Day 245 - Social Network

 SOCIAL NETWORK

Prompt - Social Network : Visit your favourite Social networking website (ie Facebook, Pinterest, Google, Twitter etc) and write about a post you see there

An Instagram post from novelist Matt Haig caught my attention.  Not so much for the image, which would usually be the primary attractive on that site, but for the accompanying text.  This photo was simply of a laptop, with a blank document open on the screen, ready to be written on.  The standard scenario for a writer about to begin telling their story.  But this was what he'd written to accompany the picture -

"I am meant to be writing a new novel but I just sit and stare at the laptop. This is a problem. Not because I am under contract to write a new novel - though that - but because I have gone a year without writing fiction and writing fiction keeps my head from falling off. I know the old writer cliché that a writer is working when they are staring out of the window. But I am done staring out of the window. I am done staring at the Arctic blankness of a Word doc. I have ideas. The ideas aren’t the problem. The knowing which one to do is the problem.

There are two aspects to writing for me. There is the FEELING and there is the VESSEL for feeling. Writing takes both the feeling you want to convey and the vessel to travel in.

The plot is the vessel. That is the thing I am struggling with. I have nowhere to place the feeling. So I am pure messy feeling and not knowing which plot to choose. And I don’t want to write a novel of pure messy feeling.

I blame The Midnight Library. It has placed me on a lot of radars. I am very pleased but also very self-conscious. I have seen so many writers have a big book and then falter with the follow up because of that feeling of being watched and coaxed into writing something that isn’t quite you.

I want - as every writer wants - to write a brilliant book. But to do that I will have to probably write a disappointing one. What I mean is: I don’t want to write The Midnight Library 2. I don’t want to write The Midday Bloody Videostore. I don’t even want to write something that overlaps. I want to write something completely different and so it will end up disappointing those who want another Midnight Library.

I want to get to a point where I am strong enough to ignore every imagined expectation. To sit there as if it is my first novel and not my 458th-or-whatever-it-is.

I don’t want to GO AGAINST what I have written before or to GO TOWARDS it. I want to lean in neither direction. I just want to write. Write a book. A good one. A true one. And I will. To find that perfect point in the creative process where you open the door and your own true self walks through. You know? Not too cool. Not too funny. Not too fake. Just there."

I am not about to compare myself with a successful novelist.  But I am familiar with that blank white screen, and the levels of procrastination, or helplessness, associated with it.  The sense of not knowing what to write, and then, once the knowledge comes, being too afraid to begin in case it wasn't really there in the first place.  Not quite the problem Haig has, but one phrase resonated more than any other - "I have gone a year without writing fiction and writing fiction keeps my head from falling off".  Because the opposite applies in some ways.

I have gone for decades without writing any fiction.  Until this year, when I began my 265 challenge.  It's been messy.  There have been days when I totally failed to meet the challenge, albeit not too many.  There have been too many days when a fiction idea just won't come and I end up writing some kind of essay, or a piece that's as self indulgent as those I have so often put out on to these 750words pages.  But then there are the good days.

I am now about two thirds of the way through the year.  To date I have written well over a hundred short stories, and more than forty poems.  The quality has been extremely variable, so that many of them will never be shared with anyone, not even Barbara.  But some I have felt quite proud of, and have shared, and will be sharing, on my Bits and Pieces blog (finding the time, and will, to revisit and edit my old stories and poems is something I've not been good at).  By the end of the year I will have maybe fifty or sixty stories and poems to post and share, perhaps a dozen of which I can feel proud of.  But what happens next?

Two things.  The simple, but bold, one is to share a story or two on story writing sites for other writers to read.  See if any comments result.  See if there is any praise that feels encouraging (there might well be none, especially as so few of the stories are more than a few hundred words).  But the other is to try and use this year's work as a platform from which to begin writing longer stories.  Long short stories to start with, but having the ultimate goal of a novella as the longer term aim.  

I may not manage to do so.  But I might.  I may not manage to find the motivation, to make the time, to have the ideas (although I already have several I think I can use), to sit and type away.  But I might.  i want to.  This year has been a bit of a revelation to me.  I can not only write, but I can come up with story ideas, something I've so often lacked in the past.  It's true these have come from a standard set of prompts, but it does mean that if the ideas I do have don't manage to work out I can find some kind of prompting that might help.  The set of creative idea cards that Kris Drever uses would be a sensible purchase.  I am not going to let the promise of this year slip away from me.  I won't be the next matt haig, but I can write like me.