I've been scared for a decade that I'll die without writing a book. My book. Any day now, I could be hit by a bus or diagnosed with a terminal illness. I imagine myself on my deathbed in an agony of regret for my lack of discipline, for my stupid terror of failing.

After years of this, seconds before descending into a dread-induced coma, I spent three years writing regularly. I'll start at the beginning.

A compulsive teller of things better kept to oneself, right off I told people what I was doing. In my defense, I'd been writing a column in a local newspaper for five years and people wanted to know why I was stopping. I'm a terrible liar. I hated the term memoir - how ordinary! how self-indulgent! -  so I mumbled that it was a book about my parents.

Every week, I instructed the muscles in my fingers to exert downward pressure on the keys, and sure enough, letters turned into words that turned into sentences. Eventually, there were 217 pages and an ending, sort of. I went to Kinko's with my flash drive and emerged with a brown box that weighed something like eight pounds. I tried to feel proud. 

But I couldn't. I knew it was awful. It bored me, and I wrote the damned thing.

I spent another year on it. I read books about the craft of writing. I made outlines. I practiced showing, not telling. I changed names. I switched to third person. I put in more dialog. I renewed my prescription for sleeping pills.

I decided it was really a coming of age story, and narrowed the focus. I wrote a new ending. When friends asked me how it was going, I tried to answer in complete sentences.

It was still awful. One Sunday morning, I cried until my t-shirt was slimy with snot. My husband patted my shoulder and made soothing noises.

I took three months off.

I did research on my grandparents' Mennonite heritage; I read stories about the dustbowl in Oklahoma, where my father was born. I decided he was the main character. I spent two weeks writing the scene of his birth and another two weeks asking my mom a lot of questions and going as far as I could go on ancestry.com without giving them my credit card number. 

I had an epiphany. I was trying not to make my dad sound crazy or my mom pitiable. It was sanitized; it wouldn't offend anyone. No wonder it was boring.

With a racing heart, I recalled the first lines of Mary Oliver's poem, "The Journey":

one day you finally knew

what you had to do

and began

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice--

thought the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

I really think I can do this now, I told my husband. I feel like a Judas, but I can handle it. Otherwise, I might as well quit, right? Be fearless. Besides, I don't have to show it to anyone if I don't want to. 

I stiffened my spine for the task at hand. Once again, my brain instructed my fingers to press down on the keys. Once again, words formed and sentences containing  punctuation appeared. A few minutes later, I  noticed I was vacuuming, stepford-wife fashion, devoid of emotion or any awareness of having risen from my chair, entered the laundry room or plugged in the appliance.

Over the next month, my house got pretty clean.

Maybe I need help, I said, and made an appointment to show 20 pages to a professional, who very kindly confirmed what I already knew: It was awful. I gave him no reason to care about the character, he said, and half the time he was confused. He liked four sentences and suggested some books for me to read. I thanked him too profusely.