I Stopped Writing Fiction…and that May be a Problem
About one year ago I stopped writing fiction. Despite being very proud of my output (five books of fiction, dozens of short stories and essays) and despite developing a small but eager audience of readers who looked forward to my work, I stopped. No ceremony. No real reason (that I know of, anyway). One moment I considered myself a writer of fiction. The next moment I did not.
Why is this a problem? I have a collaborative novel (written with the amazing Nik Korpon, Richard Thomas, and Axel Taiari) to be published by Dzanc in 2015. Dzanc is a dream publisher, and the three aforementioned authors are dream collaborators. Luckily, I don’t need to be an active writer in order to promote the hell out of this forthcoming book (which I do plan on doing, so get ready world). However, I can’t help but think that with my dissolved passion for writing fiction, my promotional efforts may seem disingenuous. Imagine Aunt Jemima giving lectures to halls filled with syrup makers decades after she turned syrup warehouse into an airplane hanger.
There are promotional events like book signings, conference appearances, and live readings that I still definitely look forward to, but I can’t imagine spending too much time organizing these myself any longer. I estimate that at one time I was spending 90% of my time trying to promote my work and 10% actually writing. Perhaps that’s the reason I stopped. Writing wasn’t writing anymore. Writing was talking about writing.
But no, this can’t explain my sudden disinterest (about one year ago). I could very well continue to write fiction without actively selling it. I tried this recently. It did nothing for me. The words themselves, the stories I created, they did nothing for me.
For a while I assumed simple creative exhaustion. I was making about two videos/week at my YouTube channel. This was fun. A lot of fun. More fun than writing had been for a while. But I don’t do much video creating anymore either (I haven’t made a video in over one month; that’s practically retirement given my output during the preceding years).
Lately I’ve been devoting my time to writing non-fiction. Short, humorous pieces that I actually look forward to creating (that excitement is something I haven’t felt in years). So perhaps what’s to take from this disinterest in writing fiction and creating YouTube videos is that my passions are cyclical. If so, those cycles are quite lengthy. I got into writing fiction when I was 20. I’m 32 now. A person doesn’t have many 12-year cycles in his life.
I’ve also been told that writers sometimes fall away from writing because whatever hole that writing filled gets filled by something else (sometimes medicinally, but not in my case; I’ve been taking Zoloft for almost as long as I’ve been writing). So what would be filling my time now? The aforementioned non-fiction writing is a new thing, so probably not that. YouTube videos were probably the culprit for a few months. I’ve got my family. My job is going well. Maybe I’m just getting older and happier.
I occupy a lot of my time reading, which is something I didn’t have as much time to do during my fiction writing years. And reading more books means a larger audience for the real writers out there. So, I guess in a way I’m already promoting my Dzanc labelmates. By the time our book gets published in late 2015, maybe I’ll somehow have grown the reading audience through a weird collective osmosis-by-reading.
If that fails, I’ll finally unleash my devious, gerrymandering inspired plan to shift the demographics in our favor by selling these bumper stickers (bumper stickers work to change minds, right?)
