Who am I? How am I?

All my life I've lived in the same square mile of England. In spite of this, I have a fairly global outlook on life. Both John Cheever and Emily Dickinson were involved directly and indirectly in wars of the world, which forced them to take a wider view of things. I grew up with the second Gulf War, so became accustomed to seeing wartime images on the news every day. This was an influence on my pacifist beliefs - which certainly come out more in my writing than in my conversation.

Dickinson admired other then-contemporary female writers, taking influence from them as much as male writers. In my life came Harry Potter, making a female writer the most popular writer worldwide, but the two who had most influence on me were the relatively contemporary female writers Harper Lee and Marjane Satrapi. In the case of Satrapi's Persepolis, a graphic novel, this - along with Alan Moore's Watchmen - allowed me to branch out in my aspirations as a writer. I'd liked comics for years, but those aforementioned graphic novels ignited my interest to write them in addition to older textual genres...

Being a sexual minority, as Cheever was, I've also grown up with much less of a "heteronormative" viewpoint than most writers. I rarely write stories with only heterosexual characters. My sexuality, as well as my non-binary interpretation of gender, definitely inform the characters I write. I think fiction, in general, should reflect reality to an extent. Since a large percentage of writers aren't going to write LGBTQIA people, somebody's got to do it - it may as well be somebody who is one. In order for texts to tell truths about the world, they should be inspired by true and personal lives.

I am a writer... aren't I?

As a young child, I'd be inventing new stories and writing them almost every day. At the time I never thought "I'll be a writer when I grow up" - I was already a writer without thinking about it. To paraphrase Harper Lee (whose To Kill a Mockingbird remains a major influence on my writing), I never loved to read or write any more than I loved breathing. Creating stories and writing them down was a natural part of life, something I got used to as soon as I had learned how to do it.

Most people write but not all of them are considered to be writers - I believe that what makes someone a writer is their self-classification as a writer, or if others classify them as a writer. Being a writer is one of few things where you can be it just by saying you are. Whether you're a good writer or not is another matter, and can be very subjective. If you write, and are considered to be a writer by yourself or others, then you're a writer.

I consider myself to be a writer because I need to be a writer. I have a constant tendency to imagine stories and situations, being inspired or influenced by pretty much everything, and my imagination is bursting so I just need to let it out. I'm drawn to fictional writing in particular because there are so many things that I can't handle in reality, but I can handle almost anything in imagination - I can create alternate realities! As Margaret Atwood writes, we writers of fiction have an "attitude that what we consider real is also imagined".

Just like dreams, fiction can feel as real as 'reality' depending on your perception of it: