Rarely do I have dreams that are true narratives, but last night I had one. I was trying to get into a theater to see a performance and had to scale a wall,  balance on a very narrow walkway, then once inside I got all tangled up in electrical cords and had to take my high heels off. (Oddly many of my students were also in this dream and they were so friendly and kind to me that they kept it from becoming a nightmare.)  I know exactly where this dream – the wall, the high wire walk, electrical cords etc. – came from. I have three writing deadlines and I’m going nuts.

The first deadline is The-Novel-That-Will-Never-End (a self-imposed deadline for the end of this month), the second is an article promised to a writing magazine about the steps needed to take for writing a personal essay which is due at the end of October, and the third is a signed contract for an essay to appear in an anthology, due in November. 

At the moment my novel is being read by my next-to-the-last reader before sending it to my ever patient and beloved agent, so meanwhile I’m working on the essay and essay article. I’ve signed the contract for a long essay – 3,000 to 4,000 words.  For a few weeks I just sat around panicking about this. I usually write short essays, 500 – 1200 words long. That length feels comfortable to me – I write about an experience, it has a beginning, middle and conclusion – and voila a personal essay!.  But 3,000 to 4,000 words?  When I was offered this assignment last month, the rest of my life – the two courses I’m teaching this fall, the four trips I’m taking in the space of five weeks, the two parties being held at the house, impending jury duty et al – simply dissolved in the pure joy of being offered a writing job. (This was before the panic set in.)  So now I’m trying to figure out what to write as well as when I’m going to get all this done. There’s a certain irony here of course – I’m struggling to write an essay at the same time I’m making notes on how to write an essay. 

There’s a saying that you teach what you need to learn (and write the book you need to read) – and I remembered (in the midst of my panic) one thing I’m always telling my students: There’s nothing until something’s on the page. So I started taking my own advice. I just flung down some memories and ideas on the page – messy, terrible, dumb stuff. I now have 1,178 words with 2,822 to go. 

The point is I guess that rarely do we writers glide gracefully into a project. More than likely we flail around wondering what the hell are we going to write.  And when we figure that out, we start worrying that maybe we won’t be able to pull it off. On some level I really believe all writers go through this. Yes, there are moments of grace when an essay or a poem is given to us, or a chapter of a novel goes so well you could cry with relief and joy, but these moments only come after many hours of flailing around, scaling walls, walking a scary path and getting tied up in knots.