As a middle schooler, I wrote stories about fictional characters, manifesting events that I hoped would unfold in my life (I remember one specifically about a girl who goes to a lake in the summer with friends, her crush telling her he liked her, them sharing a kiss on a boat one afternoon). I wrote fiction because I didn’t know how to write about my life other than writing in my diary. I had file after file of stories on my eMac computer, most lacking endings.
In high school, a few of my teachers had us write stories in the style of an author, which was my favorite way to show my understanding of a novel (like writing a “grotesque” a la Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, or writing in the style of Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway, the sentences verging on run-ons, lyrical and open). One teacher had us write page 200-something of our life memoir. I wrote about taking the crosstown bus to see my sister and meet my niece/nephew for the first time.
My friends and I became obsessed with freewriting after our teacher, Annie Thoms, had us get in the habit at the beginning of her writing workshop each day: set the timer, 10 minutes, only one rule — Don’t. Stop. Writing. Gemma would message me prompts on iChat in the evenings, a spattering of seemingly disconnected words — rose, schoolbus, blood, feather, bag of chips — and I would give her one in return — water bottle, field, purse, knife, lamp. We’d set our timers and see what would come out.
In college, I went to school for creative writing and literature, thinking I’d write the Next Great American Novel. What I found was that I was much more interested in writing creative nonfiction than anything else. In my fiction classes, I’d end up writing memoirs thinly disguised as stories, and I wouldn’t get away with it.
“The craft is good,” my fiction professor would tell me when it was my turn for feedback, “but it doesn’t read as fiction.”
I was lucky to take a class with professor and writer Kirsten Lunstrum, who encouraged my genre-bending and personal narrative writing. The first personal essay I wrote for her seemed to climb its way out of me, my fingers racing across the keyboard as I hurried to catch it all. I later took an independent study with her where I practiced more memoir writing and dipped my toes into fiction in a safe, brave space. But she left before my senior year, and I never got the mentorship — nor had the confidence — I felt I needed to finish with a strong creative writing project. I set aside my 30-page personal essay about me, my sister, and my mom, and focused on my literature thesis. I dropped the final required creative writing seminar and graduated without the double major.
I carry a lot of shame around that decision.
What was wrong with me that I couldn’t write actual fiction? What was wrong with the other creative writing professors that they couldn’t see the value in memoir?
I didn’t feel “good enough,” whatever that meant. And I stopped writing, for a long time. I’d come back to it in spurts, as the files on my computer prove to me:
- STARTING MAY 2013
- Starting oct 2017
- One file from 2019 in a folder titled simply: “ramblings”
- Three files in a folder titled “2020 Writings”
But mostly, I let it slip away until I started teaching writer’s workshop in August 2021.
Two weekends ago, Ana and I met up to record a few podcast episodes and go on our first writing date for a while at Books and Books. We ate delicious sandwiches, I purchased some books and a new notebook, and then we set out to write. I opened up my laptop to the fictional story I had started a few days earlier (my “novel,” I was calling it — no name, no real direction, just a feeling). I typed a few sentences and then felt it creeping up: the imposter syndrome. The “not good enough.” The you-don’t-even-know-how-to-write-a-short-story-so-why-would-you-try-a-novel? The if-you-can’t-write-a-fictional-story-are-you-even-a-writer-at-all?
“I’m just going to read,” I told Ana, my cheeks flushed. Her fingers were racing across the keyboard, clacking away as she typed at a story that had materialized in her mind, big magic blooming.
I opened up Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell, finding comfort in his encouraging words: “Start writing, and the draft will come.”
Later, I found discomfort in a podcast episode Ana sent me — a man telling his listeners that before you write it, your novel needs to have an elevator pitch, otherwise it’s probably not a very good one. He had some good advice, but most of it was lost in a sea of other advice that made me feel very, very small.
“I don’t have an elevator pitch,” I told her. “I don’t know what my novel is about.”
I didn’t write for a week.
Then, a few days ago, I opened up the other book I’d purchased: Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos, a writer who had taught at my college the year before I arrived. My friend Bob always told me I would have loved her classes.
And her words lit something up in me.
“But my own story wouldn’t leave me alone,” she writes in the first chapter. “It called to me the way I have since come to recognize is the call of my best stories, the ones that most need to be told. So I wrote it” (Body Work 7).
I could feel again the sensation of that first story I wrote for Kirsten’s class, how it nagged at me until I got it out, how it flew out of me effortlessly. I know writing does not always come that easily — trust me, I do.
But I also know what it feels like to have a story that won’t leave me alone. And for me, that’s never been fiction.
Writing With Abandon 