When I was in college, I used to view my unfinished stories as failures, despairing proof that anything I began would fizzle. I was afraid to write anything new. Why expend energy just to add a creative casualty to the story morgue?

Besides, too many of my stories had ended in embarrassment. Like my environment-themed fable that I stopped writing because it was too preachy; or the hilarious yarn that turned lachrymose somehow.

But many years later, I started to view writing as a lifestyle—not a slavish production job. I discovered that when I allowed myself to slow down and enjoy the process, not only did my writing improve; I stopped hating my unfinished writing and I even enjoyed rereading it.

My unfinished stories were—at the very least—good practice.  Even the silly ones. Why not congratulate myself for spending my time creating art rather than watching stale sit-coms?

Having befriended my unfinished stories, I began turning to them on days I had trouble knowing what to write. Rereading them, I would sink into a kind of nostalgia, as if rediscovering old belongings in an attic.

I even finished some of my old stories. One of my favorites was about extraterrestrials who, after first contact, decided that humans bored them. They stopped communicating with Earth because they simply had better things to do; the cosmic shrug left humanity heartbroken.

The story languished on my computer for almost a decade before I decided that I had to finish it.

I remembered painfully why I had abandoned the piece in the first place. It was because I had viewed the first three paragraphs as inspired. I had been attached to their musical rhythms. But after my first effort I had lost my “inspired” poetic flow, and was unable to recapture it. I gave up in frustration.

But the trick to reviving an old piece is the same as finishing any story: letting go. Clinging to favorite passages will stall any story.  I had to discard my original writing so that the story could become fresh again in my mind. I left the old paragraphs, and their moving rhythms, in the past where they belonged.

Luckily, I had acquired some other writing tricks beginning my “alien” story. I had learned for example that if I wrote a tentative ending to a story, even an absurd one, I was more likely to finish. Creating any point of arrival motivated me. I could always improve the ending later.

My other “trick” was mind-mapping. I used the “clustering,” technique described in Writing the Natural Way by Gabriele Rico. I used my original title, “The Aliens Do Laundry” as the nucleus of my mind map, drew lines from it, and free-associated until a pattern I liked emerged.

After clustering, the new version of my story seemed to fall into place.

It was exciting to finish my story after so many years of its lying dormant on my iPad. But not all of my stories should be finished. Some are failed experiments that taught me what not to do.

Whether I ever complete an old story, there is never any reason to regret writing it. Not only was it good practice; rereading it reawakens a part of me that has been buried by time. Like forgotten toys in an attic, old stories contain a blend of familiarity and strangeness that I enjoy, and that allow me to reunite, if only for a moment, with my former self.

As a kid I absorbed a popular notion: that life was about growing. Not the kind that made you tall, but the kind that helped you overcome your “issues.” My dad—as a psychology professor— knew all about issues. Most people had a vast array of them. Whenever you spotted one, you had to triumph over it—fast—before it ruined your life.

Beyond triumphing, the ultimate goal of growing was never clear. But it seemed to mean becoming someone else—someone nicer, smarter, and better.

If my dad never exactly told me that, his bookshelves did. He had many books, one—apparently— for every insecurity, weakness, or shortcoming. Like a fairy godmother a self-help book seemed magical. With the wave of its papery wand you could shatter your worries, snare happiness, make friends, stop procrastinating, heal relationships, or vault to the top of something called a “corporate ladder.”

By the age of seven my head was stuffed with self-help maxims: “Think positively,” “win friends and influence people,” “be motivated.” I remember bouncing around the living room singing a positive thinking mantra, “Think enthusiastic and you’ll be enthusiastic.”

My giddy chant had come down to me from one of the self-help courses on positive thinking that my dad taught to his college students. But the fun ended when a terrible discovery was made. I had an issue: I was shy. Or at least quiet, which was considered the same thing. When my dad learned that I was getting bullied at school for my issue, he was ready: he weighed down my arms with books about how to triumph over my shyness.

The books inducted me into the confusing paradoxes of self-help. By defining shyness—and not the bullying—as a problem that needed solving, I became ashamed of my shyness, which only made me shier.

The books treated shyness a disease or a character flaw and an opportunity for personal growth. The prescribed cure was to believe in yourself and be confident and talk more.

It had never occurred to me not to be confident until others had told me that shyness was bad. I tried talking more, but since I had nothing I really wanted to say, the other students could tell my efforts were forced, and the bullying increased.

When an adult frames “overcoming shyness” as a personal growth issue, it adds moral pressure. It forces conformity by making extraversion into a test of courage. Yet the belief that shyness was a moral weakness was far more damaging than the shyness itself.

