I'm grateful for the brief but deep immersion into another world provided by a good short story. I’m grateful for the mastery of language that allows a world to be created in a handful of lines. I’m grateful to have returned to writing short fiction, inspired by a class I took last year. I’m grateful to have pushed past what my secondary school English teacher said about how short stories are impossibly difficult to write and we shouldn’t even bother trying.
I’m grateful for the stories I’ve read; the impossibly perfect ones and the flops, and how I’ve learned something from them all. I'm grateful for the existence of fictional worlds and for how fun they are to visit when this world becomes too much.
I'm (very!) grateful for the stories that showed up during my morning pages this week, and how good it felt to use a muscle I forgot I had. I’m grateful for the times that writing feels like transcribing, when the beats of the narrative are so clear in my mind and I only need to capture what I see. I’m also grateful for the times when I feel rootless and lost in a story, clicking through google images and answering lists of character questions hoping to happen on something that feels true.
I’m grateful for the patterns that appear in my fiction1, and for the smart person who asked: what if you wrote about something else? I’m grateful to have returned to a story I wrote last year, and to find the notes I made to myself in those messy, early drafts. I’m grateful to have shaken off the unhelpful criticism I received, and to be able to move forward with it again. I’m grateful that, no matter what chaos is swirling in my life, my writing is always there, waiting for me to begin again.
Recommendations
📚 Some favourite stories to recommend:
Brokeback Mountain (PDF)
Claire Foster’s ‘So Late in the Day’ and ‘Foster”
Lisa Taddeo’s Ghost Lover (here’s a sample story)
Curtis Sittenfeld’s ‘You Think It, I Say It’ (My favourite story from the collection, The Nominee, is available for free online or you can download a sample of the book on your kindle and read it there!)
Rebecca Miller’s Personal Velocity, which I read this week and which inspired me to write this piece.
🍅 I recently remembered that Shashouka exists and have made a slightly altered version of this twice in the last month.
🎧 I wasn’t planning to watch a comedy special about blowjobs, but having listened to this, I will.
📺 If you need to turn your brain off and just be for a bit, can I suggest this as an accompaniment?
❤️
’s recent piece about the loss of her inner life made me remember some of the hardest moments in my life. It is absolutely worth your time.💕 If this piece resonated with you, please tap the heart below to help spread the word.
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✍️ Beyond Survival is written by me, Clare Egan, an award-winning writer and journalist. You can read more about me here, or look at some pretty pictures over here. 👋 Click reply to say hello anytime. Thank you for being here!
Surprising no-one, trauma is the common thread in so much of what I write.