Tag: fiction

Writing

Writing over fear

Amanda Gibson

It goes without saying that this has been a really, REALLY hard time for basically everyone on earth. We’re all stuck, literally and figuratively—moored in our homes, the progress of our lives halted. I recently wrote about losing my job due to the pandemic, and the relief I felt from the simple act of putting words on the page made it clear that writing was the only thing that would keep me sane through all of this.

But I knew I needed to work on something new—something completely different from the multiple manuscripts on my laptop that have racked up dozens of rejections over the years. Those, in my mind, were symbols of the same sort of thing I was currently experiencing: stasis and failure.

I knew what I wanted to work on. Romance novels had been calling to me for a long time. The first book I ever read with explicit sex in it was Judy Blume’s Wifey, which I stole from my mom’s little library when I was about fifteen and read with the door closed, hiding it under my bed whenever I left my room. There was a lot I didn’t understand about that book at the time. But one thing that hasn’t changed between then and now is the instinct to read such books in private. Ebooks have made it a lot easier to read these lascivious tales when and where we want, no closed door or stuffing-under-the-pillow required. But if anyone were to ask me (pre-pandemic) what I was reading on the train, I still would have had a smooth lie ready to go.

I don’t think I’m alone in my puritanical upbringing, my childhood devoid of any discussions about sex or sexuality. It’s a fairly standard American thing—being raised on abstinence, carrying this odd shame with us into adulthood, discovering various forms of sexual entertainment, enjoying them, but never uttering a word to anyone about it. I’m not sure what the actual fear consists of. Am I afraid people will think I’m less intelligent or less morally upright if I admit to enjoying reading erotic literature? Or is it just a lifetime of shapeless anxiety tsk-tsking me inside my head?

Regardless, I’ve spent a good amount of time thinking about what I want to do next, and how I’m afraid to do it. But then, last month, the incomparable Janelle Hanchett hosted a virtual writing workshop in which she was asked about how she overcomes her fear. Her response was simple: I’m still afraid. But I have lost faith in fear as a reliable guide for my life.

It was everything I needed to hear.

So, because my fears are often so unreliable, I’m writing romance. And there is sex. And I will be afraid of what people think. And I will do it anyway.

Because the greater fear I have right now is what will I do if I don’t write it? What will I do while I wait to see what’s next? And how long will I be waiting?

I want light, and fun, and no way to back out of it if I panic (which I will). So I’m serializing my first adult romance novel on Wattpad and will—hopefully—be updating it with a new chapter each week.

Read. Enjoy. Share, or keep it to yourself. No shame either way.

A Terrifying and Beautiful Place:

http://www.wattpad.com/story/219627349

Writing

Write What Scares You

Amanda Gibson

Today kicked off the 2019 Women in Publishing Summit, an online conference catering to the ladies who write, edit, design, market, and do anything else in the service of creating books and getting them into the hands of readers.

The presentation I focused on today was Joan Dempsey’s “The Value of Highly Contentious Topics in Fiction.” It drew my interest because most of what I write centers around those hot-button issues that tend to draw debate and ire.

Dempsey’s advice was this: write what scares you. Don’t be afraid of your readers’ response to you exploring contentious issues.

“[Stephen King] gets hate mail,” Dempsey says. “He gets people writing to him and berating him for being racist or sexist or homophobic… because he writes characters who embody those traits. He does it so well that people believe Stephen King is those things, when what he has done is embody those characters so fully and so fearlessly.”

I’ve been plagued by concerns about misrepresenting people of color or people with a different sexual orientation or gender identity. I don’t want to be another straight, white person who thinks she knows what these different walks of life entail.

But I always come back to the fact that we have to try. Because if we don’t, then we’re implying we’re not even interested in having the conversation. We’re so afraid of getting it wrong, that we neglect representation.

So, let’s write on, sometimes getting it right, other times getting it wrong, either way getting some hate mail (or hate tweets). Let’s be humble enough to know we barely know anything, and cocky enough to say we’re going to try anyway.