10 months.
It’s been 10 months since I last wrote fiction, for real. Sure, there’ve been flings here and there: “Honey and The Hound” or “The Worst Way to Lose Your Job,” for instance. But I had dragged my feet to put pen to paper—not because I disliked the practice, but because now my work was expected. And this December, my play Being Human, celebrates its one-year birthday, while my larger fiction project lays abandoned on the backburner: a hundred-thousand words written and still miserably incomplete.
And now, it’s been nearly a year since I’ve committed to a project. A whole year since I abandoned that literary spouse of yesteryear, to whom I vowed “till completion shall we part.”
“You quit me,” Nothing Beside Remains accuses. “And for what? Trying to raise those pathetic little plot bunnies into something with potential? Look where it’s gotten you now.”
It hasn’t escaped me that my 18th birthday looms closer and closer with every passing day. I had promised myself that I would complete Nothing Beside Remains before I became an adult: but lo and behold, it remains unfinished, the physical manifestation of my weak self-discipline. Traumatized by the trainwreck my first novel had become without an exhaustive outline, I then proceeded to outline every story idea with a spark of potential in painstaking detail. I thought it would have helped me: after all, I had outlined the entirety of Being Human so easily. How could novels be any different?
But I have been brainstorming, and outlining, and jotting down incoherent babblings for months. I got the idea for a quirky, spy-like thriller in dry rural Nevada—but I’ve been planning since April. 8 months, and not a word truly written. 15,000 words of brainstorming. 11,000 words of painstaking outline, down to the most minute detail. 4,000 words of character work. 8 pages of thorough research into everything between the structural integrity of Cold War bunkers and how anaphylaxis can sometimes resemble a heart attack. Yet, the draft labeled “First Draft,” with built-in reminders to just get the story written and make it good later, remains blank. Completely and utterly blank.
Recently: December 2nd, I think, the need to write reappeared. Impulses like this had come and gone all throughout the year: the itching to write something creative. But this senior year, I told myself, I had other things to focus on. I had to finish my college applications. Once the college applications were done and written and submitted, would I let myself sit down and indulge myself. But even still, my college applications weren’t completely done and taken care of. And so my outlines and my ideas grew older and older, waiting to be picked up from daycare again while their mother toils to no avail on CommonApp.org.
But that day—December 2nd—I flipped the proverbial bird at my own rules, and sat at the Saratoga Library for hours, bringing to life a play idea that had been bothering me for a while. A one-act dramatic play: whose premise I have yet to completely polish before sharing. But it felt like that itch had finally been scratched—I wrote 70% of a one-act play in one sitting. I didn’t need an exhaustive outline to tell a story. They were supposed to be a rough skeleton, a guide: not a rigid blueprint. While stories might need crutches to stand up initially, it learns to walk very quickly.
So, I pledge to myself, as resolutely as I can muster that in the final semester of my high school career, with the arrival of 2026, I will shed my creative procrastination and let myself create, without the need to make it perfect at the very beginning.