When I was in my early twenties, I attended a writing seminar where one of the panelists said of writing: “If you can do anything else, do that, not writing. Because writing is sitting down every day and opening up a vein onto the page.” At the time, I did not understand, because at the time my conception of writing stories was entirely about being clever. The woman’s suggestion that writing was putting yourself on the page in gory detail just did not compute. What was clever about that?
Also at that time, I was uncomfortably convinced that I was a man. I did not know that I had other options, and so I was convinced I was just bad at being a man and therefore bad at being me. I was at that seminar because I was desperate to get good at being me, and being a man, and being a writer. I was there to see John Cleese, who was also on that panel, and had made a rather successful go at being a man and a writer. He mostly talked about his writing desk. I wish I remembered the name of that other panelist, because her “open a vein onto the page” comment stuck with me even if I didn’t understand it at the time.
I didn’t understand it at the time because I didn’t understand me at the time. Because the thing about opening a vein and spilling the gory details of yourself onto the page is… you can’t do it if you don’t know yourself. And at the time, I did not know my own gender. There was a big gap in my self-knowledge. I couldn’t find a vein, as it were. Had never found a vein, in fact. And so, having never written anything personal in my life, I disdained that lovely panelist’s comment as self-serving, hyperbolic histrionics.
Twenty-two year old me was an asshole.
When I look back on my writing, there’s pre-transition stuff and there’s post-transition stuff. All the pre-transition stuff is obsessively clever. And I’m not patting myself on the back here; imagine I am packing so much disdain into the word ‘clever’ that it’s dripping out the seams. Each piece is so fascinated with some Big Idea that the rest is hollow. It’s not even that there’s no space left for anything human, it’s that the stupid writer just wasn’t interested in including anything else besides the Big Idea.
Once I embraced my gender, my writing changed. Opened up. Blossomed. It’s the strangest thing, but I had been writing here and there and this and that for a literal decade, but I realized with some surprise that what I was writing was suddenly about something. The stories had a weight to them, a significance, a personal investment beyond whatever clever idea I had bouncing around in my head. And some of the writing was hard in ways I’d never experienced. Painful. I’d be typing with tears in my eyes. I’d finish and find myself exhausted, emotionally gutted, for the rest of the day.
I’d started opening up veins onto the page. Hooray?
The short story attached to this post, The Axe on the Wall, is an interesting case. Because it is, very definitely, clever—coy and ambiguous and not playing entirely fair. But it is also deeply personal, anchored just under my heart. It’s about mandatory decisions with unknowable consequences, and anyone who has had to navigate the minefield that is gender will recognize the theme with a sort of dreadful familiarity.
This may be the most personal story I’ve ever released, even if it’s cloaked in speculative-fiction cleverness. I’m more than a little hesitant to put the Publish button.
All of which is to say, I guess, please enjoy this blood-spattered page.
This story has been cross-posted at Royal Road.
