Why do I write?
An introduction and musing on writing
Recently, both my dad and my brother started writing on here. I got an account to read Robert Evans and Margaret Killjoy’s substacks, and later Hookland joined. And I was pretty content with just reading. I do write myself. I write for work and I write as a hobby - my medium is fanfiction - and I keep a journal where the really personal stuff goes. Not that there’s a whole lot, in fact it’s mostly day-to-day stuff. Anyway, I’m getting off track.
When I was eleven or twelve, blogging became a thing. Sites like WordPress and other sites made it easy for people to write about opinions, politics, reviews, and hobbies. I remember exploring through them looking for reviews of books and articles on fashion history. You would be surprised by the amount of blogs dedicated to tracking the novels of V.C. Andrews. I’d think about starting a blog, but a mixture of shyness, procrastination, and “being busy” meant I never started one. Micro-blogging did become my thing for a while. I was part of the Tumblr-Twitter-Tumblr migration. I do have a Blusky, but honestly for all its faults, Tumblr is my natural habitat. Even then, I almost exclusively re-blog and occasionally voice my unsolicited and probably unhelpful opinion. Reddit is where I actually like to comment; it’s not the forums of my youth, but it’s close enough.
I write fanfiction on Archive Of Our Own (AO3) and sometimes on Fanfiction.net (somehow still with us). Outside of work, writing stories about characters and places owned by Marvel/Disney is my main creative out lit. Oh, there are a few opportunities for me to write a couple paragraphs on historical topics related to my work. Or write a presentation for an hour long PowerPoint. In a way, those projects and assignments feel like writing essays in university, a part of my education that I learned to love. I don’t think I would have found my voice without scrambling to write 5,000 words hours before the assignment was due. You wouldn’t think that essays for history class would lead to a good literary voice. But I learned about pacing, tone, and how to edit. I also learned to build a narrative - history is all about narrative after all. An archivist is like the scientist brought in as a subject matter expert to back up the historian’s argument. And part of being a fiction writer, whether original fiction or fan works, is making an argument for why the reader should care about your characters and narrative.
But I’m getting offtrack again! Why do I write? Writing as an art form is both personal and distant. You can open up yourself to the reader in a way that is daunting in person. You can hide behind pages of words as well. It lacks the visual aspect of painting and sculpting, or the ephemeral quality of music, dance, and theatre. Writing is less like holding up a mirror and more like looking at a reflection in water. I have always been shy and quiet. My brother is the extrovert and I am the introvert. Like many women of my generation, I strongly identified with Lisa Simpson and Belle from Beauty and the Beast. Ami/Amy was my favourite scout on Sailor Moon. You can see the picture. Despite attempts from many adults in my life, I was never a good public speaker and even today, I like to hide behind podiums, scripts, and turned off cameras. I’m on a couple of podcasts, but you know what you don’t see? My face. And I don’t have to see my audience right before me. Lucky me!
Yet I like telling stories. I mentioned history essays a bit, and it should be clear that I have a degree in history. And I work at an archive. One of the many things that attract me to history as a subject was the storytelling aspect. For a long time, I had issues with reading. I don’t know why, but I was far behind where I was supposed to be in like the third or fourth grade, then I found the Dear Canada books (the Canadian equivalent to Dear America) and something clicked. It wasn’t long before I was a very advanced reader who mostly read historical fiction, classics, and manga (and V.C. Andrews). And sometimes reading a lot leads to writing a lot, and I discovered that it could be a bit of an escape. I could be someone else for a while.
Like many, my teen years were awkward. I was painfully shy and had trouble making friends. I spent a lot of time alone. I had gone through some rough patches in elementary and middle school. I discovered fanfiction in computer class sometime around 8th or 9th grade. I think. I had to have heard about Harry Potter fanfiction somewhere. There was something about world and character creation that attracted me to writing. Since I was a kid I was always inserting myself or characters that were basically me into a story. I have a pretty active imagination, always thinking and coming up with stuff and having few places to put these ideas out. My parents and brother all know about the piles of notebooks I kept that were full of character and story outlines, crudely drawn map, and pages of half completed chapters. I made elaborate family trees, blocked scenes, and in my own way created these other worlds.
One of my favourite books as a middle schooler was Inkheart by Cornelia Funk. It’s a book about a girl in search of her bookbinder father who’s been kidnapped by the villain from a book. It was the first novel I read that was about books and storytelling and the power and magic held within words. For a girl who had a hard time expressing myself in person, writing wasn’t just the next best thing, it was my way to speak. I guess there’s a reason why writers are said to have a “voice.” For me, writing is like witchcraft.
And readers, I never really grew out of my pre-teen witchy phase.