The One Where I Write about Writing
11-Questions about my writing habits
1. When did you start writing? Is there a specific story?
The first time I can remember my writing being recognized, I was eight years old. I wrote a very short (like, 6 sentences long) true story about finding a dead frog in the garage of our house. It was published in a local newsletter and my parents cut it out and framed it. My next writing-related memory is of starting a diary at age 11 because I wanted to make a record of important things that happened in my life. Memory is unreliable, but writing about the events, I felt, would ensure accuracy and let me revisit my own thought processes years later.
2. Do you have rituals in writing? If yes, then please share them with us.
I don’t really have rituals for writing. I’ve been led to believe it’s a rookie mistake to not write in the same place, at the same time every day, but I dislike being told how to do things when my methods work just fine for my purposes. I mostly write while sitting at the kitchen table on a laptop (never a phone!!) with music. I prefer to be alone in the house. Breaks often involve singing along to whatever epic song has just come up in the list and/or wandering or dancing around the kitchen.
3. The ugliest monster that writers are afraid of is writer’s block. If you have a recipe to deal with it, kindly share it with us.
For me, the phrase “writer’s block” is kind of like “Voldemort.” It’s just not a thing that you ever say out loud or put into writing because that’s how it gets its power. I really value not having to write on anyone else’s schedule. If I’m not writing, I’m not writing and that’s fine. This approach means that I’m not super fearful of the “ugly monster of not writing,” as it is described in the question.
However, something I find helpful is having very rigid constraints. The more specific the better. I was once asked to write a poem for a family member’s birthday. Kind of an awkward ask if it’s not coming organically from the heart. I wrote her a sonnet because it was the most rigid poetic form I could think of. Having to get the rhyme scheme, the syllable counts, the line count, and even the volta exactly right, made me feel like I was just solving a puzzle by plugging in words, rather than trying to create something artistic and meaningful from nothing.
4. Describe the process of finding ideas for your stories. Please elaborate.
Sometimes I get ideas by reading the news. Mostly because I strongly disagree. I sometimes get ideas from other people’s written comments. In the past, I’ve also written fictionalized and poetic versions of things that have happened to me because a non-fiction version would have been less palatable for readers or too painful to create. These days, I most often use prompts I find on Medium for writing fiction stories. I think on some level, I don’t know where story ideas come from.
5. As humans, we suffer without knowing it by choosing not to move outside our comfort zone. Do you have a “comfort zone” in writing? Have you tried to step outside your comfort zone and write something drastically different?
I suppose short fiction in a variety of subgenres is my current comfort zone. I’m also pretty comfortable with poetry, erotica, and essays, although I haven’t been writing that kind of thing lately. Articles like this are outside of my zone. I don’t really like writing about myself, but I’m pretty confident that since I write fiction on Medium, very few people will read it, haha.
Honestly, I’m not particularly interested in pushing my genre or topic comfort zone right now. If anything, I’m trying to gear up to push myself in terms of length and commitment. Writing a novel-length fiction thing is starting to feel scary in a good way.
6. Besides Medium, do you use other writing platforms? Please share your experiences.
Not anymore. I was using Vocal at one point, but I left for a number of reasons I don’t really want to get into. I did keep a blog for a couple of months when I was traveling overseas, but it has since been taken down.
7. Have you published a book? If yes, how and where…etc. Please feel free to share your links with us.
I have not published a book. I was involved with editing the text portions of a published photography book at one point and I have written a foreword which will be published in someone else’s (self-published) book, but that is all. The “book” I started writing years ago is stuck around 19k words. It was about three female university students who are each killed in violent ways and come back after their deaths with succubus-esque powers, courtesy of Lilith, including the ability (and need) to feed on the lifeforce of cruel, violent, misogynistic, and otherwise dangerous men. It remains unfinished and I’m not sure I’d be able to get back into the headspace I’d need to continue working on it.
8. You write because writing provides you with something special. Could you share your experience?
As early as my diary entries at age 11, writing was the way I made sense of the world around me. It was the way I processed events and integrated them into my worldview.
I like to write fiction because it has always struck me as a kinder, gentler way of revealing sometimes uncomfortable truths. I think this approach offers a better chance at connecting with readers who may be reluctant to accept an idea that is radically outside of their worldview.
Thomas King says: “The truth about stories is, that’s all we are.” I don’t take it in a diminutive way, but in a way that recognizes the awesome power of stories. The ones we tell about ourselves have a defining impact on our identity, our self-worth, our presentation to the world, and on and on. The stories we consume and distribute about our country’s history and our social structures define our international reputation, our patriotism (or lack thereof), and our motivation for making social change and local improvement. We also tell stories about other people and those inform how we interact: do we see the world as a dangerous place or generally a safe place? Do we see strangers as potential threats or as potential allies? What stories are you holding on to? They are probably all true.
The last thing I want to say about this is that I know I’m not alone in feeling a compulsion to write. We write things that take on a lifeforce of their own and this is how we become immortal. Not in the sense of everlasting life, but in the sense of everlasting influence. Shakespeare and even earlier authors (religious texts, anyone?) still have an impact on us today, because we still read, interpret, and apply their ideas and lessons to our present lives. I’m not saying I have this lofty of a goal for everything I personally write, that would be ridiculous. But I doubt that Shakespeare knew ahead of time which of his plays would be lost to time and which would be turned into graphic novels, teen movies, and modernized theatre productions hundreds of years later.
9. Do you write a paragraph, a chapter, or a story with the end in mind or not?
It depends where the idea for the story came from. I haven’t yet written chapters and I don’t feel the need to plan the pants off a mere paragraph, so “no” to those. If the story came from a very rigid prompt, then I usually don’t know what the end is when I start writing, but if the story is something I felt compelled to write then the end is often the point I was trying to make or the truth I was trying to reveal.
10. Every writer has an idol. Who is yours? And what do you find inspiring in her/his trajectory?
I don’t have any writing idols to the point where I know enough about their life to find their trajectory inspiring. I like Stephen King’s work because I find his short stories incredibly rich. Another writer would probably need a whole novel to get to the level of nuance and backstory that he seems to cram in. I also like Jodi Picoult’s work because she presents stories that are both morally and legally challenging and a reader can’t help but ask themselves, their friends, and their family members, “What would you do if….” (Except I do have to add that the novel Picoult wrote during the pandemic was traumatic to read. I had to skip whole sections of it and cannot recommend it.)
11. Does being on a writing platform like Medium help your writing plans?
I don’t really have writing plans. I’ve spent most of my life using my writing as a means to academic ends — ie. It has gotten me credentials that allow me to do the kind of paid work I want to do, rather than being a thing in and of itself. Medium has been great in that it’s gotten me to write more than I have in a long time.
It’s also helped me to connect with other writers which has been invaluable. I recently submitted my round 1 story to the NYCMidnight flash fiction contest which, if you don’t know, involves receiving a genre, setting, and object assignment and writing a 1000-word story based on those constraints within a 48-hour time frame. I told a non-writer friend I was doing this and the response was something like “dear lord, why would you do that to yourself!?” So, a big thank you to my Medium Illuminati peeps for “getting it.”
Thanks to Jonathon Sawyer for the tag and for completing the questions first! And thanks to Subhi Najar for the original prompt which you can find here.
