Karly

I’m technically no stranger to writing fiction. When I was younger, I used to write little stories in class involving my classmates, several of which then came true in strangely specific ways later in life, but that’s a story for another day and possibly evidence that I should’ve been using this power much more strategically. At the time, I wasn’t particularly concerned with craft, publication, readership or whether I had any business turning the people sitting three desks away from me into characters. I had an idea, I wrote it down, my friends read it and, presumably, we all went back to whatever we were supposed to be doing instead.

There was an enormous freedom in that which I don’t think I appreciated because I wasn’t yet aware that it could disappear. Writing fiction when nobody is expecting anything from it is wonderfully uncomplicated because you can make people fall in love, kill them, send them to another country, give them implausibly dramatic lives and borrow whatever you like from reality without stopping every five minutes to consider what any of it might mean once somebody who doesn’t know you gets hold of it. The story exists because you wanted to tell it, and the audience, if there is one at all, is usually close enough to understand where the joke came from.

Approaching fiction as a grown-up feels rather different, although I don’t mean that I suddenly believe every sentence must be Very Serious Literature because I’m no longer writing stories during class, nor have I developed fantasies of locking myself in a room with a typewriter and emerging six months later clutching the great novel of my generation. What’s changed is much simpler and, unfortunately, much more intimidating: if I’m going to spend this much time writing something, I’d eventually like somebody to read it, and the possibility of an audience has turned out to be much louder than I expected.

I’m used to being read. Nonsense & Lit exists because I apparently enjoy having thoughts and then placing them on the internet where strangers can inspect them, and after doing that for long enough, the prospect of another person encountering my writing isn’t especially frightening in itself. Nonfiction, however, gives me somewhere very comfortable to stand because when I write here, I’m speaking as myself. I can explain what I mean, qualify an argument, provide context, make a joke if things are becoming unbearably earnest and, if necessary, devote another six hundred words to making absolutely certain nobody has misunderstood the point I was trying to make.

Fiction removes that safety rail because sometimes a character needs to say something I don’t believe, which should be obvious but feels considerably stranger when you’re the person putting the words into her mouth. Nobody watches a murder mystery and assumes the novelist personally endorses murder because one of the characters has inconveniently committed one, and most readers understand perfectly well that fiction requires writers to invent people whose politics, morals, prejudices, desires, mistakes and general approach to life may bear absolutely no resemblance to their own. Still, understanding this intellectually doesn’t completely silence the little voice that appears while writing and asks whether somebody might take a character’s words as yours, whether a scene could be read differently from how you intended it or whether you’re about to spend the rest of your natural life explaining that no, actually, you invented her.

Then there’s the even stranger question of how much of fiction is ever entirely invented, and I don’t mean this in the ominous all fiction is autobiography sense because that seems both reductive and deeply inconvenient for anybody who has ever written about murder, dragons or nineteenth-century naval warfare. I mean that writing inevitably gives you access to an enormous miscellaneous archive of things you’ve seen, heard, experienced, misunderstood, remembered and possibly stolen from somebody who once said something funny at dinner. A character can have the mannerism of somebody you knew ten years ago, the profession of somebody you met once, an argument loosely inspired by one you overheard in a café, a childhood entirely invented for her and a house based on one you walked past on holiday, and by the time all of those pieces have been rearranged, the resulting person may not correspond to anybody who has ever existed.

Unfortunately, none of this will necessarily prevent someone from asking, “Is this character me?”, which might be one of the questions I’m already most afraid of hearing. Fiction seems to invite a kind of biographical detective work that nonfiction usually doesn’t, because if I write here that something happened to me, you know I’m telling you it happened to me, whereas if I give the same event to a fictional character, suddenly the relationship between writer and material becomes much less stable. Perhaps it happened exactly as written, perhaps I changed half of it, perhaps somebody told me about something vaguely similar fifteen years ago, perhaps I saw it in a film and forgot about it, or perhaps I made the entire thing up while brushing my teeth on a Tuesday morning. The reader doesn’t know, and once I’ve decided to call something fiction, I’m not convinced they’re necessarily entitled to.

Knowing that doesn’t stop me imagining their questions while I’m writing, which is the part I hadn’t really anticipated when I started dipping my toes into fiction again. I expected the difficulty to be structural. I expected to worry about plot and pacing and whether characters were convincing and how on earth people sustain a narrative for tens of thousands of words without eventually sending everybody to lunch because they’ve run out of things for them to do. I didn’t expect to spend quite so much time negotiating with an audience that doesn’t currently exist.

My imaginary readers are extraordinarily opinionated for people who haven’t bought the book. They want to know whether I’m allowed to write something, who a character is based on, whether somebody will recognise themselves and whether another person might be offended. They’d also like clarification on whether I personally agree with something a fictional woman has just said, and occasionally they have questions about things I haven’t even written yet, which seems particularly unreasonable. None of these concerns is entirely ridiculous, but inviting all of them into the room while a story is still being made can make writing feel less like imagination and more like appearing before a committee.

