Friends of Writers

The past 6 months has seen me sneaking slowly into creative writing, once when I wrote a (draft for a) novel, and a few more times as part of a short story creative writing workshop. 

I've discovered two things about my creative writing chops (or lack thereof).

One, I always spiral down the angsty drain. I can start off light-hearted, funny, very chill, and then always ALWAYS end up all emo. I don't know why. Is being emo the easiest way to write a creative short story? MAYBE. Why else do we have an abundance of emo stuff everywhere? On TV, books, blogs, movies, everywhere. Everyone is emo. I'm one of them. 

[Read the first story I wrote for the workshop HERE.]

Two, it's true, what I once heard Tarantino was supposed to have said, something about how if your friends and family aren't nervous when you start writing, then you're not doing something right. It's easy to draw inspiration from the people around you, and it really must be really weird for my friends and family to read my stuff. I imagine they notice things about themselves on there, and most of the time, I DO use them. 

I wrote THIS STORY around a story that Bilal wrote for LOLs, and I used him as a character. Just like I did with my novel, where I used the likeness of Squeek as the main character. And all the characters, minor or major, in all my stories are people around me. 

None of them are like any of their characters, but I felt like I needed a "push" to develop real-sounding people for my story. 

I have one more story to write for the workshop, and I'm really hoping this time that I can just tell a straight-forward story without having to resort to emo theatrics, or drama. 

If you're in Jeddah and would like to join our workshops, contact me!