I finally decided that I was going to be shy whether anyone liked it or not. What was wrong with being quiet? People who blurted out every thought were annoying. My dad could keep his self-help books; I was done.

Or so I thought. I had a change of heart years later when my dad bought See You at the Top by Zig Ziglar, a bestselling motivational book about achieving goals.

The book looked fun; it brimmed with amusing quips, cartoons, and anecdotes. It was a hit in my house and my dad was always quoting from it. It focused on how to get rich while also becoming a better person, using the corporate ladder as a metaphor for life.

At age 15 I knew nothing about corporate ladders, but goals I understood. In fact, I already had one. I had decided that I wanted to be a straight A student.

I read the book and followed the advice: I wrote down my goals, a list of potential obstacles, and all the ways I planned to overcome them. Three months later when my first quarter report card came out, I exulted over my perfect record.

But chasing goals, as a lifestyle, came with discomfort. You could never stay still or look out windows. Life was an unending climb toward some hazy pinnacle. The future was where all the prizes were. My todays dimmed because it lacked the sheen of my tomorrows, which were haloed by the flattering light of fantasy.

See You at the Top framed personal growth as climbing to a higher social class and making money. The book assumes that reaching the top is what life is, or should be, all about.

I am not against setting goals; I have many. But there is no top. And while the book inspired me, it also made me anxious about wasting time—or doing anything that was not moving toward a goal.

Gone were the days of pecking on the piano keys, or drawing cats,  daydreaming, or looking off at the far distance in a thoughtful daze. From my new perspective, life was a chore, and to be unproductive, even for a day, was to fail at life.

My brother Steve, seven years older than me, felt the same pressure. But he dealt with his in an odd way. As an adult he began hoarding self-help books.

At one time, they littered the floor of his apartment, so that there was barely room to walk. He had rarely read more than few pages of any of them—including the one that promised a clutter-free life. But just having self-improvement books around made him feel more in control.

I understood. We had grown up in a household where a self-help book was the remedy for every problem. So why not brick yourself inside your apartment with them?

I had to tease him about that.

When I was in college, Steve and I used to walk around bookstores together. As I wandered the store, Steve would always gravitate toward the self-help aisle. I wondered what he ultimately hoped to find there: the meaning of life? A great epiphany? The secret to saving the world?

“Have you found The Book yet?” I asked him one day.

“Huh?”

“The Book.” I had to explain that, obviously, he must be looking for the Ultimate Book which contained the Answer to Everything. Otherwise, why was he so obsessed with that one aisle?

He knew I was kidding and laughed, but he really did want that imaginary book. For that matter so did I.

“The Book” became a running joke—the rare volume that would magically solve every problem imaginable. It would give you more time and riches and eternal youth and a diet that let you eat all you wanted. Upon request it would even offer a personalized schedule for maximizing productivity.

Many years later, I have never found The Book. But my wish to be “better” remains. I stay away from self-help books though.

Not because they are all bad, but because I remember how much they once confused me.

I remember how fighting my shyness only made me shier, and how setting goals projected happiness beyond my reach. I remember how a book on reducing clutter only became part of the clutter.

Even when I tried to improve myself without books, I found myself mired in vicious cycles. Whenever I tried to concentrate better on my reading, I ended up concentrating on concentrating, and I forgot about the book altogether.

Such frustrating ironies make me envy my cat.  I recently found her lying carefree in the sun and stretching in a posture of total bliss.

I thought how lucky she was to never have to worry about being a better cat. No one had ever given her a self-help book on how to be a better jumper. She never fretted about needing a fluffier tail. I never looked at her and thought, “If only my cat would be more productive.”

I accepted her as she was, even when she shredded the furniture. I thought that if I could accept my cat unconditionally, I could do the same for myself.

Finally, I could set aside the struggle for perfection and just enjoy my life.

But, alas, even unconditional self-acceptance looks suspiciously like “growth.” Another maddening cycle looms: the inability to accept my inability to accept myself.

Does irony never cease?

A couple of years ago, after almost a decade of happily blogging, I quit.

Although I loved to blog, I quit because it was time-consuming. A single post sometimes took as much as twenty hours in a week—a part-time job. I wanted to free up more time for writing novels, which at least—according to my marketing friends—had the potential of earning a living.

One of them asked me bluntly, “Do you want to be a blogger, or do you want to be a writer?” He told me that I was unlikely to succeed at both. If I wanted to make money blogging, I would have to research what others wanted to read. I would have to write what was popular, rather than what I cared about. I would also have to blog daily, maybe even hourly. But if I focused on fiction only, I might have a chance of earning a living at that. If I had to choose, the answer was clear: I wanted to be a novelist.

