Self-Doubt Part 2-Of Horrible Humour and Marmalade Sandwiches

In the final part of this series, I discuss how I once gave up trying to write an entire genre all together, and how a stolen sandwich taught me something about myself.

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When I was younger, I thought I was a really good writer.

I’ll give a little spoiler here and tell you I wasn’t. To be completely honest, it wasn’t even as if I had the makings of turning into a half-decent one.

I was bad. So very, very bad. In another blog post I’ll talk about some of the inanely stupid things I’ve written, but for now I want to talk about one particular piece of fiction that I consider one of my worst works.

When I was still in secondary school, around Year 8, I became best friends with a man by the name of Toby Martin. He goes by the name of tobythewastrel on his blog, and I’ll link it here for you, as he writes some delightfully funny and insightful articles and reviews on a variety of creative mediums.

I remember very distinctly how we properly began talking. I had been sent to speak to one of his teachers about a writing competition, in which you had to write a short story set in Paultons Park, which is a theme park here in the UK. This teacher (who we shall refer to as The Purple One, for she had purple hair), told me that someone else was participating too.

Hence, I sat down, and watched as Toby created one of the funniest icons of my teens, Fred Toast.

What was Fred Toast, you might ask?

To try and describe it in any way, shape or form is damn difficult. It is, for all intents and purposes, a mish-mash of completely zany humour that would make absolutely no sense to any other human being on the planet. It was insane, it was random, but Toby and I found it the funniest thing. To this day, these stories (there were a lot written actually) still stand the test of time, even if my humour has changed rather significantly.

When you’re as young as I was at the time, you attempt to copy things you find interesting and successful and put your own spin on them. I still do this quite a bit to this day.

But do you want to know the difference between now and then?

Now, I’d like to think I’m actually competent at it. Back in my secondary school days, I really, really wasn’t.

While I attempted to write some serious fiction entitled ‘This Life’, Toby, with my blessing, ending up writing his own version called ‘That Life’.

My God we were (and are) terrible with titles.

Anyway, both of those were absolutely horrific pieces of fiction (Toby is actually doing an analysis of his old work over on his blog, I’ll link the first part of that series here), and my attempts to copy Fred Toast were no different.

I created my own version of the ‘iconic’ series, and I called it Jimmy Jam.

And it was pure shit.

The humour was zany, sure, but it genuinely wasn’t funny. It was all over the place, and not in the good way. It was just a pure failure on every level, and I’m happy to admit that.

Even back then, when I thought This Life and That Life were works created by writing prodigies, I knew this was terrible.

I recall I even showed it to my Dad, actually. I never really show my family any of my work, but I did for this one. And he was polite and kind, but he did say “What’s the point of this?”

What’s the point indeed. For it had no point, no inherent story logic. It was just stupid.

So, I sat there, examined it, and with my one and only real attempt at comedic writing, I decided it just wasn’t for me.

I didn’t try and write anything seriously funny for about six years.

Don’t get me wrong, I tried to write some funny things occasionally. But this was just for Toby and I’s own amusement. There were no real serious attempts, and even these half-arsed ones weren’t remotely good. I had decided that I just wasn’t a funny, comedic sort of writer, and that was that.

I thought I was so bad at writing comedy that I decided to barely include it in any of my works. This resulted in short stories that was so dark and so gritty they were unintentionally funny laughable. Couple that with my addiction to purple-prose, and I certainly wasn’t in the running to become a writer of any merit.

Let’s fast forward to around February of this year.

I had spent the past five or six months working tirelessly on my Creative Writing coursework for college. All of my creative thoughts, all my creative time and energy, had gone into this short story. I was exceptionally proud of it, and to this day I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written.

During this period of six years, I had also developed into (in my opinion) a good, and very rarely great writer. I was, and still am, nowhere near the level of any published author. But in comparison to where I was when I was younger, it was like night and day.

After expending all my serious creative juices, I found I needed something else to do. Something light and refreshing to write, something that wouldn’t strain me. I just needed inspiration.

On one glorious afternoon, after college, I made myself a marmalade sandwich. After excusing myself to go to the toilet (and getting distracted by scrolling through Facebook on my phone), I went back downstairs.

And found no sandwich.

My sister, the little fiend, had stolen and eaten it, and looked up at me with marmalade smeared around her mouth.

I was, naturally, outraged.

“Well,” I thought to myself, storming up the stairs, “Something good must come of this tragedy. I will write a story about this.”

The story became known by the ever so eloquent and sophisticated title, ‘That Bitch took my Sandwich’. It has now been renamed Marmalade, but details.

The bitch in question was not my sister, by the way, just in case anyone was wondering. The story is entirely fictional; despite being based on true events.

