I am going to be a novelist. That’s a fact, because it has to be. That is a goal I need to achieve in the same way that some people need to have children or need to get married.
Writing lets you live beyond yourself. It lets you talk to the world through your imagination, to create the people and places that you dream about, and to get outside your own experience for a while. I like to write fantasy, horror and SF because writing in those genres extends the vocabulary I have to express myself. In The Hunger Games dystopia provides a code to talk about oppression and brutality without getting tangled in real-world complications. The Shining expresses how it feels to go mad or to witness someone you love becoming cruel through all the spooky visions in the Overlook Hotel, so that when you try and get to sleep you can still feel it – you can see it, in the shadows of your mind.
This is all an over-complicated way of saying that writing is an escape from reality. It’s also a pursuit, and probably everyone who writes is pursuing something different. It could be immortality, expression, closure, achievement… For me it’s confirmation that I am more than automatic. I invent, I contribute, I create, I understand.
At this point in time I have been writing as a hobby for about 15 years, since my early teens. I am 28 now, and halfway through an MA in Creative Writing. I have a possibly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to finish writing a novel. I’m working part-time while I study for the next sever or so months, and once this time is over I will probably have to go back to full-time work. We’re also in the middle of lockdown, so there’s no where else to go. No excuse not to write.
Sarah Jones 