Sending out my writing

A while back, I wrote about how my writing has developed through reading Chuck Palahniuk’s discussions of technique. An even bigger change over the last year has been to focus on publication, in whatever form that takes.

Anxiety over sharing my work has long been a problem. It wasn’t the simple ‘fear of success’ that some people talk about, rather a ridiculous fear of negative effects from publication. At the same time, I’ve been driven to write stories since I could first write a sentence, and these two drives have been in conflict. Sometimes I’ve thought I should quit writing stories and focus more on other parts of my life – but quitting didn’t work for me either, so I needed to find another way through.

Since moving to Yorkshire, I’ve put more effort into sending work out. A lot of my old work was written with little thought of an audience. It was fun, and some of that work was great, but you lose rigour if you don’t define yourself against any external standards. I wrote some good stories that I have no idea what to do with. An example of this is a story I wrote called Richey Edwards vs Godzilla, a mash-up of indie music and kaijus. It’s a great piece of writing, but almost wilfully obscure.

Change is a strange thing – it can take years but feel sudden. I’ve been toying with ways to put my work in public for a while. Part of this was attending a 2018 Arvon course with Tania Hershman and Nuala O’Connor, which provoked me into one flurry of submissions. The South Downs Way zine project has been an interesting way to explore publication, and putting recent volumes onto etsy has worked well. In 2022, I have become more consistent with submissions (41 so far this year) and it feels like a significant change.

It’s not as if I am now writing things only so they can be published. I have a huge number of ideas and it is more about working on the ones I feel I can find a home for.

Recently I thought about writing a folk horror piece about offices. It was interesting, in that it took the elements of folk horror and transposed them to a corporate setting. But, at the same time, it was mostly a cover version of The Wicker Man. If I’d worked on this, it would have been competent, but I couldn’t imagine being enthusiastic about submitting it. Long stories take a lot of time, and need to be worth spending so much energy on. In the end, I stripped out the elements of the piece I liked, and it will emerge as a smaller, stranger piece than it would otherwise. I’ve spent too long writing solely for myself, and I need to make up for lost time.