Candice LandauLast Updated on October 28, 2024 by Candice Landau
If Maggie Stiefvater (a very famous and brilliant YA author) can reuse Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’ title on her own blog, I don’t see why I can’t too. Really, its a perfect title for writers as it allows us to say anything we want in any order without a semblance of plot or structure. Even if we’re not writing about writing, the fact that we’re writing…well that makes it all okay.
I was 17 when I read ‘On Writing‘. My mom gave it to me because she had two copies and because I was going through a good writing phase (meaning I was writing fiction). At the time we were living in Buellton in the Santa Ynez Valley. Prior to Buellton we’d spent a year on an island in the Puget Sound. It was beautiful but as can be expected of the latitude, it never stopped raining. This drove my father round the bend and after only 9 months he decided no more. On our way down to the sunny hills of California, we stopped off at Crater Lake. It was an experience I’ll never forget…
Early July 2004. Outside temperate – 85 degrees Fahrenheit. My sisters and I kept the car windows rolled down, letting the warm summer air waft in, thick with the smell of sap and pine cones, earth and grass. The stereo was off so we could better taken in the scenery – sighs, smells and sounds.
Ahead of us, above the fir trees, volcanic peaks jutted here and there, disappearing and reappearing as we wended our way through the Park. The closer we drew to Mount Mazama, the nest of the Lake, the cooler the air became and the more peculiar the scenery. Heavily forested slopes turned into crowds of skeletal tress, bent sideways, fixed in a permanent non-existent wind. The air stilled and then the trees vanished altogether and the landscape opened into something that looked a cross between a desert and a golf course. Patches of snow appeared here and there and then as we drove the empty, winding road up to the rim of the caldera, the patchy snow thickened into steep banks. In less than an hour we had gone from open windows and sleeveless shirts to hoodies and goosebumps. From summer to winter. Above us, the moon was bigger than I had ever seen it, bright white even though the sky was still light, a mix of pinks, yellows and oranges in strange contrast to the more foreboding scenery of grey sand, blue water and green firs.
Crater Lake is a sight and an experience that no description can do justice to. It’s both beautiful and peculiar and there’s a strange sense of otherworldliness about it. From the astonishing deep blue colour of the water, to the endless ripples you only expect to see in desert sand, this National Park is something you don’t forget. For me, it was the inspiration for the setting of the YA fantasy novel that I had been begun working on just before leaving South Africa.
I incorporated the lake and the scenery into my novel; I created a map; I absorbed the foreboding stillness of the National Park and then…I set it all in a dead world. A world in another dimension.
Over the next few years I would work tirelessly on this novel. I’d stay up late at night with my sisters and my mother, writing, drinking tea, drawing maps and characters, plotting and reading scenes aloud. Even in university in the more boring lectures, I’d scrawl notes into the margins of my books, dying to get home so that I could pen the scene.
Fiction writing is an adrenaline rush I’ve never quite got from anything else except possibly showjumping, though that has the added danger of a slightly mad horse and large obstacles to make it a thrill. Writing though, is something else. It’s a frenetic desire to put the scene in your head on paper before it disappears but also to find out where the story will go. It’s a balance between chasing something and being led.
From age 18 through 24 I could imagine no other life than the writing life. As I saw it, the entire point of my existence was to write novels that would absorb readers in much the same way that my favorite writers did for me: Enid Blyton, J.K.Rowling, Garth Nix, William Nicholson, Owne Colfer, K.M.Peyton, Dianne Wynne Jones. I wanted a life that invovled reading, writing, making things, exploring and travelling. I wanted the opportunity to find inspiration for new stories all over the world. I wnated to be suprised by people and places all the time. I wanted eyes as fresh and innocent as a child’s and I wanted to live in my head where I was most comfortable. Looking into the future as I did then, all of my dreams seemed set in stone.
It’s been 3.5 years since I can honestly admit to taking my fiction writing seriously. While I have had my reasons – needing to support myself with a job while living in the UK – I am under no illusion as to the facts: I did not prioritize my pursuits.
Today I primarily write non-fiction. I write about marketing and blogging and business and social media. I write about digital trends and website design. I enjoy learning about and researching these topics, but largely because I’ve always enjoyed learning, not because I’ve got a particular career in mind. While I am certainly glad that I have found paid work as a consequence of my skills, I still miss and long for the days when nothing but books and words mattered to me, when journaling and plotting was everything. When jewelry was a side-pursuit and a job was something only others had.
As a consequence of the little fiction I’ve written of late, I begin to ask myself, ‘do I really want to be a novelist?‘ After all, the amount of fiction I’ve written over the course of the past two years is less than I would have written in a single term at UC Davis, and those were only 3 months long…
I keep coming back to this question because I haven’t been writing fiction, not because I don’t want to be an author or a writer but because I haven’t taken the actions necessary to make it happen.
For someone like me, that means a lot. I’m someone that works hard to achieve my goals. If I want something, I go for it. If I want to learn something, I generally find the time. So, the fact that I haven’t ‘found’ the time to write much fiction makes me wonder…do I actually want to be a novelist?
This is an UGLY question because my answer is immediate. Yes. Yes one hundred times over. I don’t want to ask this question and I don’t want to ask it openly but…perhaps it’s the only thing that will get me back to working. I don’t know.
