Accomplishing Aspirations

Awhile back, I introduced the concept of "Askfriend" when someone I knew in real life asked me my stance on a very difficult question: "What is your opinion about abortion?" While it was difficult to write the answer and I was a bit shaky when it came time to hit the "publish" button, it was a good exercise in reasoning and honesty and I appreciated the prompt.

Recently, Askfriend has returned with enough questions to keep me busy for at least three blog posts, though none of them will cause me the same hesitation over posting. The answers to the first round of questions cover enough similar ground for me to group these questions together. It is also the easiest to answer.

Did you have any aspirations growing up?

I have a dim recollection of a piece of paper. I must have been four or five when I pencilled down everything I wanted to be when I grew up. I recall for sure that I wrote down: Astronaut, ballerina, cowboy. I can't remember if I also wrote things like "artist" or "writer" but I might have penned in "limo driver" because there was no cooler or weirder car to my five-year-old mind than a limousine. The list was probably ten or twelve "really cool" occupations long, written with my typical pencil-grinding pressure on lined notebook paper.

Thanks to my Grandma Betty, I was able to attend several kinds of classes to augment my homeschooling. I took horseback riding, ice skating, ballet, and art classes. I enjoyed them all, but never became proficient at any of them. It wasn't until I was eleven, when my parents put me in a co-op homeschooling Journalism class that I found my one true love. First, I had to get past a semantic misunderstanding.

"Journalism?" I moaned, "Not Journalism! I hate writing in my journal!"

I quickly found out that Journalism was about writing opinion pieces, submitting poetry, and spinning up adventure stories for our little "Homeschool Times." The very first piece I submitted was a book review for The Flight of the Eagles by Gilbert Morris, the beginning book in a favorite series at the time.

Have you accomplished those [aspirations]?

Writing took root in my soul and spread its grip deep and wide. I attended the Mount Hermon Christian Writer's Conference a few times at an early age, presenting initial chapters of a Holocaust novel--a story I called Abba's Daughter--to editors and publishers at around age 13. At least two of them asked me to return to them with book proposals. I was exhilerated by the idea that I could be one of the youngest published authors.

So exhilerated, that upon returning home, I never formulated a book proposal and never wrote another word on Abba's Daughter.

Okay. So I was exhilerated and absolutely petrified.

Facing actual publication always triggered a freeze reaction. I don't think I've ever wanted anything as long or consistently as I have wanted to write and publish a novel, but neither have I been able to face those hazy, constricting fears that keep me from it. The following points are the closest I have come to articulating the ideas keeping me frozen all these years.

• I cannot possibly be as good as the best writers on my shelf and I can't let myself submit anything of lower quality than their works.
• I'm stuck! I'm stuck on this concept, I can't make it work! It's worthless! The whole story is terrible! Obviously I can't write and never was a writer!
• Navigating the steps to traditional publishing or self-publishing is difficult and I have no concrete view of what either of those looks like.
• They're going to rip my baby apart. This story is my heart and soul printed out for all to see and they're going to mock it, shred it, burn it, and dance on the ashes while calling themselves clever. I should know! I've done it to books I thought were bad!
• What if I actually succeed and become a famous writer? Do I WANT the scrutiny, upheaval, and pressure that comes with that?
• WHAT IS WORLD BUILDING I CAN'T EVEN I CAN'T EVEN
• WHAT IS MARKETING I CAN'T EVEN I CAN'T EVEN

So. For about eighteen years, I poured all that energy and love into writing fanfiction, sometimes called "poor man's literature". Over a million words of practice writing given away for free, developing other peoples' stories along lines I thought were interesting or overlooked. I wrote poetry, short stories, novel-length stories, and saga-length series. My longest fanfiction broke the 100k word mark and while I'm not sure I ended it correctly, I was proud of bringing a five-fanfiction saga to a close with it.

In addition to that, I blogged profusely on Tumblr, writing over two thousand posts--not all of them coherent--and gained somewhat of a following there before I quit, "moving out to the countryside" of a private blog.

I've come to realize there were many additional factors to my being unable to finish an original manuscript. I have strong desires, but I do not have a strong drive and I have long lacked the skills to structure my day or even define and pursue a goal. My own projects and work always came in second place if anyone in my life needed help, because they were simply more worthwhile to me than myself. I was also hampered, first by depression and later by anxiety. While none of this stopped me from writing fanfiction, I think it's fair to say that fanfiction was my coping mechanism for being unwilling to face the blood-curdling demons of failure associated with my attempts at original fiction. Many of these things are changing incrementally, but it has taken most of my life to get here.

However. Never in all these years could I shake the sense of guilt that I was not doing what I was mean to do, and no attempt to rid myself of that burden ever succeeded.

I married someone with a rational head on his shoulders. His name is Sergey. Roughly a year ago, as I once again wrestled aloud with what my responsibility is to the unidentified story in me that seems desperate to tell itself, he began helping me address my various fears. After going through a few of them with me and hearing my rebuttals, he remarked that in the end, all of what I was saying boiled down to, "I just won't write."

I had to admit, it was true. In a hundred guises, I was just saying, "I won't write it. I'm too scared." He's eerily perceptive like that, cutting to the marrow of a given issue with ease.

I released the need for the story to be perfect. I cut loose the fear that if I posted the story before handing it to an actual publisher, nobody would want it. I gave myself permission to explore the story without having a single-cellular clue about where it was going. I pulled out a chair for the screeching voice in my head that yells about how I'm never going to be good enough, gave it a cup of cocoa, and told it politely that it was probably right but I had a story that I needed to tell anyway.

As I began the arduous work of pulling together words in a story, I wailed and flailed, danced on clouds and cursed the day I first put a pleasing phrase together. I sat with the blank page and its accompaniment; the feeling of absolute failure. And when I came to a point where I could not figure out how to make the story work because I didn't understand how systems and organizations function in real life, I vented to Sergey.

Who promptly spun up plausible organizations and scenarios under which the story could continue. Astonished, I found myself coming to him more and more often, over small sticking points and large ones. Whether I couldn't get past a specific conversation that didn't sound real enough or needed help springing a blind dragon from a clever prison, I went to Sergey. To the surprise of us both, he has an incredible gift for analytical worldbuilding. I rely on him so much that, at this point, we are co-authoring The Remara Phenomenon and discussing future off-shoots into other novels.

At the time of this writing, The Remara Phenomenon sits at the 57k word mark. Having surpassed the length of a novella, it is now headed toward the low end of the fantasy novel wordcount requirement.

And we've only begun.

Do you feel fulfilled in life?

I'm not sure what feeling fulfilled in life would look like.

If I were to publish a novel I would be ecstatic. I could see myself riding easy on that pride for a few days or a couple of weeks. But I guarantee you, based on what has happened every single time I bring a fanfiction or a saga to a close, by then there is already another idea groveling to be expressed. It gnaws and gnashes, begs and badgers and berates until I forcibly archive it because I simply don't have the time... or I sit down with the idea and begin the process all over again.

I am a neurotic person. What that means is that I am more prone to negative emotion than the average person. I don't think I will ever reach a time in my life when I am in some continuous, dreamlike state that I could call "fulfilled." I have had moments of fulfillment, like breaking the previous 40k word curse on original fiction, and those have been marvelous.

I am more healed, more stable, and better able to wrestle my old demons to reach those moments. My husband often joins me in this fight, making the success even sweeter as it is a shared victory. I notice, too, that when I start a writing session with prayer, I am less prone to frustration and stuckness.

Moments of fulfillment come more often than they used to, but they never stay. It's the journey between them that I am now learning to savor.