Writing Log: Ch. 1
Forgivably,
the colossal effort of thinking up a story and writing it from beginning to end
is no easy task.
To add to the bad habit I have of procrastinating from writing said story, and to minimise my imposter syndrome
with the fear of calling myself a “writer”, even though it’s my longest
standing and most frequent pastime, I’ve decided, rather counterproductively, I
may as well start logging my writing progress, primarily for self-motivation,
but also as another way of writing about the idea, when the main idea is currently
lacking inspiration, or I want to consider ideas and get feedback/help from
other writers and readers like you.
I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, as the cliché
goes, but I have a tingling sensation that, for the first time, a finished piece of work I
actually don’t feel like tearing up and tossing out the window yet is on the
horizon, and I want to keep up the momentum. Small print: it may never go
anywhere.
I’ve written about four or five different stories over the
years, none of which have been seen by anyone who isn’t my little sister, who only
found them accidentally by raiding the darkness beneath my bed in search of my
other private property, for whatever reason that remains unbeknown to me.
There are several reasons why I never showed these to
anyone. Mainly, I didn’t think they were any good, and I could already picture
people’s reactions to reading it. It would be awkward and uncomfortable for
everyone involved.
More importantly, they didn’t feel genuine.
I only recently realised that, in all my creative writing
projects, I’d never once thought to write truly about my own identity. I’m a
gay woman in my early twenties, in a relationship, living in a big city, have moved/travelled
around a fair amount (in different kinds of households too), from a family with
two re-married parents, step parents and all the rest of it.
Meanwhile, I had spent most of my writing projects focusing
on trying to write about boy characters (largely, because I identified with
their romantic lives, and thought I’d be able to write about this convincingly),
straight relationships, people from happy nuclear families, who probably lived
in typically middle class nice houses, and whose parents were probably still
together. I wrote about very static, fixed things and people, the very opposite
of how I feel and think about myself, about others, and about life in general.
I didn’t notice this at the time of writing them; only
looking back did I realise how fake they sounded. It was so obvious that even I
didn’t believe in what I was writing, as I tried to erase my own experience.
There was so much of my personal experience, and that of other people in my
life, that I was literally gliding over for the sake of seeming palatable.
It would be rather hypocritical of me to be preaching about
representation and writing about it in an academic setting, and on social media, and then continue
to write about what is already the
norm. That isn’t my story.
Last year I was lucky enough to meet Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties) at the Dylan
Thomas Awards in London, as my girlfriend had been working with her nominated book
at the time. I took my copy of her short stories, a collection of wondrously
dark and deliciously queer tales, to get signed. Brimming with different
questions to ask, I chose the one question that I’d been so confused about for
years. How much (as a queer person, and as a woman) should or shouldn’t you
write autobiographically?
In the inscription, Machado wrote, “write the stories only
you can tell.”
It changed everything about the way I write. I’m now 35,000 words into my second draft of a queer fiction novel, called
Almost Heaven. For me, this is the story I always wanted to read, and it's been burning at my finger tips for a long time coming. Now I'm ready to see it through, and eventually (hopefully) share it. Let the challenge begin.
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