Carter Bedward, Senior, Writing, Fort Worth, TX
Panic is a primal emotion. It rises from deep within, shortening the breath and closing the mind until its clutches seem impossible to escape and thinking becomes impossible. Panic was designed for fight or flight, for a life-or-death fight with a wild bear, a desperate escape from a pack of wolves. Writing, on the other hand, is a sophisticated and cerebral activity. It involves carefully choosing words to represent ideas, people, actions and placing them onto a page in such a way that another person could read them and be placed, for a short time, within the vision created in your own mind. It is a calm activity for individuals in intellectual society, generations removed from the primacy of nature.
It seems wrong, therefore, that these two fundamentally opposite ideas should be locked so closely together in my mind, not even needing to look at the piece I know I should be working on before my throat starts to tighten and the walls in my head start to close in. The piece I refer to is an entirely rough draft of a novel I have written, which has now been over a year since I have even dared to open the file. And the panic I associate with it is not a new phenomenon either.
As an aspiring novelist, who, from the age of seven, was drawing my own little comic books (which were about as engaging and readable as you would expect from a seven-year-old), I dreamed of one day writing a real novel that would once be published, be an instant classic, remembered for generations. But, although I had been developing an idea in my head of a sci-fi mystery/adventure novel for a few years, I hadn’t gotten any closer to actually writing it. Sure, I had jotted down a few notes of plot devices, character sketches, etc., that I had thought about when envisioning this imaginary perfect novel, but when it came to writing a real sentence that might be contained within that novel, I was at square zero. Already I was nearing the dangerously geriatric age of twenty-three, and I was no closer to being a novelist than I had been at seven.
Enter National Novel Writing Month, a concept I learned about from a book my parents got me for Christmas in an attempt to subtly nudge me to follow my dreams, or maybe just to get me on a path that would lead to moving out of their house. So, shortly after reading the book, I committed to their main principle: a strenuous, one-month blitzkrieg to get your novel written now before becoming a novelist is just a dead dream. They call this model National Novel Writing Month (for reasons which should now be obvious), or NaNoWriMo for short, which is ironic considering that even the “short” version of the name is rather long and difficult to pronounce. The general idea of the program is that you put yourself under so much time pressure that you are forced to ignore your own internal critic and just put words on the paper until bam! Instant novel. One month and done. And then, according to the book, you get to bask in the glory of being one of those few proud souls who have actually written a novel, never mind how good it might be.
Once committed, however, my problems began immediately. For instance, in my brilliant foresight, I chose the month of February to write my novel, the one month in the entire year, which would shorten my deadline by at least two full days. Additionally, I waited until the third day of the month to actually start writing so that by the time I put the first word on paper, I was already six days behind the book’s already tight schedule. So although I told myself that I would use the NaNoWriMo structure and zoom through a rough draft of a novel in a month, I ended up sitting down to get in my word count for the day and panicking. I would plan for a big catch-up night: ensure I didn’t have any obligations that would force me to wake up early the next morning and stop by the grocery store and buy a Starbucks mocha Frappuccino or six that I could drink throughout the night so that the rush of sugar and caffeine would keep me productively churning through words all night long. I would then sit down at my computer, drink in hand, open the document, and refuse to work on it. My subconscious mind would then lock onto the hours of work ahead of me and rebel, perhaps thinking that if I refused to start working, then that outcome could be avoided. My rational mind would then push back, telling me that I needed to get to work and refusing to let me open and get a taste of that sweet sugary drink until I had actually gotten some words onto a page. This standstill would continue until the wee hours of the morning. Sometimes I would put down my first words of the night at midnight, one, two, in the morning and work until eight or ten am before collapsing into my bed. Sometimes it would hit two in the morning, and I would still be staring at that next blank page as my body screamed at me to run, run far away, abandon this project and never return, and I would give up and hide my shame in sleep, a little further behind than I had been the day before. And as I got further behind, that feeling of desperation and the panic I faced each time I sat down to write grew with it.
“Well, if I’m 20,000 words behind and I’ve been working for an hour and written a thousand. So, to catch up right now, I’d have to work for twenty hours straight. I can’t do that!” I would tell myself. Then I would bargain with myself, reasoning that if I had fifteen days left in the month, then I only needed a little over a thousand extra words per day. Then I would still be able to finish on time. But then fifteen days left became ten, became five, and I was still just as far behind and just as unwilling to work for twenty hours straight. So, for the sake of my own sanity, I was forced to abandon the end-of-the-month deadline and take more than a month off before I could open the draft without immediately reverting to mental lockdown.
Almost two months later, I did return to the draft, working in fits and starts and using the same “get the words on the page and edit nothing” mentality that I had used to attempt to write it in a month as I continued to work on it. And while rationally I tried to congratulate myself for continuing to work on it, continuing to make progress, every time I sat down to work on it, or even when I was thinking about working on it, guilt would start to build within me, knowing that, really, I should already have finished it months ago, but here I was less than halfway through. Then that guilt would build into the familiar panic as I considered for the thousandth time that what I had managed to produce was an utterly unworkable pile of garbage that wouldn’t be worth the paper it was written on if I hadn’t written it on Google Drive where it wasn’t wasting any paper or even file space on my computer.
But I kept writing, and after just over six months, at ten in the morning after a twelve-hour writing burst, I finally had a completed draft. And as I typed the final words, I sat there at my computer, exhausted, waiting for the rush of achievement and satisfaction that I should feel now that I had accomplished this monumental feat. When it didn’t come, I gave myself a little fist pump in the air and a mental pat on the back, wondering why I couldn’t celebrate my hard-fought victory. After a good day’s sleep, I knew why. I had missed my self-appointed deadline, and what I had produced was too sloppy to show to anyone, even my closest family members. If I had allowed an outsider to slog through the jumble of inconsistent characters and broken scenes that I had slapped together, I would consider it remarkable if they were able to come away with an idea of a plot that even somewhat resembled my original vision. But, with my pyrrhic victory in hand, I proceeded to again follow the wisdom of NaNoWriMo and wait for at least six months before rereading it and beginning the editing process.
Six months went by, then seven, then eight. I began to think of revising my draft, but I never found the time to sit down and get started or even write down some of my ideas for editing. Now, approaching thirteen months since I completed the first draft, thinking of the file immediately brings to mind my mental projections of the insurmountable workload that editing, rewriting, revising the mountain of words I have created would take, and the panic kicks in, telling me to run. “I’m busy enough with school, I have to relax and unwind sometimes, I can’t jeopardize my mental health and overwork myself,” I tell myself unconvincingly.
But the panic builds on the other side, too. What if I never get around to editing it? What if I never even attempt to get it published? What if my dreams die, not because I fought the angry bear and lost, but because I saw just the shadow of that bear, and all I could do was run, run, run until I’m living a life I never wanted, but I can still tell myself that if I had taken the fight, I could have won.