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Heyyyy I am really good at leaving asks in my mailbox, just thought I'd brag about that. Anyway, one thing I was thinking about is how I started writing stories down when I was about 4 years old, and even wrote "fanfic" of my favorite stuff (Somewhere on legal paper is an unfinished Eros and Psyche tale I started when I was no more than 7 -- the dialogue was largely plagiarized, but it was practice). The idea that one could "be a writer" was a constant one, and I wrote shit down all the time. However, when I got older, there was a somehow oppositional idea pushed at me that there was a "proper" way to "be a writer". My 9th grade English teacher, a true favorite and a good guy, the one who exulted over my bawdy portrayal of Mercutio and my analysis of Hawthorne and Crane, may have asked me or I may simply have told him because I was excited, what I happened to be reading outside of class. I was absolutely enthralled with this thick anthology of horror fiction I'd borrowed from my mom. And I had been writing Shirley Jackson-inspired macabre little short stories for a couple of years at that point, too. "HORror??" He was incredulous. THat was GARbage! "But what about 'The Turn of the Screw'?" Oh, that was an exception, it didn't count as horror either really, no true Scotsman (I didn't know that phrase yet and he didn't use it but you get the idea). It was discouraging! I kept on writing fiction, but it got really, really dry or else really jejune and damp. I took the "write what you know" way too literally, because when I went too far out into the realms of the weird, it got no response or a puzzled one at best. I was a huge nerd and teacher's pet. I thought I was going to be an academic at that point and was working my ass off to get there. Thing was, I wasn't exceptionally good at it unless I got very imaginative and syncretic and had a teacher who was into that sort of thing.
By the time I was 20, I was still trying to "be a writer" and I even got a summer scholarship to a prestigious master class program. Heavy hitters teaching. Sharon Olds, Rick Moody. I got to take a class with one of my short-story idols, Barry Hannah, who said I reminded him of one of his old students: "She wrote beautifully, but she didn't have anything to write about. Then she published her first novel, and it was excellent." That novel was The Secret History, it feels both important and weirdly humiliating to point out, seeing as I have not published a novel at all, let alone something that awesome. The story I was the most proud of writing that summer (not with Mr. Hannah's class) was a rural gothic about vampires. It was also about adolescence, family, and transmuting the hunger of hardship, grief, isolation, and longing into something comforting or at least nourishing. The notes I got on the story were puzzled. Why was I writing this lurid grand guignol stuff? Meanwhile there was an 18-year-old in my cohort who was impossibly sophisticated and had an internship at The New Yorker (and no, I didn't hate her, she was a delight, I just had no idea how she did it). I was clearly supposed to be writing the sort of short stories or poems that got published in The New Yorker. Literature. Otherwise why was I wasting my time and someone's money studying?
My writing petered out pretty quickly after that. I just felt this phantom scrutiny every time I picked up a notebook or opened up a blank document on the computer. There was no joy in it. I stopped, and felt abject for stopping. Over the course of my adult life I had my hand in journalism and even wrote a column for the paper in a small city for a couple of years. I became a crack shot at editing other people's fiction, and ran the short story section of a local magazine. My own shit, nope, never made it out of the gate.
Then, in the fall of 2020, I decided to give myself a birthday present. I took a little 4-week online writing class. The teacher was a TV critic from the school of Television Without Pity and the general heyday of media blogs. I started looking at the frivolous stuff I enjoyed with a writer's mind. I think that was my first real breakthrough into writing for fun again. Then I gave myself another present and took a couple of a friend's erotic writing workshops. I wrote a piece in ten minutes that made people gasp and want to hear it again and again. That was the juice.
In 2021, I fell in love with an arty murder show and when it came to its breathless conclusion, I lost my mind. I needed MORE STORY. That's how I got into reading Hannibal fanfic on AO3. Some of it was not my thing, but some of it was fucking electric. I started commenting. A lot. It wasn't really parasocial (except when it was), it was a passionate engagement with stories and how to tell them over and over in so many different ways.
Yesterday I was showing some of my fic to my sister, and I crowed about how I'd written 3,000 words of blistering smut and angst and banter in an evening, and pushed through when it was tough going. "I just thought I wasn't good at writing after all, but it turns out I just hate writing literary fiction. I was born to write GARBAGE." Glorious trash. Stuff that makes people laugh or gasp. Louisa May Alcott wrote her "sensation stories", and I'm writing my fic about the arty murder show. I am happier than I have ever been. Last night I wrote 2,000 more words.
And that's how I became a writer. :)
