Trying to write honestly is weird, and it's a large part of the reason I've kept everything private for a long time. Putting any authentic emotion into fiction requires giving a little bit of yourself to it, and I've often stalled in the middle of something because my brain starts needling me: people are going to think this is just you. They'll think this thing happened to you. If they know this thing didn't happen to you, they'll go on the internet and tell everyone you're lying about it. I'm aware it sounds silly. It is silly. It's not entirely unfounded, though. Some writers openly say that this is how they do things, and people have projected onto my work like this before, admittedly most often because they'd quite like to be in a story and they assume I must have put them in mine somewhere. So often my anxiety takes priority over what I know to be the truth, the potential judgement of an imaginary someone becomes more important than telling a story I want to tell, and I stop writing it. I need to get over this, because the emotional kernel is the thing that makes my stories flow. When I try to do without it, for this reason or because my needling brain has told me that real writing is Plot-Heavy Hard-Hitting Bleak Shit and nothing else, I can maybe squeeze out a few pages of vaguely competent mulch before I get too bored and annoyed to carry on, and I get nothing out of rereading it. My writing is best when it's exploring a complicated bond or strange dynamic between characters, and I would like to feel free to write about an abusive parent or unrequited love or too-intense friendship without my brain compelling me to preemptively project shit onto it before anyone else can.
Blogging honestly is a different beast, because this is me and everyone knows that. On OpenDiary and LiveJournal and DeadJournal and all the other places I was writing in my teens and twenties, there were two or three readers max who knew me in real life, but the internet's changed. People will only find this if I tell them it's here, so anyone who reads this almost certainly knows me already. (Hi.) Which leaves me in the weird position of trying to work on my stated goal of chilling out, expressing myself more freely, not second-guessing myself, while avoiding crossing any invisible lines into Oversharing or Creating Drama. I'm already having to fight the urge to leave this one in the drafts, telling myself I'll come back to it when I've posted a few things that aren't so angsty. (I will not do this. I will post the angst, and you will read it.)
It would be nice if I could learn to treat writing like I treat my other hobbies. I'm currently working on my second ever corset, which I am fully and happily expecting to be shit as a learning experience. I am not putting off working on it in case it's shit, I'm not imagining paranoid scenarios where it's shit, it will turn out the way it turns out and I'm excited for the valuable information I'll have for next time. A couple of weeks ago I was in a truly terrible improv show which even my friends and family in the audience couldn't find a good word to say about, and in a few months I'll get right back up there and do another (improv! But musical! The worst nightmare of so many and I'm itching to get started). I give myself grace in those things because they're not my lifeblood the way writing is, so in practice they end up being more fun than the thing I really love and by this time next year I'll have fourteen unnecessary corsets and still be trying to coax a coherent sentence out of my brain with a biscuit.
I'm going to try and remember to write again tomorrow. Preferably about something that's actually happened.
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