I just published a poem about a half an hour ago, and it’s titled, “I don’t know how to write anymore.” I wrote it because I’ve been thinking about my writing process a lot lately and how what I write tends to reflect my mental health at the time. Some of my previous poems and the chapters that I’ve written for my novel thus far focus on emotional instability, the loss of a loved one, grief, self-harm, etc. I didn’t realize until I inspected the majority of my pieces just how much I write about sad and depressing things—it probably takes up 85% of all creative writing projects I’ve worked on over the last 10 years. Maybe 90%? Because of that, and because I feel like I’m doing better as of late, the following question has been stamped on the inside of my brain:

Now that things have been going well for me, what do I write about?

I recently moved to a big city that I’m really enjoying; I started dating my boyfriend a few months ago, and he’s really wonderful; and I now live in an apartment with no asshole neighbors below me who cuss me out, call me names, threaten me, or pound on their ceiling whenever I walk across my apartment—it’s great! I majorly lucked out with my neighborhood, and I know that Harper is happy with our setup. Even though our apartment building isn’t silent all the time, I’ll take clumsy upstairs neighbors dropping things throughout the day over violent and threatening neighbors every time.

In an effort to meet people in my new city, I’ve popped in on few writing, reading, and movie-watching groups, and I genuinely enjoy chatting with my coworkers. Overall, things are going really well for me. Since this is definitely a pretty new experience, I’ve been nervous that I won’t have anything to write about, especially in the poetry realm. When I was in a poetry class in undergrad, my favorite professor of all time (Professor Gogan) went around the room and told each student in the class (made up of 5 or so women) what he believed our writing style was. (You may think that he shouldn’t have put us in a box like that, but the thought of a skilled writer and teacher I respect so much taking the time to read my work and then often liking it enough to give me good grades for it made my curiosity and excitement skyrocket. I was eager to know any of his thoughts about my work and me as a writer. I forget what he told everyone else (of course), and when it was my turn, he said that my writing style was “Serious.” I nodded, agreeing. I was so pumped. I thought, “I am a Serious Poet,” and I liked it. If I was him and had to describe my style as a poet, I too would probably say serious. The first full-length poem I wrote for that class is called Waiting for Mr. Fleming. This was the poem that began the semester-long grieving fest where I started to actually process my dad dying when I was younger. This was maybe… 9 or 10 years after he died, but hey, the grieving process is weird. I remember starting to recite this poem in class, and I had to leave the room because I couldn’t get through it without crying. Crying while presenting something I’ve written—or crying while presenting anything, really—was/is my worst nightmare. I don’t like crying in front of people, and I still don’t. But, now I get less ashamed of myself when I do.

I wrote a lot of poems about my dad that semester, as well as my childhood dog and my grandma. I’m pretty sure I only wrote… two or three positive and uplifting poems that semester. For example: Home and The Writer. The other forms of writing that I’ve done tend to read as sad and depressing as well. I’ve been writing a novel over the past… 10 or so years, which is an incredibly long time, I know. I usually find myself writing about themes that I have dealt with in my life, and I like to divvy them out to my main characters. I sometimes have a problem not using things that have actually happened to me, so I have to remind myself, “You can make stuff up.” When writers can literally build worlds from scratch in their brains… I am astounded. I genuinely do not understand how that happens. I once tried my hand at writing fantasy in my homeschool days. Let’s just say that I ditched that genre very quickly, as I realized that the world I made up was resembling Narnia a bit too much. Come to think of it, I’m also shocked that I keep trying to insert romance into the novel I’m currently writing. Writing about romance doesn’t come easily to me. With that same fantasy story I was writing, I remember the height of romance for two of my characters happened as they were sharing a saltine cracker by the fire. Whenever I write a romantic scene now, it tends to be on the quirkier side of romance.

I don’t have a game plan for how I foresee my creative writing career going. I’ve just been going with what seems interesting to me, and my newfound organization has been super helpful. There have been numerous times when my chapters were scattered in different documents and I didn’t know where to begin, so I just gave up on writing that day without even trying. I have now purchased Scrivener, and they have a trusty cork board feature to “pin” whatever ideas you have cooking around in your head. I’ve been reading lots of thriller books and Stephen King lately, and I always have some scary movie in the queue. It didn’t dawn on me until recently that I’ve never given a fair shot to writing horror, one of my favorite genres—so that’s what I’m doing now! I’m writing what I believe right now is a short story about a surgeon and a prisoner in the hospital the surgeon works at. We’ll see where it goes from there!

It’s really encouraging to know and discover for myself that we are not just made up of one skill and don’t have to be smushed in a box that we have to stay in forever. I’m sure that I’ll continue to write about sad things, but I think that more neutral-to-positive stories will be making their way to my blank documents soon.

Reagan Fleming