Different fictions
Diaries, narratives, starting something new
For some reason over the last week or so I’ve kept trying to start a new post and writing extreme overshares instead, things from this year better kept in privacy. I’m feeling self-conscious about what it might mean to tell a story about yourself that you can’t recall, and what might be driving that impulse to confess in the first place.
Maybe it’s because this year I’ve started writing a diary and have been trying to write in it daily. Surprisingly, it’s turned out to be one of my favourite changes of the year. Most of the entries have been pretty banal – dear diary, I ate some soup today, can’t think what else to write, byeee – but in others I’ve come to my diary feeling looser, or sadder, or just having woken up, which puts me sometimes in a bizarre state of clarity. At the very least it’s useful to track moods and impulses, to have something to be accountable to, and to write at least a sentence every day.
I’ve started writing another novel this year, too, moving into something new. Finally at the point where it shifts into excitement, into relief. (Is it normal to feel relief as part of your “creative practice”? Literally every time I finish a book I think I might never be able to do it again.) I’ve been focussing more on shorter fiction in the last months, dipping in and out of other smaller narratives and trying out things for size. It’s working my brain differently, and I’ve been enjoying it a lot. Thinking consciously about how you tell a story, or a glimpse of a story, how much you can pack in and how much you can leave out. I printed out four stories and realised, with surprise, it’s a fair amount of words. They sneak up on you. And then things are in movement.
Whilst looking through my notes app for names for stories and the novel, I found notes all the way back to 2012, when I first got a smartphone, in a folder I hadn’t thought to look in before (Luddite! Millennial!) Some of the notes are incredibly sad. Some are puzzling. My first novel-related note is 27th June 2014, where I’ve made some comments for edits on my first novel, What Dark Thing, which was never published. There are grocery lists, of course. Shopping lists for clothes I wanted, some of which I still have (an American Apparel jumpsuit, gaudily patterned, still-loved).
A note full of things I wanted to say to someone, when I felt too timid to ask questions like How do you really feel about me? The questions become more combative, turn into statements. I feel often that you do not treat me with care. And yet I still want you. Oh my god, I think, reading it back, remembering the total uncertainty, the powerlessness of debasing myself in return for crumbs of affection. Keeping my feelings under wrap so as not to rock the boat, storing them safely in my phone; not realising they would become a kind of recording, proof, shoring me up against future heartbreak. Remember how you never want to feel like that again, I tell myself. Remember that this was actually how you felt.
I’ve been working on this new novel since the summer, trying to work in Berlin with a shivering heart, cold and wired, feeling a little unreal, as if I was in a bubble. Everything in my body had felt clear for a while, but soon every sensation felt blunted, filtered through a haze. The fucking rain! The crazy city. But the fledgling novel was something to hold onto, a future promise. And I wrote pages and pages in the diary, trying to crystallise things. How it felt to be suddenly unmoored, how it felt drinking tequila with Ivan as we sheltered from yet another storm, the red light of a room, a stranger’s conversation, a large and sandy dog that nosed at my legs as I drank a tall beer, the terrible art in the bar selling cheap spritzes. Attempt after attempt to settle, to get comfortable.
Somewhere in the summer the narrative shifted to a determination to make the most of the summer, a summer I started to feel dramatic about. It would be the last summer, where we would go to multiple festivals and I would be uninhibited and free and happy and leave no desire unturned, and then I would grow up and change my life. I did a good job of it, I think – I wrung absolutely everything out of it, did everything I could in pursuit of pleasure.
Now the last summer / best summer is over and the winter is here. Now, time to change my life? Maybe. Next year is around the corner, and with it the impulse already to narrativise, to try to predict or control the outcome. What will be the story of next year? Who knows. There are some things I’d like to happen, but for the most part these things are basically out of my control.
Writing a diary is helping me record moments that I would probably otherwise forget, like waking up alone early the day before my birthday this year and my sheets were clean, I’d changed them before going to sleep, and after feeling terrible physically for weeks I was feeling slightly better, a run of improving mornings. And it was raining outside, and it muffled everything, every sound. The light was grey and soft, and I went downstairs and made coffee and toast with jam and ate it in the kitchen, watching the water pool outside. And I was happy, suddenly, as easily as a light being switched on. (Remember that this was actually how you felt.)
The other day I was re-reading the start of Susie Boyt’s excellent Loved and Missed, and this paragraph made me pause, the same way it did when I first read it:
I felt traces of a Christmas from a few years ago that was very sharp-edged. The goals have changed, though, the hopes have adjusted themselves down realistically, and that strange day seemed like an old photograph discarded because you looked sour or plain or deranged but, of course, finding it again in a packet of old letters a few years later you’d give quite a bit to be like that now.
My least favourite Christmas of the last years wasn’t so terrible. We dramatically overcooked the turkey and I sat out in the cold on the fire escape to get away from everyone else. I was sick of people and of board games, maudlin drunk and unable to tip myself into happy drunk, longing for comfort. Lonely, missing people who weren’t there, trying to imagine them in different corners of the city and the country. Of course I’ve also recalibrated it by now to unconventional, to fun. Watching my breath rise up in the cold and listening to the quiet of the city around me, high up as I was, the sounds of my friends laughing inside, as the year trailed away hour by hour.
Other things I ended up doing this year, apart from keeping a diary, that had a disproportionately positive effect: putting my books in alphabetical order, writing down every book I read. I now enjoy being able to find every book I want quickly, and feel moved by the amount of space my favourite authors take up physically. I’m glad I can look back on the year and remind myself of the books I enjoyed most (including Biography of X, Big Kiss Bye Bye, Monkey Grip, The Dry Heart, The End of the Affair, and the aforementioned Loved and Missed).
Next year in April I’ll have a new novel out, my fourth published novel, which always gives the end of the year an extra something. Anticipation and nausea battling with desire for people to read it and love it. I’ll be writing about it more next year, but in the meantime you can pre-order, if you’re interested (thank you if you do! It really helps.) Fourth novel! Weird.
For my birthday I got a new bike and now I whirl along the marshes, remembering how it felt to speed through meadows on holiday, earlier this year, already seeming like a dream. I go up and down streets full of light-filled windows, racing, cold air sharp in my chest. There are things up ahead, half-glimpsed; I might get to them or I might not, I might be too slow to reach them, or they might be already gone.
Congratulations on the new novel! :)
Beautiful last line