I joined a writing group. Not the Flashtag one. Another one which is yet to be given a name.
Every few weeks, I meet up with a Canadian, a dramatist, a comic book guy, a Prestonian and an evil lizard to bitch about each others' fiction writing in the hope that, at some point, one of us becomes better.
I play with surrealism and comedy so my stories can be quite 'surface'. An author friend once expressed his frustration that I didn't care about my characters enough; that I wasn't finding the deeper truth in the stories I wrote. I felt he had a point.*
Manchester has fifty million literary events a second, literally, and so last year I found myself performing many gigs. To be precise, 40 in all, whether they were open mics, headline slots, event compering or comedy lectures. I continue to perform and the audience buzz is a drug I never want to go cold turkey on.
But that's where the problem was. It was easy to write for performance and to let my creative process stop the moment I walked off stage. It was easy to mistake being happy with a gig with being happy with my story. I wanted to dig deeper into the process**: through its accountability and series of deadlines, this group will help me do that.
Those that prefer my music writing are probably confused. My Aphex-tinged Bieber-baiting will continue of course (I have an unfinished 57,000-word manuscript to prove that) but fiction is where my future is. Perhaps I'll write bestselling saucy fanfic or a series of symbologist adventure novels. Or an evil lizard story. Yes. Evil lizards. Saucy, symbologist evil lizards***.
* Pseud alert
** Pseud alert
*** Lizard alert
