Playing with Dolls

Thumbnail Photo by Jossuha Théophile on Unsplash

This is my first original post since kicking Substack to the curb and embracing the, uh, madness, I suppose, of beehiiv (which is both extremely intuitive and easy to follow between email and website editing!). I’m not going to lie, there was a part of me that really wanted to try out another place like Kit or even Patreon. I would just dissolve my accounts and start over again, reuploading the same two posts until the end of time. The unfortunate matter of fact was that it really is Substack (Good UX Horrendous Community and Userbase) against the world (Difficult UX Normie Userbase No Community Nazis (as far as I can tell)). To be frank (hi frank), we just need to buy back Livejournal from the Russians.

see i didn’t even know where the subscribe button was until just now! goddamnit!

And to be fair (hi fair), I had practical reasons to not pursue this brilliant plan. This silly notion was nothing more than a form of procrastination—that most favored companion of a writer. Since publishing my last article, I hadn’t worked on The Places We Call Sacred (TPWCS) at all. How could I justify updating a blog focused on my thought process and word count progress of TPWCS? Compounded procrastination! But alas, procrastination cannot be ignored it can only be faced, so vot tak, here we are today.

Now—in my defense, I had reason for not working on TPWCS. I had been caught up in the winds of a second project, a short story that I submitted to O-FIC Magazine. It was my first litmag submission! I had worked on it for months and had asked for feedback from three different people! All 8,200 words of it, and I was proud of every syllable. If my refrigerator was magnetized and if I had a printer, I would have hung it up proudly for all who entered my abode to see.

The funny thing is…this short story began as fan fiction too.

Contrary to my vibes, I have taken exactly one college-level creative writing course. It was fall semester 2013, and I needed credits to be full time to get my mom’s GI Bill Benefits, so I jumped on the opportunity. I learned and retained more from her class than I did from any of my business major courses. This is as much praise for the professor as it is absolute derision on my chosen undergrad major. She was the first person I heard who said that an acceptance letter to a doctoral program without funding is a soft rejection. She told us all to think really, really hard before applying to an MFA. I remember, not well some 13 years after the fact, the shadows and paint blots of short stories and poetry from her syllabus.

I don’t have that syllabus anymore (my mother, UCLA class of 1980, had a footlocker full of her college stuff; I have a terabyte-sized external hard drive). Which is a shame, because there was a series of poems that I’m about to talk about, and I can’t, for the love of me, remember who the author was or the name of the poetry collection. What I do remember is Professor Young’s lecture. She told us, with no moral judgement whatsoever, that in poetry, your first published collection is usually drawn heavily from your past and experiences. She called it the Me-Poem. Once you’re done with the Me-Poem, then you go on to do other things, but getting Your Life Out was a crucial step in your journey as a poet.

For those curious as to how 23 year old Sarah wrote, here’s my own Me-Poem in the style of the unremembered author:

This memory is a xerox of a xerox of a xerox at this point, almost a decade and a half later. I can see where this description can be very seen as judgy, but I’m going to give Professor Young the benefit of the doubt and say that she was probably more graceful in her delivery than how I’m portraying her. However, this memory’s status as real or fabricated is irrelevant. The point of the matter is that ever since that day, I’ve had the concept of the Me-Poem Step in the back of my head.

The first step to talking about other stuff is talking about yourself, I guess. It gets you in the habit of speaking. It gets your mouth used to the feel of syllables and the rumble of words in your throat.

The vast majority of my finished projects are fic. They are not perfect stories, but even if the landing is messy, there are defined character arcs. TPWCS is the longest at 80k words. Children of Violence, my somewhat (in?)famous Star Wars AU set in Kabul during the Soviet-Afghan war, is 32k words, and only shorter than my master’s thesis by maybe 400 words. Everything else is a one shot, less than 10k words. I won nanowrimo three times with ofic wips that barely broke 50k with stories where a bunch of stuff happens to people—which is only a “narrative” by the most technical and broadest of definitions.

During the time I should have had the most time to dedicate to writing, I didn’t. The years between undergrad and grad school I described lied in my intent letters as “a period of growth and discovery,” though in reality I was white-knuckling that period trying to figure out my career and how to pay off my student debt. Fic came back to me in 2015, inspired by Cartoon Network’s Over the Garden Wall (which has become a Halloween mainstay in my family). As I put on shows with other people’s actors on other people’s stages, I tried, and failed, five times to craft my own performances.

One of those drafts is an attempt to file the serial numbers from a fic. One isn’t quite that, but an attempt to “do a premise right” after watching a movie horribly fumble the bag. Four are purely original, three having been written in 2017-2018. Long time viewers will know that 2017-2018 was a Bad Time for me. For those new subscribers, I’ll just say this really was a “time for growth and discovery,” just not in a way I can put down on an intent letter. It was a time for growth and discovery the way that a supernova is growing and discovering. I lost 15 pounds, gained it back and added another 10 on top of it. I chopped all my hair off. I drank a lot. I fucked off to Vermont to do Middlebury University’s eight-week intensive language summer program. Then in 2019, I went to Europe. Like an asshole.

