Summer is in full swing! I did some travelling in June and a whole lot of relaxing via bike rides, TV-show binging (just finished Dark Matter, highly recommend), and reading on the balcony. It’s what summers are meant for.
I also visited my parents for a week, and somehow chose the ‘heat dome’ week, go figure. While I was cleaning out some boxes I’d stashed in the basement probably a decade ago, I unearthed a big blue Tupperware bin simply marked “Erika’s Stuff” that I had little memory of packing.
It turned out to be a time capsule of sorts.
It was filled with spiral notebooks from undergrad and grad school, and many older school planners and journals from high school with all my angsty teenage poetry I never showed a soul. There were pen pal letters from elementary school, dream journals, even my handwritten scribbles plotting out my gymnastics floor routine.
The most fascinating of all was finding a diary penned by my 7-year-old self (with parts that were edited with a red pen care of my wiser 10-year-old self.😅 So that’s on brand). I wrote about watching the classic movies The Land Before Time and The NeverEnding Story at daycare. The seeds of myself were all there: my interests in documenting, capturing details, journaling...
The thing is I haven’t written anything I would consider publishable, well, ever. And nor do I want to. But just finding a tub of basically my life’s analog journaling output reminded me that a writer is someone who writes. Period. And I have clearly had the impulse to capture my thoughts in writing since I was little.
But I’ve also had the impulse to document, to capture moments, to create an archive.
And so reconnecting to these deep-seated desires and revisiting those memories was truly awesome. It's inspired me to keep documenting and writing so that a future me can find the fossils of what I currently take for granted and be suitably astounded.
And here’s where this relates back to you… It’s the same with fiction.
Stories intended to be published for an audience are also a kind of fossilized record. They capture how the author chose to see their world and how they were dealing with things at the time, just channelled into a fictional universe. As the author, you encode so much into your books: the meaningful names of certain characters, how your rage and your disappointment and your despair become themes that inform character arcs, how the protagonist is a thinly veiled version of you (or an amalgam of features of other people). Stephen King has even talked about stories being “found things, like fossils in the ground… relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world,” but I’d add that these creative ‘discoveries’ you write into existence get channeled through you, so your writing and stories are your life caught in amber. That’s what writing does.
These stories, published or not, are stepping stones into our past, but also the launchpads into our future.
Author Resource Round-Up
Short and sweet this time because I went longer with my story. 😅
- You know when you have a word on the tip of your tongue? Someone invented a cool website to help you find it! This totally worked for me (but I can't remember the word now, ironically...).
- If you love perusing Reddit forums on writing and books, here's a search tool (like Google for Reddit) that cuts through the noise and finds relevant discussions. It's pretty neat.
- Here's a useful article on how to avoid publishing scams (from the Nonfiction Authors Association). And while you're at it, bookmark the Writer Beware website if you haven't already.
What I'm Reading
I love a good short story. Some are better than others in this collection, but right now I'm enjoying "The Answer Man," which apparently took Stephen King 45 years to write. He tried writing it when he was 30 but just couldn’t get it down, then he somehow lost the manuscript in the bowels of his desk, only to have it resurface when he was ready to take it on, in his seventies... 😎
That’s it for this month. See you in August!
P.S. I'm booking for October (line, copyediting, and proofreading), so if you're looking for an editor click here to get a sample edit and see if we're a good fit.
- Erika
