HOWARDROBINSON

 

 

 

 

I recently completed a new short story called Just One Step Forward, which tells of a conversation between a young man contemplating taking his own life and an unnamed individual who happens upon him. It prompted one person to ask me why I always seem to write about the darker side of life rather than something more comic or light-hearted instead. It’s a fair enough question. 

 

I guess it’s what interests me most. I tend to think we learn more about ourselves when we are forced to face up to adversity. It is in those moments, when we are stripped back to the core, that through fiction we can begin to ask ourselves how we would react if we were faced with the same situation as the characters about whom we are reading. Good fiction should make you experience things, it should make you think and it should make you ask questions of yourselves. And sometimes it’s okay if it makes you feel a little uncomfortable because, although the story may be inherently dark, the counterpoint is always light and, if the writing is balanced, elements of both should still become apparent.

 

Great writing should trigger your imagination. It should cause you to step back from the hustle and bustle of your everyday existence and take you on a journey. It should provide you with an escape, whether to somewhere sunny, uplifting and humorous – and there are some fantastic writers out there delivering just this – or to somewhere deep within yourself and help you explore the human condition. Whatever the genre, great writing should distract you from your real concerns and help you to use your imagination to build your own picture of what the world could be like.

 

It should open your eyes to the world in a way you may not have previously viewed it. I want anyone who reads my writing to inhabit the characters I conceive, if only for a short time. I want them to imagine what it feels like to be a terrified mother whose child has been kidnapped; a terminally ill man committed to making what time he has left the best time of his life, or simply a policeman whose personal life is in shambles and who is desperate to get it back on track.  I want them to feel that fear, pain, joy and emotion.

 

Above all, great writing should reflect life in all its fragile beauty, using language that is both complex and simple to convey those emotions. It should take you away from your own experience of life so that you temporarily experience it through the eyes of another. And, of course, great writing should remind us that each of our lives is potentially a great story waiting to be written.

 

 

 

Howard's latest novel, Micah Seven Five, is published by independent publishers Inspired Quill. Click here to buy.