the play (or screenplay or book) i’m afraid to write

Every writer has one.

The play we circle but never begin. The screenplay whose title has been sitting in a folder for years. The book we describe as something we’ll write “eventually” — as if eventually were a date on the calendar.

We may even have notes. Characters. Fragments of dialogue. A first scene written and rewritten so many times it has become a form of procrastination. We tell ourselves the subject needs more research. The structure isn’t clear. We’re too busy with other projects.

All of which may be true.

But it isn’t the truth.

The truth is that we’re afraid.

Not afraid the work will be bad. Writers produce bad work all the time. Bad pages can be revised, cut or quietly buried in a hard drive where no one will ever find them.

The deeper fear is that the work might be honest.

There are subjects we can approach with craft, intelligence and professional distance. We know how to shape them. We can invent characters, manufacture conflict and arrange revelations with the precision of furniture on a stage.

Then there is the story that knows where we live.

It contains the thing we haven’t forgiven. The desire we don’t want examined. The person we still need to punish — or still hope will love us. It threatens the version of ourselves we have spent years presenting to the world.

Writing it would mean admitting that the wound is still open.

Worse, it might mean admitting we helped create it.

That is why this particular project is so easy to postpone. We persuade ourselves that we are protecting other people. We change names before we have written a word. We worry about who will recognize themselves, who will be offended and who will insist that it didn’t happen that way.

Sometimes those concerns are legitimate. But concern for others can also provide an extremely respectable hiding place.

Because the first person the forbidden work exposes is the writer.

We like to imagine that writing brings clarity. Often it does the opposite. It complicates the story we have been telling ourselves. The villain acquires a point of view. The victim discovers an appetite. The noble sacrifice begins to look like manipulation. The memory we have polished into certainty develops a crack.

A dangerous piece of writing rarely asks, “What happened?”

It asks, “What if I’m wrong about what happened?”

That question can dismantle an identity.

Perhaps this is why writers sometimes become obsessed with form when the real problem is fear. Should it be a play? A screenplay? A novel? Should it be fictionalized? Should it be funny? Should it take place in another century, another country or on another planet?

Form matters. But form can also become camouflage.

Calling it fiction will not make it less personal. Turning it into comedy will not make it harmless. Giving your shame to a character named Evelyn will not prevent your family from recognizing it.

The story knows what it is, even when you refuse to call it by its name.

There is also the fear that the work will change us. Once written, certain thoughts cannot be made unthought. A private suspicion becomes a sentence. A sentence becomes a scene. Actors speak it aloud. An audience witnesses it.

The secret is no longer safely sealed inside the writer. It has acquired lights, costumes and a performance schedule.

And what if the audience doesn’t understand?

What if they understand perfectly?

The work we fear most is often the work we cannot control. We cannot dictate whom the audience will love. We cannot force them to absolve us. They may laugh at the moment we consider tragic or fall silent at the joke intended to protect us. They may recognize the character we carefully disguised.

They may recognize us.

So we write something else.

Something clever. Something timely. Something we can discuss at a talkback without feeling our pulse in our throat.

There is nothing wrong with those projects. Not every piece of writing must be an emotional excavation. Entertainment is not a lesser purpose. Craft is not cowardice.

But the unwritten work remains.

It waits without complaint because it knows we will return. It appears in other plays, wearing a false moustache. It slips into minor characters and unexpected speeches. It contaminates the screenplay we thought was about something entirely different.

The story we refuse to write does not disappear.

It becomes everything else we write.

I used to think courage meant sitting down and producing the whole thing. Now I think courage may be smaller than that.

Write the scene you would most like to avoid.

Let the wrong person tell the truth.

Give your antagonist the argument that could defeat you.

Write the sentence you immediately want to delete.

You do not have to show it to anyone. You do not have to know whether it is a play, a screenplay or a book. You do not have to understand what it means.

Not yet.

The first draft is not a confession made under oath. It is an investigation. Its purpose is not to prove the case you arrived with. Its purpose is to discover what the case actually is.

Maybe the frightening project will become your best work. Maybe it will be unproduceable, unpublishable or unfinished. Maybe you will write a hundred pages and realize you still aren’t ready.

But “not ready” means something different after the pages exist.

The work no longer owns the darkness. You have switched on a light, however briefly, and seen what is in the room.

Every writer has a story they are afraid to write.

The fear may not be a warning to stay away.

It may be the story knocking.