I can write

A sort of sequel

Furious fiction

On this weekend just gone, I submitted an entry to the January edition of the Australian Writers’ Centre’s Furious Fiction Competition. This is a monthly competition that anyone can enter. AWC sends out a challenge on the first Friday of each month, which you have until midnight Sunday to write a maximum 500-word short story in response to.

The first time I entered this was in the middle of 2022, and I had an idea that I’d enter it every month as a kick-start to my creative writing. Word limits, deadlines and mandatory elements would provide some structure that meant I wouldn’t be floundering around in the dark with no clear direction and no reason to finish the story.

But come December 2025 and the number of times I’d done this since my first entry was exactly zero.

I had many excuses. Don’t have time. Other things more important. Can’t think of an idea. My writing is shit. The challenge is too hard. 500 words isn’t enough.

Sure, I’d started a couple of stories. One had something to do with a misheard lyric from Elton John’s song Rocketman and another one involved Kit-Kats. But they didn’t get very far and I never finished them. Most months I looked at the prompts and decided to think about it for a while to come up with an idea, and an idea never came so I didn’t do it.

I finally did it

When last December’s challenge was released (wait, was this only a month ago?) I had a completely free weekend. I decided I would actually do this thing, and I did. Excitingly, and encouragingly, my story “Aussie Gold” made the longlist so I felt really good about that.

By 2 January I was ready to have another go at it. Another story submitted. That makes three stories I’d finished in three and a half years. (And, full disclosure, they are the only stories I’ve completed in three and a half years. That is my complete creative output since July 2022. That story I’d started in the workshop? I still haven’t finished it.)

What’s different?

I started thinking about what was different this time to the previous times I’d started to write something and, indeed, the times I hadn’t even bothered.

I had no fully formed plot when I started either story. In “Aussie Gold” I had the idea of the coffee shop worker throwing out jars of Vegemite in response to the Canadian foods regulator’s ban. I didn’t know what was going to happen. And in this month’s story, a character called ‘Steve’ started the story by saying “Crikey” as he was doing the job he’d been engaged for.

So on Friday night I wrote a bad first draft (‘Steve’ saying “Crikey” is very bad, cliched, cringe-worthy, embarrassing . . . ), which had the vaguest idea of a story but no ending, and I left them alone overnight. During the night, in the shower, early morning, more ideas would come to me. What might be going on here? This idea is a bit shit but what if this character says this instead? What’s a better character name for them? How might it end?

I’d take some time on Saturday to add those thoughts in and try to wrap the whole thing up. Ideally, somewhere close to 500 words. Then let it sit again.

On Saturday nights, the same thing would happen. New ideas, ways of fixing plot holes, changes I needed to make to the beginning so the ending made sense, would come to me. Mostly in the shower. I know that sounds cliched but it really is the place where many of my creative blocks get unblocked.

Then on Sunday, it was time to refine it, fix the plot holes and remove the excess words. (That’s the hardest part! This month the story was only 84 words over the limit, compared to 300 last month.) Read it through. Aloud. Fix the things that sound terrible. Then stop tinkering with it and submit it.

Submit it!

Submitting is incredibly difficult for me. I love tinkering. I would tinker until two minutes before the deadline and not submit it until the last minute in case another idea came to me to make the story better. (Did I ever tell you about the time I was studying at a Queensland university and the submission deadline was midnight their time, which was 1.00 am our time, and I submitted the essay at 11.30 pm, went to bed, had another idea for the essay, got up, recalled the assignment, changed some things and submitted it right on the 1.00 am deadline?)

Do not do that.

Let it go. Any new ideas can be added to an idea file for a future story, or a future iteration of this one if I decide to use it for a longer piece.

Write the story

It seems to me that I can’t write the story unless I actually write it.

Yeah, I know.

What I mean by that is, I can’t let the prompt circulate in my head and try to come up with an idea for the story before I start writing it. I need to start writing and let the ideas come in written words.

I can’t go out for a walk and compose a fully-formed short story in my head. I used to think I should be able to because I write blog posts like this. (It’s how I wrote this one.) But creative writing is a different type of writing and I’m guessing it requires different brain connections to fire. Or maybe I’m not used to this type of writing so it doesn’t automatically appear in my head like blog posts do. (I’ve been writing them for 15 years so perhaps my brain is deeply in that groove.)

Whatever the reason, and based on two experiences (so this isn’t exactly scientific), I’ve realised that “write something” is advice that actually works. Ideas or not, I just have to write a sentence.

I’ve done both of the Furious Fiction stories without ideas. The ideas have come with the prompts, and the stories have fallen out as I’ve written them. I’ve had no idea where they were going until I wrote them.

This leads me to think I’m being too fearful in saying I can’t write unless I have an idea, and that not having an idea is a convenient excuse for not writing anything. (Procrasti-fear, right?)

I’ve proved I don’t need an idea to be able to write. I just need a prompt and a constraint (and a deadline) and I can do it. I know I can. I’ve done it twice now.

The fear factor

The other thing that this has made me aware of is that I’m much more terrified of writing, submitting and publishing creative pieces than I am of making photos and publishing them. I’ve published thousands of photos across three Instagram accounts. I have a photo blog. I have a photo website. Some of these things even have my name on them.

Yes, I have a blog, which I’ve been writing for 15 years, but this isn’t creative writing. It’s me telling real stories that are based in fact. The work on that blog comes in turning truth into something readable. I don’t have to make anything up.

Making stuff up, writing it and putting out something that has come completely from me is terrifying!

A friend asked me why I think this is. Why am I more reluctant to share my writing than my photos?

I said I don’t know.

But I do know. I think it’s because I identify more as a writer than a photographer. So the stakes are a lot higher and I’d feel a lot worse if I failed at writing than at art. Which doesn’t mean I don’t care about my art. I care a lot. I don’t want to be ‘bad’ at it. But I also give myself a lot more grace with it than I do with my writing. I’m not an artist. I’m learning this craft, and I don’t expect to be a great artist.

I went out for an hour this morning with my camera. It was fun and I had a great time, with no expectations on myself.

But I’ve gotten so fearful of writing in case it’s bad that I make up any excuse not to do it. I need to learn more. I need a good idea. I need to find out how to do [this particular thing]. I need to sit in a quiet room surrounded by 12 candles, an exact amount of light, and with the correct music (which I haven’t worked out what it is yet), and it not be too late in the day or too early. I need to have checked my emails and social media and finished this blog post . . . and if I don’t actually write anything (but do a lot of courses), I can still go about calling myself a writer, and I’ll never fail.

I think you can see where this argument falls down, can’t you?

I’ll never write a bad thing, because I’ll never write anything.

Also, the word ‘fail’. That’s not helpful.

There’s a quote I saw recently that I can’t remember and I don’t know who said it, but it was something along the lines of the only bad writing is the writing you don’t do. You can’t edit a blank page. Something like that.

It also occurred to me, as I struggle to find a way to finish this, is that taking a long time to get this post right is yet another thing I’m doing instead of the actual writing I say I want to be doing . . .