Defining myself as a writer

Words are slippery things. Trying to find the right one seems impossible at times and it can seem like everything has been written before. That's when your brain seizes up and nothing flows and the only thing coming off at the end of your fingers are pedestrian sentences that plod along into nowhere.

Words sometimes behave like stubborn toddlers, like when you're dragged as a kid into some interminably boring place and you literally dig your heels in. I do have a method of dealing with these type of toddler words. It's by no means a foolproof method and it probably just shows up the fact that I'm no literary genius but it is a method nonetheless. I rewrite the same phrase, adding in new words, replacing them, twisting them, trying (but usually failing) to trick my brain into surprising me.

Here's a random example:

Mona jumped off as if frogs were biting her arse and motioned to a blue-uniformed attendant, who hurried over to Ava and helped her off the wheeler as if she was a fragile snowflake or a piece of glass on the verge of shattering, perhaps even a glass snowflake.

And another:

Better, better, best, bitter, butter, bust. The ideas flooding into her head now were scaring her shitless because they were coming in like little shooting rockets, pinging into her neurons, spiking her neural pathways with nettled hooks, digging their way in with barbs that could not be pulled out without causing irreversible damage.

Yes, when I sit down to write, this is some of the stuff that travels from my brain down into the ends of my fingertips, onto the keyboard and onto the screen. Does it make any sense? Not really. Will I ever use any of it in a story? Maybe. I do like the bit about Mona jumping as if frogs were biting her arse.

Maybe one day, in a few years' time, I'll look back on this stuff and be able to pinpoint the birth of a perfect sentence. Perhaps in the juxtaposition of pinging with nettle hooks, or with snow, glass and shatter. But more likely I'll stick with the image of the arse biting frogs because I think that's my true voice as a writer.

So the next time I'm asked to define my writing I'll have this response: my writing is defined by the type stories in which people jump as if they've been bitten on the arse by frogs.

Maybe that's what's really missing from Girl in the Shadows...