Part 1: Waiting, waiting

I’ve been writing for a while. As a kid I was better at it than most but this was rural New Zealand in the nineties, and there were less than seventy of us in the entire school, and even then I had this sense of being an averagely-sized fish in an extremely small pond. So I wrote, because we were told to, and I was really proud of this one poem, I think it was called “The Taniwha”. It was a story about a vengeful taniwha (a dangerous water spirit) who gobbles up a band of warriors as they try to escape, and the first line went something like:

The taniwha swam around the island, waiting, waiting.

The fact that I remember that line at all means I was very proud of it. I must have read it aloud to the class. I must have listened to it over and over again in my mind’s ear.

In high school, I continued to write because we were told to. I liked writing but it felt like copying most of the time; absorbing the cadences of things I’d read and then dabbing a stagey, derivative version of that down on the page. It didn’t feel like it was something to be proud of, really, the way I was doing it. I liked art, I drew a lot, and I played the piano. I never learned to read music properly, I would just watch my teacher’s hands and do the muscle/ear memory thing until it sounded right. My brother taught me the guitar, and then I thought myself. I was not confident about any of these things. I mean, I was confident in my ability to do them but only because no-one else did the same combination of them, and I felt special, but also vulnerable. Art felt like something I was happy to be known for, but the details were better kept to myself. Like, if someone looked closely at what I was making—at me—I would literally die of embarrassment. I thought that if you weren’t a prodigy, doing anything creative was innately shameful. Everything I did was fine from far away, but shit up close.

In the days leading up to finishing high school, two of my teachers asked me, separately, “Are you going to keep writing, then?” And I thought, what do you mean keep writing? I don’t write. Not really.

Part 2: “I knew you could write, you bitch”

What those teachers said must have got under my skin, because, around the age of eighteen, I actually wrote something, and it wasn’t for school, or any reason other than I just wanted to. It meant nothing, and was for nothing. It was real *writing*. It sounds melodramatic, but that’s how it felt. It was so exciting.

What even was it? It was a description of a setting—mountains, a shining city—the beginnings of what felt like a story. I have no idea what happened to it. I can’t find it in any of my documents, not even in [checks iCloud] the folder marked “old_online_data” that has PDF exports of old Gmails from the time when I lived in Ireland, mostly from my mum with subject lines like “Still alive…”. This thing, this piece of writing, was barely a page long, seriously. But I printed it out and it felt like a beacon in my hands. I gave it to my mum, I think she was doing a wash at the time. She stopped to read it right then and there, and when she finished, she said, “I knew you could write, you bitch.”

Thus, I knew I had something. And I sensed I was actually good at it, or I could be good at it. Not like music; my brother is the real musician. When I played guitar I was just blapping around. Not art; I am too lazy and imprecise to ever really be good at that.

This was something else.

Still, though, as sneakily revolutionary as it felt, I still kept it secret.

In 2008, I lived in Ireland with my friend Kathryn and couple of Kiwi guys in a terraced house in Cork. Kathryn and I had finished our first English teaching jobs, maternity leave positions and therefore time-bounded, at the same high school the year before. I hated it, she didn’t. I never went back. Kathryn loved reading and literature and history and kind of put me to shame, because I’d studied those things too and was supposed to love them way more diligently than I did. What the hell had I been doing with my life up to this point? I feel like I was on auto-pilot. Maybe that is a whole other thing to write about, another time. Anyway, Kathryn would talk about how she wanted to write, and when we went on road-tips up to Galway or down the coast, we’d stay up late in whatever hostel we were in, drinking Beamish and hot ports, joking about “waxing lyrical” over this time in our lives, about Ireland and its many beauties. I don’t know why, but I never told her I already had a secret stash of writing—no complete stories, mostly fragments. I didn’t tell her that instead of following her back to hell (high-school English teaching) I had applied to do an MA in Creative Writing at my old university in Wellington. I got accepted based on those writings in my secret stash.

I am a strange mixture, aren’t I, of confidence and shame.

So I went back home after my year in Ireland and started this MA. It was the best thing I ever did, the best learning experience I ever had. Because of my class mates, my teacher. Because I actually love writing. I love it. I love how it feels when something occurs to you in words that are so close to being perfect, and all you need to do is write them down, and then, having been remade in pixels, they are perfect.

I was a good writer. I could write, and impress. But I couldn’t tell stories.

I wrote what I thought sounded like stories, or parts of stories. My portfolio was, looking back on it, a nice wee sampler pack of the type of thing I could do, but there was barely anything close to a story in there. The strongest ones were strange, a little sad, and were always about families. They were all set in a small town like the one I’d grown up in. The main characters were always kids. But every piece was kind of pointless, like I couldn’t find the shape of things. I tried writing stories with older characters, people in their mid-twenties, in relationships. But they felt hollow, like I was flailing to find meaning in that sort of life. I was in my twenties but I didn’t know how to be in my twenties. I had never had a relationship, and the idea of one just felt so flat and bone-chilling to me, but I was imagining relationships with men, you see. My secret gay thoughts terrified me. They didn’t excite me, and I didn’t want to know more about them, because doing anything with them just felt impossible. I didn’t feel like I could possibly be attractive to anyone. It was safer to just be my slightly-off, slightly solitary self. All this probably seems strange to young people, or to people who grew up in big cities or more gay-conducive environments. But what you need to understand is, I came of age in a place and at a time when the only queer experience available to me, as far as I knew, was a sad, dank, alien carpet woven from aggressive slurs. I would have suffocated. In my high school of fifteen-hundred kids, there were no gays, and by that, I mean “no gays”. It was just not a thing, to be out. I detached myself so much I barely saw what was right in front of my face, like two of my mates (girls) who boned consistently for most/all of senior year. When someone told me they were a thing, I wasn’t shocked. It was unremarkable, vaguely numbing.

