Ego Dominus Tuus.

I am currently attempting to write the literary equivalent of Andrex toilet paper: soft, strong and very, very long. And guess what: it reads like shit. As if that weren’t problem enough, it also appears that I’m typographically constipated; I’ve been sitting here for ages and I’ve still got hardly anything to show for myself.

Perhaps the problem is that what I’m writing is heightened autobiography, which is where people get to rewrite the actual events of their lives so that they get all the best lines. Well, actually, it's not quite that bad. Heightened autobiography is really just autobiography in which you get to add as many fantasies and grotesques as you need to convey the truth as you see it; you lie to tell the truth.

Now the problem with this is that everything I write at the moment feels a little bit stillborn. Either that or the little sparrow of a new idea emerges alive and chirping and then I put it in a cage and very slowly flick it to death. I worry that this happens because I’m already bored of the material; the act of describing people and places in this proximate world, even when largely fictionalised, feels depressingly familiar and clichéd. Worse, the act of drawing from my memories of real events seems to generate a sort of stylistic constipation – the type of writing which is a pain to read and even more painful to ‘pass’.

And yet, for all the discomfort, I find the thought of abandoning this story terrifying. Is this Freudian? Am I clinging on to unresolved grief and preventing myself from evolving either as a writer or an individual? Perhaps. And yet one of the main reasons I have for writing this story is that, as a troubled and too-serious teenager, I promised myself that I’d one day try and write something which defiantly answered all the pain and stupidity in which I found myself so that no other poor fucker would have to go through it quite as alone as I did. A relatively pure motive then, surely, despite all the adolescent narcissism.

On the other hand, there are so many other stories which I want to tell and which I’m neglecting in order to focus on this one. And the most fun I’ve ever had writing anything was Untitled Story No. 4, which is essentially a horror story with a pseudo-religious streak. No self in there at all: it’s pure genre.

Perhaps writing through the veil of genre still enables you to interact with (and expiate) all your psychological baggage, only via the tangent of metaphor as opposed to head-on? Maybe, in fact, we can’t help translating our own experience through the metaphorical prism. After all, everything anyone ever writes is the product of how they see, and how you see is indistinguishable from who you are.

I suppose that, ultimately, you could say all fiction is metaphorical, since one of the primal incentives for writing fiction is to transmute the actuality of personal experience into something universal. But what does all this mean? What can we learn from it? Only one thing: I need to get on with some bloody work.