Getting into the arena

Exactly two years ago, I finally picked up creative writing regularly.

I’m saying “finally” because I’ve tried many times before, always failing after a day — maybe two, if I had a good run. I used to write as a kid.

The first story I remember writing was about a band of boys running through an unnamed city, playing pirates and whatnot. Yes, I was very much into Arthur Ransome and Jaroslav Foglar, thank you for asking. Later on, all sorts of stories followed. With a friend of mine, we would write lots of adventurous stuff. My favorite one was a piece of historical fiction where a princess gets kidnapped when still a child by a group of rebels trying to influence their country’s politics. She is raised as a boy, hiding her true gender and not even herself knowing her true identity. Then, she gets to the royal guard, suddenly finding herself in the place that used to be her home.

When writing on my own, especially in my teenage years, I gravitated towards romance. I suspect it was due to the fact that I had very little of it that I needed to make things up ;).

I stopped writing around the time I entered high school (and became more sociable). Still, throughout my teenage years and adulthood, I always wanted to return to it. There were always so many pictures, scenes, characters, dialogues, and themes in my head, and I wanted to give them the voice they deserved. Except that, as I was growing older, I was less and less the child who was happy with just about anything as long as it was fun and more and more the adult who thought that if I couldn’t write as good as Terry Pratchett, then what’s the point. (Read: the inner critic entered the scene.)

I would write a scene or a dialogue, and I would hate what I’ve done. I would think of a fun character and try to give them a story, but the stone in my belly would make me so sick and anxious that I would “take a pause” and never return. Not knowing any better, I assumed I just didn’t have what it took.

Still, two years ago, I decided to try again and try for real this time. No excuses. Lots of learning, lots of practice. Always being a bit of a late bloomer, I was finally starting to realize that just as with anything else, you just have to get through the shit (pardon my Orkish) before it becomes easier. So I challenged myself to write for (at least) an hour a day with hopes of getting better. I put on my big girl pants, put up Neil Gaiman’s quotes all over my wall, and started.

“Assume that you have a million words inside you that are absolute rubbish, and you need to get them out before you get to the good ones. And if you get there early, that’s great.”

— Neil Gaiman

I didn’t manage 1h a day for the past three years (although I did for at least a year), but I kept writing this time. What helped the most to keep me going was, without any doubt, accountability, both internal and external.

For external accountability, I’ve joined creative writing classes at the university where I was doing my Ph.D. That was wonderful because I’m very much an assignment girl, and I need prompts and to know someone’s waiting for it. Not to mention that I met some lovely people there, and I was so happy to be around writers for the first time in my life.

For internal accountability, I started a challenge. Sending my prose and poetry to magazines, I was trying to get 100 rejections between November 2020 and November 2021. Yes, rejections. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have something accepted too, but, first, I knew that as a rookie writer, that’s very unlikely. Second, aspiring for rejections would prepare me to handle them better. Third, having a clear goal would force me to keep producing. (Although, technically, I could have just sent one piece one hundred times. That would be fine by my rules.) I’ve submitted 25 unique poems and 8 short stories. 102 submissions. I got 97 rejections. Don’t get excited — no, acceptance, 5 submissions have simply not been replied to yet.

The numbers show something — besides the fact that I love a good challenge — and I’ve only started to realize it recently. I’ve spent lots of time writing poetry. I have enough poems to publish a respectably long chapbook. (Which I actually might start working on soon.) I’ve written a few songs. But I’m very much behind with what led me to writing in the first place — writing fiction books. I only have 6 or 7 short stories behind my belt, at least 2 of which are flash fiction.

And worse yet, while it got so easy to write poems regularly, writing stories is still completely anxiety-inducing. Recently, I had a fun idea for a novel, but after outlining it for a month, I concluded that I had no idea how to spin the little concept into an actual full-blown story. I got almost eaten up by anxiety in the process.

So I’m taking a step back and going back to short stories as their length makes them more manageable. I’m aware that writing a short story is not the same as writing a novel, but I assume there are overlaps and blocks that I can reuse. Honestly, my first step will be to write up just about anything — the only goal is to finish it. And as I hopefully earn some confidence in being able to finish, I’ll then try to play with everything that I admire in stories of other authors: the story arcs, character arcs, inner voices, dialogue, humor, themes, different points of view, bringing places to life, etc.

Except that I need that accountability again and a community to keep me going. That’s why I decided to publish my first ever longer-format short story that I wrote for a creative writing course in autumn 2020. I’ll post it weekly, chapter by chapter, both here and on Wattpad, and while it’s finding its way into the world, I’ll be working on something new.

The goal: finish a new short story before the whole of the first story is out. Let the games begin!

If you’d like to read the story called The Soft-Hearted Prince and His Dragon, you can find it here. If you prefer reading it on Wattpad, it’s here.