
Seven Seas of Writing
Article tunes: Seven Seas, Emancipator
Just a week in and I’m already at a writer’s block, stuck between an all out war within to create fiction or nonfiction. Old habits die easily. I’ve already achieved a glorious sense of accomplishment hitting “publish” on my first piece of content marketing liberation, but now I’m at the tipping point.
When I was in second grade I wrote a short story about a gorilla that I was so proud of. I puffed my chest out and showed my Dad, who promptly said him and mom were going to retire early because I was going to be a bestselling author. [Insert ego here] I love storytelling. I revel in the challenge of not only creating a story line, but a time, a place, a character that you either love or really fucking hate.
Throughout my childhood and adolescence I wrote countless stories and filled books with my poems. I was going to be the next James Thurber, a local (and national) icon. I was going to write the next Golden Compass. In 7th (?) grade a poem of mine was published in a national collection of poems written by kids. I wouldn’t dare share it now because it was laden thick with patriotism and religion, two things I’m quite a bit more on the “meh” scale now. But truthfully, like any creative soul, anything I wrote yesterday is totally trash. On to the new. On to the next.
Then came high school and college, and fiction was quarantined into the books I was assigned. My writing became papers and critical analysis. I studied spanish literature and got lost in the prose of other writers. But it was clear I was missing fiction, as my final paper for college I wrote in the form of a play. Clearly I was so very done with formal writing. The play about the development of historiography of Cuba was written in 4 hours. Sure that it was going to be the first paper I ever failed, I handed it in. I was pleasantly surprised at the result.
I realize I’m sounding incredibly full of myself. But such is the curse of self-reflection. There is a lot of self in it. Writing is a passion, and I make no pretense of being actually good at it.
Now as a fully fledged adult I am a content marketer, writing for other people, forcing me to write at a 3rd grade level so everyone can understand what I’m trying to say. It’s stifling. In one way I get to be incredibly clever with one-liners, but storytelling is limited to the brand’s story. There is no epic.
With this project I have made for myself, of writing something for myself once a week on whatever I want, I’m struggling. Do I brave the art of fiction or stay in what has become my comfort zone of nonfiction; of analysis and critical thought? Or do I create in new ways? Ways that I am afraid to let out again?
Fiction inherently means vulnerability. Even though I’m writing about my personal experience I can still hide behind a logical and analytical lense in nonfiction. But fiction is art, and art toes the line between the personal and the public. How public am I willing to go? How open can I be?
For me the point of breaking free of corporate voice is to incorporate my own voice within my body again. To take back my power.
The choice is clear. Fiction it is (with maybe a smattering of non for a good bit of balance now and again).
