Falling in Love with Writing (Again) \| Author Post by A.L. Michael

I don’t remember a time before writing. I loved it from the moment I could use a pencil. Even the act of it, tracing dotted lines to create swirling joined up handwriting, writing poems in birthday cards, songs, stories - it felt beautiful.

As a child, I created with abandon. There was no fear, no ‘I can’t do that’. I took every chance to write something as a moment of joy. I wrote plays and movie scripts, long ballads, haikus, articles, short stories, long stories, fan fiction. I wrote anything, because I could. I used to like writing essays, that’s how sad it was.

And then, I grew up. I took it as a craft. I wanted to be brilliant. I knew I could write, but I knew a thousand other people out there could write too. So I only did the things I was good at. I turned away from poetry, and scripts. I attempted novels, over and over again, but halfway through I’d realise they were crap, and someone else could do it better, and what was the point?

That thought, the thought I had at sixteen, and eighteen, and twenty one, is what stops people writing every day. It’s why there are people with wonderful half written manuscripts sitting in drawers and under beds and on hard drives.

If I had let it stop me at sixteen, or eighteen, or twenty one, I wouldn’t be where I am now. I would never have applied to a degree in English lit with creative writing. I would never have gone on to do an MA, I wouldn’t have written a book, and realised that I could. I wouldn’t have written another one, just for fun, just because I knew it was suddenly possible.

And then, after seven books, the voices had crept back in, that doubt, that tiredness. Someone else could do it better, someone else would be writing something similar, nothing was new, nothing was exciting. Every story had been written already, over and over. And something different wouldn’t be marketable. I was in a funk.

I couldn’t write something I couldn’t feel. I couldn’t write another romance with a muscled, tanned love interest and a quirky best friend. I couldn’t write about a bakery or a coffee shop or a beach.

And then, after weeks and months of quietly despairing, of thinking that I’d never write another book, I wrote these words:

I was seven years old when I realized my mother was not a great person…

And suddenly, the voices receded, back to where they hide, in the shadows of my mind, waiting for the next wobble. And a story came to life, these characters wanted their story to be told. And I remembered that I knew how to do this. As long as I didn’t think about what anyone else was doing, I could write a book.

It might take a while until I return to the haikus and the scripts and the fan fiction, and I honestly never want to write another essay again, but writing Cocktails and Dreams reminded me that I still have stories to tell, these characters have journeys to go on. And so do I.