The Creative Project I Abandoned for Six Years Out of Fear

I had been writing the book in my head for years before I started writing it on paper, and writing it on paper from the age of 23 in irregular, committed bursts that produced something real and then stopped. The stopping was never accompanied by a decision.

I would simply find myself not returning to the document for a week, then a month, then a season, with an explanation ready each time about the workload that had increased or the personal circumstance that had intervened. By 27, the manuscript was eighty thousand words and had not been opened in fourteen months.

I told myself I was waiting for the right time, which is a very effective story because there is always something available to justify the waiting. The honest examination of why I was not finishing arrived through a conversation with a friend who had read the first fifty pages and who asked me directly why I had not sent it to anyone.

I deflected with the standard reasons - it was not ready, I wanted to revise it further, the industry was difficult. She listened and then said, with the particular accuracy of a friend who has known you a long time: you know it is good enough to send.

You are not revising it because you are afraid of what someone says back. She was right and I had known she was right for at least two years. The fear was not of producing bad work - I had made a reasonable assessment that the work was not bad.

The fear was of completing it and submitting it and having someone in a position of authority read it and tell me that the thing I had been carrying for six years, the thing that felt more genuinely mine than almost anything else in my life, was not enough.

While it was unfinished, that verdict was not available. I finished the draft at 29 over three months of deliberate, unglamorous work. I sent it to agents. The first twelve rejections were exactly as hard as I had feared and also survivable in a way I had not trusted they would be.

The thirteenth response was different. The book was published when I was 31. None of this is the point. The point is that the six years in the drawer were entirely about fear - not the fear of the work being bad but the fear of finding out.

Finishing removed the protection and put the real question on the table. I wish I had let it sit on the table six years earlier.