Fear and Fiction.

September 18, 2012 in writing with 4 Comments

Once upon a time, I tried to write a novel. For class credit. I got 60 pages in before my computer ate it. Every single word, all 20,000 of them, were wiped away with the rest of my hard drive just two weeks before the end of my junior year of college.

My attempts to rewrite the damn thing were feeble at best. I pretty much bombed the class from there on out. My professor tried to be understanding; it was completely outside of our control, sort of like a natural disaster – a tornado had hit my hard drive, destroying everything in its path, including the only draft of my novel. No, I had never even bothered to print it.

But I think he and I both knew the unspoken issue that kept me from a better grade.

I didn’t want to rewrite it.

Oh, I cried and bit off all my finger nails over whether I would earn the credit for the class and graduate on time.

But secretly, I was relieved.

Secretly, I had hated all sixty pages.

Even though my prof had diligently met with me and talked me through the process of writing fiction and the importance of story arch and character development and setting and the whole shebang, my nugget of an idea about the story and every word I wrote slowly soured in my mind and began to feel wrong all wrong what the hell am I doing this sucks its all completely WRONG, as though my vision for the story was a piece of fruit that rotted away over the course of the semester. Possibly, my demon laptop sensed how terrible this was and mercifully decided to execute it so that I wouldn’t have to.

I rewrote the bits and pieces I remembered, and I still have that on an external hard-drive. Sometimes when I am looking for another stored file, I wander into that folder and take a peek, wondering if this rotting piece of fiction has fermented into something fabulous, like a good bottle of Merlot. But no, still terrible awful no good very bad fiction. The kind that I hope no one ever finds in the event of my death.

So why do I keep it?

Maybe to remind myself :

Once upon a time, I did manage to spend a semester writing fiction.

Be humble. Failure is just as important as success.

Be vulnerable. My real failure was in my unwillingness to let myself be vulnerable enough to write even the crappiest first draft of a manuscript. I became afraid of my own ideas, of the clumsiness of learning to write fiction.

Buy an external hard drive. And don’t forget to “⌘ + S”.

I don’t know that I’ll ever be a fiction writer. I still wonder if I have the imagination for it, or the patience, or the vulnerability. But I write this as an admission of my fear. Maybe someday I won’t be afraid of fiction anymore.

So tell me : what are you afraid of?

  • http://unknownjim.com/ Jim Woods

    Wow Bethany, this story is filled with tragedy and truth. Fiction scares me to death. After I write fiction, the story reminds me of swiss cheese. But I’m doing it anyways. I know it will take some time; more time than I want it to. I know it will be hard. Probably one of the hardest things I can do creatively. But I’m pushing forward and doing it anyways.

    I encourage you to do the same. At bare minimum I think you have some amazing short stories in you!

  • Laura M.

    Wow, thanks for sharing. If my computer had eaten 60 pages of a novel, especially for a class, I think I would have gone into severe depression. It shows just how much strength and potential you have as a writer that you can look back on that experience and the lessons learned from it with an objective viewpoint. One my biggest fears is that no matter how much time I spend revising something, it will never be good enough. I’m still learning how to revise, how to take apart a rough draft and stick it back together again and not be too attached to the rough draft, even if I know deep down that it’s could be so much better. Often I get too attached to something and it sits, practically unchanged in my writing folder. I’m really working toward being able to make a new version and completely rewrite something, knowing what needs to be fixed, and trusting that it will come out better than before. Oh yeah, and saving things. That’s a biggie for me, too. Thanks for another insightful post. We can fight our writing demons together! :)

  • val dering rojas

    The first time I ever wrote anything “creative” as an adult, I sat down and recounted a super-intense three months. I didn’t know why I was doing it, and I honestly don’t know why or how it came out the way it did. EXCEPT, that what I wrote, although in short story form, was a pouring out of truth. To this day, that is how I write. The wild card for me is the emotion. What I am most afraid of, is that I will stop feeling, or stop *wanting* to feel. If I don’t feel something deeply, I’m not writing deeply– and writing deeply is just about all I want to do. I know some people don’t “get” or even like some of the things that come from that, but that’s not really what matters to me. I need the writing. I need the emotion. It’s not from a selfish place, but from a place that makes me whole. A place that connects me to others, in some way, no matter how obscure.

    Thanks for your story today, and everyday. I always find something inside myself worth pondering thanks to your own honesty, truth and emotion.

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