June 7, 2023 – It is official! I have been on summer break for a month. It is my first summer break since I started college in 2020. I have, as timing would have it, battled a kidney infection that started mid-April, left me struggling through finals, missing many of the senior activities I wanted to be a part of, and attending graduation on Motrin, Tylenol, and adrenaline. After weeks of fever, chills, and brain fog, I am just beginning to feel normal, whatever that means, again. And, it is starting to feel like summer break.
I have been reading a lot. Some of it was complete fluff, the kind of stuff you read when you are excited to read whatever trash you want because you have the time and no assignments due. However, I can only read that like for a limited amount of time before I become irritated with the elevation. So, I moved to Kuang, Patchett, and Rushdie. I had to sit down and write before I allowed the ability of these writers to convince me that I, as I have long feared, did not have the chops to do this for myself.
If I am being completely honest, I still have a bit of pride about myself, suggesting I do have a novel somewhere in my hands capable of catapulting me into financial stardom. I don’t care if this is nonsense. The truth is I believe, as a writer, you have to have something in your brain to convince you that this work, this time, this struggle holds in it some promise of something that makes it worth doing. Whatever that is must be honored as true, valuable, and legitimate. For me, it is acceptance by a large readership. Whatever that sounds like to anyone else, I own it.
I was determined to find something to write this morning. An email came through yesterday for a regional volunteer position with NaNoWriMo. I applied for it. I probably shouldn’t have because I know my track record for such things, but, at this moment, I have a desperate need to find a writing cohort. A local, in-person, chemistry conducive cohort that I can dive into as some sort of safety net trampoline that will do something, anything, different than what I have always done.
Today, another email arrived from NaNoWriMo, albeit unrelated. Instead, the message heralded the July writing camp – kinda like November, only not. I logged into my long-neglected dashboard. Listed there is my Booze and Blindfolds project. I can’t remember starting the thing, much less the actual intentions for it. I set out to search for these long-lost forgotten words. I find them. It is the genesis of What Did Maggie English Do Today, another project that saw promise during my weeklong writer’s retreat on Ossabaw Island. Despite my best intentions, it found the back burner, then the deep freezer. I am still wholly uninterested.
I found this haphazard manuscript fetus after remembering I used Scrivener (another tool that has been untouched for about as long as my NaNoWriMo dashboard) to begin it. It surprised me to find other things stored there. I clicked through the different folders, projects, and ideas, remembering as much about them as I did Maggie and finding the same level of interest. As one would expect, it was the last one that touched a button – Wish it Was a Leap Year.
I do not remember creating Delta. I do not remember why I decided to play with a successful, husbandless, childless female protagonist – but I can take a guess. One of my biggest fears about writing is the idea that I will stand naked in front of the world while those who know me, or think they know me pick my story apart, searching for the real-life people, events, and feelings standing behind the fiction. Delta – husbandless, childless, pet-less – is the most obvious version of not me. It is, in fact, the most not-me you can get. I am assuming that is where the idea started.
In spite of, or perhaps because of, Delta piqued my interest, and I spent 2,000 words with her. I think I would have spent a bit more time if not for a 10 am massage appointment that I would have only missed to take a sure-fire offer phone call from a Simon and Schuster publisher. However, on the massage table, instead of drifting into the weatherless sound spa music track (because Melissa knows I hate it), I kept coming back to Delta. I really like her. Well, honestly, I think she’s a bit annoying right this second, but that’s for a well-written character arch to fix. I started to wonder about her and her friends and her life. I realized I have encountered my first problem: Delta is so much not-me that I have no idea how to answer these questions.
I have never thought a writer must only write about what they know. I have a strong belief, as do many authors who are far more reputable, that fiction writers can and should be empowered to write from their imagination. It is, after all, fiction. Also true is the massive failure of a story when the author does not respect that they are writing from imagination. I will write Delta, who is not-me. But I am not released from the responsibility of getting to know her.
I began to run through a list of the husbandless, childless, 30-40 something-year-old women I know. I came up with shockingly little. I realized while my friend group is diverse in age, race, gender, and religion, it is not diverse at all in domestic situations. I suppose there are many reasons for that, and I also suppose I am not in the minority. I suppose it is quite common for wives to hang out with wives, mommies to hang out with mommies, and singles to hang out with singles. It seems to me, unless I am oblivious to the way the world works, this is the standard nature of relationships.
But I am committed to Delta, or at least today I think I am. So, the first order of business is to find these women I don’t know, or don’t know well enough, and meet Delta.
Understand, Delta will not be them either. Delta’s family is not their family. Her friends, her job, her life, her shenanigans are not theirs either. This is fiction. If fiction touches on or reflects some piece of real life, mine or yours, I attribute that to two things:
- I cannot unknow the things I know
- As humans, we are more alike than we are different
So, I will attempt to write this fiction and see how the world builds around her. I will sell out to the idea that all first drafts are shitty and just get the words on the page. I will NOT apologize for the time it takes, the time taken, or the time wasted. I will learn as I go. I will make mistakes. I will write a lot of words. I will keep some and throw out the others. I will not get hung up in the bullshit – ok, I will most likely do that, but I will not wallow there, and I will be gentle myself when it happens and attempt to make that time as productive as possible.
Let’s see what happens next…
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