What you research is what you write

I remember that moment when I finished writing the final words of my first novel, A Song of Swords and Dragons, how easily it came to me, how little resistance there was. It all just flowed and flowed and never stop, and thus I wrote my first book at 16.

But nowdays, although I have read a lot, have been exposed to so many genres, movies, stories, ideas, literary techniques and philosophies, I seem to arrive at a road block again and again.

I have started many stories, but have not finished them.

But how is it that I wrote my novel so easily in the past? Logically, should it be easier for me now?

Now , when I think of it, I think there is a good reason how I wrote.

I was a huge fan of fantasy literature, games and movies.

I consumed them through out my life. Fantasized about fantasy for many many years.

Although now I have dabbled into many literary genres and topics, I don’t think I have studied enough.

Literature, in my opinion, need not be seen as that different from scientific thought.

When we think about how one can make discoveries in physics, one would go through this kind of thinking — Learning from many physics books and teachers, and then developing the field furthur.

So why don’t we see literature as the same thing?

Should it always be about some incident that happened to us? Should it always be about expressing our emotions?

I mean, everyone has emotions. Even those people who hate art have emotions. So are they performing literature when they are writing about their emotions?

I think Great writers teach about what to do, and Poor writers teach you what not to do.

To me, literature is kind of like painting. When you learn painting, you start off with many principles, philosophies and so on.

In the same way, literature can also be learned, taught, and it’s principles deciphered or hypothesized.

The problem is, the principles of literature cannot always be learned by our conscious mind by consciously reading conscious words.

May be, there are some unconscious symbols at play here.

Data must be fed to our subconscious machine. Data feeding means reading basically.

We cannot always state the principles of literature, but may be we can make our subconscious recognize those principles, find out why a work of literature is great, soak up the melody, the styles of the masters, joy creators, happiness stimulators.

The reason I was able to write my novel was because my subconscious had picked upon medievalism through years of study and engagement, and it had prepared a novel already which only needed a slight nudge to be activated and manifested in the real world.