My Fear of Fiction

Introduction

I don't think I am very good at fiction and don't believe that I could ever write a book. To me, there is too much planning involved and my mind likes to run off in an uncontrolled manner where I reign it in if I get too wild. This is really about how I manage to write fiction despite being scared stiff every time I put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard.

The thing is when you review something or write about something you have done you have a source to draw your words from, but with fiction, it essentially has to come out of your mind although you may draw on experience and ideas from other sources that stop short of plagiarism.

This is why I admire fiction writers so much because they produce something with nothing to start with. It’s like a painter with a blank canvas and no model.

My Scary Fictional Times

I have never had a fiction Top Story in eighteen months on Vocal, but their Challenges tempted me to try. It, although my first fiction story that I shared on Vocal was one that I had purloined from my blog, a sort of black humour piece inspired by COVID and a local Chinese restaurant ( which is excellent by the way) and you can read that here:

The thing is that essentially crime and horror fiction are usually easy to write because adversity gives us so many threads to follow up on, and the story above was horror and my first Vocal Challenge fiction drew on dystopian themes which reoccur in a lot of my writing. This one required a heart-shaped locket.

I started to think that maybe I could write fiction but was also aware that everything seemed to have a negative slant. There was hurt and misery in there rather than happiness and laughter. Even at this stage, though I had started writing fiction I still questioned my ability and wrote about it here:

Then there was a challenge about a brown paper package for which I took my friend, the writer Paul Campbell’s idea that he used in an episode of “Doctors”, of cannibalising Samuel Becket’s “Waiting For Godot”, and entered it into the challenge. I thought it was good, and members of the Vocal Facebook Groups liked it but Vocal didn’t:

I was starting to feel like a one-trick pony, or more realistically a no-trick pony and wanted to write something a little more positive and not hot dark or horror. So I came up with a concept based on elements from Paul Gallico’s “The Snow Goose”, the film “Local Hero” and me and my Muse at the time and created The Sandman and The Sea Girl. This, like all of my stories, was meant as a standalone piece, but people asked what happened next and so I created a follow-up.

This has resulted in five stories so far which means that I have to make sure that they properly knit together like a real author. All my stories have been well received by readers but not have appeared as Top Stories, but my audience feedback is what makes me proud of my writing.

The story starts here:

Conclusion

I have written a lot of fiction since, and very often people want me to follow up on the stories. When I start writing a piece of fiction I often don’t know how it is going to end. And am sure that will stop me from ever writing a normal book.

Most of my fiction, I believe is worth reading, but I still feel a short story is the best that I can do.

I included "Guitar and Pen" by The Who because often play my guitar when looking for inspiration to pick up my pen.

I hope this has given you a little insight into my total fear of fiction.