notion sickness

I hate telling people I’m a writer. Aspiring authors are some of the most annoying characters on TV. Hannah Horvath telling her parents she thinks she could be a voice of a generation, Dan Humphrey sincerely believing he’s the next F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jenny Schecter earnestly waxing about her ghastly autofiction at parties. They have a hugely inflated sense of their own talent and ideas of grandeur about why the world should hear their words. Or, if you’re Irish: they’ve got quare notions.

I regularly accuse people and things of having notions (usually pubs that charge more than £5 a pint), and I am fairly self-conscious about anyone saying it about me. (I recently chickened out of ordering a negroni sbagliato at a bar in case the person serving me thought I was trying too hard to seem sophisticated.) For me, saying I’m a writer feels as if I’m informing people that the words in my head are so big and important that I believe they need to be documented and disseminated. Peak notions. It’s mortifying.

I have written fiction since I was twelve; and, until I was in my mid-twenties, all of it was of course very, very bad. When I was nineteen I wrote an eighty-thousand-word historical crime novel about a Victorian lady who solved murders. There was a running joke throughout the text about an urban badger who occasionally came into her house to sniff around; someone would hear a noise in another room and ask what it was, and the main character would say, ‘Oh, that’s just the badger,’ and the conversation would move on. The novel was called ‘What the Badger Saw’. Incredible to think it will never be published.

I didn’t start to write about present-day Ireland until I moved away from it five years ago. When I first lived in Newcastle I was desperately homesick, and to make me feel closer to the motherland I started binge-watching everyone’s favourite feel-good show set in the north of Ireland: The Fall. I wasn’t paying attention to the serial killing half the time; I was eyeing up the background, trying to work out which streets I recognised, feeling warmed when I saw places I knew and missed. I wanted to feel close to the home I’d left in Belfast, so I started writing about it. I wrote about chaotic Irish women tripping around Union Street and worrying about things. (What a creative stretch for me personally.)

While I am still a frequently chaotic Irish woman tripping around and worrying about things, writing about home has helped me find my way in fiction. Good things are happening, and I’m now working towards finishing a short story collection and a novel. But to my mind, I’m a writer still feels like a terribly pretentious thing to say, even though it’s true; half the time it feels like saying I’m a Gryffindor, something daft and made-up that no-one should really take seriously.

As usual, Jane Austen said it best: ‘I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.’ I will continue to likewise ‘dare’, although ‘authoress’ isn’t a label I plan to attach to myself anytime soon. The absolute notions.

Cover photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash