Most of all, to write something I'd like to read.
I also aim to be at least a little unique - say, an Alternate History
where magical creatures are well-known
, and seeing how it would impact society. Do they need licenses to practice magic? If so, how easy are they to get? If not, how is the use of magic monitored, if at all? Not to mention its effects on technology, as my magic doesn't cause electricity to go bonkers. Steam trains didn't go out of style, as magically-created, fuel-less fires work pretty well instead of coal fires, for example. A Bag of Holding
can bought in a store, but they're very expensive. Banks have protection against magical intruders as well as physical ones. And so on.
Sometimes, I aim for a specific style. I once wrote a short story that was set entirely in a hypercube. I wanted it to be as mysterious as possible, so I wrote in first-person
. The protagonist woke up in there, but didn't bother explaining how odd it was, as this was part of a test he volunteered for. However, I didn't tell
the reader it was a test, and the testers were only referred to vaguely, as "they" and "them". I also never used the words "hypercube", "tesseract", "experiment", etc. in the story, so the reader would have to use lots of lateral thinking to figure out what was going on, with warped gravity and rooms that loop back on each other.
"The Uncertainty Principle isn't about uncertainty and it isn't a principle; other than that, it's perfectly named." — David Van Baak