Zen and the anxious pre-novelist
by maryperth
There is literally a cat knocking on my door right now.
I have been absent from my own creative – and just barely poking out of the ground – career much more than I would have anticipated a year ago. It has been almost a year since my graduation from college, and since then I have experienced much confusion, a slow learning of what I might want to do with a great deal of my time, and the anxiety of recognizing that although I have surrendered some of the goals of my earlier youth, I remain interested in dedicating myself to a ridiculous variety of pursuits.
As someone who has not written a novel – though has always intended to, as many do – I feel this self-consciousness that the first long-form fiction I write may barely be fiction. But my best (and my worst) short-form fiction over the last few years hasn’t escaped completely from autobiography, of course not. I have an idea, and nothing at all will come of it if I do not accept the possibility that I may emerge from a literary tunnel with a thinly-veiled memoir, or that it may have the feel of a shiny-covered paperback lauded as a “beach read” instead of the emotional punch-kick-stab in the heart of The Dollmaker.
