Not being ‘a bit normal’

Anyone who was following me on twitter last night (because that’s where I spend my wild Saturday evenings), would have seen that I was struggling with a short story (yes, the same short story that was making me lose the will to live on Facebook last week).

I decided a few weeks ago that I’d enter a short story competition and that I’d write a story especially for that competition. I’d decided that it was to be set in a specific location and contain a character that I had wanted to develop, but for the past few weeks I’ve been really struggling to write the story. It’s all felt so false. Last night, I finally finished the story but straight away I was hit with an anxious niggle. I knew that the story wasn’t ‘me’. It just didn’t ‘feel right’, it didn’t ‘fit’. I knew that I’d written it with an audience in mind, an artificial audience, trying to second guess what a judge would want and assuming that the answer was something truly commercial and not at all experimental. The story I’d written was lacking the ‘something’ that excites me.

Last night, I made G read the story. He’s ridiculously honest, obviously knows my style inside out and he does it for a living. He finished, looked up at me and said something about how it was ‘a bit normal’ for me. Of course, I tried to resist the urge to stamp my feet and asked him to explain to me what he thought was wrong with the story. His answer was basically that the story simply wasn’t me. And I know that he’s right because in trying to second guess and to conform to an imaginary reader, who clearly hated my natural style, I’d realised that I’d been forcing words out. So, after G suggested that I turn it all around and write it all over again, I did and I have. I swear, it was suddenly so easy, I mean effortless. 1,500 words in less than an hour. The same story, a different voice, the voice that needed to come out and clearly it was just such a relief to be ‘given permission’ to write what I wanted to write.

Today I’ve been through it all again, checking dialogue consistencies, making sure there weren’t any rogue full stops (!), or paragraphs(!) and I’ve ended up with a monologue, something that I am sure has flaws, but at least it’s something that I can feel proud to have written. And, if the judges hate my story, then that’s ok too (and probable as I am Marmite after all), because I’ve got something else to add to my portfolio and I’ve created a character who is begging to be written into novel 4. But you never know, someone might just ‘get it’, fingers crossed and a bit of fairy dust…

So clearly by now you’ll be seeking the point to and of this post… well all of this struggling to write a short story malarkey, well it’s reminded me just how In Search of Adam will always be the freest thing that I’ll ever write. There was a disregard for an audience, a spilling out of a story and an honesty that has made people love or hate it. In the publishing world where sales figures can break a career there is the temptation to try and second guess readership and the constantly changing marketplace, but really a fiction writer should just write the words that are inside, the ones that need to come out and then worry about everything else later.

(Or maybe I’m just an idealistic fool?)