This idea found a home in me after I had a dream.
I dreamt about a story I’m working on, with the writer of a film I have immense belief in. It wasn’t the dream itself that stayed with me as much as what it made me realise afterwards.
A subject really does stay with you.
Dreams are, in many ways, the subconscious continuing a conversation your conscious mind has been having all day. Of course, they’re processed, distorted, reshaped. But even then, the fact that my mind chose to dream about that story said something. Lately, that is what I’ve been thinking about more than anything else.
It made me wonder about other writers.
How much does a subject consume you when you’re deeply writing it?
Every writer has a different process. Some outline every beat. Some discover the story as they write. Some know the ending before the beginning. Some know just the characters and believe the story finds itself through them. Others have no idea where they’ll arrive. But perhaps there’s one thing common to all of them.
They become completely engrossed in the world they’re writing.
There are different kinds of worlds. Some are gentle. Some are funny. Some are unbearably dark.
I imagine writing a dark story must consume you in a way that leaves traces. You spend months, sometimes years, imagining grief, violence, fear, loss, guilt. You walk inside the minds of people who are nothing like you, and somehow they begin speaking in your voice. When you’re writing a climax that is horrifying at its peak, when every emotion is stretched to its limit, you’re asking something of yourself too. Your own fears, your own demons, your own understanding of humanity inevitably find their way onto the page.
How could a writer not be affected?
Writing is not just the act of putting words on paper.
It is observing people in cafes without realising you’re observing them. It is reading subjects you otherwise never would have. It is travelling alone. Listening more than speaking. Becoming curious about cultures, histories, professions, philosophies and lives completely unlike your own.
Your mind slowly becomes a warehouse of ideas.
You’re working obsessively on one subject while carrying thousands of others you’ve accumulated over the years. Everything sits there together, colliding, mixing, reshaping itself into something new. Sometimes it genuinely feels as though your mind might explode from carrying so much at once.
And then there’s another layer.
Fiction and reality eventually become inseparable through the writer’s ink. Whether consciously or unconsciously, your values always seep into your work. Sometimes it’s admiration. Sometimes disappointment. Sometimes anger. Sometimes compassion. Sometimes you’re arguing with the world. Sometimes you’re defending it. Whatever form it takes, there is always something of you inside what you’ve written.
There has to be. Your work becomes an embodiment of your way of seeing life.
While you’re shaping the story yourself, filling in the cracks, working through every puzzle, refining every scene with precision and painstaking detail; what you’re shaping is not just the story. You’re also shaping yourself with it.
Perhaps not deliberately. But inevitably.
Writing about a specific world also broadens your understanding of that world. To write truthfully about anything, you have to descend into it. Surface knowledge is never enough. You read more. You research more. You ask questions you didn’t know existed. You begin noticing details everyone else walks past. The deeper you go, the wider your perspective becomes.
In trying to understand one world, your own expands.
You also gain empathy. Not only for the characters you’ve created, but for the people whose realities inspired them. For cultures different from your own. For perspectives you may never have considered before. And when that story eventually reaches production, you witness an entire crew pouring themselves into something that once existed only inside your head. Seeing so many people care for your world changes you too.
World-building often reveals thoughts and emotions the writer didn’t even know they carried. A particular setting changes your language. It changes your rhythm. It changes your tone. Writing the same world over a long period slowly strengthens your own voice because you’re forced to understand not just how your characters speak, but how you speak.
Exploring fictional conflicts often helps make sense of real ones. Sometimes, by trying to answer questions for your characters, you unknowingly answer questions about yourself.
Sometimes, the writer changes more than the world they create.
That isn’t always true, of course.
If writing is approached purely as a technical exercise, if the world is simply something to construct and dismantle without emotional investment, perhaps the writer remains largely unchanged. Craft can exist without complete immersion.
But I suspect that the writers whose work stays with us are rarely writing that way.
Too many great writers come to mind to mention. But I’ll recall one of my favourites, Martin McDonagh. He once described his writing process by saying, “I literally, at the start of a film script, don’t know what’s going to happen. I maybe have one or two characters or a sense of what their characters might be, but I know absolutely nothing.” He’s genuinely surprised when one of his characters does something unexpected. I find that endlessly fascinating. He doesn’t impose the story onto the characters. He plants the seed and lets the story reveal itself. The characters remain honest to who they are, rather than obedient to the writer’s convenience.
That’s what makes them feel alive.
The subject consuming you is okay, I feel. In fact, maybe that’s exactly how it should be.
If it isn’t keeping you awake at night, if it isn’t something you’re thinking about consciously for the major part of your day and subconsciously all the time, are you truly immersed in it?
After all, writing a world is not a small thing. Typing isn’t writing. Writing is creating an entire world.
And perhaps that’s why the relationship between a writer and the world they create is never one-sided. They shape one another continuously. The world changes because of the writer, and the writer changes because of the world.
I think what writing gives back to the person writing is something that cannot quite be described. Perhaps one shouldn’t even try. It almost feels impossible.
And there’s a fitting irony in that.
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