Fact to fiction

I tell you, I’ve learned more about myself in the past two semesters of writing than I have from mulitple stints in therapy.  For instance: when things get hard, I get paralyzed.

I finally put my second-to-last packet in the mail recently, after much procrastination. In the end, I came up with 20 pages of original work instead of the required 25: a gap I will have to reconcile in this month’s work. I’m less worried about the extra five pages in this packet than I am about the reason getting 20 pages was like pulling teeth.

Writing comes easily to me when what I’m writing is completely–or mostly–fictional. That’s why my last packet felt so easy and was so successful. There’s a freedom in totally making things up that lets me really spread out on the page. It’s when the work hits close to home that I have a problem.

This packet focused mainly on the main character’s relationship with her family: specifically, her brother and sister. These characters are modeled heavily after my own brother and sister, and something about this makes it terribly difficult to make them three-dimensional characters. Do you ever try and explain the meaning of a word, but keep using that word in your definition? That’s what it feels like.

But the difficulties did not only lie in trying to bring certain characters to life. I focused most of the pages around the death of the main character’s father and the aftermath within her family; ripped from the headlines of my life, as it were. Four years later and in the context of fiction, my father’s death is still not easy to write about. When I finally bit the bullet and tried, I got down a few lines, cried; got down a few more, cried again. You get the idea. I know this meant I was on to something real, but it was also really scary and paralyzed me for a while afterwards.

My first instinct is to step back from the super-realness of this packet and do some fleshing-out of some more fictiony areas. But some unfamiliar voice inside is telling me to push on that painful place between fact and fiction and see where it goes.

On procrastination.

Yesterday after work, I had a lot to do. And none of it got done. This loss of eight hours’ work time has put me in the all-too-familiar position of needing a miracle or an all-nighter, or both, to save my ass.

I’d love to blame this on work. Sure, it’s hard to come home after staring at a screen all day and sit down in front of another screen. It’s difficult to generate creative prose or thoughtful literary analysis after your day job as a drone. But most writers have day jobs and manage to crank out story after story. I only have myself to blame.

I’ve always been a procrastinator. A big one. In college I had to research and write my final exam–a ten-page paper, en français–in one night after having months to do the work. In high school, same thing.  When I would finish, it was always good work, but it wasn’t my best; how could it be? I’d wonder what I could have achieved if I’d worked on it every day, like everyone else in the class, but that possibility for greatness (or, at least, better-ness),  never held my attention long enough to impact future work.

Procrastination, for me, has become  a full-time job and a very real means of self-harm. While others drain a bottle of whiskey or stick a needle in their arm to escape real-world responsibility and consequences, I sprawl on the couch and watch hours of sitcom re-runs, all the while gripped by this growing panic that I do everything in my power to avoid facing. The longer I put it all off, the more the panic takes over. Eventually, it paralyzes me.

That’s what happened last night. I sat down to write a ten-page paper and realized it terrified me. I’m great at literary analysis; why was I so scared? Because after that paper, there was another paper, and my fiction, all due this week. I was suddenly tired from the blur of thoughts and panic and decided to lie down for a bit. Next thing I know, it’s 11:30 PM and time to go to bed, for real.

I have this vision of a Highly Effective Me in my head that gets me through the day. This version of me gets home, gets the house in order, makes dinner, and does her writing straight away. Beside that is this terrible fear that I will let this version of myself down, so I never even try…until I have no choice. And this is where I find myself today: the land of sudden death, my second home.