Motivation, or: What I Talk About When I Talk About 2005
Picture it: Nashville, TN, 2005. A young black girl has recently discovered soft-core porn and her parents don’t know she has access to Skinemax on her bedroom TV. She's new to the area. Her love of Yugioh is in full swing. She has a chalkboard on her wall full of fanfiction titles, plots unknown. She’s often naked and wears plaits. She writes and she loves to write, with no real expectation of the activity besides happiness and fun. She will not live forever.
Lasses and lads, that young black girl was me.
And that unmolested love of writing is… gone.
That’s not to say it’s always gone. It does come back every once in a while. A glimmer of it, or a ghost only hinted at on the edge of a photograph. It’s hard to touch, anyway, and it doesn’t like to be touched. I haven’t been that girl in so long.
The hardest part of writing, we think, is motivation. Which isn’t wrong, it is hard to find time enough and inspiration enough but I think the crux of it is finding love enough.
Back in those days, I had enough love for 1,000 yaoi girls. I just enjoyed it so damn much and lately I’ve been trying to examine why. Why don’t I feel that way anymore? It’s hard to put your finger on if you don’t admit to yourself why you write or have ever written in the first place. Why did you ever start?
For me, it’s easy.
I do it to harass people.
That’s as straightforward as I can be. And there’s no open forum I can really voice all my opinions in, so it’s a good thing I paid for my own domain, eh? Yeah, I like harassing people with my writing, always have. That’s what got me started, what kept me going, and posting, and amassing readers. I’ve had legit thousands of people subbed to me and I was delighted to be able to write just outrageous, disgusting, ridiculous things and have people show up week after week to read and respond to it.
Let’s take it past fanfiction — when I started writing original, I was in undergrad, attending my first fiction writing class with the great Dr. Mini. I was scared shitless but there was this fire in me: look, new people to harass! I glanced around the room shiny-eyed, salivating. What a great opportunity.
I remember, specifically, my second fiction writing class at MTSU where one of the other students was a total prude. He, for some reason, despised anything with sex in it. He simply was not having it, dahling. So I latched onto that and wrote about sex the entire semester, going so far as to start off a story with it and I drank in his discomfort like an aged Italian wine.
Fast-forward to now.
What am I now?
an adult
usually alone at home
writing original
barred from sharing original work outside of sending it to editors because putting it online suddenly makes it unpublishable
ergo no one but editors reads my stuff
So what does that mean?
I HAVE NO REAL REASON TO WRITE.
It’s cause and effect. I know you’re supposed to want to write for yourself, for your -gag- ART, oh Jesus save me from ART, but fuck man, do you know what this does to me? I have no one to harass, It’s like a predator alone on a desert island with no sheep to eat. I’m dying, oh, I’m dying.
And my agent wonders why my next book is taking so long, but that’s another post.
…
No, fuck it, it’s THIS post! I’m lovely and lonely and I belong deeply to myself and I don’t want to. At this point, the only way I motivate myself into writing and finishing this goddamn book is by sheer force and threatening but there is no JOY in it. Writing is joyless for me now and so when I think back to 2005, what was arguably the height of my fervor for writing, I don’t just think of the scene and emo kids, the Death Note AMVs, the long nights spent on MSN while rewatching the L death scene, the Hot Topic trips, discovering masturbation, the hot Tennessee summers, the ice cream sandwiches, the giant house shoes I wore, my hair in long braids, the sound of a locker door slamming, ringing down an empty hallway, a Snickers bar melting in my hand.
I think, I wish I could love it again.