The thing about writing minority characters is that i never feel like I’m good enough as a writer or a person to do them justice, even when they are my own minorities.

You fuck up writing a white straight man? Make them too stereotyped or too weird? Make them too perfect or too broken? Nobody is going to fucking care. It’s all good. It’s one individual in a parade of other white straight men.

When you write a minority character though, they end up pretty much representing every single person in that minority. They end up being viewed as your personal opinion of that minority. They end up being analysed and critiqued and judged for *being* that minority, rather than being just a character you wrote.

And so I have queer characters and trans characters and non-western characters and female characters and disabled characters and i love them all, and i write them because i love them and because diving into their worlds is so much more interesting to me than diving into the worlds of straight white men, but i don’t dare publish. I don’t date show people. What if i didn’t do them justice? What if i offend them? What if i got it wrong? It’s not like they can just put it down, shrug and move on to all the other fiction doing a better job at representing them than i do….

And there's a chance at more representation... Gone.

That feeling when your story just completely ran off on you and it’s off the rails now and you’ve got no fucking clue where it’s going but you’ve got heaps of adrenalin rushing through your veins so you’re just going to run after it and follow because what the fuck else are you supposed to do?

Surprise stories

Sometimes I sit down and write. I don't think about it, I don't even really make stuff up, I just write. It's like there's this story or poem in my head and all I have to do is write it down. Like there's this narrator and all I have to do is put the narrative on paper. Once that's done, more often than not, I give the file some redundant name and close it, because I'll usually be late for whatever I should've been doing in the time that I just spend typing out this story or poem. Then I forget about it.

You read that correctly: I forget about it. Once in a while, I have this thing where I click random files in my writing or poetry folder and just read and let myself be surprised. I'll often have only the vaguest recollection of writing it. It's undoubtedly mine. My style of writing, my signature, my particular brand of spelling errors. More often than not, it's even pretty good. But it's like it was in my head, needed out and once it was out it was done and okay to forget about. All these forgotten stories and poems have three hallmarks:

1. They are all first person and, stemming from that, usually flow of consciousness writing. When I consciously write, I always write third person.
2. They all have a certain flow in the writing that is nearly lyrical, even the prose.
3. They don't cover my usual subject matter

So does anyone else recognize this? Is this what people talk about when they talk about muses or 'divine inspiration'? Or am I just bonkers and dramatizing something that's really normal? Just curious.