I’m sure I’ve mentioned before about how, for me, writing was a means of escape from life, my childhood and my adulthood. There are still sometimes I write with the mind of being somewhere else, but it does not guide my writing nearly as much as it once had five, ten, fifteen years ago.

I didn’t think I started writing as young as I did, somehow I’d forgotten. When I was thirteen, I moved from WA to NSW, changing guardians once again. I thought I started writing not long after I arrived in NSW but apparently I’d been writing most of the time I had been in WA, and I’d just forgotten it until one of my friends from there mentioned it in a chat one night. I don’t know how I’d forgotten because once I was reminded I remembered how I had mapped out all of the characters on charts that I still used up until about 2017. Basically tables of character names and their ages, hair colour, eye colour, etc. I don’t take notes on characters like that anymore. I write up mini profiles when needed and extended ones when I feel like it.

Well, I’ve long since thrown out those first pieces of writing. They were either short picture books personalised for my younger cousins or more or less fan-fiction where I just took something I liked and made it very much not my own. Maybe that’s the source of my worries about being perceived as copier. I don’t write anything like that anymore. Stopped that around 2010 when I started working on my bigger projects. I think it was around then I got my first rejection letter, took a look at my work and went “yeah, it was total garbage”. I became more serious about refining and improving it, stepping away from writing completely for myself.

I still wrote for myself up until about 2019, but I did refine my work with the expectation of someone reading it. It wasn’t until the middle of my degree that I really started thinking about writing for others. I’ve always had important themes in my work that really speak to the hardships and trauma of growing up (and even being an adult) and so always had the intention of being able to connect with my audience, but it was only through my degree, and then it was further reinforced by my internship, that I would like to write for others. It became less about the story I wanted to write and more about the story I wanted others to listen to. Because, strangely enough, they really are two different things.

In between 2014-2016, my writing evolved. It had always been about magical places and warm families; where I couldn’t be hurt. And then I started confronting my hurt in writing. Everything became dystopian-like, all broken families and harsh realities. I started focusing on the hurt and writing a happier ending. Pages upon pages of crushing a character so I could build them up and give them a finale. It was still a form of escapism, but through this, I was taking a look at my problems and giving myself a way to share these realities with others. People don’t always want to read about real issues, we pick fiction because it’s fake, right? But I started realising that I could give the same essence of empowerment to the pieces of me I was putting in my writing that the heroes of the fantasy novels I read had.

Empowerment from reality. It’s really just the evolution of escapism.