What to write? Fiction mirroring everyday life.

How do writers decide what to write? There is a romanticised idea that writers stick steadfastly to their muse, creating an innovative piece of work that is a mirror to their soul. This is, in some part, true. However, those writing for publication must bend to commerce and produce as certain format and write within fairly strict genre.

A piece of fiction is a communication between the writer and the reader and as soon as it is created becomes subjective. The difference between a list of instructions, which is fairly objective, and a story is a beginning, middle, and end, characters and also a temporal aspect. A story lays out, in a familiar format, a narrative of where, when, why and how something happens. Part of the reason fiction is so popular is that it mirrors the way we live every day.

Each person has their own narrative which is the story that they convey to the outside world. The 'I' of the internal world of thoughts is translated to the 'me' that presents to the world through storytelling on a daily basis. We create a story through verbal and non-verbal language to convey our identity to others and to ourselves.

This creation of our identity is effected partly through memories. Our memories are unique to us because each person occupies an individual spatio-temporal situation therefore each person has a slightly different physical view of and event. Also, our memories are built upon schemas of our individual experiences and relative to these. So, two people observing the same event will inevitably remember it in different ways, as the meaning of the event will be different based on previous experiences. So, in effect, the recall of these memories are fiction in themselves, as any recall and telling will be a construction between sensory memory, experience and meaning.

This throws an interesting light on what we decide to write and how people read it. Our identities are constructed through representations on personal, interpersonal and institutional levels, yet as soon as we receive this information it becomes subjective and is regurgitated in terms of our cumulative past experience in the context of everyday life.

Is writing fiction any different? When we 'invent' a story is it really invented or is it a genre-structured regurgitation of collective identity? Are the plotlines and characters escapees from our mundane everyday storytelling, finding refuge in the pages of novels, where readers turn the pages to release them into their consciouness to add richness to their own stories?

I, for one, am profoundly affected by representations in lots of different types of novels. I recently re-read 'Rebecca' and was so struck by the term 'starting an infant' to describe pregnancy that I smirked for days. Similarly, when had read Bridget Jones my writing and speech was seriously affected by 'diary format' for weeks. Nick Hornby provoked the eternal capitalisation of 'Good Thing' and 'The Memory Keeper's Wife' meant that I would forever reconcile the body with objects in nature. Rather than learning by rote, fiction inhabits the fictional parts of the memory that construe meaning through individual experience.

Fiction exists to entertain not to educate, but how much of someone else's identity and therefore meaning does the reader imbue when reading a novel? Are novels a way to pass on moral messages in a non-threatening, non-evaluative way? Are the best novels those that take the themes of character, their relationships and and overarching premise which mirror the personal, interpersonal and institutionalised aspects of identity construction?

Many works of fiction seem a million miles from everyday life, but the formation of the story, the underpinning familiarity of starting and progressing a novel, the sensory exchange from page to consciousness is exactly the same as the perception of storytelling from day to day, and contributes equally to the construction of memory.

Studies on stress and visualisation techniques have shown that the mind cannot differentiate between a visualised experience and a real experience; so visualising lying on the beach has a similar relaxation effect on the nervous system as actually lying on a beach. Similarly, watching Crimewatch on the TV can have the same effect as experiencing a crime.

This highlights the power of storytelling and the tremendous effect it has on constructing meaning. So, what to write? As everything execpt this very moment is fiction, steeped in our own constructions of meaning, does it really matter? Or should writer's bear a responsibility for their escaped memory schema's shaped by imagination, sensationalised, and beat into genre form, and their meaninng-making steps, towards the reader's consiouness?

'Life itself is only a vision; a dream; nothingness is the same empty space..and you, and you are but a thought.' – The Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain.

Nanotastic!

This week has been mostly about National Novel Writing Week. I started last Sunday on my quest to reach 50k words in 30 days. I'm pleased to say it is going well. The only problem, or blessing, is that my motivation has changed.

I started last week with an agent reviewing my last novel, Life: Immaterial, and the next novel in the pipeline. I ended the week with a liberated feeling as it now looks less than likely that said agent will sign me through an event of unlikely synchronicity which even I have struggled to believe really happened. I won't replay it here out of respect but suffice to express my disbelief thus: what are the fucking chances?

Anyway. Onwards with nano. I had a period of about three hours on Wednesday evening when I wondered if I should quit writing. My expectations of other people sometimes *are* a bit out of synch and being an eternal optimist I tend to overestimate what people are thinking of me. This time I really had it wrong. I wondered if my intentions in writing these novels from themes in my psychology and philosophy work were being brought into question, if I was working on a different level to the rest of the world? Was there a place for me in the literary world at all? Was I completely wasting my time because no one 'gets' my work?

But I love writing. I almost cried when I thought about never writing again. I suppose I have had a reality check and it's made me consider how I spend my time but I just can't stop. Even a couple hours after I had this conversation with myself I was brimming with ideas.

So I carried on with nanowrimo. I hit 13195 words today and the story is coming along nicely. I lost a little bit of confidence but I didn't lose my story. I've become involved with my characters and now I feel like they deserve to conclude the days of their lives I have brought to life in my novel. Does it matter what anyone else thinks?

Yes. I would like to be published. It would make me work even harder than I do now. So I care what agents who are reading my work think. The problem is, there is a writer/agent divide before publication that is extremely unbalanced. Whereas the agent is actually a mere mortal just doing their job, writers privilege them worth almost god-like importance because the whole future of their writing career rests in their hands. The odds of actually getting plucked from the slush pile is akin to winning the lottery if the submission statistics are to be believed. I laugh when people tell me they have bought a lottery ticket, so why do I insist on buying my own lottery ticket and posting my MS off?

For me it's a case of wanting to be judged on my merits. I've worked hard in other areas of my life to be professionally credible and now, in this strange world of creative types and commission hierarchies I'm feeling my way through blindly. I've excelled in some fields solely on my knowledge and skill, regardless of my working class background and who I inevitably don't know. I somehow assumed that it would be the same in the publishing world. I'm not suggesting that people don't get chosen on merit, just that it's enormously difficult to get a MS read by the right person who will 'get' your work. Clearly there is some element of 'it's who you know' from the success for 'sleb lit'. But I'll keep trying!

I'll carry on with nano and see what I end up with. No editing until the 30th but by then I will have another full novel to think about submitting next year. One thought consoled me and carried me through this week: a weaker person would have crumbled. My reserves of strength stepped up and lifted me out of my dilemma and set me down in a new place, one week into nanowrimo. Any other time, when I didn't have a goal to reach, a daily word count to update, I might have just put my pen down.