Or, maybe it's just me and I'm overthinking the whole thing.
Right now I want to write about pirates.
Or any science fiction at all, for that matter, but cyberpunk's what I'm currently writing so it's the most relevant bit for this. It doesn't flow out of me as fantasy does: I keep having longer breaks, I constantly second-guess what I'm putting down to paper, my mind drifts to other things, and in the end I get out only somewhere around two thousand words a day at most. Really hard to obsess over, and feels a lot more like work.
A big part of it, I think, is the relative lack of works - books, comics, video games, films - to find inspiration out of. There's just so much more fantasy stuff available than scifi: I have to go actively looking for the latter, where I just keep stumbling at the former by accident - and then I read them and end up getting a couple ideas for some really great fantasy novels that I can't wait to get to writing. My head ends up bursting with all the wrong sort of thoughts. My focus is where it shouldn't be.
I feel like it's a sort of a vicious cycle. There's more fantasy than scifi - and so people get more excited by fantasy, and inspired to write more fantasy, and make the whole problem worse. A dark and nigh-inescapable mire of magic and dragons and wonder, spitting out more of the same, growing bigger and stickier with each new work of fantasy. The scifi equivalent is more like a puddle that you have to actually go looking for, and if you leave you will get lost and have a difficult time coming back... and the whole time you risk being swallowed by the great big fantasy swamp. You have to work a lot harder for that. Or, maybe it's just me and I'm overthinking the whole thing.
Right now I want to write about pirates.
Pankarp
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