Someone retweeted this into my timeline the other day.
So, who’s going to write a dystopian YA novel where a girl is a drug dealer but what she deals is contraception? Because I want in on that.
— Justina Ireland (@tehawesomersace)June 30, 2014
It literally gave me goosebumps. It had everything in there: dystopia, a girl doing a rough tough job, issues of female bodily autonomy and the implied criminalisation of that… I wanted to write that book so much I could taste it. As with all writing-related tweets, I didn’t just favourite it to get buried in the hundreds of articles I mean, eventually, to get round to reading. Instead I emailed it to myself, to sit in my inbox with the hundreds of literary prize details and inspirational snippets I mean, eventually, to get round to making the most of.
But as it stewed in my brain for the rest of the day, I had a slow, joyful realisation. I couldn’t write that book. Not in a million years. For whomever did get round to writing it, I would be first in line to buy that book by them on launch day, but I couldn’t write it, any more than I could write a nineteenth-century historically accurate thriller, or a hard SF war epic. I’d read the bejeesus out of both of those, but they are simply not in my brain to write. But the joy of that realisation was that the other stuff in my head - the nonfic about my parents’ families, the literary novel, the next women’s humour(ish) fiction book, the children’s picture book - is brewing so nicely, fattening up like the grapes in our back garden grapery (or whatever it’s called), and I know they will all come to fruition.
It turns out that actually, it’s pretty good to occasionally be reminded of what you can’t do. If only to remind yourself of the wonderful things you can.