This is where I’ve started wondering whether intending to be read makes me less free as a writer, because when I was writing stories about my classmates, the consequences were wonderfully contained. Everyone knew everyone. References could remain unexplained because the audience already understood them, and I wasn’t thinking about whether a joke would survive contact with a reader five years later in another country who had absolutely no idea what our classroom was like. Now, the hypothetical audience has expanded until it includes people I know, people I used to know, people I’ve never met, people who might recognise fragments of themselves where I didn’t put them and people who’ll inevitably understand something in a way I could never have predicted.

The obvious solution would be not to think about them, but I’m not sure that’s entirely desirable either because readers do matter. If you intend your writing to be read, you have to accept that the words eventually leave the private little ecosystem in which you created them and begin interacting with people whose experiences you can’t control. Something you find funny may hurt someone, something you intended sympathetically may strike another reader as cruel, a character you think is obviously behaving terribly may acquire an online defence squad of seventeen thousand people, and another character you adore may inspire a level of collective hatred you previously thought was reserved for corrupt politicians and people who play videos aloud on public transport.

Some of that deserves consideration because writing for other people doesn’t absolve us from thinking about what we put into the world simply because we can call it art, and “but it’s fiction” can’t magically transform every lazy stereotype, careless portrayal or gratuitously cruel choice into something beyond criticism. If I’m asking readers to give me their attention, then thinking about how the story might meet them seems less like an infringement upon creativity than part of the work itself. The problem, I think, is working out where consideration ends and fear begins.

There must be a point at which imagining possible reactions stops making a piece of writing more thoughtful and starts making it smaller. If every character has to be impossible to misinterpret, they can’t be very complicated, and if every difficult subject has to be approached only after calculating every conceivable response, it becomes tempting not to approach difficult subjects at all. If characters can only say things I’d happily defend under my own name, then I’m not really creating other people so much as manufacturing a room full of increasingly elaborate spokespersons for myself, which sounds both artistically tedious and like an absolutely unbearable dinner party.

Perhaps this is one of the fundamental adjustments involved in writing fiction for an audience: learning to tolerate the possibility of being misunderstood, something I find particularly difficult after spending so much time writing nonfiction. Clarification is one of nonfiction’s great temptations because if I think you might misunderstand a paragraph, I can add another paragraph, and if I think an argument requires context, I can give you the context. Fiction often asks for something more uncomfortable. It asks you to trust the character, the scene and eventually the reader without continually stepping between them to explain what everybody should think, and I’m discovering that this is much harder than it sounds.

There are moments when I want to tap the hypothetical reader on the shoulder and say, just so we’re clear, I know she’s being unreasonable here, I know that was a terrible thing to say, I know this relationship is complicated and I know somebody should probably go to therapy, so please don’t email me. Then I have to remind myself that if the scene works, none of those interventions should be necessary, and if it doesn’t, appearing from behind the curtain to defend it probably won’t save me. At some point I have to let fictional people be fictional people, even when I can already hear myself composing the explanatory footnote.

There’s also something slightly presumptuous about trying to anticipate every response to a story before anybody has even read it because readers aren’t passive recipients waiting for the author to install the correct interpretation in their heads. They bring their own histories, associations, sympathies and irritations to fiction, and sometimes they’ll find something in a character that I didn’t consciously put there. That used to sound vaguely frightening to me, but increasingly I suspect it might be one of the reasons to write fiction in the first place.

Once a story is read, it stops being entirely private, although I don’t mean that the author loses all authority over what they wrote or that every interpretation becomes equally convincing. Reading introduces another consciousness into something that previously existed between a writer and a page. The reader notices patterns, makes judgements, dislikes people they were perhaps supposed to like and becomes attached to characters the writer thought were peripheral. They may recognise an experience the writer never personally had or interpret a scene through a context the writer couldn’t possibly have anticipated, and the text has to survive that encounter without its creator standing nearby with explanatory footnotes.

Maybe that’s the freedom I’m currently struggling to exchange for another kind, because writing when nobody is going to read you gives you the freedom not to worry about reception, while writing for readers gives up some of that privacy but allows the thing you invented to become something outside your own head. Other people can care about it, argue with it, misunderstand it, see themselves in it and occasionally tell you something about it that you hadn’t realised yourself. The frightening part is that you don’t get to choose which of those things happens, and I’m not sure anybody can fully prepare for that before they allow themselves to be read.

So do I feel less free writing fiction as a grown-up? Possibly, although I’m certainly more aware of consequences than I was when I was casually assigning dramatic fictional destinies to my classmates, and given how several of those stories subsequently turned out, perhaps a little caution is warranted. I know now that stories can touch nerves their writers didn’t know were there, that characters can be mistaken for confessions and that putting something in front of an audience means surrendering the fantasy that you can control exactly how it’ll be received.

I’m not sure the answer is to stop caring about any of that, and for now I think I’m trying to learn when the imagined reader deserves a chair beside me and when I need to politely ask them to leave the room so I can actually write. There’ll be time for reactions once there’s something to react to, and if I spend the entire process trying to protect a story from every possible interpretation before it exists, I may end up protecting it from being interesting too. Besides, I’ve already learnt one important lesson from writing fiction as a child: be extremely careful what you put on the page, because apparently some of it comes true.