Dafydd McVeigh
ORP: What inspired you to begin writing or creating? Has that source of inspiration changed throughout your life?
Dafydd McVeigh: I've joked before that I write fiction because I'm bad at journaling. As a kid and as a teenager, I often wrote stories to help me understand and process my own anxieties and emotional experiences. As a closeted teenager especially, writing fiction helped me understand and come to terms with my own queer identity in private before I came out to others. There were also stories I wrote more for fun, or as a way to engage with the books that most impacted me. When I was seventeen, I got obsessed with Kafka and wrote a knockoff Kafka sort of thing that got featured in my high school's little lit magazine. As an adult, my worldview has naturally expanded quite a bit and I'm less interested in looking exclusively inward. Though I still write as a way to understand emotions, or understand experiences that interest or scare me.
ORP: Do you write or create with an audience in mind? If so, how do you consider the relationship between that audience and your work throughout your creative process?
DM: I've never been good at judging the quality of my own work, so I don't think much about a specific audience. I write stories that interest me and that I would want to read. I often write as a way to capture a specific emotion or feeling, so I suppose I write for readers who have felt similar things and are looking to have those experiences put into words.
ORP: What does success as a writer or artist mean to you?
DM: The highest compliment I can give to a text as a reader is that it made me feel deeply, emotionally moved. My favorite pieces of fiction have all made me either feel seen or understood, or in turn have helped me to understand the experiences of people very different from me. For me, success means that I have helped other readers have those kinds of emotional experiences in a way that remains with them after reading.
ORP: What does vulnerability mean to you as an artist and/or writer?
DM: Sincerity. I think you can tell sometimes when a writer was more worried about what their readers would think about them, then about telling a story that felt honest and meaningful to them. I try to push past that kind of perfectionism and anxieties about rejection, even if it can feel scary. There's nothing appealing to me about writing or reading fiction that feels apologetic or defensive.
ORP: What would you say is your most interesting writing and/or artistic quirk? Do you have any habits that you believe help or hinder your creativity?
DM: I almost always write the ending first. With most of my first drafts, I'm thinking less about a linear plot progression, and more about how I want to build a thematic web and circle around this finale that I have planned. I think that's part of why the ending is usually my favorite part of anything I write. On the flip side, I think the way I write first drafts makes my first scenes super awkward and info-dumpy in a way that doesn't compel people to keep reading. My revision process almost always involves completely rewriting the opening scene, and even then I'm usually dissatisfied with it.
