on writing original fiction, and some short story/novel ideas

03/03/25

Too much inspiration, too little brain power

I really wanted to write tonight, but I had an awful shift at work so I'm exhausted and brain dead. I don't want to waste this inspiration I have though so I figured I might as well jot down some loose ideas rattling around my brain.

It's weird, after struggling with writer's block for so long, my current issue is having too much inspiration. Oh, well; I won't complain. It's a nice problem to have.

What I want to write, and why

I've been a writer all my life, the same way I've always been an artist. I guess writing took a little longer to manifest though given that I needed a vivid enough imagination and a competent grasp on the English language to put it all to words.

As I've gotten older, I believe my writing has become more robust/matured than my art. My drawing and painting is usually pretty kinetic and spontaneous. My writing is more mellow. I take my time with it.

I won't go into all the stuff I wrote as a kid, but to make a long story short I haven't written much original fiction. I've been writing fanfiction for over a decade¹ which makes me feel old as fuck.

I take my fanfiction seriously and consider it a perfectly valid form of literature. I'll probably write more about that one day. In short, I appreciate how it provides a sandbox with established characters and lore already in place. All you have to do is build stories and focus on plotlines, character work, prose, etc. It's a super convenient way to hone your craft.

But that convenience comes with downsides. After writing for established IPs my entire life, I've felt the itch to start making my own characters in my own worlds.

I used to think that original fiction needed to be something grand or awesome. Probably because I was a teenager during the dystopian YA craze, where every book was part of a series with convoluted worldbuilding. That, or it needed to impart some epic philosophical lesson.

As I've gotten older, my fanfiction has matured with me. I hardly read fanfiction at all anymore to be honest with you. I just like writing in my established fandoms with ships, tropes, and headcanons I've become intimately familiar with. I've sort of built my own fanon lexicon of ancilliary material to use in my writing.

A lot of what I write is slice-of-life stuff that is angsty as it is fluffy. I'm really drawn to stories about regular people doing regular things. It all feels very grounded and relatable.

Even if the stakes are low, feelings will always be high. Without a doomsday or rebellion or thesis statement, there's more time to focus on feelings.

Feelings rely on emotions. Emotions are derived from behavior and conversations. These things are put into motion by character actions and beliefs. And so forth.

As I've gotten older, I've gained a lot of life experiences that are sitting in the back of my memory, waiting to be utilized. I've got a little scrapbook of reference material to build characters, places, and stories with.

But I'm not just into slice-of-life as in I only wanna write meet-cutes and wholesome family squabbles or something. One of my favorite authors ever is Chuck Palahniuk.² His writing style is really snappy and vulgar and irreverent. I love him. He also writes a lot about sex, and how it affects people and society.

And I mean, come on. I've been writing fanfiction. For over a decade. That stuff gets pretty steamy too.

But I don't mean pulpy sort of smut where it's all tropes and bullshit. The thing I like about Palahniuk, for example, is that when he writes smut it's as sexy as it is real.³ The characters fuck not just because they want to have sex. They want to have sex because of XYZ. The sex elevates the story and lends service to the plot, characters, and character relationships.

Sex isn't the only explicit subject I want to write about. I've also had my own brushes with mental illness complications, addiction, etc. I want to talk about these things in my writing, too.

I nearly forgot to mention (I guess because it's so obvious to me) but I want to write a lot of trans characters, especially trans men. I want to write them as regular people. I don't want their trans status to be this huge event. So much trans fiction these days is like, dramatic coming out stories and treatises on the trans experience. Or misinformed. Or weird and chaser-y. Or whatever the hell. Just let us be people, dude. Let us be men with complex problems that have nothing to do with being trans.

All of this is to say:

• I've been writing since I was young
• I've mostly written fanfiction (now for 10+ years)
• I want to start writing original fiction
• The original fiction I want to write is:
  • Realistic
  • grounded
  • slice-of-life
  • character-focused
  • dialogue heavy
  • a good balance of fluff and angst
  • adult oriented, sometimes explicit

Scared to be vulnerable enough to write

It's weird having so much inspiration to write original fiction all of a sudden. I think it's driven in part by the fact that I'm really figuring out who I am as a person, what I believe, and how I view the world. It's all exciting stuff. But it's also scary stuff.

It's scary because it's authentic, and it's me. Writing stories using all this stuff inside me is basically just putting my insides to paper. And if people read my poetry or my novels or whatever, they're reading my insides.

It all feels really vulnerable. I'm scared to write because I know it will be authentic, and other people will be able to see that. Whether it's strangers or friends or family. But I guess that's the trade-off.

I've been thinking lately that the truth makes us vulnerable. We only lie when we have something to hide. Telling the truth means we aren't hiding anymore. We're opening up. There's no getting around that.

I've been trying to think of ways to make being vulnerable less scary. But I don't think there's much you can do about it. There isn't any strength to pull from opening our insides and letting them out into the world. The strength comes in spite of that.

We're practically incapacitating ourselves all so people can see everything we've kept locked away up till now. I guess the whole point is that there comes a time when the risk of letting that stuff out is overridden by the burden of carrying it around.

I'll probably end up writing proper posts about specific stories, but seeing as I'm just thinking out loud here I don't wanna worry about getting too systematic with it right now.

I've got a few projects in mind. Some are short stories, some are novels.

Short story ideas

Rapunzel

A short story about a guy with addiction problems who grows his hair out long except every time he relapses he shaves his head. It'll be called Rapunzel.

Talking roadkill

A short story about a guy who cleans up roadkill. I don't know whose job it is to clean up roadkill. I'll have to look into it. I assume it's probably an animal control thing or something. Anyway, one day he learns that he can talk to dead animals. So he goes around cleaning up roadkill and they all tell him stories. I want it to be a morbidly beautiful sort of thing.

I really like short stories. They're probably my favorite form of fiction to read. I like how punchy and quick they are. But it's an intimidating format to break into.

I used to write a lot of short fanfics. I hardly every wrote multichapter stuff. But as I've gotten older I've started writing longer stories, so...

Novel ideas

I wanna write a book! The closest I got was writing a fucking terrible novella when I was 16. I hammered out like 100 something pages in a week or two. I spent 8 hours a day writing. I think it was winter break. One of my Tumblr friends did a couple illustrations for it. The art was amazing. Such a dog shit story didn't deserve it.

I've only got two ideas right now.

Gay FTM romance between a failed drug addict and a wholesome frolfer

I've had this idea in my head for awhile. I'll write a longer post about it soon with character breakdowns etc. Basically it is a love story between two trans men.

One of them is a masochist with a history of self harm. He shares custody of his son with his ex-gf. Their son is a cat. He took care of his ill grandmother and promised her that he wouldn't self harm again before she died. He started pushing his ex into more intense stuff until she finally broke up with him. After they broke up he turned to booze and drugs but none of it hit right. He ended up looking for a dominatrix and fielded a few until he found someone who was not good at her job and therefore perfect for his goal of using sex as a workaround for self harm. He lives in his grandma's trailer home and feeds a partly domesticated opossum who hangs around.

The other dude I don't have as figured out just yet. He's gonna be a wholesome jock type, super chill and peppy. Opposite of the other dude. I'm not really sure how I want to build him up yet or what I want his motivations to be. I want him to be really into cheesy classic rock. Sometimes he'll drive around blasting Air Supply's greatest hits just for feel something.⁴

They meet when the first dude goes into the wood trying to psych himself up into committing suicide. Second dude is practicing frisbee golf stuff. He accidentally nails the other guy in the face, unwittingly interrupting his suicide attempt.

The dude just gives up and goes home. After awhile he goes back to the woods hoping to run into the frolf guy again.

Wanna have lots of angst and sappy shit mixed in with other stuff that's a little harder/touchy.

PSYCHOSOMATIC SADOMASICHISM; part autobiography, part allegory, part Jungian psychoanalysis

Don't wanna get too much into this one right now because it's already 1:30 AM.

For years I've envisioned doing a series of self portraits of myself and the "girl" version of me interacting in a toxic relationship. I got really into Jung when I was smoking pot so this is sort of a synthesis of all of that lol.

It's gonna follow two characters from their youth into adulthood as they navigate sex, gender, relationships, mental illness, etc. Loosely inspired by some stuff in my own life and vageuly characterized as personifications of my conscious/subconscious, masculine/feminine, etc.

I like to think of my mental illness as a bad girlfriend. It's like I'm stuck in a toxic relationship. But it's also got it's soft side that just wants to keep me safe.

So it's all of that just personified into these two archetypes and abstracted into their own independent characters. It's gonna get pretty freaky and esoteric. I'm really excited to dive into it.

The title is a play on how all this stuff is like an automatic psychological response of inflicting pain on myself and all that jazz.

Idk! It's probably pretty weird to write something like that, but I'm super into it as a concept.

That's it

Yeah that's it. I'm tired now lol. I'm glad I managed to churn this out though. I feel a lot better and now I can go to bed satisfied.

Peace out.

✘ Posted on — 03/03/25
✘ Last modified — 5 months, 2 weeks ago
✘ Link — https://blog.xavierhm.com/on-writing-original-fiction-and-some-short-storynovel-ideas

Footnotes

#blog #mental health #trans #writing