The Spider’s Web Of Fiction

“Fiction is a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is barely palpable.” Virginia Woolf.

This year, for over three months, there was a loud, anti-social sea monster of a man living in the flat next door to me. The walls here are very thin. It was frightening. His presence was intrusive. Often it felt like we were in the same room and I was dodging all the cups and curses he threw, hoping they wouldn’t hit me.

“If you continually write and read fiction, you can change what’s crushing you.” Jeanette Winterson.

My way of coping was to write about what was happening. I changed what was ‘crushing me’ by fictionalizing and embellishing the facts (with smoke, tentacles and general witchery) and, through this process I discovered that the act of writing fiction can be empowering. In fiction I could take control of parts of my life that, in reality, were beyond my control.

Here are the results. I’m not sure if you’ll be to discern the places where the spider’s web of fiction is attached to the facts, but I’ll tell you now- no real names have been used, the bit about the potato is true and it should be ‘octopuses’ not ‘octupi’!

~ by Gaia Holmes on July 17, 2023.