I have several trends of procrastinatory failure in life. (Doesn't everyone?) One of those, which is probably my biggest frustration, is the act of writing. Or should I say, the non-act of writing.

Before the age of 22 I was a considerably prolific writer - short stories, lovelorn poetry, plays, screenplays, even a couple novels. My senior year of high school I would obsess about characters I'd created and entangled plots I wove around them, and I would spend hours writing pages and pages of prose. In college, as a Creative Writing concentrator, I took several writing classes and my undergraduate thesis was a novella. I wrote - a lot. After my first breakup I wrote deep, bleeding-heart free verse poetry that I've never been able to recreate.

But then something terrible happened. I graduated. And I started working and living in New York City. And my flow of ideas, my ability to develop characters and execute interesting, thrilling plots, took a nosedive. Oh, it hurts just to think about it.

Every time I met someone who considered themselves a writer and I felt somewhat connected to them, I would casually suggest a writing club. Don't writing clubs sound fun and exclusive? The club almost always consisted of just me and the other person. Sometimes it masqueraded under a different name, but it was definitely just a two-person writing club.

What happened with those clubs? Well...

One of them was carried on completely over the internet during huge transition phases in both our lives, and it fizzled after a story and a half.

Another was truncated by flakiness, a jealous boyfriend, and several intense makeout sessions. Whoops!

The next was only theorized, but never carried out mostly because I was too busy being miserable and sick of New York City and all that it symbolized for me.

And finally... last week, my friend Hilary and I decided to give 'writing club' a shot. We had dinner in the city and talk led to our writing - she was a Creative Writing concentrator at Haverford as well, and last summer her play was produced as part of the Fringe Festival in New York City. We both bemoaned our writers' block and I had the brilliant idea of writing with each other, with weekly deadlines and feedback. We joked about the frequent failure of such projects because of the lack of strict deadlines and consequence for not writing (as opposed to school, which forces you to write by threatening you with BAD GRADES) and decided to really give this a shot.

So, this week's topic is: airports.

Pretty broad topic, which is both great and terrible. With a broad topic, you can write whatever you want, but without specifics it's very easy to have no idea where to begin.

I've already begun, mostly because I had a great character in mind and placing him in an airport led me to build a plot around him. But I guess the hardest part about this, and the roadblock that has always inevitably, well, blocked me, is self-doubt. I wonder if he's a compelling enough character. I wonder if the story isn't completely uninteresting to a reader. I wonder if the ending, as I've imagined it so far, isn't too far-fetched or just plain stupid.

I wonder if my writing sucks now.

Well, I have until Friday and I'm only working one day until then (sigh), so I guess I have some time to continue with this self-torture. Hope it turns out well. :)