Since one of the advocacies of the LitCritters is Speculative Fiction, we are occasionally forced to think about our poetics and how they are reflected in our body of work. Having been writing for a while now -- not as long as some other authors, but enough to get out of the "writing for writing's sake" phase -- there are some questions that buzz around in our heads when working on the latest story.
Dean's most recent core LitCritter lecture listed some of these questions. They are:
- Why write this story?
- Why write this type of story?
- Why write this story now?
- Why write this story in this way?
- How does writing this story challenge you as a writer? How does writing this story improve you as a writer?
- How is the completed story an expression of your poetics as a speculative fictionist? How is the completed story an expression of your poetics as a filipino?
- Why bother?
A lot of these questions stem from the realization that our completed stories (which will hopefully be published and hopefully be read) are the only possible physical manifestation of our writerly poetics.
