How do you create something beautiful if you have never witnessed it yourself?
We all know that works of literature often contain the most beautiful stories, the most beautiful worlds, wonderful characters, beautiful relationships, true friendships, loyalty, and above all: hope that there is something good in the world. Something worth living and fighting for. When I was younger, and watched lots of Star Trek, read Tolkien, and also explored other fictional worlds, one of my thoughts was: "Yes, it's a different world. It's fantasy. But somebody must have experienced something similar to be able to describe it so well. The author must have experienced true friendship/true love/loyalty etc. to be able to describe it." It was my belief that if someone was able to write about it and describe it, then there must be a reason for it, especially when it came to such intangible things as love, friendship, trust, and what it was like to experience them. So I grew up with hope. But I also hoped that Michael Jackson would one day walk around the corner, then I could ask him for help, and he would help me. Learning how to ask someone for help in English was one of the first things I learned when I started teaching the language to myself. I had a vivid imagination. I was full of hope. I needed that hope, I needed to believe that someday someone would truly care and understand (and at that time I was only eight years old). I held on to hope and my dreams for a very long time. After all, if Tolkien wrote about it, then those loyal people had to exist somewhere, right? And Michael Jackson was a real person, too. He did exist (as mentioned in another post: even though I obviously liked his music, I was more connected to his loneliness, and the strength he displayed in dealing with all the bad things in his life, and it was devastating for me to see that he eventually lost the fight).Anyway, year after year passed. There were no magical moments. I could only watch how other people received all the little things I wished for, and how they did not even know how precious what they received was. I could write a whole book about my life, but it's not something I want to share. I only wrote this bit, so you might understand a bit more about where I am coming from.
Writing has been a way to express myself for quite a long time. One of the very few friends I had during my school time also encouraged me to write Sailor Moon fan fictions, in which we both also turned into magical characters. Unfortunately, she completely changed when she had her first serious boyfriend. She even skipped the final exams because of him.
Fortunately, losing her didn't make me stop writing. Writing often helped me because I could express myself, and pretend that some magical, invisible friend was reading my words. In my other school, I then also chose to take part in a creative writing class, and always enjoyed writing essays in other classes.
When I was 17 or so, I also started writing on my novel. I had ideas, and I wondered why there wasn't a book like that out there yet. My characters developed (often just in my head) a lot over the years, more and more points of the plot turned up (often just in my head, and then jotted down in a variety of different places). By now I kind of know how it roughly works out, but I feel like I still cannot write. So far, over the last 15 years, I only managed around 80-100 pages (and many of them still have to be translated into English because I wrote them when I still lived in Germany, but would now not ever want to write in German again). But those pages are not all chronological. Every time I come to certain parts, I just can't write it. I literally wince, get up, and stop writing. And if I forced myself to at least try, the results are horrendous and it hurts me to write these things. Because I have no clue what I am writing about, and it shows. It reads like a technical manuscript.
Sometimes I try to be clever. And sometimes it works, e.g. before something I can't write about happens, something else happens that prevents the event from occurring. It would most likely frustrate readers very much. I know how much it frustrates me. I did a similar thing with the fan fiction I wrote. But that is just a short tale, and I had a very clever way to prevent writing about things I cannot write about. Nobody would know the real reason why I did certain things with that story.
So how do people do it? Or is it just my problem? How do people create beauty when they do not know it themselves? To me it is a bit of a problem now, because I cannot work on my novel without finding an answer to this. I can torture my characters emotionally and spiritually to no end. I have enough experience with those things myself. I can do dark stories very well. But for this novel, it would just not work.
Maybe I need a ghost writer for part of the book? Because I have lost a lot of hope, and I know how unrealistic my dreams of the past were. I have given some of them up completely, and now try to find something else to keep me going. But it certainly doesn't help with my writing.
How do other writers deal with things they need to put into their books but that they know nothing good about?
Edit: Of course I know how things could be, should be, or how I would LOVE them to be. Or I could describe things the way others do - but it would not be me. It just does not sound right. It would be fake, because I would not believe it. And even though my novel is a fantasy novel, I do have to be able to believe into my story to a certain degree. Does that make sense to anyone?
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