IWSG: The Fiction Is My Second Language Edition... (#27)

Insecure Writers' Support Group (IWSG) is a really awesome meme that you should be doing along with the rest of us writers. Unless you truly are happy with your writing and don't feel the need to vent about your insecurities because they don't exist for you. But, really.... Don't they?  
IWSG is hosted by Captain Ninja Alex at his blog, Alex J. Cavanaugh.

Oh-ho, I am back from the dead of winter to meet you all in the fair month of March. I told you I wouldn't rear my head again for the rest of the year after that last blog post in December. (I'm so consistent about procrastinating. At least that's something.)

The topic I have chosen to write about today may seem rather odd. What in the world could I mean by saying, "fiction is my second language"? Yeah, what am I talking about? Well, this is something that has recently occurred to me after several years of suppression: I do and always have struggled with writing FICTION over another form of story-telling, that being stage play-writing....

What I mean is that when I first began to tell stories many years ago, mostly back in my college days, I was doing so in the form of dramatic stage plays, not fiction. In fact, I remember taking writing classes that required me to write poetry, fiction and drama and I always sucked at poetry (I snorted as I wrote this), struggled with fiction a fair amount, but truly exceeded my own and everyone else's expectations when it came to dramatic stage writing.

I don't know why, but it came more naturally to me. It just leads me to believe that, like anyone living in a country other than their own native country and who was raised away from that adopted land, the second language doesn't come as naturally as the first.

I decided it wasn't feasible to become a playwright in this day and age. When was the last time you went to the theater to see a play? And, not a musical, because we all know musicals are doing just fine, but I'm not Andrew Lloyd Webber. The stage play has seen better days. I won't even go into how incoherent the typical modern play is by now. You probably know what I'm talking about.... 

It is true that, for me, sitting in a theater and watching a live play is more transcendent than anything else I can think of, other than sitting through a musical, but we already established I'm not musically gifted or skilled. I knew I had to go a more realistic story-telling route, so I chose fiction. Trust me, it IS more realistic than writing stage plays.

Like an immigrant to a foreign land who must adopt the language of the natives in order to live and get by in their new environment, that's what I've been doing for twenty years with writing fiction. It just doesn't come to me as easily as telling a story through the dramatic medium.

This is just an interesting observation I recently made and it has helped me in understanding why I struggle so much with fiction. It makes sense now. It's like I forgot I'm not really from here. I would probably do that if I moved to a foreign country--just utterly forget my American roots if I lived long enough away from them.

But, like any of Hamlet's soliloquies, knowing this is not going to solve any of my problems. Though, I will be more inclined to forgive myself for not keeping up with the natives.

As for the IWSG Question of the Month: Have you ever pulled out a really old story and reworked it? Did it work out?

It's such funny timing because that's exactly what I've been doing. I realized it's been too long since I shared anything I've written with... anyone, really. So, I've pulled out an old fan fiction and am dusting it off (revising it) to share it on Archive of Our Own (AO3). It's time I stretched out these "sharing" legs of mine with something I actually finished once upon a time. If only I could finish something original that I could sell to an audience!