Quitting my blog did free up a lot of time. And I did finish a new novel. But I missed blogging. And even though I was writing more fiction than before, I was writing less overall—and enjoying less what I did write.

My reduced productivity surprised me. I had expected that if I quit my blog, I would spend all my freed-up time blazing through novel manuscripts, especially at night.

It was at night that I had learned to make use of stolen moments. I did most of my writing during the day, but after supper I would sneak in extra writing while watching television with my family. Whenever a show began to lag, I would draw out my Android phone and work, surreptitiously, on my blog.

Without a blog to write, I could instead use those stolen moments for writing my novels. Whenever the TV plot stalled or pointless explosions began, I could escape into my own imaginary world. I wagered that if I wrote on a novel every time a TV show became tedious, I could be as prolific as Isaac Asimov.

But there was a problem I had failed to consider. My stamina for writing in noisy rooms, though robust with blog posts, withered when writing novels.

Inventing stories demands more of me than blogging does. A novel requires me to live in a tumultuous world, constructed only from words, for hundreds of hours, but first I have to make it all up—the walls, the people, and even the floors that they stand on.

Then I have to lie about it all in an entertaining way. Furthermore, my lies must seem plausible, even though my readers already know that everything I say is outlandishly false.

Keeping my lies consistent demands focus bordering on the superhuman, which is hard to come by when I am fretting about getting “caught” in a plot hole, just as if no one knew beforehand that I was only going to make stuff up.

Blogging allows me to simply tell the truth. Plagiarizing from reality is infinitely easier than constructing the stable edifice of lies called storytelling. So, when I quit my blog, I stopped writing anything at night, and instead had to watch television without any recourse when a show became tedious.

But blogging does more than offer sanctuary from bad TV. When my energy for making stuff up is drained, blogging gives me a way to shift gears. I can keep writing—just on a different kind of project.

Instead of dreaming up worlds, I can blog about a memory, express a point of view, or enumerate the antics of my cat. Blogging flexes different creative muscles than writing fiction does—but in a way that hones my writing skills generally.

It also makes me more receptive to new ideas. When I stopped blogging, fewer ideas for stories and essays came to me.

This is unsurprising. I had told my brain to focus on a single project exclusively, so that even when dazzling new story ideas came to me, I swept them under the couch cushions with the cat fur and stray pennies. Exploring my new ideas risked diverting me from my “more important” writing.

By “setting” my mind to pay attention to new ideas—even if they are unrelated to my main project—blogging encourages creativity.

It also motivates me. Embarking on a short project, such as a flash fiction story or essay, lets me enjoy finishing it after only a short time—a day or a week, rather than months or years.  Completing short pieces, especially when I do it often, builds confidence. Quick bursts of success also give me the patience I need for the arduous marathon of writing a novel.

Blogging has another benefit. I often write what I need to read.

As a novelist I need to give myself constant pep talks. Writing is an intense psychological game that pits my ego against rough drafts that seem to mirror my deepest character flaws. Sometimes my writing is silly, self-pitying, biased, sententious, or sentimental, yet I have to look at my prose and say, “Yep. That came from me.”

It takes fortitude to face my Jungian shadow day after day, and to keep writing after my many embarrassing beginnings, which sometimes sound like the exuberant blather of a five-year-old.

In fact, many of my blogs have been discourses about why “blathering” is a necessary stage of the creative process, and why there is no reason to be ashamed of it at all; in a rough draft, anything goes.

Blogging is a way to remind myself of that. Whatever motivation or confidence issue I am facing on a given day has a remedy: I dig out a notebook and write a post about it.

When I stopped blogging, I found myself slipping into old habits of thought about how I might be losing my talent—the kind of thinking that never gets me anywhere.

Which brings me to an ironic bonus of blogging: sometimes I feel guilty for exploring my creative side ventures instead of working on my Big Important Potentially Lucrative Novel.

Whenever I feel any guilt about writing, I embrace it wholeheartedly as a sacred gift from the muse. Writing is at its most exhilarating when I feel like I am doing something forbidden. In contrast, whenever I feel like I should write, nothing is worse for my productivity. It only makes me want to take a brownie break.

So, instead of fighting guilt, I make friends with it. I use it as a source of energy. Naughty writing is prolific writing.

And despite what my guilt tells me, I do not have to decide between being a blogger and a novelist. I can be both. If I want to put novels first, I can still blog for short bursts while my coffee is boiling. Or I can just write a few paragraphs.

When I stopped blogging, I felt like something meaningful had vanished from my life. Blogging may not be necessary for a successful writing career, but when it was gone, I missed it. And I am glad to have it back.

No writing critic stirs such terrors in me as my Future Self.

I may think my brand-new story about peppery kittens is the best thing since the Iliad. I may soar on currents of self-congratulation,  but all the while Future Me is lying in wait to smother my zest.

That is because the delay between giddily finishing my first revision and returning to reread it somehow strips the sheen off my opus. The manuscript I re-evaluate after a hiatus is never the manuscript I remember. My clever metaphors seem too florid. What once seemed like eloquence has become bombast. “Once again, your ego has deceived you,” Future Me says. “Poorly executed and shoddily constructed. Start over.”

I have a name for this maddening phenomenon: temporal subjectivity. Everyone knows that writing is subjective from person to person. But writing is also subjective from moment to moment. I may hate at night a story I loved earlier in the day. Sometimes my attitude shift takes only hours. Maybe it is my bipolar disorder, but the writing process seems to lend itself to abrupt mood shifts,

I would be less crestfallen if my future self only denounced my rough drafts. I expect a rough draft to be rough. But the damning verdict from Future Me always occurs after I have painstakingly revised a written piece and mentaly declared it a success.

The difference of opinion between my present and future selves creates a dilemma. If Current Me loves my work but Future Me deems it blather, which self should I believe? The distinction is fateful. If I believe the grim denunciations of my future self, then I might have to scrap everything and start over. But if my past self was mistaken to love my work, I risk tossing a disheveled manuscript into a world already ailing from mediocrity.

Before I start razing walls of text, I have to think. The worst thing I can do is start making random, desperate changes. Frantic edits made to coddle a wounded ego are rarely good for stories. I might as well cut my hair by trial-and-error – which I have done with predictable results and would not recommend to anyone.

Nor is it a good idea to gaze at text in the hope of divining how to fix everything in a few facile strokes of a key. Staring at a wall of words only triggers frustration. The epiphany I am looking for is never going to come if all I do is wait.

It is better to go through a checklist of diagnostic questions, but first I do some the emotional screening. Could it be that my problem is not flawed text but a shift in my state of mind? Is a mood swing causing me to view my manuscript in a distorted way? Am I depressed? If so, it might not be the best time to revise a humor piece. Humor writing rarely strikes me the same way twice on my best days, much less when I am agonizing over the ephemeral nature of life or my inability to open a pickle jar.

On with my checklist. Do I have a migraine? Itchy toes? Are my pants too tight? What is going on in my life that could be affecting my perception? Do I feel hostile toward my manuscript because my cat just lost her kibble on the carpet? Or is it because when I called my pharmacist, she put me on hold and forced me to listen to gospel music for an hour only to hang up on me?

Anything that happens, no matter how trivial, can warp how I see my work. But if I finally decide that my mental state is fine and my prose is in fact culpable, I move on to forming a new plan.

I leave the screen and jot in a notepad what I think needs improving, basing my diagnosis on a quick impression. I ask questions, stating them positively when possible. Are my figures of speech fresh? It my story logical and well-structured? Are my characters consistent? Is my grammar solid? Is my tone the same throughout?

Detached analysis may not solve my problem right away, but at least it jolts me from helpless befuddlement and propels me toward clarity. Analyzing also encourages me by reminding me that any error in writing, no matter how egregious, can be changed.

But what if I solve all my writing problems and address all my concerns, only to later discover that I still hate my story without knowing why? Maybe statistics will help. I can say, “If I reread my story ten times and I love it at least seven of those times, then my story is a-go. Otherwise, I will revise it more.”

But this process is arbitrary and maddening. It propels my mood pendulum into violent motion. It triggers alternating periods of confidence and self-doubt. Nothing is more dispiriting than to believe you have written scintillating prose only to later find – again and again – that its luster was a mirage.

Worse, often I will reread my original revision only to find that of all my grinding rewrites, I like my original best. My first version crackles with spontaneity and freshness, I suddenly realize. Why did I ever think there was anything wrong with it? Past Me was correct after all. I have spent hours revising for nothing.

This absurd plight leads me to one other possibility for how to deal with Future Me: fire her.

Future Me is too fickle. She is not even me. She pretends to be a quality control expert, but she is really just a front for my control freak of an ego, which wants to micro-manage everything, so that I will always look good – an impossible task. If I have painstakingly revised my work and I have done my best and I love it, why is my single moment of approbation not enough?

Writing is relentlessly subjective no matter who is reading it — whether it is me or someone else. In fact, my inability to love my writing from one day to the next puts a whole new spin on the subjectivity of editors, publishers, teachers, and everyone else.

