Square one

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I’ve studied literature since I was 15. It is the only thing I have wanted to study. I loved it and I still do. I started writing criticism as an undergrad student and got published. I still write it and I still love literary theory. I never took a creative writing class, for none of the two universities where I was a student offered them. I never considered taking such a class, for I gave up writing literature when I was around 18. Ten years later, I started again, not with poetry, as I had written in my adolescence, but with prose. I was awful. To this day, I feel embarrassed by my first texts. I never tried to publish. I knew critics, I was one, and I used to be vicious as a critic. But writing literature (even one as crappy as mine) made me feel thrilled. It still does. It is also  emotional hell. I found my perfect creative outlet.

I have been writing fiction for 7 years now. I have a completed novella, which I cannot edit for the 10th time because only the thought makes me sick. I still like the story. Not so sure about the writing though. It’s been rejected several times, and I understood why every time. Still, I can’t bring myself to edit it again. I also have some short stories, which gather rejections. The problem is that I have grown to consider some of them as utter nonsense. I can’t work on them. And I mourn that in the beginning, I was in love with the idea from which they stemed. 

In all my years of study and love for theory, I never understood that weird is not good in fiction. I like reading weird fiction and probably that brought me to fantasy. There are only certain types of fantasy which I like, the weirder, the better. The problem is that what I write is incredibly weird, too. Most of the times, I have to censor my inner voice just to draw a clear storyline, one that the reader can understand. And when I “experiment” with my style, I often find my writing flat and uneventful. 

So yeah, after 20 years of studying literature and 15 years of being a literary critic, I find myself back to square one. It’s like I have no idea what I’m doing. It feels kind of writer’s block (I had that before) but less severe, because my day job is now also writing-related, and that makes me feel like I’m not wasting my life anymore. But starting over with literature, that’s a whole different deal, one which I am unsure I am willing to make.

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