Writing in the 21st Century appears here every Thursday. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to leave a comment, or email the author at mromard@gmail.com. This column is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
Small bit of administrivia before we start: I’m shortening the title of this column because it’s not really a how-to, exactly.
I was watching the special features on the Braveheart DVD that I have, and one of them was about Randall Wallace, the guy who wrote the script for the movie. Now, Braveheart is a flawed movie in many ways, but it’s also one of my favourites. It’s a very exciting, epic adventure story with kick ass fight scenes and it’s genuinely funny in parts (especially in the characters of Hamish and his father, and Stephen the Irish guy). Braveheart has also been attacked for its many historical inaccuracies, which are too numerous to list here, and would detract from the point that I want to make here (but just for fun, here’s an analysis of the first two and a half minutes, with several errors and a minute and a half of opening titles and aerial scenery).
In watching Wallace talk about the script, it’s pretty evident that historical accuracy wasn’t his biggest concern. He wanted to write something that felt true to himself as a story. It seems like any attempt to add historical accuracy only occurred after the script was completed. Wallace has a decent sense of humour about it, pointed out at one point that he was being made fun of for details like having a castle with glass windows.
Now, I’m not going to defend the film’s many inaccuracies. But I would like to point out that, in the end, they didn’t rally matter. Braveheart was a hugely successful film, doing well at the box office and winning several awards. And this happened because Randall Wallace wrote what he wanted to write.
You should do the same. If you want to write, you’re going to enjoy it a lot more if you are writing the stories that you want to write. I don’t care if it’s an historical inaccurate epic adventure, or some slash fan-fiction. If you don’t enjoy what you’re working on, at least a little bit, you’re not going to keep at it.
You may be limited in what you can do with your writing if you take this approach. You might have a hard time getting your work published. In fact, if you’re writing fan fiction, you may not be able to legally publish it at all. Some creators, like Diana Gabaldon get really pissed off at the idea that fan fiction even exists, whether it’s published or not. Others, like Charles Stross, don’t care as long as you aren’t making money from it, and they don’t have to read it.
Go ahead, let yourself write the story that you’ve always wanted to write. Who cares what other people think about it? What you think about it, and whether or not you enjoy writing it, is what really matters anyway.
