Recently I’ve been talking a lot with several friends and my brother David Abrams about issues relating to vulnerability, self-worth, and what Brene Brown called “whole hearted living.”
It’s posed an interesting connection to my Enneagram* personality type, which is a “3” (“The Success-Oriented, Pragmatic Type: Adaptable, Excelling, Driven, and Image-Conscious”) because it links closely with my need to project a certain (read: perfect) image of myself.
What it all boils down to is that we can’t live our lives if we are living a lie.
Not that I have been, too much, but I do spend a lot of time pulling curtains over parts of my life out of shame or fear or all of the above. My writing has really been subject to that because of the expectations I’ve put on myself. I keep waiting for the day that I put my back into it, when I buckle down and write LITERATURE that is finely crafted and respectable. So therefore, of course, I never write anything of the sort.
But I do write. A lot.
Which is to say, here is me “coming out” with something a lot of you may already know: I write fanfiction. And the reason I started writing fanfiction was because it was one form of writing that was utterly and completely without expectations, ironically. I mean, the point of writing a fanfic story is the same reason a person knits, or plays golf on the weekends: because it is fun. That’s it. No big defense from me about it, because if you read my fanfic and call it marginal or crappy my response is likely to be, “Well, hell, I wrote and posted that in less than five hours and I had three glasses of wine to fuel me at the time. What did you expect, literature?” I don’t care if you thumb your nose at what I wrote, because the only reason I wrote it was because I wanted to.
In a way, this has proven to be freeing for me. I’ve found out that even at my worst, I will have people who enjoy my stories. And that even at my worst, I’m not actually that bad.
So I’m taking the next step, which is sharing my original fiction. I know what I should do, what has been whipped into my head since I was a girl, which is find a publisher and get my work published in a “respectable” way. Well, screw that. Because I’m not here to become the next Scalzi or Vandermeer or Martin – I’m not that talented anyway. All I want with my original fiction is the same thing I want from my fanfiction: to enjoy writing it, and to put it out there for people to enjoy reading.
Over the next month I’m going to start posting things online. I’m deciding between Wattpad and AO3 – to be honest, AO3 has better features as a platform, and since I’m familiar with it from posting all of my fanfic there (nearly a million words worth of stories**) I’ll probably go with that. Maybe. Wattpad, theoretically, offers a better community and discoverability. Maybe I’ll post at both and see what happens.
I could, of course, self-publish via Amazon. Right now, though, with everything else I’ve got going on, that’s a daunting task I’m not ready to take on. Self-publishing is something I’m not entirely ready to commit to with these stories. Anyway I can’t afford a proper editor so I’d feel bad charging people for books that have not been “cleaned up” the way they should be. So, this is my compromise.
It’s a great era we live in that I can do this. It’s also about time that I start being honest with myself first and foremost, and stop being ashamed of the things I love.
*I tend to take personality typing with a grain of salt but I’ve gained a lot of insight into my own behaviors through Enneagram analysis.
**If you want to read my fanfic, keep in mind that most of it is slash (not all, but most) and is only in a few select fandoms. Just email me if you want a link.