A peek into my inner world of fiction writing
All my published writing is nonfiction. But recently, my unpublished writing has become more fiction-heavy (I share one of my short stories below).
I’ve long craved the ideal of writing interesting and successful fiction, but my academic brain has put up guardrails against sharing things that aren’t rooted in our shared, lived reality and in historical facts and data.
A year or so ago, I started writing fiction (again). I wrote fiction a lot as a child and teen, including a story I wrote when I was 8 or 10, about two conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War, who dodged the draft and moved to Canada. This was inspired in part by my regular dives into our collection of World Book encyclopedia and year books (see one from 1970 here), which I loved because I could see how people were reporting on the war (sorry, ‘conflict’) as it was unfolding.
The sociopolitical complexities of the Vietnam War were a special childhood focus of mine because I was a very normal child with normal child interests.
Anyhow, fast forward to the present day.
The last time I wrote fiction with any regularity was before I graduated high school, and while I’ve dabbled here and there since then, it has been incredibly expansive and refreshing to write fiction again.
In particular, to imagine stories and lives that map to the histories I cover in my books, but for which in many cases we don’t have records of the lived experiences of those histories.
How exciting is it to imagine what it’s like to be the person who buries their butter in a bog, or be the person who blends together various non-tea things to make fake ‘tea’ to sell. What were their lives like moment by moment?
What intricacies of that moment in time, and the particular calculus of living within it, informed each thing they did in connection with food?
The latter, which I share below, was inspired by my research for Afternoon Tea: A History, where I cover the high price of tea in England and the resulting tea adulteration, and laws around tea adulteration.
Writing fiction about the histories I’ve worked with sheds new life on the histories because I’m able to dive in with greater nuance an depth, and to consider those histories in new ways (my thinking on food history and the experience of place has been really helpful with this).
When I talk about trying new things and being flexible and curious as writers, this is what I talk about: I am always pushing my clients and students to explore the world in new ways because the payoff is enormous and the process is often also really fun.
We can only go so far as writers when we work with the tools and experiences already in our toolbox. Getting back into fiction has felt like adding a whole new shelf to the toolbox, filled with exciting new-to-me gadgets to explore.
Here is one of my short stories, written about smouch.
Smouch is a slang term from the 1700s/1800s in England, and refers to imitation teas made using not-tea ingredients, from random leaves from nearby trees to dung and beyond. It was really interesting to write about the experience of choosing and blending these ingredients so they were just passable enough that you could keep selling the ‘teas’ without alienating potential customers (or poisoning them, or at least not poisoning them too much).
I’d love to hear what you think!
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