“Little Paper Boats” was a big hit with my classmates. Leaving class after having my piece reviewed by my peers, I was beaming with optimism and the most satisfaction I’ve ever felt from any assignment or project I had done up to that point. I had some of my classmates emailing me after, asking where I learned to write how I do. My family loved it as well, especially my grandmother. My dad is a painter and he sometimes paints pictures as gifts for my grandma. I’d always wished that I could someday do the same with my writing, and I finally could. It was a nice feeling. I felt as though I had the undeniable proof of my skill that I had been looking for. I felt validated.
Then came the inevitable question, “What next?”
I didn’t know. I no longer had a deadline stalking me as I wrote, propelling me forward. I tried time and again to get something, anything, going. But I never could make it past the first paragraph with everything I tried. I’d go and sit in my writing corner of the Main Library, hoping that there was something left of whatever cloud of creativity that I had been pulling from for my last piece, but still nothing.
Eventually, this bout of writer’s block turned into ennui, and the ennui turned to insecurity. Somehow I had managed to refute all the evidence that I had gained as to my writing ability, and found myself in want of more proof. A year after my taking my first, I enrolled for a second round of creative writing. This time it was “advanced” creative writing, which was intimidated me. Maybe I was good enough to get through an intro class, but I just knew the advanced course would swallow me whole.
This time around, I wanted to try my hand at fiction again. I still wasn’t all that confident in my ability to think up a compelling narrative, so I decided that imitation might assuage my insecurities. I had just read John Gardener’s “Grendel,” so I elected it as my story template. I sat with the “Grendel” arc for a bit, tweaking it and personalizing it until I had come up with something that I felt was original enough to call my own.
As for the style, I decided to channel Faulkner. I had read “Absalom, Absalom” over the previous summer and the writing contained within it had stuck with me long after I had finished the book. I had already flirted with stream of conciousness — namely, the final section of “Little Paper Boats” — but I had not fully embraced it, so I decided to continue building what I had previously started.
While the writing of “Green Vein” was a rocky, stop-and-go process and was the source of many mini panic attacks, I eventually ended up on the other end with what I still consider my best piece of writing. The story is not all there as of now. I had only planned for this piece to be a short story, but after finishing the short version and reading back over it, I decided it needed much more room to breathe. I am planning on expanding this into a full novel, and a lot of the details from the short version have already been cut, so I’ve decided to pare down the original 30-page version as to emphasize the style and minimize the story.