Why I’m a specutalitve fiction writer
When events in my life piled up to the point that I thought I’d explode, I sat down and puked out a novella on my laptop. This is how I started writing.
At first it was furious typing, expelling out a story at breakneck speed with no idea of where it was going or when it was going to end. I only knew I had to keep going. The story was drawn heavily from my life, and the process leeched out a toxicity that had been building for years. I felt invigorated.
Naturally, as I finished that story and searched for more to write, I chose to write in the same genre–mainstream fiction. Which is not be confused with literary fiction. I never even approached that, but do confess to thinking I did at the time out of ignorance. No, I left my life behind and wrote stories about everyday people set in the modern world with the conflict centered on some type of dissonance between the way they viewed themselves and reality.
I did this for about a year and a half. Until one day I sat out on my porch (my preferred writing spot) and realized the problem with the current story I was working on: I was bored, not only reading it, but writing it. This wasn’t a one day funk to work through; boredom pervaded this piece from beginning to end. I diligently finished the piece and half-heartedly sent it out (if I was bored writing it, who would be excited reading it?).
The idea of not writing anymore never even entered my consideration. Instead, I thought about the stories that I’ve read and were fun to read and what made them awesome. My mind naturally went back to all of the fantasy I consumed as a kid: to the epic battles of good and evil, to magic systems, to floating castles and underwater cities, to all of the things that make fantasy awesome. Soon, I had an idea. Two weeks later I had a story. I felt invigorated again, and I knew exactly what kind of writer I wanted to be.
I am a speculative fiction writer, and I haven’t been bored since.