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It’s strange to be writing again after such a long gap - strange but good – but I’m finding the need to write so very strong at the moment that I’m wondering what was going on over these past few years.
The thing is, I’ve always written, ever since I started with pony stories as a child. I have a collection of notebooks from my teenage years that make for painful reading, not because they’re badly written (they’re not), but because they’re complete Mary Sues. I was a fish out of water, a girl who wanted to be a boy but who was stuck in an all-girls school where she just didn’t know how to be a girl and play female social games (still don’t!); a straight-A student who was crap at sport, who thought she was fat and ugly, and who was being bullied (and who as a result developed never-show-weakness coping strategies that still have damaging effects on my life even now). When I read the teenage stories I wrote, all those Mary Sues, I can see so clearly that I was desperately trying to write a better life than the one I was experiencing. Living in a fantasy world was a much-needed escape, but it hurts to see it so clearly now, and also to acknowledge that I still go there in times of extreme stress.
So, the stress of what was happening in my life during January and February of this year undoubtedly fuelled a lot of fiction writing as an escape into a fantasy world (hot men this time instead of Mary Sues, but the principle is the same, I was escaping to a better place). What’s interesting is that now that the stress has dialled down, I’m still needing to write. Maybe the whole sorry business unlocked some sort of creative floodgate, I just don’t know.
It’s also interesting to me to reflect on what I’m writing. Given my subject matter and my main protagonists it may seem odd to say that I’m writing from personal experience, but I’m more aware than possibly ever before of how I’m drawing on things that I’ve experienced in my past. The selkie fic draws on leaving someone, not forever but for a year, and how that last night together felt, how I never wanted it to end and how it felt to know that time was moving on and the end was inevitable. And the latest fic... well, that’s really moving into personal issues territory, and if I do write a sequel piece it will be even more so. Which could be cathartic, or could be revisiting things best left buried, I’m not sure.
Whatever, I’m enjoying writing, being creative again. I’ll focus on that :)
The thing is, I’ve always written, ever since I started with pony stories as a child. I have a collection of notebooks from my teenage years that make for painful reading, not because they’re badly written (they’re not), but because they’re complete Mary Sues. I was a fish out of water, a girl who wanted to be a boy but who was stuck in an all-girls school where she just didn’t know how to be a girl and play female social games (still don’t!); a straight-A student who was crap at sport, who thought she was fat and ugly, and who was being bullied (and who as a result developed never-show-weakness coping strategies that still have damaging effects on my life even now). When I read the teenage stories I wrote, all those Mary Sues, I can see so clearly that I was desperately trying to write a better life than the one I was experiencing. Living in a fantasy world was a much-needed escape, but it hurts to see it so clearly now, and also to acknowledge that I still go there in times of extreme stress.
So, the stress of what was happening in my life during January and February of this year undoubtedly fuelled a lot of fiction writing as an escape into a fantasy world (hot men this time instead of Mary Sues, but the principle is the same, I was escaping to a better place). What’s interesting is that now that the stress has dialled down, I’m still needing to write. Maybe the whole sorry business unlocked some sort of creative floodgate, I just don’t know.
It’s also interesting to me to reflect on what I’m writing. Given my subject matter and my main protagonists it may seem odd to say that I’m writing from personal experience, but I’m more aware than possibly ever before of how I’m drawing on things that I’ve experienced in my past. The selkie fic draws on leaving someone, not forever but for a year, and how that last night together felt, how I never wanted it to end and how it felt to know that time was moving on and the end was inevitable. And the latest fic... well, that’s really moving into personal issues territory, and if I do write a sequel piece it will be even more so. Which could be cathartic, or could be revisiting things best left buried, I’m not sure.
Whatever, I’m enjoying writing, being creative again. I’ll focus on that :)
