Even now, as I frenetically fumble with the keyboard, typing what I’m sure will turn out to be a directionless flow of consciousness, I still find it difficult. Difficult to know where to begin. Difficult to place one word after the other and to restrain myself from pausing to proofread the last sentence I put to the page, turning it over and over in my mind for all possible verbal alternatives. Difficult to decide that what I’m writing is worth an initiation, let alone a conclusion.
I think a part of me may have always been this way: averse to beginnings, expectant of endings, and far more comfortable in the middle of things. All throughout high school, I compiled a list in the Notes app on my iPhone of odd stories I’d create in media res. I would formulate short scenes — excerpts from unwritten fantasy novels, bite-sized episodes of young lovers keeping secrets from each other or admitting feelings while on a boat in a foggy river using poster board signs Love Actually-style, extended rants and hypothetical stories about people that frustrated me, one-liners about politics, you get the gist — never bothering to extract the stories’ starts. Instead, I would hastily add the half-baked uninitiated words to the catalog and move on until the next mid-scene tale would reveal itself in my mind.
For a while, I was satisfied with that — the belief that I could only write bits and pieces of stories halfway finished, leaving their inceptions unclear or up to the imagination. So when I found it paralyzingly difficult to start writing my college essays during senior year, or when I encountered a nearly impenetrable mental block when drafting the first piece I wrote for the HPR, or as I’ve stared for hours at a blank Google Docs screen when beginning each class paper I’ve written since then, I thought it was just in my nature. There was no way around the fall of my stomach at the thought of typing the first word, the fleeting excitement dampened by an overwhelming emotion I couldn’t quite place, the 25 opening sentences I wrote then erased. I simply wasn’t good at writing beginnings.
It’s taken me a while to realize it, but I think that is a lie we tell ourselves. Looking back, there was a time when all I could write was beginnings. In the third grade, obsessed with C.S. Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia” and with far too much time on my nine-year-old hands, I filled notepad after notepad with the melodramatic beginnings of at least five or six “Narnia” fan fictions.
In the fourth grade, one of those miniature splotchy duotone composition notebooks came into my possession, and instead of participating in recess — I kid you not — I started (and somehow finished) a short story about astronauts abandoned on Mars (and forced my teacher to listen to me read it out loud to her on the playground bench once I finished writing each chapter: God, bless her soul).
In middle school, I must have started writing (and eventually abandoned) a half dozen young adult dystopian novels, each an unseemly amalgam of “Divergent” and “The Selection” and Percy Jackson and the Olympians. I even dabbled in the harrowing world of Wattpad, boasting that 300 readers had viewed the poorly written teenage drama about a British prep school for which I published chapters each week (for a total of six weeks, to be clear). I started writing two other books on Wattpad (one whose title was a line from Taylor Swift’s “Out of the Woods” — some things never change) before they too fell victim to my adolescent lack of commitment.
When high school came around, I decided I wanted to be more intentional with my time — and my words. So I settled down with one project: a young adult fantasy retelling of “A Thousand and One Nights.” After about a chapter, I decided I wanted also to include elements from “Sleeping Beauty” and “Snow White” and maybe even inspiration from Paul Kalanithi’s autobiography “When Breath Becomes Air.” New developments meant that a new beginning was in order. I went back and rewrote the prologue. And then I began writing stories within the story, fleshing out the fairy tales the main character’s stepmother told her at night, the pitiful origin of the villainous king, the supporting characters’ comings-of-age.
Little time passed before the one project I’d settled on had become a 50,000-word mammoth of at least six or seven — and that each time I tried to commit to one throughline, another story yearning to break free would promptly emerge. My biggest realization, though, was more melancholy: I had a half dozen narratives wrapped into one, and I knew how to finish none of them.
It was a somber epiphany — that I could not, or believed that I could not, envision endings, either happy or sad, for the characters of whom I had grown so fond. Only new starts followed by tenuous interstitial moments and … that was it. With that thought lingering, festering at the fringes of my mind, writing became a burden. A reminder of something I felt I couldn’t do. My fits of time spent at the family computer typing grew shorter, then sporadic, then ceased.
It has been five years, and I have not started a new story since.
I’ve long deluded myself into chalking it down to laziness or a packed schedule or, most often, a lack of skill at starting, but I don’t think any of those explanations are particularly convincing — merely distractions from the real deterrent. There was, after all, a time when the start felt so much more organic than the scenes that came after.
We all must know, even if we don’t acknowledge it, that the only thing that keeps us from doing is not ineptitude or busyness. The only thing that keeps us from doing is fearing. Fearing the knots we can’t tie, the stories we can’t finish, the theses we can’t prove, the in-class questions we can’t phrase quite right, or the past essays we can’t live up to. Heck, even the texts we can’t ensure won’t be misinterpreted.
But the anxiety that ensues can’t be worth it. Imagine how many breakthroughs, bestsellers, inquiries, conversations live underground, unexplored not because we are too afraid or too unskilled to start but because we fear that we do not know how to end the things we begin. Or how to end perfectly. Words are fragile things, and it is easy to assume that we protect them from our own mismanagement by locking them away, when in reality, we are denying them the life they deserve. We are denying ourselves the life we deserve.
It’s been an hour since I began writing this, and I’m doing my best not to throttle my brain. My fist is propped importunately against my temple as I mull over the irony that an ending to this too is escaping me. But I suppose that is part of the point. I am hoping this will be the first exercise of many in beginning something, the conclusion of which I cannot foresee. The first attempt at scaling the often all-consuming mental blockade that keeps me trapped behind the white line. No ending? No problem. I breathe in, exhale, and reassure myself: At least I started. So should you.
