Dec 21st: Writing

[bluflamingo]

scrollgirl asked me about writing:

I remember being... maybe 8 or 10, I'm not sure... and writing a short story about three kids (me, my sister, and the son of a family friend) finding a dead body in the back garden and solving the mystery, and that's the first thing I remember writing.

It wasn't very good, but fortunately I think I've improved.

Someone asked me a few years ago where I got ideas for stories, or how I came to be someone who writes stories, something like that. I don't exactly know where I get ideas from, but I do know that, when my sister and I were kids, our parents read to us a lot. Stories were always part of our lives, and so was imaginative play. As kids, my sister and I were really close, more like friends than siblings, and we thrived on 'let's pretend' games. Our dad built us a little Sylvanian Families house (remember those?) and so we made up stories about our toys, and my sister had a baby doll that we pretended was a real baby. I know it's a cliche, but we really were the kids who found the box more interesting than whatever was inside it - because the box could be anything, but the toy could only be what it was meant to be. I think, as I got older, that turned naturally into writing stories.

The other thing I remember from being a kid was telling myself stories when I couldn't sleep. I still do it - when I'm trying to sleep, when I'm walking around, when I'm bored in a meeting. At the moment, it's post-Avengers fic where Clint gets captured and rescued and has a really hard time recovering. Sometimes, like with that one, it's a story I'm hoping to actually write, sometimes it never goes anywhere, and sometimes it's just nonsense, but it's oddly comforting.

I had my first story publication in 2005, in a queer literary journal that no longer exists, about a girl who's partner has just died. I went to the launch event - it was the first issue of the journal - and read part of my story, and the editor introduced me by saying that he'd been moved by my story despite never having met me, and that was part of the power of writing. I remember sitting on the train going home after and thinking, "I want to do this for the rest of my life." Although I haven't exactly made much progress towards that, it's still part of how I think about life. When people ask me what I'd ultimately like to be doing, I tell them it would be a mix of training, lecturing, and writing, and one day I hope I'm going to get there.

I find it really weird to be told that I'm good at writing, even non-fiction - my PhD supervisor keeps telling me how much she likes the way I write, and it's very odd to hear. To me, my writing is nothing special, and being able to tell a story is nothing special - it seems like something that everyone can do. Plus, I don't sit down and think up ideas or anything. I think I've said before that, more often than not, I have the first line and then I just keep going. I don't feel like I make up the story, I feel like it's out there somewhere, and really I'm just writing it down; that's also the reason I get bored with writing something when I know how it's going to end! It's only interesting to write when I feel like I'm being told the story as I write it, so I don't know what happens next.

I used to write pen and paper and then type it up, but that stopped after I wrote a 20,000 word story and then had to type the whole thing in time for a ficathon deadline. Not doing that again! Everything goes straight onto my netbook, with a cut file for anything I take out beyond a couple of lines, just in case I want to put it back again (like my first Atlantis big bang, in which I cut 40k when it came back from the betas, but ended up reusing about 20k of that in bits and pieces. Very glad I didn't just delete it!). I pretty much go from beginning to end when I'm writing, partly because I don't always know what comes after the current scene, and partly because when I do, I use the bits I want to write to get me through the bits I don't but need.

I vastly prefer being given some kind of prompt to being given a blank page and free reign, because that gives me something to stick on my mental pinboard, where it turns into something that I can write. It's why I love ficathons so much, and why, professionally, I pretty much exclusively write to short story anthology calls. Also, I much prefer short story writing to novel writing - with novels, I usually know the ending halfway through, and then I'm bored.

You know, reading through this, the one thing I'm noticing? An awful lot of my writing decisions are driven by avoiding being bored with the process. weird.