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I'm Coming Back to Fiction!

I fell into a deep lull, and I couldn't read fiction for months. For longer still I haven't been able to write it. I wrote all the time when I was younger, before I could draw and before visuals could describe what I needed to say better than language. Years have passed, and I have allowed words to fall to the wayside and imagery to take precedent in my creative practice. I always felt that I had lost something as this happened, even as I gained more skills than I ever thought possible, personally.

There is no shame in changing passions. I became a visual artist, and all the time I spent creating was guided into perfecting this part of my craft. I barely have the responsibilities of "true adults" and yet life has stopped me from writing the way I did, when I was a child. And that's a shame, as life-experience likely gives you more to write about.

There is no shame in rest. But am disappointed in myself for thinking that fiction is mostly frivolous, even if that apathy is (and I am working on it) some kind of depression.

In these months of not reading fiction, I found myself less and less able to express myself, both on a basic level (the sentences and sounds sticking in my mouth) and deeply. A profound obfuscation developing around how best to express my needs. I never realised that reading fiction gave me agency, to the extent that it did. And losing that agency, for reasons until now mysterious, frightened me. The hypochondriac in me told me I was rotting on the inside, and disconnecting from what I was reading - finding it entirely uninspiring, enough that I would forget a page within reading the next - was a symptom. I thought that I must be an un-empathetic person, to find stories of interpersonal issues and contemplative personal experience so dull.

I'm deciding to make a change and give fiction (and writing) a chance again. Or rather, give myself another chance to submit myself before fiction, if it will have me.

Join me!!