Contemplating my process

I’ve not had a good relationship with my fiction writing in the last year or so, if not longer, and figuring out what’s going wrong there is an ongoing issue. Writing fiction used to be my passion, one of the great loves of my life, so the loss of it is really hard. I’ve been finding it increasingly difficult to make stuff up. It’s a loss of self, as well as the creative impact. So, what went wrong?

I spent a lot of years trying to write commercially, and while this works for some people, it doesn’t work for me. The bottom line is that I have to write for love – love of the work, and also love of the people I am writing for. I’m not talking ‘love’ in an exaggeration of ‘rather like’ here – as it is too often used. I’m talking passionate, devoted, slightly deranged, obsessive, driven, overwhelmed and absolutely have to write in order not to be entirely drowned by that sort of love. It is not an easy thing for other people to deal with, which is probably why somewhere in my early twenties, I stopped trying to work this way and started trying to be all professional, grownup and sensible about the process. That’s not working, and I am increasingly clear that the only way forward for me involves a willingness to be utterly vulnerable.

I work best when I’ve got a very specific audience in mind. Ideally it needs to be more than one person and if I’m writing for a couple of people whose needs and tastes don’t neatly match, then that creates a really exciting kind of tension, out of which things happen. My other half is fantastically supportive, but there’s just the one of him, and things I write for him or because of him can be too immediate and intimate to want to share more widely. I need more people in the mix.

I need feedback. I’m a bit of an attention junky (not an uncommon trait in writers and performers). Having people who will interact with my work, talk to me, read it, tell me what works for them, and generally get active about being my audience makes a world of difference. The odds are that anyone undertaking to do this simply becomes one of the people I write for.

Muses. These are always actual, alive people who are present in my life. People who inspire me both creatively and emotionally. It has to be both, because when this works for me, the two things are largely interchangeable. Love is inspiration, and inspiration is love.  People who catch me that way are few and far between, especially in a sustained way. Odd flashes of inspiration are more normal than the sustained stuff, and what I need is the sustained.

In an ideal world, I’d be interacting with people who are willing and able to be all of those things to me. That’s a very big ask in terms of time and commitment. More realistically I can think about the people in my life I could be writing for, and give myself more opportunities to be in spaces with people who inspire me. Those are the bits of the underpinning process I have some control over.

The short of it is that I think to fix my relationship with my writing, what I’ve got to do is invest a lot more time and energy in my connections with people. I spent too long being a hermit, and this is the toll it has taken. I spent too long trying to be safe, inoffensive and palatable when what I should have been doing was looking more for the people who can say ‘yes’ to all of this.