Spilling my Guts and not Apologising for the Mess.

I've been doing something rather daunting recently. I've started writing again. (I realise this must be shocking news to announce on my blog.)

This isn't to say that I ever stopped altogether. Even when I've taken a significant break from writing creatively, I have always maintained a journal into which I can empty my thoughts, written letters to friends and family, love notes to those I adore, and at the height of my academic career, completed a long dissertation on toxic masculinity. What I mean to say is that I am once more writing stories about things I feel inspired by after quite a long hiatus.

Throughout my childhood, I was always working on one writing project or another. There was my first attempt at a stage play, which was a near-verbatim reproduction of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Upon revealing the first few pages to my father, I was gently introduced to the notion of plagiarism, and immediately set about on a new script - this time a feature-length film about a girl who encounters aliens whilst spending the summer at her family cabin in Lake Tahoe. This script, too, was abandoned in favour of a novel following a stowaway girl on a pirate ship who must obscure her gender so as not to be thrown overboard. I was nearing completion on it when I felt compelled to move on to another novel set in Venice featuring an orphan who is taken in by a group of cats living in an abandoned manor. This one, I believe, was heavily influenced by the Warriors series, and did not amount to much more than five or six chapters before my attention drifted once more.

There have been many more abandoned writings along the way. Love stories became more appealing to me as a teenager, and I devoted a fair amount of time to one that was told in a non-sequential form. I liked the idea that the story didn't have to be told in a linear fashion, that all of the hurt and the upset that occurred later could exist immediately adjacent to the profound love that the two characters shared at the beginning of their intimacy. It felt like a more honest representation of how a great love is remembered, with all of the combatting emotions in one enormous mishmash that needs to be teased apart to be fully understood. It was a retrospective story, rather than one that the reader progressed through with the protagonist, and for that reason, it felt significantly more tragic. We know how the story ends, because we were told about it in the beginning. None of the pages in between will change the characters' trajectory. We are silent witnesses to two people coming together for a time, and eventually falling apart.

I never finished that one, either, but I got fairly close.

I wrote a great deal of poetry in high school. I enjoyed the shorter format and found it easier to express the essence of my feelings, if not all my thoughts, in the few stanzas I was allowed. I was gripped by the same fascination with spoken word poetry that seemed to infect everyone in LA County in 2016 and produced a number of such works which still haunt me to this day. Over time, these simply morphed into free verse, which I'll openly admit was much lazier writing. It was simply an excuse for me to pour my feelings out onto the page and dress them up nicely with pretty formatting and appealing metaphors. I was a product of the city around me; if I was going to feel things deeply, at least let me present them in their most charming and artistic format.

I continued to write poems in my year out and my university years, as they were the simplest way for me to release the pressure of the emotion that stuck in my throat. I didn't keep much of a journal at this point in my life, so poetry was the outlet through which I emptied the thoughts that swirled endlessly around my head. It allowed me to avoid too much rumination. Once I had completed a piece on something that was occupying my mind, I was able to move on to better and happier experiences. At one point in my first year, I realised that I had accumulated such a great number of poems that I could almost turn the collection into a little book. This was a dangerous realisation that set me back on the path of wanting to write a novel again.

One of my favourite works-in-progress was one that I began to write when I was cross with an old boyfriend. We'd had a disagreement about feminism and what it means to be staunchly in support of women's rights. I started writing a tale about wildly powerful witches. He afforded me a little more distance for the week that ensued.

I abandoned one more project about a lesbian vampire before I decided that I'd had enough of all the WIPs I had on my virtual shelves, collecting figurative dust. I set myself a challenge, with a real deadline in the form of a nonfiction short story competition with a submission cutoff date, and forced myself to finish something. It had a beginning, middle, and end. It had an overarching theme that felt salient to the times. But more importantly: it was complete. It gave me hope that I was capable of writing something in its entirety.

The reason I have set down so many projects, never to return to them again, continues to elude me. I think it very likely that there is an element of fear at play. If something is only a draft, you can make a number of excuses for its shortcomings and various inconsistencies. You can tell people that it's nowhere near finished, and that it'll be in much better shape by the time you're through with it. To admit that something is complete opens it up to scrutiny, leaves it vulnerable to people's opinions and criticisms and objections. Such is the way of the world, I suppose, but I am a bit of a perfectionist - can you tell?

I think, too, that critical word, vulnerable, plays a role in my pattern of avoiding completion. I tuck a piece of myself into all my work. My protagonists speak the words I wish I had said and fight for the love that they deserve. My plots are often based on my regrets or my memories of moments that slipped away too quickly. My poetry did not even attempt to disguise the raw emotion in every line - only beautify it so that it might be more palatable for the reader. I felt that if I were to release any of my work, I would give myself away. A person might only glance at a page or two and see into the very depths of my soul, then promptly decide that they don't particularly like the look of it, thank you very much. To write with honest emotion rooted in the events of your own life is to bare yourself to the gnashing teeth of the cynical world. It is to take your heart in your own two hands and proffer it to every boot just itching for a good stomp.

And yet...there is nothing else that I can bring myself to do. I am happier when I write what is choking me. I am relieved when I allow all the unsightly emotion to pour out of me and take the form of a character forced into circumstances that she does not enjoy, but can at least endure. I feel lighter when I unburden my mind of the memories that I cannot share with anyone else. I would rather make myself vulnerable a hundred times over than attempt to bottle up the contents of my whole life until I forget the moments that have made me who I am.

Last summer, I wrote a complete short film. It is riddled with weaknesses and obvious motifs. It lacks subtlety and the characters are more hollow and simple than I would like. But it was an idea that gripped me enough for me to see it through to the end, and finishing the script (despite knowing edits desperately needed to be made) felt like a success.

This summer, I am working on another script. It will be a feature-length film by the time I've completed it - and I am determined to complete it. I'm about halfway through. It, too, is messy and will require extensive edits once the first draft is complete. But I am allowing my unfinished work to be messy, to have problems that will require fixing. It's all part of the process. The best advice I have received is to simply write. Write it all out. Write everything down. Things can always be trimmed and adjusted and added to later on, but first, you must write.

This project is one that is very near to my heart, which is why it feels particularly daunting. But I'll admit; spilling my guts, however unbecoming and untidy it may appear on the page, is a wonderfully cathartic process. I am no longer ashamed of the mess. I am no longer (massively) afraid of the vulnerability I incur through the story. I am no longer shying away from telling my stories, because I think they deserve to be heard.

I'll let you know when it's finished.