What are you bringing to the table?

I wanted to write something longer today, but that will have to wait, so I thought that I’d point you to a wonderful interview with author Tobias Buckell over at Ficlets.  One of the things that struck me as I read it was that everyone has a unique perspective.

Although your perspective may seem banal to you, that is because you live it.  The key is to find the facet of your perspective which is different from the norm and focus on it.  This is one of the things that will make your writing interesting.  This goes along with what Mur said on a recent episode of I Should Be Writing, with regards to education (to sum it up, she said that you shouldn’t spend all of your time studying literature, other subjects can be just as, if not more, useful).

What it comes down to is that there are two fundamental parts to writing, the craft and the content.  The craft is how you write, and the content is what you write.  Both of them need to be in place for a piece of fiction (or non-fiction for that matter) to be worth reading.