Stomachs and Crickets

I can't sleep. My stomach feels like it's running circles under my lungs. I take short breaths as I listen to the crickets chirp. If I was tired, the sound would seem distant, filtered by the fog of my drowsiness. But the chirping is loud. I'm not bothered by the noise, however, so much as the fact that I'm alert. I can't relax.

Is it because I have a lot on my mind? Sure. There is a journalism class that I'd rather sleep through, a Shakespeare lecture I haven't read for, and a creative non-fiction class late in the evening. The last one is especially stressful because I have to critique essays I haven't looked at yet. I also have my own essay up for scrutiny, which is horrible.

I had proposed something different. It was supposed to be a fun paper describing the awesomeness of my plain looks. I had good conversations with friends that I wanted to include in the essay, and I had a point that I was excited to convey: you don't have to jazz yourself up to feel important (actual phrase under construction). However, I had a hard time writing about it. I kept getting bored of the prose and I struggled with concrete details. So, I wrote about the difficulty of writing concretely. I ended up submitting a three and a half page whine about how I can't write. At least, that's how I see it, kind of like this blog. Am I not whining right now?

But I digress. What is really bothering me is my fiction writing, which is not happening. It's my sudden obsession with details, or rather the lack of it in my writing that's causing this.

It used to be that if you let me do my thing, I would come back with a story that had mostly abstractions. "He was angry," "it didn't make sense," and "she liked to sing" made good statements but were backed up by sparse or weak concrete details like "he punched the wall," "they raised their eyebrows," or she hummed a lot." And I would have been fine with all that before. But lately it has bothered me. I would look at a phrase like "he punched the wall" and ask, "okay, so what?" or "what about it?" and realize that there are many answers to choose from. The number of options scared me.

It's a classic case of fearing what's new. Trying to write more concretely is forcing me to think in a way I'm not used to. My usual reaction to the unfamiliar is to hide - so I stop writing.

I'm having a hell of a time fighting the urge to run from the fear. It's hard to move forward when the default mindset is to stand still. But my tense stomach (developing ulcer?) and insomnia are pushing me to get out of this slump. I figure if I conquer this fear and get used to it, these physiological problems will go away. It's not the healthiest way to write, but I'll take what I can get.