I am my own worst critic. I tend to tear up everything I have written. I am hard on myself and delete each word I type. Even still I have written many short stories, poems and screenplays. When I was a child I didn’t care about the audience; I wrote from the heart. Now that I am older, I tend to scrutinize over every single written word. The most hindering of habits is that I worry too much over what other people will think of my writing.
I wanted to be a writer so much that I earned my BA in Creative Writing and now I’m under even more pressure to be a successful writer. My parents keep asking me when I will write a novel. I had no plans on doing such a thing until just recently. My brother Shane told me that I can self-publish my writing via Amazon and that my e-book would be available through Kindle. This was the ice that needed to be broken. One thing I did learn in my creative writing courses was that I will get rejected. Every good writer gets rejected. I didn’t want to go through all that hard work and for nothing.
So here I am close to the new year and I could make a resolution to lose some weight, but instead I am going to turn one of my short stories (Secret Closet) into a novel and publish it over Amazon. The story is something that one of my professors at UTEP thought was well written. It is a story close to my heart.
It is about a young girl who is physically and mentally abused by her mom’s boyfriend. Her mother keeps moving to get away from him, but he always seems to win his way back into their lives. She always prepares herself for this by finding a secret place inside every new apartment/home they move to. It is told from the child’s point of view, something that was difficult and will continue to be difficult to achieve. I need to keep the novel in the same voice.
I am truly excited to get it started and hope to get it published in the coming months. I would also love to retitle it, but am having difficulty finding a catchy title. I guess a title will come to me when the story takes shape.
You may wonder why am I questioning if it should be written if I seem so set on what I want to do. I am afraid by writing this story that some people in my personal life will be upset that I wrote it. The story is derived from my own horrific experience and I think that some in my family would like to forget that it ever happened. It will have a lot of fiction embedded in with the truth and this could be perceived as me creating lies rather than fiction. It is not my wish to make up lies, but expand on something that I experienced as a child. I just need to write it because it needs to be written. I need to stop caring about what others will say and just tell the story. How can I do this when I care too much about what my family will think?
Sunshine Overrated 