The Most Authentic Voice
TW: Trauma
This week, I started taking a science fiction, fantasy, and horror writing class from a place I’ve admired for a while. I’ve felt like I was in a rut with ideas ever since the pandemic started (and longer, if I’m being honest) - and the class seemed like the best way to break myself out of writer’s block by trying something new.
I had no idea that I’d find my way out by going back to one of my oldest wells of inspiration.
After the first class, I dove right into the homework: “Using whatever means at your disposal, describe a hero. There is no wrong answer.”
I thought of superheroes first, and the Fellowship of the Ring, and it was there that my mind began to diverge from what I’d typically think of as a hero. My brainstormed characteristics started to change from physical strength to mental, and most of all, to survive something incredibly terrifying and be able to vanquish it a second time, knowing exactly what they’re in for.
It’s what scared me the most after I had my blood clot - knowing that I could go through all of that again, and that I’d know exactly everything that was going to happen to me and what it looked and smelled and felt and hurt like. Thankfully, I’ve avoided that fate, but I started to think about a common trope in horror movies. (Not that I’m brave enough to watch them, but I watch commentary and learn about their plots, because I enjoy the genre.)
I started to think about what might happen if a “final girl” who survives a horror movie, some sort of encounter with the supernatural that no one would ever believe her about, was forced to return to normal life and try to be normal herself - and then faces the demon she’d survived once again.
My fingers flew over the keyboard in a way that hadn’t happened in quite some time, and even though I was working with a new idea, the story veered into the familiar almost instantly. My character, Britt, started the story at a college BBQ for new freshmen, something I attended at my beloved school. The world around her took shape. The attic room, the closet with the far-too-heavy doorknob, even the food at the event that she was doing a very bad job of eating - everything started to come together and even though it was fiction, it felt incredibly real.
Unlike when I write most of the time, I wasn’t stopping constantly to second-guess myself. I didn’t research names - I picked whatever came in my head first - and I didn’t let myself edit until I had the whole first scene done. By the next day, I was starting on the second. And when it came time to share my work with my class, I finally decided to reread what I’d written, and discovered something I haven’t done in a very long time.
The last time I wrote one of my “Ellie” stories was my senior year of college. She was one of the three narrators of the novel I wrote as my thesis, and although my thesis was picked apart by so many people, Ellie’s voice was never up for debate. The one piece of positive feedback I got from everyone who read it was that the character felt authentic, real, and like she was about to jump off the page and turn into a real person.
The difference between this Ellie and characters I’d written previously - and which came back again as I started to write my new story this week - was that I was writing in-depth first-person narrative from the point of view of someone living with a mental illness I too live with.
For Ellie, even though I didn’t obsess about the same things as her, I knew how daunting it could feel to have an exposure experience, and how I would need to split up something like that into a series of tiny tasks so I could feel like I was accomplishing something, a bit at a time. Therefore, since her story started with her large fear of getting on an airplane, I dove into her head and described every task from calling a taxi to putting her suitcase in the taxi to lifting said suitcase on the conveyor belt at airport security. I numbered each step, and no matter what anyone had to say about other parts of the story, sections like these got a lot of praise for authenticity.
I never told anyone except for my close friends that I was merely putting my thought processes on paper. I never told anyone that I could have those exact same thoughts and go in the exact same direction, only about the things that I personally obsessed about.
Writing about Ellie, and now about Britt, is also a way to delve into the deepest thoughts in my head and draw them out farther. What happens when I let myself explore thoughts that are frightening or the ones I try to keep out of my life? I tackled my understanding of violent crimes committed by people living with mental illness in Ellie’s story, and with Britt, the guilt that sometimes (but thankfully not often) resurfaces over my inability to take care of a dog made an appearance.
I never liked the advice from writing professors to “write what you know.” I felt like my own life was too boring (not nearly enough dragons) to merit writing about. But as I’ve come to see, writing about what you know doesn’t necessarily need to mean copying your life exactly. It can mean using thought processes that live in your head and putting them in another world, just to see what happens - and it’s not uncommon for me to wonder what my characters would do if they were in my life instead.
Starting Britt’s story this week reminded me of my first favorite character to write, an original character I wrote in the Lord of the Rings universe when I was nine years old. I used to write her as the version of myself that I wanted to be, and I drew inspiration from that idealized version of myself when it came time to face challenges in my life. As the world is starting to move to a post-pandemic state, I wonder if I’ll look to Britt for inspiration as I keep writing her story. After all, there’s plenty of time left in this class - and now that I’ve tapped into one of my favorite sources of inspiration, I’m not short of ideas.
Ellie, a writer new to the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.