Been a while, hasn’t it?
A good thing I did in 2024 was to rejoin a writer’s group. It took a while. One of my friends from the first writers’ group I was emailed me way back in spring of 2024, telling me she had revived the group, and asking me to join. In typical fashion, I kept finding reasons not to go—and some of them were legitimate!—but in late October, I started going, and I’m glad I did.
The Sunday after Election Day, I wrote my first anger piece, a response to the shock and horror of knowing that the imperfect America I grew up in and loved was gone, and also a response to Internet Nazi puke, Nick Fuentes, who, hours after the election was clearly decided, tweeted ‘Your body. My choice. Forever.’ The piece I wrote involved the protagonist roughing up someone wearing a shirt with that slogan. Unusual for me in these groups, it was pretty much complete, clocking in at just over 700 words, and also unlike much of my writing in these groups, it was pretty clean (not that it was ‘finished’ or ‘polished,’ just that there were very few crossouts, inserts, or arrows shooting all over the page to tell me that this line should actually go here or there. I wrote for however long we had furiously, with purpose, and the truth is, I think I’d been writing this thing in my head since I first saw the tweet. The word ‘cathartic’ comes to mind.
When I copied it from my notebook to a Word document later that day or during the week, I added some stuff, and I already had an idea of where it would go from there. The end result is something just over 8000 words, and I’m actually looking at submitting it to places. The anger is there, still raw, but there’s also thought, reflection, and even a little redemption. I actually like what it has become.
Literally one week later, I wrote my second anger piece. There’s no physical violence depicted, though it invokes what is probably the worst period in human history, the Holocaust. This was triggered by one of the prompts we were given to work from, if we chose. The prompt in question? “Write about an amazing tattoo.” As soon as I heard those words, I knew immediately that the tattoo in question could only come from one place on earth (so far), and one point in time (so far): Auschwitz.
The human mind works in really strange ways, and as I wrote that afternoon, what started out as someone seeing this tattoo on the arm of an old man became a reminiscence piece, as my protagonist found himself remembering being on the beach with his high school sweetheart. Perhaps the initial anger over the election had ebbed a bit (don’t get me wrong: I’m still pissed), because the tone of this piece is very different from the T-shirt piece. The overall feeling here is sadness, and, strangely, nostalgia, and I am a little uncomfortable with it. When it came time to read our pieces to the group that day, I chickened out, and censored myself, opting to sketch out the “reminiscence” scene that occupies that middle. I did this partly because we work in a public space and there was a small child in the room (indeed, when I read my t-shirt piece the previous week, I dropped one F-bomb in reading voice before being aware that there were kids not too far away). It wasn’t just the adult content that had me self-censoring: the scene in question felt almost disrespectful to victims of the Holocaust, and that was absolutely not my intention. The problem, I think, was that did not have time to tie these two strands together properly. I knew the idea of what I wanted to do, but couldn’t quite pull it together.
Once I “finished” the t-shirt story I began putting serious time into the tattoo story. It is now nearly 15,000 words long. The overall tone is still one of sadness, which is right, but the story also veered off in ways I never expected, and it still strikes me as inappropriate for the thought that inspired it. As I read it over this morning, in hopes of being able to truly finish it, I realize I still haven’t found a way to bring it all together in a way that is clean.
Sadly, the conditions that spurred the creation of both stories still exist.