While I have spent majority of my life as a “writer,” I have never been strongly inclined to fiction writing despite me favoring it in my reading. My writing that has been developed in my childhood and teenage years specializing in academic and journalistic papers. Fiction writing exercises in school seemed to me, childish and uninspired. But last year on my literature class, I had an assignment which felt like an audition offer for an indie film to an actress who is not even actually an actress, but an obsessive cinephile who poses herself daily as if assuming a role.
I was tasked to write a short story detailing my life. It was not exactly an autobiography, rather we were asked to not name a single real person and maybe fictionalized a detail here and there, a la roman à clef. The idea that I had was a recollection of daily life. I wanted to emphasize repetitiveness and specifically the cyclical thought pattern which fuels my anxiety.
My mistake: thinking like a reader. The outcome was as if I was simultaneously creating and interpreting the work. I was narrating a story, but I was also writing an analysis so readers could absorb it the way that I wanted. I was so arrogant about it, upon reflection I realized. Needless to say, it was didactic, though not wholly unfeeling.
I suffered as R.F. Kuang did in Babel, I did not trust the reader. More closely, I did not trust myself to be understood. I was drilling my points too hard, so I was ranting and not sharing with the delicacy a solemn master of the literary fiction has. My forwardness was not out of resolve or self-possession, like the virtuoso of the non-fiction, but my ineptitude as a writer and person.
I am known, or was especially known in that class, to be timid. I was ashamed. I felt whiny in my own story and wanted to mask it as some sort of commentary or general observation, which it was to me nonetheless, which saved me from feeling pretentious on top of everything else. In Atonement, Breony's and my fears are bared:
The imagination itself was a source of secrets… Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know… Self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character's weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have?
This passage in on itself voiced my daydream-prone fringes, my fantasies which were only meant to supplement my depravation and unwordliness, whether or not I knew that when I began at ten. That I was giving voice to my secrets in a way that might come off to others as clumsy on my part, was horrific. I was forgetting that everything that comes out of anyone was once parts of them, anyway. There is no inherent shame in fiction, but there might be in vulnerability.
Which, to go on a tangent, I must mention Matty Healy singing about calling his ego imagination which spoke to me and made me feel like I had an ego of a terrible man! Isn't that a fearful thing? Back to it:
While (as I may have supposed in my Introductory Post) I believe a written work will have ceased to be the author's alone once it has been beholden by others, in the moments where I am being an authoress I have a very limited sight and think of only what my words will reflect back to me. Hence, I am constantly overpowered by my ego and idea of what a work of writing should be. I am always grappling for felicity:
3
: a pleasing manner or quality especially in art or language
a felicity with words
4
: an apt expression
The poet was well known for his felicities.
It appeared to me that I cannot possibly become a fully-fledged fiction novelist without facing the vast possibilities that vulnerability will have as an aftermath, most of which will remain as episodes of paranoia from my restless anticipation. Or, without a proper self-concept. But then, much like reading, writing itself is an internal process. It is an accumulation of the parts of yourself that you can and dare to materialize, no matter how impersonal the subject may be. It is already a form of a self-concept.
My aspiration for felicity is not for the distant future as a best-selling novelist, but also as a person. It is a revolt against the nature of the finite language and the persevering temptation to accept a destiny of solitude. It is an inevitable truth: I will never be a fully-fledged writer, fiction or not. I will always be a child confessing, a woman lecturing, and a girl admiring. I am always simply writing.
Mentioned:
Babel by R.F. Kuang
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Part of the Band - The 1975
Stoner by John Williams I learned the word ‘felicity’ here
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I think self-analysis vs. unfiltered feeling is a plight many writers suffer from. It‘s so hard to feel without judgment and to then metabolize that into words.