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I don’t knowwhy, but I’d expected the card to be printed. That’s a daft thought, now I think of it. The count couldn’t have finished more than a couple of hours beforehand. Less, considering that shortlist. I mean, Aliette de Bodard. Paul Cornell. Gareth L. Powell. Jeff Noon. Nnedi freakin’ Okorafor! And I was giving an award to one of them. How did that happen?

The light was beyond illumination—that brightness where it clicks how light’s a flipside of dark, just as impenetrable and overwhelming. Only by the lectern’s shade could I see the crisp, sealed envelope—my stubby fingers ripping into it. The 2015 BSFA Award for Best Short Fiction. It’d all been leading up to this moment.

And there it was. Handwritten. Felt tip pen, I think.

“And the winner is…”

Then they plomp this heavy thing into your sweaty hands, this engraved priceless gimcrack you’ve not to let slip, as you wait for the person ambling, utterly overwhelmed, towards the stage; who, in turn, you’ll hand the thing to, maybe with some faux-casual, graceless mumble like “I think this is yours”, and you’ll step back into the darkness; and then, finally, you can relax. It’s someone else’s turn in the spotlight. And thank fuck for that.

Award ceremonies are funny things at times. But, to me, they’re also a startling crystallization of the impact of any kind of first success on a writer. Not in its immediacy, when you’re climbing the stage, trying not to stumble over your own shoes, so befuddled are you with love and gratefulness and sheer tongue-tangled shock. I mean, what comes after it. When you realise, “wow, how cool! People like what I do. People are actually paying attention. Wait. People are paying attention?”

And you look up from your laptop. Feel the prickle in the back of your neck in the local café. Spin round in your office chair, even if it’s ages before anyone else gets in. At the bar, in the park, in your own bedroom. Every face you see has just looked anywhere but in your direction, and you know it.

That metaphor, so neatly outlined by Stephen King—’write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open’ 1—shatters into a thousand piercing splinters. There is no door. The way is ever open. And into your dim, cosy retreat comes illumination, all-consuming; a stark light on all you do. Every story you have written, every story you are going to have written. It throws the success into relief against all else, until it is all you can see; your work in progress, nowt but blank sheets of paper.

Under this tyranny of panoptical scrutiny, something is thrust into your hands, and you are made to walk. You can’t tell what it is yet, this thing, but you figure it must be important, because it’s got weight to it, and the more you think about it, the heavier it gets. Yet there’s this fragility to it too, a delicate beauty, you’re sure, like a vase or ornament. The further you go into the light, the more those qualities of weight and fragility are exaggerated in your mind, until—to any sane person looking outside in—the thing has grown monstrous, distorted out of all resemblance to what was first given to you. But to you, this task is something you must do, else disappoint all those watching, people you perceive only dimly in the darkness beyond the light, through disembodied whispers and echoes of laughter. You are carrying glass, both wanted and unwanted—never chosen by you, and yet all of your own making—through impenetrable brilliance, a light too blinding to see by.

Now, it seems obvious what you should do at this point, doesn’t it? You let go of the glass. It’s clearly doing you no good. Put it down, give it to someone else, otherwise free yourself of it, just for a little while. Drop it, if you must. Let it smash into bits—no, you can’t do that. This is the bind of writing, its bizarre brook-plank balance of humility and ego—or rightly, vanity. That someone might be interested in what you write is a nonsense against the shame that the work never lives up to your fevered hopes. Yet you love it all the same—and, naturally, you love the attention too. So when it comes to letting go, you’ll find your grip surprisingly strong. And besides, what will people think of you if you do?

So you keep going, keep blindly struggling with this ugly weight.

There’s a David Foster Wallace essay, The Nature of the Fun2, where he talks about what happens when a writer finds their audience. As your motivation changes more to please others than yourself, the shittiness of the work increases. The only way out of this bind, Foster Wallace suggests, is to get back to the original driver of your own pleasure—but one transformed by your experience. The pleasure of writing that comes from illuminating those parts of yourself you’re afraid the audience might see.

It was an accident, really. A writing prompt from Cat Hellisen3—ten first lines, to spark new stories. In the end, I only needed one. The line sounded like a story already, one I knew too well.

I stopped myself from going deeper with this piece so many times.

I kept thinking, “this is too personal.”

I kept thinking, “there’s too much of you in there.”

I kept thinking, “people will find this too cloying.”

I kept thinking, “what will they think of me?”

I kept going.

Maybe, I think, the answer isn’t to put the glass down at all. Maybe the answer is to turn the glass into something else.

Foster Wallace sees the more truthful writing that follows these crises of motivation as an opportunity for growth. That not only is this the kind of story readers respond to, but writing it “a way fuller and more large-hearted kind of fun… the best fun there is.”

I don’t know that yet. What I know is this.

Tonight, I’m going to a meeting of the Glasgow SF Writers Circle. I’ve been a few times before, but this’ll be my first time as critee, as such. I deliberately booked this night, two weeks after the BSFAs—enough to edit this piece, but stop before I fall into my navel. A comedy, of all things, something I rarely do. I’ve no idea if it’s even funny anymore. These folks don’t pull punches. I’ll soon find out.

Then tomorrow, I’ll pick up that darker piece and start reading.

You know, it’s funny, the BSFA Awards aren’t usually the glass vases they were this year. Mine was this stylish ray gun, carved from plastic—great for scaring the cats with pew-pew games when I need an editing break.

It’ll be good to feel like a writer again.

1 Stephen King—On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, p. 57.

2 David Foster Wallace—The Nature of the Fun. https://penusa.org/blogs/mark-program/bookmark-david-foster-wallaces-nature-fun

3 Cat Hellisen—The first line game, and a prompt for June. https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/8463882-the-first-line-game-and-a-prompt-for-june

Ruth Booth is based in the North East of England. In 2015 she won the BSFA Award for Best Short Fiction (2014). Her short fiction and poetry has appeared in anthologies for NewCon Press and Fox Spirit Books, as well as Far Horizons magazine.