Why We’ll Never Stop Asking ‘What If?’

What if? It’s one of the most important questions for a writer, and one that we should never stop asking. No matter what stage a writer is at in their career, it’s a question that will always be relevant.

There must be very few writers out there who, when they first thought that spending lots of time putting words on a page might be a good idea, didn’t think: what if I wrote a book? And what if it did really well?

I think one of the reasons this simple question is so important is because it manages to embody so much in just a couple of small words. As well as encapsulating the hopes of many a writer, it also has plenty of uses for plot.

It’s a question that all writers will ask themselves at some point during the process of planning a novel. What if this character did that? What if I had a look at this concept in this way? What if the novel ended like this? As well as helping writers to develop plots, it also reminds us that so much of fiction writing is just asking ourselves mad questions and seeing what happens when we try to answer them.

And, increasingly, the question of ‘what if’ can be applied to other aspects of novel-writing. In particular, more and more writers are asking themselves the question: what if I self-published my book? It’s an option that, even just a few short years ago, many writers might have rejected. Now it’s a viable, desirable route to take, and an increasing number of authors are finding out for themselves what they can achieve through self-publishing.

It’s something plenty of writers have already seen the benefits of and, thanks to them asking themselves ‘what if’, they’ve helped to blaze a path that other writers can now follow with confidence.