Anyway, I sat down and didn’t plan out the story at all (which is a rarity for me) and I wrote it all out in the space of a day.

Let me tell you, it was a dark, twisted, but oddly humorous tale about one man’s quest to get back at the mysterious person who ate his prized marmalade sandwich.

I didn’t really think anything more of it. But, feeling slightly curious, I sent it over to my Creative Writing teacher to see what he thought, along with another more serious short story I had been editing at the time.

The very next day, I came into college and had a meeting with him, just about my coursework. After we had finished discussing it, he mentioned to me how much he had enjoyed the short story I had sent him.

I presumed he meant the more serious piece.

I was wrong. He told me he liked that too, but he said that he really, really liked Marmalade.

In fact, he even went as far as to say that it was his favourite piece of work he’d ever seen from me.

And my reaction was, “What?”

This humorous, randomly dark and edgy story… was funny? Genuinely funny.

I dismissed him as just being polite, but thanked him.

Later that night, I showed it to Toby.

Know what he said?

He found it really funny too.

And my reaction was, “Wait, you too?”

Because this really didn’t make sense. I mean, for goodness sake, I can’t write humour. I just can’t. I’m terrible at it. I don’t write funny things, don’t be silly.

So I thought he might just be being nice to me and my pitiful attempt at humour. So I thanked him, and moved on.

A few weeks later, I showed it to one of the girls at my work on a whim.

Know what she thought?

She found it really funny as well.

And my reaction was, “What is actually going on?”

She had no reason to say these things, no reason to lie about it being funny. Which meant… was it actually entertaining? Could it be possible that I had maybe, just maybe, written something that people could laugh at?

Tentatively, I began to plan a short story collection with stories of a similar vein. I’ve called it the Condiment Collection, and have actually written four of the stories (including Marmalade) over the past month and a half. But, that’s for another post at another time.

So, I decided to show it to my local writing group and get their reaction on it. I read it out loud to them all.

Know what they thought?

They found it hysterical.

I’m not someone who can argue with the facts. If so many people had found it funny, that meant it had to be, right?

But it’s me. I can’t write humour. Why wasn’t anyone, including myself, understanding this?

It was just a fact.

Except it couldn’t be now, could it? Because it had been disproven. I can write comedic pieces of fiction and non-fiction.

But how? How could this be? How could I have gone from writing utter dog shit to something that made people chuckle?

After thinking on it for a long while, I’ve come up with two answers that make the most sense to me.

Number One: I’m better than I was.

So this one is pretty damn simple, but I’ve obviously improved with age and experience. I kept writing and never gave up, and so I would’ve generally grown and gotten better the more I’d done. At first, I figured it was just this general fact. But, then I realised something that is really, really important.

Number 2: The humour I was writing wasn’t my style.

As much as I enjoyed reading Fred Toast, attempting to emulate it just wasn’t going to work. Because I cannot write that style of humour.

That’s where I went wrong. I had decided, presumptuously, that I could not write humour at all. This wasn’t the case. In fact, turns out I might not be half bad at this humour thing. But I had decided for such a long time that I was, and that was that.

For the past six years I could’ve been writing and perfecting my style of humour. Because that’s what this is, my style of humour. It’s the humour I now enjoy reading, and it’s the humour I enjoy writing.

All my zany forms of humour come across as forced and jagged. I just can’t do it; my brain can’t formulate the ability to do that sort of humour. But this darker, more edgy, bitingly sarcastic kind? My brain can deal with that. It can do things with that, conjure up ideas, put them down on the page and make them flow.

I was not bad at humour. Rather, I chose to believe I was because I couldn’t write the type of humour I wanted to at the time.

There has been a point to all this rambling, by the way. I think there’s a lesson within that weird Jam and Marmalade sandwich of self-doubt and confusion.

The lesson is that there will be some things I cannot do with my writing. There will be styles and specific types of fiction I will just not be good at. I can continue to try and work on them to make them better, but I might never grasp them.

And you know what? That’s okay.

As people, as cliché as this is, we’re all different. This follows through to the way we create art. We do things differently, take inspiration from different things, and we ultimately fail at different things too.

One of my favourite things about my writing is my dialogue. I love dialogue so much. But descriptions of people and scenery? I’m horrendous.

I’m going to continue plugging away at them, because I can’t really get better if I don’t try, but I’ve come to the conclusion I will never be the type of writer to describe sweeping vistas and chiselled jawlines.

In fact, I’ll be the type of writer who thrives when two characters are talking. I’ll be the writer that enjoys getting in characters’ heads and figuring out what makes them tick.

And I might just be the writer that, although he can’t write zany humour to save his life, he can sure make something funny out of a psychopath and an orange condiment.

And you know what I say to that?

I think that’s just fantastic.