What I have learned from 30+ years of writing full manuscripts, some published as books and for sale on Amazon (shameless plug) I’ve learned how to read and write, better. Several of my manuscripts from my teens, I have published, I’ve seen my own development. There was a time when I was tip toeing into ideas around sex, sexuality, race, politics, identity and then as the years pressed on and I went on to university, I began exploring more and more. The exploration was because my work began to blossom, to expand.
Most people who write, and go on and on and on about it—-the internet has opened the floodgate of people who watch too much tv, too many movies, read too much pulp fiction (vampires, the girl on the train, zombies, romance, dragons and bs)———are vomiting a redux of what they’ve read. Creating a glut. The other side of that is to be creative, innovative, to create Art.
There comes a point, there came a point, in my writing where it was no longer mimicry or fantasy or fan fiction or trying to write superhero scripts—-which I realized using Marvel and DC and Star Trek characters—-that they would never be mine—they were static, they would never change. I started creating my own characters, my own storylines. I had fun. But that step from the musings on other characters to my own, was the first level of growth.
I started writing a tawdry soap opera—-The Hemmingways—-about 700 handwritten pages that my middle school passed around. I then saw that I was doing One life to Live, All My Children, Dynasty, The Colbys with different names and drama. Again, growth to my own creations.
The World Today was my first long short story—-75 pages—-which was wholly original characters, that I worked on with my high school creative writing teacher. Then I wrote a court thriller, Court of Conscience. TWT (later published as a 700+ page novel retitled Hush) and CoC taught me, pressed me, I challenged me, teachers challenged me, about racial lead characters, sexuality, dramatic dynamics. I had danced around these issues before in The Hemmingways and comic book scripts but now I boldly went into them. Then a few years later at university, working on Hush, I started exploring short, intense short stories—-published in Escapades I and II.
I began to deeply explore race not from simplistically White to Black but to how Black people experience bigger ideas—-magic, the multiverse, power, money, wealth.
Then sex and sexuality—-and how people were different in my experience and imagination. And then how a dollop of drama or magic or fantasy or depth could transform a story, a full novel.
What I learned was that the world did not need me to try and recreate my favorite tales or books—-those had already been written. The world needed me to try and answer my own ideas and questions and thoughts, explore those. What I learned from there, surprisingly, was that my first books published were not my first books written. My first books published were non-fiction then I circled back to fiction. I discovered in writing, Art, that my characters were more complex, easier and more difficult to control. They had matured from archetypes, from stereotypes, from cardboard placeholders to people that I am not always sure I like. My writing began to parallel the stuff that I love that I read.
Sometimes I’ll pick up one of my books and just sit and read it, a chapter or two, and like good Art, I’m lost. There was a time in birthing this novel or story that I knew it frontwards and back, and now it takes me a minute, sometimes five, to remember who this person is, what this story is about. But I can move with it now, I can understand it as a reader.
Your work takes a quantum leap when you not just move from mimicry to Art, from writing to being a writer but when you become interested in your writing, interested in a scene, a character a point——that yes, you wrote—-like a reader.
That’s what I’ve learned. It’s not a self congratulatory thing, it’s more of a wandering into this forest and suddenly seeing each tree that you yourself carved, shaped and planted. You realize that one root goes back to another and to another and that they all form of a novel. And you can sort of smell in it which book it reminds you of, from your favorite writer, or a twinkle of an idea you turned hybrid for your own work.
That’s what you get from reading—-seeds for a forest of your own.
#KylePhoenix
#TheKylePhoenixShow
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