What and why I write.
I’m twenty-two, and for the most part my life hasn’t unfurled in quite the way I expected it to. Please don’t hold back the pity for my white, male, privileged ass. I suppose in some ways I’m also a little girl and feel more heartache than I should, but that’s between me and myself. I am not an unhappy person, but every day sadness hardens in new and unexpected places.
The title of my fluid fiction sketchbook type thing is a small fragment of something Hemingway wrote in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald. The full quote—
That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best—make it all up—but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.
— is really where writing starts for me. I write to find meaning in the things that hurt or move me. Most days, I can’t really pin down that meaning, but still I write and just manufacture one instead. More times than not, the manufactured meaning is what ends up becoming the truth. I believe with each granule in my body that the universe gives us what we give ask for. Writing honest fiction is a way of asking for an honest life, and really, there is nothing more we can ask for.
That’s mainly what I share my fiction sketchbook. To make small honest steps towards some day when I can write not only for truth but also to finance more writing (and also to pay the mortgage on a small modernist house somewhere, go on book tours, impress beautiful women, and give credence to my beard and nail-bitten fingers). I’ve written nothing sustained yet, because I have the day job and all, but a writer must work every day so this is a good compromise. I sit down every night and put something on the paper. I try to post every day. Sometimes whatever I write doesn’t grow into anything for a few days, so I’ll wait to post until something concrete emerges. There’s no thread to follow, aside from all fiction has that kernel of truth somewhere in it. I don’t know how long I’ll keep posting.
