Crisis

So I am slowly accepting (can’t say realizing, I’ve know for awhile, but was trying to ignore it) that I am in the wrong wrong field. I’m not that far off, just one genre over, but this is going to suck. Everything I’ve ever said about writing being in my bones and my need to write otherwise I get all schitzo is true. The problem is, I don’t think I’m actually very interested in writing fiction. It’s okay, I like it all right, but well, no, I don’t really care for it all that much anymore.

Here’s what’s happened. I started out writing terrible fiction. I had one vampire story my freshman year in college, and after that, all of my fiction was thinly veiled memoir. I’d only end up with a “story” if I took a scene from my life that already had a beginning, middle, and end, and wrote it up, changing as much as possible, but there it was, my life on the page. When I made up characters, I never seemed to have any plot. Nothing happened. The stories died. But I kept plugging along. I loved to write, and I wanted to do it and do it well. So I came to grad school. My first story was about me again. Every little thing I put in there was about me or other people I know/knew. My short shorts were all about me. I knew I needed to do something different, so I did. I wrote an entirely fictional story. I got myself a character and a plot, a beginning, middle, and end, and even a little gimmick that I tried to make not a gimmick. The story went over so well in class. The story bores me to tears. I’m just not interested. The same way I am not interested in reading tons of fiction anymore or analyzing it at all. I’d still rather just read things I like and ignore things that don’t immediately strike my fancy. Why else was it so hard to finish my metafiction independent study? Because I kept picking up books that, even though they had merit that I could easily see, bored me. I didn’t care. I didn’t want to read them. So I read them very slowly, falling behind, and eventually ditching them to pick up a different book I might actually get into.

I am not a fiction writer. I am a nonfiction writer. I am really into memoir (since I have a gigantic ego), but I also really like nonmemoir pieces. I’ve written all sorts of diatribes on various topics from the status and feasibility of marriage in our modern times to this bullshit with politicians trying to dictate to academics to thoughts on Brave New World, etc. Some I’ve posted on this blog or the old one, many more are just sitting in a file on my computer.

I’ve never really posted any fiction on my blog. I have no interest in doing that. But once I got a blog, I sure did start using it to my heart’s content. Sure, sometimes I don’t write anything for a bit, but that’s because I’m fucking busy or preoccupied with watching all three seasons of Millennium or playing Katamari Damacy or going to California.

So fuck. I have to do a thesis in a field I don’t even care for anymore. I want to do creative nonfiction. I spent all of last semester doing creative nonfiction when I should have been working on my fiction. But I don’t want to work on fiction. Once I decided to really write fiction and leave myself out of it, I lost interest. I did it. I really did it. I can do it, and do it well, but I don’t have any love or drive for it. At least not right now. I still like it and I still have stories I want to tell in fiction. But I want to do creative nonfiction.

I am in a creative nonfiction workshop this semester, and I’m already ecstatic. The first two essays I read for class got me pumped. The authors addressed issues that concern me, and they made good arguments and clarified a lot for me. I want to get going. I want to finish the pieces I’ve been working on and workshop them. I don’t want the distractions of having to write fiction to get in the way, but alas, I have no choice.

I feel like I should go talk to the Director of my program, who is also my advisor, but there isn’t anything he can do. We don’t offer a major in creative nonfiction yet because we just don’t have the faculty to do that. I’m lucky DW came back at all and is teaching this workshop right now.

Shit. It’s liberating on the one hand and debilitating on the other. Fuck fuck fuck.