inAuthors: Keli Goff Riffs on Why Writing Fiction is More Terrifying than Jumping out of an Airplane

July 6, 2011 by inReads

Keli Goff has just published her first fictional book The GQ Candidate, adding to her already impressive resume as a blogger, author, and political analyst. In addition to appearing regularly on national and international news programs, Goff was recently named a contributing editor for TheLoop21.com and is also a regular contributor to the Huffington Post.

Goff’s writing has appeared in national magazines; she is a featured essayist in the collection The Speech: Race and Barack Obama’s A More Perfect Union; and the author of Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence.

Here she shares her feelings about writing her first novel:

When I jumped out of an airplane a couple of years ago, crossed skydiving off of my bucket list, and wrote about the experience for Cosmopolitan magazine, I was pretty sure I had tackled one of my biggest fears and what would likely be one of the scariest things I would ever do.

Then I tried writing my first novel.

To say that finishing The GQ Candidate has been scarier than jumping out of an airplane may sound like classic writer hyperbole. In my case it’s not. Despite having written in multiple platforms (print, online, nonfiction and for television) there was something about trying to finish this damn book that left me feeling more than once like I was tumbling through the sky without a parachute.

With nonfiction, facts are your parachute. Facts and ideas. If your facts are verifiable and your ideas are interesting, you’re guaranteed a reasonably soft landing—no crashing into a mountain or landing with a thud, metaphorically speaking.

With fiction, as I learned, there are no such crutches. Just you, the story, and the characters, and of course courage; the courage to keep going even when you feel like you’re falling aimlessly without that parachute.

Strangely, I only conquered my fear of falling when my life began falling apart. When I encountered some health problems (including being hit by a car), suddenly sitting at a laptop and typing didn’t seem all that scary. I finally realized that there are much scarier things in life than falling or failing, and that I’m much more courageous and resilient than I thought.

So here it is, that novel that I spent much of the last couple of years fearing. I can honestly say that finishing it gave me an even bigger high than the day I jumped out of that plane.

And I can’t wait to do both again.

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