Writing As Metals

Metals are amazing things to me. We take them so for granted, but they have truly amazing properties on every level. On the atomic level, metals have their own kind of bonding where electrons are shared amongst all the atoms in a "sea of electrons" (which is part of why electrical power works). In metallurgy, you start dealing with alloys, which are not molecular bonds, but really just mixtures of metals - and yet the combination of these metals completely change the properties, and the proportions of the mixture can wildly change the properties, too.

I see a lot of similarities between writing and metals. Every kind of writing is like a different kind of metal. Each one has its own qualities and its own uses. Some of them are very similar, and some of them are completely different. Some are quite malleable, and others are very difficult to work with.

To some degree you can mix styles of writing to come up with new ones. When you take a fantasy story and replace magic with technology, it becomes science fiction. When you mix science fiction with action/adventure, it is usually sci-fi. When you mix science fiction with dystopian antiestablishment, it's cyberpunk. When you mix science fiction with melodrama, it becomes space opera.

Now, classic sci-fi, cyberpunk, and space opera all have science fiction in them, but they are all vastly different from each other, and they are significantly different from their original components. Different people appreciate these things for different reasons. Some people love cyberpunk because there's really cool-looking outfits and technology in it. Some people love it because there is action that occurs unlike any other kind of genre. And some people love it because it can be a haunting foretelling of a future gone awry.  Similarly, people may love gold because it is shiny, or they may love it because it is so useful in engineering, or they may love it because it is such a fascinating chemical.

I would recommend thinking of writing as metals, but that really only works if you already understand a bit about metals. So if this was an interesting post, let me recommend that you start learning about metals. Study them from different angles (as a a chemist, as a metallurgist, as a jeweler), and see how else they have qualities similar to writing.