I’m sitting in a comfortable place right now.  One of the most comfortable in my life, in fact.  Iced coffee, sweating in the midsummer heat in my left hand, beautiful wife to my right, reading a book and occasionally brushing my arm.  Some faint indie pop of a Stereolab-esque strain pipes unobtrusively through the speakers of the coffee shop.  I’m completely relaxed.  So why can’t I write?

The reason this idyll is disturbed is because I’m trying to write fiction.  And when I stare at the blank page, hoping to will completely-formed characters to appear out of the ether, the anxiety builds in me to something close to anaphylactic shock.  Nostrils flare.  No three-act plot coalesces. I harshly pound the gentle mid-century coffee table, threatening to upend my icy drink.  No detached narrator’s voice is heard.  I glance pleadingly at my copy of the collected short stories of Graham Greene.  The world-weary Brit blows me off.  Crap.  The fey French pop is now getting on my nerves, and I’m reaching for my headphones and pulling up Motörhead on iTunes.

What’s the big deal?  It’s not supposed to be this hard, is it?  I mean, you just think of a cool story, sit down, and write until you’ve reached the pre-determined conclusion that you already know is coming, right?  The fact is, of course, that it’s far more complex than that.  If it were that easy, every piece of Twilight fan fiction would get its own book deal.  But that’s a question of skill and copyright law; for me in particular, it’s a quite different issue.

The first time I tried to write fiction was in college, around the same time that I wrote some truly regrettable poetry.  (It was embarrassingly bad stuff; the fact that I was listening to a lot of Dashboard Confessional at the time should explain the tone and timbre pretty concisely.)  The fiction that I attempted to write was, at its heart, fantasy.  Not swords and Sauron fantasy, more “what would it take for me to get the attention of this girl I like?” fantasy.  It was an awful experience, trying to make a protagonist who was simultaneously completely me and completely unrecognizable (like that’s possible).  I was living out a hopped-up scenario where I rescued her from a pushy lothario at a drunken party, only to arouse the wrath of his buddies.  Truth, justice, and the American way versus popularity, charm, and other evil things.

I never finished the story.  It was too uncomfortable to face that greedy, grasping side of my personality.  Supporting characters were versions of my friends, as thinly-veiled as my protagonist.  My temptation to air my grievances toward them through prose made my skin crawl.  Surely they’d see themselves and hate me for the way that I portrayed them.  I deleted the file and immediately selected “Empty Recycle Bin.”  Fiction went to sleep.

I swore off fiction like a young child declaring an opposition to vegetables.  I did anything but write fiction.  I could bang out a thousand-word essay about the Houston Astros’ minor league system in my sleep, or pontificate about my theory of U2 as three separate bands spread across three decades.  Meanwhile, Fiction lurked.

After college, it took a couple years before I could enjoy reading fiction for its own sake again.  The analytical part of my brain finally shut down, so that I read like I enjoyed it, not like I was preparing for a paper.  I discovered novelists and storytellers whose ability to craft words were like sculpture.  Somewhere in the back of my brain, Fiction began to scratch.

I started to realize that my excuses for avoiding Fiction were pretty weak, almost as weak as my original story ideas had been.  My life was too mundane to be exciting, too free of angst to be tortured, and to manufacture conflict within that context would ring hollow. But even though I’d tossed off the shackles of thinking that writing had to be drawn from personal experience, I still didn’t have anything that grabbed me and compelled me write.

Then the hurricane hit.  My hometown was swamped by Hurricane Ike in 2008, pitting natural disaster against a scrappy populace who maintained a sense of humor even as the winds howled and the lights didn’t come on for two weeks.  The seed was planted.  I know my city, and I saw how it reacted in a time of crisis, so I could still write from experience, without being autobiographical. Fiction was pounding on the door, demanding to come in.

Since the idea of a novel still, to this very moment, scares the crap out of me, I decided to do a series of short stories, set in Houston during a hurricane, with characters from different stories intersecting at odd angles, like the movie Crash.  I had a couple of the characters already thought up when the idea first appeared.  All that was left to do was to sit down and write it.

Uh oh.  Here we go again.

The blank page mocked me, but I wasn’t going to be bested, not this time.  I knew where the first story was going, and even had the last line ready to go.  I just had to get there.  The first sentence came out.  I hated it.  Boom! Destroyed with a firm hold of the delete key. Wait!  That wasn’t that bad!  I hastily retyped it.  Almost instantaneously, I thought of a better opening.

The original opening got moved down so that I could keep rolling with the second one.  Phrases became sentences.  Sentences became paragraphs, dialogue bloomed (and occasionally rotted, as when I forgot which character was speaking), and scenes changed.

This felt . . . good?  Yeah, it actually felt good.

The characters started to think on their own, and I found myself surprised at what they were saying and doing.  Details came into being that weren’t part of my original plan. I figured out mid-stream how this story would connect to two others.  Memories of the real storm created more details.  It was like riding a bike without training wheels for the first time: After your parent lets go, so subtly, so sneakily, you pedal for several feet before realizing that there isn’t a hand on the banana seat anymore.  I’m riding!  I’m writing!

That analogy continues to hold, in that when I learned to ride a bike, the realization that I was officially solo caused a near-instant wipeout. I had several pages before I realized my mistake.  I thought I’d built a passable villain, or if not a villain, someone the reader would root against.  But it just wasn’t there.  His comeuppance would seem cruel and gratuitous instead of the just desserts of hubris. I can’t kill the guy just for yelling at his wife on the phone.  I thought I was writing a two-act story, but I realize I have to add another set piece to tilt the character in the right direction.

So here I am at the coffee shop again.  I’ve been browsing Wikipedia looking for inspiration, a real-life analogue to my half-built character.

I glance at my phone, where I’ve created an ever-expanding set of notes about the stories.  I’ve got the premises for two more stories in there.  I open up a new document, to start on a new story until the first one starts making sense.  But I’m not breathing into a paper bag — I’m putting on headphones and getting ready to climb back on the bike.