Dreamlike is this week’s series of posts. A collection of my inner thoughts on writing, art, poetry. One a day, June 10-June 17. A challenge to myself, a bizarre thought experiment on pretentiousness, an examination of why I do what I do (write like a madwoman). The first one was free. So is this one. The rest will (likely) be locked up behind a paywall like a maiden guarded by a dragon in a dungeon… I don’t know, please ignore that simile. If you’d like to support my writing, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Enjoy xx
Ripened fruit nestled in obsidian stalls, dizzy magic spritzed through enchanted halls.
from a poem I’m writing. don’t ask me what it’s about because after reading this post you’ll understand I probably won’t tell you…
I felt like a fairy here so it fits.
Novels are non-fiction
Truly. Everything we write comes from our brains, or perhaps our stomachs, but it’s all… inside of us. We disguise it well enough so no one can tell, the people in our past and future can’t see themselves or our own actions in our words but… we are there in pieces. For some novelists, maybe it’s only a sliver of a rock, a pebble in the work. Others an entire cliffside, lifted with trembling arms and thrown haphazardly into the pages, ostentatious like a gaping wound and festering in the recesses of our minds when we complete the project and anticipate everyone seeing us for who we really are.
Write what you know is a popular bit of advice handed out to emerging writers as if it’s entirely sensible and logical. Dragons are out then, I suppose?
No. I don’t think we should write what we know so much as write what we feel. If you can feel the longing for a dragon—a symbolism for worlds beyond, new heights, and just the fact that dragons are really fucking cool—then write it. Writing what we know would severely limit our creative capabilities (although in this post I did mention living life so you have more to write about and I stand by that). But we must write what we feel or we are grappling in the dark and our work will read psychopathic or flat.
In any good book, a piece of the writer exists. Maybe a single moment of their life, maybe a disease they are trying to cure through the excruciating act of disemboweling words onto the page—a self-surgery. Perhaps an aspiration or fear, a gnawing worry. It doesn’t mean the author is any particular character or any particular character is their mother or father or issues (Freud may disagree), but their fingerprints are smudged throughout the pages.
Yet.
You, dear reader, would never know.
That is the protection of the novel, or even the short story.
Non-fiction but scattered with distortion and lies.
And then there’s poetry…
Which wounds can you see?
I wrote for a paper when I first started out this foray into a career of writing. It wasn’t a career then; I didn’t get paid despite the fact I was the headline article person and the photographer and the interviewer and driving all around the city, etc. The paper no longer exists so it was probably right not to pay me…
I digress.
After that, some years passed, then I tried poetry. It was published—once more, in places that no longer exist. Despite that fact, it meant something to me. Aside from a jaunt into journalism and some magazine I submitted to when I was in high school—a piece I can no longer recall; was it a short story or poetry and did it have lots of teenage angst? (yes)—it was my first published work.
It felt like a rush, of course. A high. For about five seconds.
Then it felt… exposing.
I had written about sex, I believe (this was nearly a decade ago). That was part of it. It was drawn from my own life. Another key piece in why I was feeling vulnerable. I hadn’t yet learned how to finesse my reality onto the page. It was like the cliffside metaphor above; just hulking and too big and there.
Parts of me were ashamed I had written it at all, let alone published it. It was like an itch diving deep into my veins, as if all my vessels had been exposed, but I was the one who had shred my skin and held the carnage up to the light.
In reality, the online zine that published it was tiny and new and did not grow and very few people ever saw it. In reality, too, it wasn’t that insane and no one would necessarily know it was autobiographical.
None of those facts mattered. Logic jumped out the window. It gnawed at me to the point I almost gave up the idea of being a writer entirely then and there in the aftermath of it all.
Writing poetry feels like giving myself an autopsy for everyone to see. The wounds are all visible and if you look closely, you’ll figure out precisely what made them. As if every reader is a detective, every critic a coroner.
Fiction is Fun Even if I’m Dying
An evolved writer probably paints their melodrama with a detached brush. In fact, perhaps it’s too easy to write about what happened to you. (And make no mistake, something happened to all of us; a life-defining moment that altered our path, or at the very least, gave us pause—the pauses can be as unsettling as the course correction)
I mentioned we should write what we feel, but then one must tangle it up into threads of falsities. I predominantly have written romance thus far, which requires a HEA (“happily ever after”) or HFN (“happy for now”). So what I can do if I’m feeling particularly off-kilter is tie off my grief with a nice little bow of lies at the end of a book and give myself a twisted wish fulfillment. I actually despise that type of thing and hope my readers’ agony while consuming my books means I rarely do it, and yet I’m sure I have done it, subconsciously or otherwise. The final form of a fiction writer, however, is probably a clean break from their own internal crises. A discarding of their wants, a telepathic leap into another world entirely where their own experience only serves as the baseline for human interaction and nothing more.
I try this tactic. I end up injecting too much emotion still, but I try. Even if I think I might be dying—in the midst of a depressive episode or a manic one gone wrong or just general writerly angst and panic—I can make a reader escape and as they jog through my words, I ensure they don’t notice this particular landscape has been pruned by me.
In poetry, it’s different.
Can you talk about it? Or have you lost the words?
Why write poetry at all? So much is about relationships, and not necessarily romantic ones (although there is certainly that). Why not merely have a conversation instead of dripping letters and syllables into stanzas? A poet sits down with something to say to someone and barring that someone’s death, what prevents them from picking up the phone instead?
I don’t think this is true of the novel. Maybe there is a message inside, but usually it’s to ourselves or multiple people in which an emotional conversation orgy isn’t ideal or perhaps the novel is meant to reach those we don’t know about but understand are out there, someone going through what we are or have and we hope our message in a bottle reaches the right group of people.
A novel isn’t often an intimate letter, in my opinion. A poem always is.
It can even be funny or silly or ridiculous, but it’s intended to arrive in a particular person’s mailbox.
So why don’t poets call?
Can we talk about it? Or have we lost the words in the sense the only courage we’ve got left is to wrap them inside a few lines? Ironically, for me anyway, if I write a poem about someone, it would be absolutely dreadful if they actually read it.
Too exposing, you see.
I’m not making that fucking phone call.
Too much. It’s too much. Poets can be an intense, dramatic bunch and not everyone yearns for the role of recipient to all our inner feelings. Maybe to be polite and save them the burden of our insecure, longing, pining, heartbreaking vomit, we don’t pick up the phone, and instead we grab the pen.
What comes out is turbulence, disturbances, hatred, loathing and lust (maybe all at the same time), hopes, dreams, “I wish we…”, “I’m sorry I,” “I think of you constantly,” in thinly veiled metaphors and similes and it’s all so pathetic, really.
Lying on the coroner’s table and saying, “Gather round, gather round, here are my small intestines, and up here, you see, is my heart.”
I made a playlist called Fairy Poet, if you wish to be enchanted.
I don’t know why this made me cry but it did. Poetry is one of those things I always struggled to write and keep. I would bleed everything on to the paper and then immediately rip it up or burn it so others didn’t find it
“I can make a reader escape and as they jog through my words, I ensure they don't notice this particular landscape has been pruned by
me.
In poetry, it's different.”
I think this is one of your most powerful and moving articles yet.