The world is brimming with potential readers who, like me, suffer from headaches, depression, sick cats, strict diets, messy houses, itchy toes, tight pants, leaky sinks and intransigent pickle jars – all of which affect perception. What does this mean? It means that trying to please anyone, including all my fickle future selves, is futile. I can do my best, but at some point, I have to let my work go.

Nothing I write will ever be beyond reproach. If I fully accept that, I can write whatever l like and have fun doing it. Freedom comes from accepting that writing to please anyone but myself – my present self – is unnecessary and possibly futile.  

I do not have to make all my future selves happy. If at some point in time, I thought that what I wrote would have made Homer rethink The Iliad, then I can rest easy, let go, and begin something new.

Many months ago, I slipped off the edge of Cyberspace and plunged into the mysterious dimension called Reality.

Reality was as strange as everyone said it was. I discovered that I had something called a body, which I had to lug around everywhere I went. I had to spend all day pumping it full of air or it would stop moving.

I saw other natives hauling their bodies around, too, snorting air like fiends.

One of them claimed to be my brother. “Come off it,” he said. “Social media is not some other dimension and you are not your Gravitar! You always had a body. You were born here.”

Suspecting a prank, I made a mental note that Reality People like to play odd mind games.

I hit snags in communicating with the other natives too. Every time anyone said they felt hot or cold I became so excited that I could hardly speak. Since having a body was new to me, I found all mentions of heat and cold fascinating.

So, whenever anyone mentioned temperature, I would frantically start looking around for a “like” button, hoping one might suspend itself in front of me, allowing me show how much I approved of the topic.

When a “like” button failed to show, I became severely agitated. My palms would sweat, and my jaw would quiver until finally, in a fever, I would blurt, “I like your comment!”

At first when I did that, the Reality People smiled in a polite, puzzled way, but after a while they started to avoid me. They said I was impossible to talk to because I kept interrupting every sentence to praise them. With great regret, I stopped declaring my heartfelt approval and learned to merely smile and nod.

The strangeness marched on. Reality had an impossibly weird alien called a “cat” in it that ruled over everything. And something called ice cream. From what I could gather, ice cream is the best thing reality has going for it. 

My brother said, “You always loved ice cream. You were born here, in the solid world, not on some social media website. You do know that, right?”

Once again, I was dubious, but my “brother” seemed genuinely worried that I could not remember my previous life. He said I had something called a diploma with my name in it to prove I went to college. “If was a physical building, too, not some online course.” He further suggested that I also have clothes hamper full of socks with my DNA all over them. But that means nothing to me. Do Gravitars have DNA?

My “brother” theorized that during my Cyberspace sojourn, I must have forgotten my previous life altogether. He seemed so worried about me that I became concerned about him too. To humor him, I checked the identification that “Reality Me” had supposedly kept in her purse.

I felt guilty rummaging through her personal items, but I was shocked to find that the photograph on the license looked exactly like my Gravitar! My name was even printed on it.

I was astounded. I must have had a trans-dimensional twin! What other surprises awaited me?

I yearned to venture out and further explore this alien dimension called Reality, but someone told me that Reality was in the grip of a terrible virus, which I know something about because Cyberspace has them too.  I became terrified that the virus might delete all of Reality with me in it before I had a chance to safely return to my real home in Cyberspace.

Homesickness began to tug at me even more. I had a yen for pics and pixels. I missed updates and down votes. I missed the wordless beauty of emoticons and the jaunty thumbs-up graphic I used to express my wildest enthusiasms. There was simply no place like Cyberspace.

Strangely enough, I could not remember exactly how I had gotten to Cyberspace in the first place. It just seemed like I had always been there. Until I slipped that day.

I had read somewhere that when you wanted to go to space you needed a rocket ship so I asked a neighbor how I could build one. She told me it was too expensive to build a rocket ship; she said, all you need is the internet.

I began to worry then because I had heard nets were used to trap animals, and what if I got trapped between dimensions? But the neighbor assured me that crossing was easy; she did it all the time. She had such a soothing voice she finally convinced me. My fears evaporated and a thrill took their place. I was finally going home!

Now here I am, home at last. I now live in the part of Cyberspace called the Blogosphere. I am not sure what happened to my body, but it feels nice not to have one anymore.

It is a wonder I ever got anything done, having to inflate that wheezy gadget in my chest all day. I therefore plan to stay here for a while. But I may have to visit Reality again someday. Only because I miss the ice cream though. If the Blogosphere ever gets any ice cream, I will never have to leave again.

Unless, of course, I slip.