lately i’ve been struggling with an apoplectic fear of fiction writing. the more i try, the more i wonder how i could presume to have the authority to know what it is to be someone else. how do i know what winter wind feels like on the face of someone else? the taste of ginger on a stranger’s tongue? the things that make them feel irrationally sad, happy, angry? all of my attempts at fictitious characters are really just extensions of myself, and that feels like a lie, too. here on slithy tove i struggle on a daily basis to process my own convoluted existence – imagining what it is to be another person is like trying to picture in my mind a color i’ve never seen before. incomprehensible, the closer you look.

and yet, other people write wonderful fiction without having an existential crisis. what’s my problem?