On Writing

I am a firm believer in writing what you know. Until recently, I've been struggling with writing and what I class as experience.

I read The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan in early November which is a selection of short stories and essays by the late Marina Keegan who died in her early 20's. What struck me was the youth of her writing. Before I read Marina Keegan I thought I had nothing to write about because I never felt like I had begun to live yet. Childhood was good but the last few school years have always felt like an unfortunate experience I had to get through to get to the next stage; work hard on my exams so I have opportunities and then move on. I felt the same about my exam years the same way I feel about main courses. Sure, there are good parts, but it's main purpose is to get to pudding. Marina Keegan took what opportunities come to the young and wrote about them. 

My outlook has got better since I've started doing more this year because I am an adult now, with a car and ID and an unlimited train ticket into the city. I've started doing more of what I consider "the sixth form experience" like going out for drinks on rooftop terraces but also learning to cook baked beans in the microwave and going out on ice cream runs.

I think exploring "the high school experience" and "the sixth form experience" is a really interesting thing to explore because it's a time in your life where you are all going through the exact same thing but in different environments with different groups of people and those people all interact in different ways. I've always found that very pronounced because I moved from a single sex senior school in a small town to a boys school with a co-ed sixth form in an interesting part of a small city that is very student oriented. Comparing my experience to my old friends experiences is weird because we do such different things as a result of our environments but we are still all applying for universities and working for the same exams.

I also feel that sixth form has been the first time where my year have interacted without adults hovering over us all the time. It's the point where we've all begun to interact more freely because of that. I've certainly felt like this is where I've started to become an adult because I can finally make my own choices without an adult interfering with them. It's when people start to make their own choices and make their own experiences which is why writing about them makes them interesting.

I always used to confuse validity of experience. Just because I have had fewer experiences than people who are older than me doesn't make my experiences less valid. I have never been in a serious relationship but I've seen girls get skinnier and skinnier until their hair falls out and I've lived in two countries and I've been followed by a psychotic and worked in a school and a hospital for a week each.

I want to start writing about my experiences as they happen because of these reasons and that's really exciting to me because I am finally becoming a person