The 2017-2018 wips were were experiments in creative non-fiction that used “I” and “you” not to reminisce on what had been but to materialize in some way what could have been. I tried to do something very similar in 2020 with a wip about the end of the pandemic as a hope and prayer for what could be with my past (all the bad parts) as scaffolding.

“I never put myself in my stories,” Sasha said over a basket of fancy fries from a fancy French restaurant on the fancy DC Waterfront. Sasha’s one of my favorite friends to write with and talk craft with. I met her online during Peak Reylo days on tumblr dot com. She was revising a nanowrimo win and I was still working on TPWCS the fic. “My characters are like dolls I play with,” she said. She might as well have told me that she ran 5ks on her hands.

“My characters are basically me in different costumes like Daniel Radcliffe in The Half-Blood Prince.” I said with a grin and a ketchup-smothered fry. I was screaming on the inside in shock and in horror though. I couldn’t imagine sitting down to write something original that didn’t follow the broad contours of my life or share the same bloodforce of my trauma. The protagonists were all clearly me, but the antagonists were just as clear avatars of my parents, my Shitty Ex-Boyfriend, the Nice Ex-Boyfriend Whose Heart I Shattered, and The Boy.

Whereas I ended every chapter of TPWCS with an author’s note saying, “I had fun writing this section of the chapter! If this wasn’t fic, I would have gone a lot deeper into that section, but that’s not why you all are here!” Why couldn’t I just write this story as an original piece first? Why did it have to come into being as fic first?

And then it hit me.

All my ofic wips had been Me-Poems, and that’s why it was so hard to write and finish them. It wasn’t because of some natural ease that comes with not having to create worlds or characters from scratch. It was because the voice guiding those tales was always my own in a raw and inartistic way. I wasn’t playing with dolls. I was trying to speak through puppets, bearing my soul on a stage blacked out by the spotlight hot and steady on me.

Cori is my other favorite writing friend (and one of my favorite humans in general) and she prodded me to watch Bojack Horseman all through 2017/2018. She said I might relate to some characters and it could help me get through some stuff. When I finally put it on and made it through Season 1, I texted her through hiccuping sobs—You bitch.

In Season 6, in an episode titled “Good Damage,” that once again cut a little too close to home, one of the characters, Diane, says to another, why she has to write her book of essays, even though it’s clear she has a better time writing an unserious middle grade chapter book about a kid who solves mysteries at the mall. “I have to write my book of essays,” Diane says. “Because if I don’t, that just means all the damage I got isn’t good damage, it’s just damage.”

Maybe that’s what I was trying to do all this time, trying to repurpose all the bad that had happened into something Meaningful and therefore Good. But it doesn’t matter if it’s meaningful or good, right? It happened. I learned from it. I’m a different person now.

I should really re-watch Bojack.

It’s not that I didn’t write fic that didn’t take cues from my life. Like I said at the top of this post, the short story I submitted began as fic—specifically responding to a mutual’s prompt to “bring your fandom to work” (meaning, write a fic with the characters at your job). I hashed out a draft (for OFIC Mag readers if you’re here, I never uploaded it to ao3!!), cheekily titled “Undesirable.” I worked for weeks with three beta readers (including Sasha and Cori) to transform it to an original story. Transforming this draft was an easier task, even working through the trauma of being laid off for the high crime and misdemeanor of working in international human rights and democracy, than generating anything for “Dinner with Friends” (the covid project mentioned above). I finished “Undesirable” after all. “Dinner with Friends” still sits in my Scrivener pile at 39k words, at least 10% of which words are just notes reading, “something not stupid goes here.”

I walked away from the french fry outing realizing that with those original drafts, I was reflecting my life to audiences. With fic, I was refracting it. With its established characters, costumes, and sets, I was able to tell my story—my experiences, hurts, comforts, and dreams—with enough distance that it neither hurt nor weight me down. It wasn’t just me up there burning up under the limelight.

I don’t know what the proper craft term is to describe this phenomena. It’s not “authorial distance,” because that seems to be talking about the reader’s insight into the characters’ worlds, rather than what the author puts into them. So, for lack of a better term, I’ll call this authorial refraction. If you’re putting yourself into the characters and their situations, how much of it is true to form (reflection) and how much is transformed (refraction)?

What’s great about having a vocabulary to describe this phenomena is that I can recognize when it’s happening. If I can recognize when I’m doing this, then I can be intentional about its usage—and really, the only difference between a master and an amateur is the level of their intent.

As I develop in my writing, uh, “journey” (feels too presumptive to say “career” and too belittling to say “hobby”), I hope that this recognition will help me generate more characters, more stories, without writing a whole fic first or without being weighed down by the need to make good damage out of bad shit. I hope I can write fic to have fun and play with barbies. I hope that my past will be a chisel to carve out a story rather than the block of stone from which the story is sculpted.

I finally figured out how to turn on comments would love to hear your thoughts on this idea of authorial refraction, especially if you know the actual term for it. I would also love to hear if you’ve had similar struggles in feeling weighed or inspired by your own experiences in crafting original or transformative fic.

Until next time. Take care of yourselves and each other,
Sarah K