on sharing

I haven't shared anything I've written for a very long time.

 I used to be prolific. I had a box full of handwritten books that people could delve into. I would write stories during class and hand them out to people in the corridors afterwards. I had multiple serialisations of dramatic teen fluff on the go on my fiction sharing site. People would say nice things and I would be pleased, but never surprised. Of course they liked it. The one thing I never doubted was that I could write.

Over the past ten years, it's usually been the case that the person I was closest to, the person who loved and valued me more than anything else in the world, was also resolutely uninterested in the fact that I wrote. One of them was also a writer and we decided to write a book together. We wrote alternating chapters and we spent hours at a time discussing the plotlines of his chapters, the motivations of the characters and their back stories, the themes he was trying to present. We got it almost finished, and he never read a word I wrote for it. One of them nagged me for months to let him read something I'd written, and once I'd handed it over didn't glance at it for the best part of a year. When I finally got him to read it, he told me he wasn't quite sure which country it was set in and refused to discuss it any further.

I've written a lot since then, and I've shared none of it. Most of it is bad. I'm quite comfortable with my bad writing, where my characters are undefined and my plot is like wandering around the supermarket with no list, or even the vaguest idea why you might have gone in there. I understand it. I understand why it's wrong, I understand where the fixes would need to be made. My bad writing has never made me doubt my ability.

The thought of sharing my good writing is petrifying. The idea of presenting someone with words I'm genuinely proud of - which is rare - and having them go ignored or uncared for frightens me more than I can say. I genuinely worry that after so much disinterest, my urge to write simply wouldn't survive any more of it. So I hide it, refuse to show my work to people, and keep my belief in myself as a Person Who Can Write.

I'm doing this project in large part to try and get over that. Maybe if I get used to sharing something - anything - again, get to the point where I expect my words to be read, I can start sharing the good stuff. Maybe once I'm sharing again, I won't be too frightened to finish my good stories because I'm terrified of ruining them. Maybe if I can stop seeing the potential reader of my writing as one single, bored audience member, it'll be easier to access that place of honesty where all of my good words came from.

It'll take a while. But I have hope.