That stuff I wrote that ended up in a book ... uh ... never mind

I'm in this book!

I’m not as good a self-promoter as I once thought myself to be.

I used to spruik stories I had written that I was proud of via Facebook. This dried up.

I, like a lot of writers, have what another writer friend has described as that ‘look at me, but don’t look at me’ thing.

I can better explain it like this: I would love to have teeming masses of readers, however, if someone close to me reads something I penned, it can get cringey.

To use an (awkward) analogy, if a nude picture of me leaked out and thousands saw it, I’d probably shrug, but if my boss and my colleagues and my kindergarten teacher saw it, that’s when I’d want to hide for a while.

That’s what writing is like – being naked. If you’re doing first-person stuff, you need to throw in lots of juicy, slimy, filthy revelations. Your story can’t be the equivalent of a sympathetically-shot, highly-edited and airbrushed image of you; far better that it be like a grainy, tabloid-style image of you scratching your butt. That’s more riveting.

The more personal the writing the worse the ‘look at me, don’t look at me’ gets. A newspaper report on a council meeting? Fine. Memoir? Cringey. Fiction? Really, really cringey.

Well, maybe that’s just me. If people I know read stuff I write, I fear my sentences and plot lines and story arcs and characters could warp their opinions of the real me. I fear revealing something about myself. Eww.

Anyway, this is all a roundabout way of saying I got something published in a book this year: a short essay called Newsrooms, a survivor’s guide. It is published alongside 36 other pieces in this year’s edition of The Emerging Writer, a book for rookie writers that was launched recently in Melbourne. Oh – one of the other contributors is Shaun Tan and that gave me a severe fangirling moment. If you’ve read The Arrival (not that it has any words) you’ll know what I mean – Shaun is a giant.

My essay was something I penned right towards the end of my time at a daily broadsheet newsroom. I pitched to be part of this ages ago because I knew I had some things to say. In newsrooms, you get to do lots of weird shit and that makes for good stories. I think it’s why I love journalism so much – the weird shit.

Some of my current crop of colleagues read my piece and said nice things about it. It was lovely but kind of excruciating. You know, because of the ‘look at me, don’t look at me’ thing.

It was this feeling times a million when I once showed my mum a short story I’d written. It wasn’t one of the pieces that had attracted modest acclaim (I’ve been shortlisted and highly commended for a fiction prize, twice), it was some other thing that had popped into my head and, like a lot of stuff percolating in my brain, had its unsavoury aspects. For example, one of the three incarnations of the same female character was a fetish film actress. I emphasised to mum that I had made the whole thing up: this character wasn’t me. I wasn’t her. These were cringey, cringey times.

I explained this predicament to my creative writing teacher, Craig. He said, wryly, “I’m sure Kafka went through the same thing. I’m sure he had to say, “Mum, I’m not a cockroach.”