The eternal panic

This is going to be a weird piece of writing; a very subjective piece of writing.

But then, aren’t they all?

There’s this cartoon making the rounds of my Facebook acquaintances recently, produced by Shannon Wheeler of Too Much Coffee Man fame.

How old is the cartoon? Good question. The Internet, especially in the form of social networking sites, tends to be a churning morass of content where stuff keeps seeping back to the surface even though it might be years old. People seeing it for the first time then excitedly share it around until someone rains on their parade by telling them they’ve seen it before, perhaps even taking the opportunity to make snarky comments about their intellect for daring to only now enjoy what others previously enjoyed when it was still hip.

This article is not about that, though. Nor is it about fuzzy mathematics. It’s about panic. I think I can safely date his cartoon as being done sometime after March, 2010, when Shannon Wheeler’s interview with the Portland Tribune had him quoting the line.

Tribune: Do you really clean your whole room just before you write?

Wheeler: Yeah. It’s like a meditative thing. And it’s a way to procrastinate. There was a recent cartoon, “Writing is 90 percent procrastination and 30 percent panic.”

So I guess it’s not even originally his cartoon, then. But nevermind, let’s get back to the panic.

Growing up, I used to write fairly often, but it was mostly for the behest of school projects and the like. My personal creative writing attempts were sporadic, and although there might have been a germ of talent in them, I never ended up doing anything on a regular basis, even on the scale of doing something like writing for a school paper. When I did get off my ass in some fit of undeniable inspiration, I couldn’t keep it up. Was it a fear of failure?

No, it was something much stranger. It was a fear of success. A paralyzing, panic-inducing fear that people might like what I was doing so much they’d clamor for more, and I’d have to then produce more for them. What if I couldn’t maintain the quality of the content? What if I ran out of ideas? What if they got angry with me for saying something stupid? What if, what if, what if…?

As those of you reading this are aware, I got better. Oh, I’m not saying the quality of every one of these posts is fantastic, much less the dialogue in every Zombie Ranch page—but for the past three years I’ve managed to crank them out in a state that I’m more or less okay with. And yet I’d be lying to say there’s not still a little bit of panic and terror underlying the process, which doesn’t even necessarily involve looming (mostly self-imposed) deadlines. If you want to find a way to interpret the cartoon’s math, you can envision that 20% of panic overlaps into the procrastination, which would leave 10% pure panic that’s not tied into any specific timeframe or circumstance.

Ten percent panic—that sounds about right. Ninety percent of my life continuing as normal, only a small portion of which consists of me occasionally not being able to sleep because my mind is churning through plotlines and trying to figure out how to get to the scenes I want, without trampling on the characters or otherwise presenting something which I would mercilessly tear apart if I were the reader.

This is without even getting to where Dawn has to sometimes come in and tell me that a certain thing I want to present won’t work visually, or at least won’t work as well as I’m imagining. This has no need for a script, or a writing session, or any such logical examples of cause and effect. I just get to enjoy that at any given moment, I may look at what I’ve gotten myself into and wonder: what the hell have you gotten yourself into?

It helps to hear of other writers who speak of panic and procrastination, but then there are all those writers who have it totally together. Productive. Scheduled. Their trains of thought all run on time. They’re the real professionals, right? The prom queens. You’re just the wallflower who showed up in their mom’s old dress, no matter what interesting alterations you might have made.

Ten percent of the time, I wonder if I should even be writing… which of course leads to an even more disturbing thought: if it makes me so anxious, why don’t I quit?

But that’s the damnable thing, I also enjoy writing. For as much as I speak of fear and panic, there are joys and satisfactions. The times in my life where I stopped writing altogether were, to look back on them, times I felt anxiety of a different sort, an anxiety, I suppose, of doing nothing at all. Of taking no risks. Of sitting on and letting rot what my mommy and daddy at least thought was a halfway decent ability to express myself in written form.

Speaking of which, both of them to this day seem more than just supportive of my taking up the pen/keyboard again, they seem almost relieved. As in, yes, they must have really felt I was wasting something by not writing. And I must also credit my dad for saying something worthy of thought when I admitted to him about my feelings of unease—basically, that anything you feel completely comfortable doing probably isn’t worth doing. The unease is what keeps you on your toes. What keeps you focused. What keeps you striving for more.

So is the panic always there, for all writers? I don’t know. My friend Justin (recently published!) is one of those guys who has his schedule down and sticks to it, but would be the first to tell you that writing is pretty much the idea of putting your inner psyche on display to a world full of strangers, and letting them judge you—an inherently terrifying concept to all but the most narcissistic of souls.

All I can say is that, for better or worse, I got back on this horse three years ago and I’m holding on tight for the ride. If it runs off a cliff, well, that’ll definitely be a good time to start writing some wings.