Well, I thought, I can’t do anything like that. It’s got nothing to do with me. Good for them, though.

People talk on the internet about their sapphic awakenings, and I had a tonne of those over the years. They were only awakenings in retrospect—at the time, they were more like smouldering, disconcerting inklings. There are three that stand out: one was Lurleen Lumpkin singing “Bunk With Me Tonight”. There’s not a baby lesbian alive who wouldn’t have gotten hot-stomach syndrome over that. The second was a real-world event, where, in line for a cash machine on campus, I was stood behind these girls, who were kissing, and it wasn’t the kissing per se, it was the fact that they were in love. Like, obviously and scruffily in love. I had never seen two people look at each other like that in my entire life.

The third awakening was falling in love myself, with a close friend of mine from teacher training college. This friend, whose name was [Redcated]—I’m pretty sure she’ll never read this, but if she does, she will know I am talking about her—was interesting, kind, open, and had this extremely intoxicating brand of insecurity. We had a very co-dependent relationship. One night, we were out with one of my flatmates at a bar, drinking Belgian beers. [Redacted] walked away from the high-top table for some reason, to get food or something, and my flatmate just casually goes, “She’s really beautiful, isn’t she.”

And this was my thought process:

[stomach drop]

Yeah. She *is* beautiful.

Oh, shit. She is so beautiful.

Shit shit shit shit shit.

Nothing happened with this girl. Looking back, I think she might have known how I felt. She never pulled away though, so sometimes I wonder if she might have been open to something, or whether she was just… one of those girls who is very *platonically* intense and devoted. You see? Even now I can’t evaluate things in a clear-eyed manner. It’s bananas. She ended up marrying this extremely handsome man from her church.

Part 3: Grace

This is what I’m saying about the shape of things. I never told [Redacted] how I felt and, in fact, I think she was a big part of why I decided to flee the country. All my life I had been emotionally detached and secretive. To recognise the heart of a story, you need to not be emotionally detached. You need to recognise feelings and call them what they are. To tell a story, you need to not be secretive.

I worked on this one novel for nearly fifteen years. It had many shapes. What has never changed is that there’s a character called Cell, and she’s a weirdo, and she runs away from home. In 2015, I submitted it to a publisher who had considered and provided feedback on an earlier version. In my heart I knew that it wasn’t ready, still, even though I convinced myself via a noxious blend of impatience and self-delusion that it was fine. The writing was good. What else was there? The (very kind) rejection came back and it told me everything I already knew. It was not clear what the stakes were. The split POVs weren’t working. The story needed to be reimagined as YA with Cell at its centre. What was her story, and why the hell was she doing what she was doing?

I buried the story. The next year, 2016, I came out of the closet. I was 31 years old. There is a whole lot I can say about what that was like, but I want to focus on what happened to that novel afterwards, when I finally came back to it after a few years lying fallow. See, I fell in love with girl, and she was in love with me back, and it was life-changing. In the space of about three months, I went from being empty and blank to… not full, far from it, but I suppose I became something else, something capable of filling. I woke up and it was like the world was waking up around me. Suddenly my family and my friends knew I was gay, and it was heady and exhausting but it was also very thrilling. Everything in my life tilted sideways. It was a weird time. That girl I fell in love with is now my wife. In 2018, we moved together from New Zealand, to England, where she’s from. I think it was during Covid when I started thinking about writing again. I dug that novel out. I thought about Cell, and why she was doing what she was doing, and it was suddenly obvious because the details were all there. I just hadn’t *seen* it. When she ran away, she wasn’t fleeing something. She was looking for something. She was looking for the only person she had ever loved and felt connected to, but who had disappeared from her life: her step-mother. Suddenly, I saw that, all stitched together like a shabby quilt. So I started getting up at 5 in the mornings, before work, to write that story, and it was exciting, but then a weird thing happened. I think it was because of my sideways-tilted, gay little brain. During her journey across the country, Cell falls into company with this rag tag group of people, including this girl called Grace. And seeing these two characters together again after having stuffed them away in a drawer, I was like, these two. These two are gonna hook up.

Thus, I wrote my very first baby gay kissing scene. It was the most viscerally satisfying and cool thing I had ever written up till that point. And I was like, this story is a romance. The second part of this story is a romance. Am I a romance writer? By the time I had revised everything again, and rewritten the novel fully to completion, I, like an unstoppable idiot, had completely over-corrected. I gave the story two hearts, instead of one. I know in some circumstances, that would be completely fine. But in this case I think it is just fundamentally unworkable. The story is completely uneven at a foundational level. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fix it, but that’s OK. I’ve put it away again. I think I will just leave it unpublished, I’ll sit it on a shelf in jar, and look at it now and then, and admire its beautiful, freaky extra heart.

And in the meantime, I can write stories where the romance is the entire point.

Before coming out (BCO, let’s call it), my writing was good, but it was too polite. That’s the word I’d use. My writing was very polite. Romantic love and desire is the least polite part of myself, and I guess what I’m saying, and the whole point of this, is that everyone should—in my opinion—always—write about the least polite parts of themselves because that’s what makes the story good.