When I was younger, I always thought I would be a writer. It was probably because I liked reading so much—I could go anywhere and meet anyone. Eventually, reading wasn’t enough, and I began writing my friends and I into our favorite stories. The wide-ruled pages are still in my closet, complete with chicken-scratch handwriting and poorly drawn illustrations. I enjoyed sharing these stories, imagining a world that was infinitely more interesting and adventure-filled than the one I actually lived in. I had no way of knowing if I was any good, of course. People my age liked my stories, but they also picked their nose and ate play dough. It was only until high school, where I started testing well and receiving positive feedback on essays. Writing—and writing well—was easier for me than it was for most of my peers. It seems like I unconsciously developed an “ear” for the English language, the way that musicians do for melodies. These are rules that anyone can learn, but they’re difficult to put into practice—the best way is to get an intuition for good writing by writing and reading a lot. Of course, I hit somewhat of a plateau in my late teens, but I did pretty well for the first 16 years of my life without trying much.
At around 15 or 16, I decided that I don’t have enough life experience to write a novel. I hadn’t met anyone or done anything particularly interesting. Any story I wrote would lack depth—it would be little more than my elementary school stories. It may have actually turned out to be worse, because I stopped adding stick figure illustrations to my writing after I moved on from wide-ruled paper to a word processor. For the next five or six years, I wouldn’t be able to write good fiction. The best I could do was record the memories that happened to stick in my head. They weren’t always the funniest, happiest, or most emotionally charged moments. They just were different enough from everyday life that they stood out. I did the same thing for all forms of art, including other peoples’ stories—if it had a lasting impact on me, I made sure to file it away into a metaphorical mental cabinet. Even if I don’t consciously remember everything I’ve stored away, it’s become a part of who I am. When the moment is right, it’ll turn up—whether I plan for it to, or not.
The day I’ve decided to commit to fiction has come. I’m telling everyone I know so the social pressure of being branded a liar lights a little a flame under my bum. Though I started some character sketches last year, I’ve decided to allocate specific time to novel-writing this year. That’s one lesson I learned in 2022: if you don’t make time for it, it won’ t happen. That includes spending time with your loved ones.
To ease the pressure of writing an entire novel—and to get some practice writing suspense—I’ll start with a short story. It involves a heist, and I’ve been working on it for about an hour every day this month. The good thing about writing fiction is that you can make up whatever details you want instead of having to fact-check. I don’t know jack shit about alarm systems or fingerprint scanners, but I can invent whatever I want for the sake of this story.
While making stuff up is fun (better to do it on paper than be a pathological liar), it does make fiction writing a lot more personal. Everything you write is filtered by your mind, body, and soul—even if it was based on real life, it was processed by your brain first. On top of that, the first draft of any fiction piece of mine feels childish and idiotic. By contrast, the first draft of any nonfiction piece is always incoherent and ugly—but never as foolish. Nonfiction is the truth, and if a reader doesn’t like it, maybe they’re not really interested in the topic. Or your writing wasn’t good enough to get them interested. That’s about it. When a reader judges a fictional work, on the other hand, they’re judging you. The literary arts, the part of writing that’s wonderful and vibrant and poetic, the part that transcends what we in the business call “effective communication”, that part is hugely subjective. Unlike academic or typical newsroom writing, it’s different depending on the writer’s voice. We’re not meant to like everyone, so it follows that we won’t like everyone’s writing. I dislike a good number of critically acclaimed writers, and I know I’m not alone. The most important thing for a writer—or any artist—to remember is that nobody’s art is universally accepted. All we can do is try our best.
Nobody’s read a fiction work I’ve written past the eighth grade, so I haven’t gotten a good sense of how my storytelling has matured since then. You guys will be the first to find out.
This Week’s Top 3
- M3GAN and The Menu 🍿 – double feature at the movies this week. Glad to see that there are good movies out there that aren’t sequels or reboots
- Hobonichi Techo Planner 📆 – helping me have a great start to 2023
- “Level Up” by the Cactus Channel 🌵 – great song to work to