Why I Stopped Writing Fiction

Agnes Bannigan
Jul 23, 2017 · 4 min read

For a while in 2015, I was documenting my daily writing activities and posting them on social media with pictures as applicable. I was trying to keep myself accountable, cherishing this grand illusion that I had eager fans awaiting each day’s post. (When I stopped posting, however, no one seemed to mind.) One of the topics I explored was my aversion to writing fiction after years of writing only fiction and after graduating from an MFA program in fiction.

As of today, a sweltering summer Sunday in 2017, I’m proud to say that I’m writing fiction again. But at that time, I wasn’t, and below is what I wrote on the day I explored why I stopped.

Today’s assignment for social media is a portrait of the mundane: a picture of my laundry churning in the washer at the 24-hour laundromat near my house in Brooklyn. Why laundry? Well, I add #amwriting, and it all makes sense: I want to keep to the promises I made to myself today to write and do laundry, and the washer and dryer are convenient timers.

As I crouch in front of the machine with my iPhone poised, I’m afraid I’ll get weird looks from the couple to my right — a pretty, dark-haired woman who owns her baggy pants and near-sightedness in a way I envy and a giant dude who clings to her. But when I snap the photo and look back, the two are intent in their own phone activity, so oblivious to the happenings beyond their screens that I could rob them. I watch these two humans and consider stealing them and experimenting with their stories. But I turn away, wondering why I don’t write fiction anymore. I pull out my notebook and explore my resistance instead.

Fiction is scarier than nonfiction. Fiction is where I explore the dark, the comical, the absurd, the perverse. I used to find this comforting. I didn’t have to be me when I was inventing someone else, somewhere else. I was a ventriloquist, not a writer. But who was I to speak for others? It takes audacity to pretend to know anything about anyone.

When I was completing my master’s degree in creative writing, I wrote a story from the point of view of a woman whose son goes missing after the attacks on 9/11. I thought myself capable of not only standing in the shoes of an invented stranger but also in her toes, feet, calves, legs, torsos, arms, hands, fingers, skin, blood, tissues, organs, eyes, and mind. I even entered the womb in that story. Looking back, I think, How did I know anything about having a missing son? Ten years later, I still don’t know. I’ve never had children. I’ve never been pregnant. But I have family. I’ve experienced loss, sadness, regret, trauma, confusion. Maybe I tapped into my own darkness and extrapolated from there.

Since my time in the master’s program, I’ve discovered a deeper well of despair to draw from: I went through my own mental breakdown of sorts, and people in my life died, got cancer, lost children, got divorced. If I want to put it crudely, I’d say that I have more material. And yet I still have trouble transforming those memories into make believe.

Developing characters for fiction can feel too much like dating, too much like the early intimacies of a relationship. And maybe I stopped writing fiction because this trepidation is too closely related to my desire to be in a romantic relationship. I’m curious and invested in others, and I desire for someone else to be curious and invested in me. And I’m scared, too. But isn’t that what being intimate is?

This is not a rhetorical question. I’m asking.

I pause now to look up the definition of intimate: Belonging to or characterizing one’s deepest nature.

My desire for and my fear of fiction writing are related to belonging to one’s deepest nature. But one’s deepest nature is a dark and endless cave. It could be filled with minerals, or it could be filled with bats. More likely it’s filled with both, always something you want and always something you fear. I don’t think you can want anything without being a little (or a lot) afraid of it.

Despite all this, I want to write as if I belong to someone’s deepest nature, and I want live as if someone belongs to mine. I want permission to be vulnerable with another human being. I want a partnership that exists in this cultivation of intimacy. Isn’t that what fiction is? Aren’t writers in partnership with their characters and the people in their lives such that they’re creating the conditions to be intimate?

Whatever these conditions are, they don’t appear out of thin air. It’s within my powers to create the conditions, and my wand may be the pen in my hand. My book won’t write itself. And I can’t simply commission a relationship, or man. The fiction and the relationship don’t have to be magical, and they likely won’t be. The conditions for each can be as simple as the present moment: Doing what I’m doing anyway but being willing to do it out loud.

I’m not imagining the lives of my laundry cohorts today. I’m not writing the scary fiction. But I am waving my wand. I am creating the conditions: At a Sunday session at the laundromat, socks mingle with shirts, sheets, towels, and thongs until everything is clean and dry. I write what I write as the washer washes; I write what I write as the dryer dries.

I write what belongs to my deepest nature.

Agnes Bannigan

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