Autumnal Madness

It’s October. I’m consistently exhausted by cross country practices, but the end of the season is close enough in sight to hold in. I’m coming down with something, not anything to keep me out of class, but a little runny nose or cough or sore throat, accompanied by the stuffy head and slight disorientation and vivid dreams that tend to accompany these little illnesses. It’s getting colder without ever getting cold, lots of rainy or windy or foggy days. I’m watching something nostalgic, maybe that Ghibli movie that I saw at a birthday party in fourth grade and loved so much without ever quite knowing what was going on. And I have a powerful urge to write fantasy. It’s like this every year.

I’m not sure if that makes sense to anyone but me. Reading drafts for a literary magazine, I know well that there’s a real danger in assuming what is meaningful for you is meaningful for everyone. So maybe I should unpack that a little bit. October always feels a little haunted for me, and not just because of Halloween. (I’d actually bet that the feeling of October makes Halloween feel haunted, not the other way around). I’m always in these altered states: a little delirious from a subtle illness, exhausted from running, confused by how fast I’ve settled into a school routine and how the summer I thought had just arrived slipped out from under me. It’s an in-between time, not fully grim or lively. In that moment of disorientation between seasons I feel like I can see into some other world, and it’s a world that I really want to write about. 

And, like I said, this feeling comes every year. And it goes, usually before Thanksgiving. Which is a shame, because I feel like I could do a lot with this half-conscious creative energy. It’s odd describing fall as a manic period when most people are settling in for winter, but that’s usually what it is for me: my imagination soars and I spend my long runs crafting fantastical stories that I don’t think I’d have the courage to try any other time of the year. I’m prone to bouts of obsession on certain ideas any time of the year, but fall seems especially bad, maybe because it only properly feels like fall for such a short time. 

I spent all the time to lay out this vague dilemma because I have a very specific one facing me right now. There’s a novel, the one I posted about finishing last summer, that I’m just now returning to. It’s bad, worse than I expected, rambling and aimless and full of tangled subplots that don’t last two scenes and never add up to much of anything. Refining it into something that matches my original vision for it would take long, careful work, the sort that builds character in a writer but doesn’t seem like much fun. Or I could take the story in a bizarre new direction, one that seems brilliant, but might end up just as rambling and aimless and tangled as what came before, only now less inhibited. I think it’s a good idea now, but I’ve been caught up in swells of inspiration often enough to know that the route to the end goal is never as straight or clear as it appears.

So what will I do? I’m not entirely sure yet, but I think I’ll go with the new idea. Because I have the rest of my life for the slow, careful work of a writer, but spur-of-the-moment kicks like this only come around in this liminal season. I won’t say that it’s good advice for anyone, but I think I’ve laid out plenty of reasons in this post why I’m not the best advisor anyway: I’m exhausted and sick and drunk on some kind of fall-season madness that I don’t think anyone else actually gets. But it won’t last long, so why not take it for all it’s worth.