The Importance of Our Roots & Folklore in Our Writing
Four years ago I moved from Romania to the UK to study Creative Writing. In my country, the degree doesn’t exist and, due to numerous political issues, being a writer of short stories there felt like an impossible thing to achieve. Plus, the idea of living abroad was exciting and I felt ready to be somewhere new which offered more possibilities when it came to writing. Although I was already fluent in English, it has taken me the whole time I’ve been here to improve my language and writing skills, but I expected that. What has surprised me though was that the new language I have been developing has helped me unfold memories from my background that had been dormant for a long time. During the writing workshops I attended as a student, I found myself remembering events and stories either experienced by me and my family or told to us by others. Not all that repressed information was pleasant and easy to face and, subsequently, I had difficulties disentangling certain parts of my past, yet the motivation to do so in a narrative space supported me to continue.
As a child growing up in Romania, I was exposed to numerous folk tales—my country is, in general, quite superstitious and spiritual, and has a very open relationship with concepts and ideas that others might consider bizarre or even morbid. We believe in the dead not wanting to stay that way, in local fairies, creatures that have otherworldly powers, spirits of nature that can do as much harm as they can good, and much more. Though I was born in the capital, Bucharest, I spent most of my school summer holidays in villages around the city, with family members and friends. The plethora of strange and supernatural stories I heard during those months have fed my work for the past four years—the more I’ve advanced on my writing path, the greater the quantity of memories that have returned to me, and which I have eventually stitched into my fiction in one way or another.
As writers, understanding where we come from can be a very important source of inspiration. For me, it’s the odd, disturbing, unpleasant, and unexpected elements of my culture that I’m drawn to explore in my stories. It’s no surprise considering Romania was under dictatorship until 1989—the stories I tell aren’t only inspired by the incredible folk tales I was lucky to be told as a child, but also by what I imagine to be the lives of the other Romanian girls and women I grew up with or learned about. Of course, due to my predilection for magical realism, the weird, and the gothic in literature, I exaggerate many of the things that happen in my stories—what I write is a mix of truth and fiction. That is my way of making sense of certain things and experiences.
When it comes to stimulating ideas for your writing, what will make your stories remarkable is to allow yourself to explore what’s uniquely yours. How you see the world, what you read, the notes you make on your dreams, or your past, the imaginary scenarios that come to your mind in episodes of daydreaming, the conversations you hear around you, the movies you watch, things like these contain invaluable resources for your writing. In my first year as a student, I desperately wanted to write like Angela Carter. Her luscious and ornate prose filled me with admiration and envy—how could she write so beautifully and why was my prose so stark, so simple? Later I understood that each writer develops a style that suits them, and while influence from other writers is unavoidable, we can’t all write the same things, in the same manner because we all engage with the world in different ways.
If you struggle to find if and how your background can be utilized in your writing and how you can invoke it on the page, there are a number of things you could try: attending writing workshops where you discuss ideas and share work, browsing platforms like ours for guidance, keeping a writing diary, discussing with your family members certain memories you have and want to look further into, or simply reading history books on topics and places you feel connected with. The choice is always yours, as is your craft. It is likely you will come across things that are upsetting or even traumatic in this kind of search, so unpacking all you face will be much easier if you have a support group of people you trust. Learn your boundaries and cross them only when you’re ready. After all, your well-being matters most. For more on writing and depression, go here and follow these suggestions for when you want to engage with writing but need a break from it.
About Liliana Carstea
Liliana Carstea is a Romanian writer fascinated with the macabre, the ancient, and the magical. She lives in the UK and has a BA with Honours in Creative Writing from the University of Bedfordshire. She is currently working on her first short story collection.
Her work has appeared on Black Flowers and Civilian Global, and she was interviewed for Write or Die Tribe for the ‘In the Spotlight Series’. Some of her flash fiction stories made it to the second round in the SmokeLong Flash Fellowship for Emerging Writers in 2019. You can find her on Instagram, @adaughterofmoths, and read some of her work at www.adaughterofmoths.com
