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By James M. Lang

Over the past six months -- during the time that I have been preparing my tenure application, enduring endless observations of my teaching, receiving vague assurances from tenured friends, and awaiting the big news -- I have started or conceived of at least a half-dozen book-length projects in different genres.

I've written one play and started another; I wrote a proposal for a book about higher education; I began taking notes toward a book of creative nonfiction about my experiences with adult education; I revisited a proposal for a writing guide I had written with a friend; I wrote the first 60 pages of a mystery novel.

As of this writing, each one of those projects sits on my hard drive, lonely and spurned, like the monster pining for his creator in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

I have always been an ambitious writer, but my recent manic energy in creating unfinished projects has mystified me. I seem to have developed an attention-deficit disorder that did not afflict me in the writing of my first two books. I come up with ideas and pursue them with passion for days or weeks. Then slowly they loosen their grip on my mind, and slide into the sorts of files I try to avoid thinking about when I spot them while searching for some other file I need for teaching or committee work.

Last week, though, a colleague who is also up for tenure this year said something to me that helped me understand my strange behavior. His proposal for a conference panel at a prestigious academic meeting had been rejected, and he was debating whether to volunteer to serve as a panel chairman instead, so he could still get that line on his vita.

"And then I realized," he said to me one afternoon, as we were whiling away some shared office time together, "that I really didn't need extra lines on my vita anymore."

Neither of us us taking tenure for granted. We won't hear official word about our futures until the spring, after the full faculty at our college has voted on our cases, and then they have been approved -- or denied -- by the administration and the trustees.

But our applications are complete and in the pipeline, and have been for some time now. The promotion and tenure committee has written its letters of evaluation of us, which will be presented to the full faculty meeting. Nothing we do now (assuming we don't run naked across the quad or start dealing drugs from our offices) will alter the content of those letters or that presentation.

So our fates have already been sealed, and we plan the future as if we will be here next year, and the year after that. What else can we do?

But how I plan my future has undergone a transformation that I am still trying to sort out.

I am happy at my college, and very committed to teaching, so I have no intention of sliding into complacency in that area. This semester, for the first time in five years, I chose a new text in my introductory literature course, a choice that meant revamping the course even though I am no longer under pressure to make such time-consuming revisions.

But even more than my teaching and my service, I know I won't let my devotion to writing slide either. What seems to have slid away from me, instead, is a clear understanding of the kind of writing to which I should devote myself.

My first two books were not scholarly projects; they were works of creative nonfiction, and because I developed a new course for the college in that creative genre, and taught it multiple times, those books counted toward my tenure case. Partly because of that, my first concern in the writing of those books was their literary quality -- I wanted books that I would be proud to show to an audience of faculty colleagues.

But I don't have to write like that anymore if I don't want to -- and I've come to believe that that realization, tied so tightly to the timing of my tenure application, may be producing my writerly paralysis. I can write absolutely anything I want from here on out, and the dizzying array of possibilities is making me, well, dizzy.

I could chuck all literary pretensions aside and write a scandalous exposé of the inner workings of academic life. I could try to write a Harlequin romance, or a potboiler mystery (some emphasis probably needs to be on try in that sentence). I could write a heartwarming tale about my life as an academic with five children -- Cheaper by the Almost Half-Dozen.

I have a literary agent who is willing to pitch my work to publishers, so none of those options is completely out of the realm of possibility, and all of them would be designed to produce a single effect: a big fat royalty check.

On the other hand, given that I already lead a perfectly comfortable life, I could chuck all financial considerations aside and write an experimental novel, or pull together a collection of essays I've written for a quiet little book I could pitch to a university press. Or I could spend three or four years investigating a subject I care about -- religion, or the environment, or the struggle to live an artistic life in 21st century America -- crafting a book that will open me to new areas of nonfiction writing, and new ways of thinking.

Those options seem closer to what I care about, and pursuing them has always seemed to me the best part of tenure's promise: that it will free me to write and teach whatever I want. I never imagined the rub would be that I had no idea what I wanted.

Do I still want to fulfill the romantic (and maybe outdated) notions of becoming a literary author that I have been carrying around since I read my first Hemingway novel in 8th grade? Or do I want to write for money, and spend it all taking my family to exotic travel destinations?

In an ideal world, I would do both -- become a Zadie Smith, an acclaimed literary author and best-selling one to boot -- but I'm not sure I have the writerly chops for that.

Of course, I could always do what 99.9 percent of the rest of the world does, and not worry about writing at all.

It's my winter break as I write this, and I want more than anything to be able to forget about writing, to relax and enjoy the time with my family. I've been reading The Hobbit with my 2nd-grader every night; my 10-year old and I have played a dozen or more games of the old military board game Stratego; I've built endless block towers with the 3-year old and spent time on the floor with the twins.

But, to be honest with you and with myself, I have to confess that relaxing with my family will never be enough for me.

Neither will teaching. I love teaching, as my mother and wife and two of my siblings love it -- teaching seems to be in my blood. I want to be the best teacher the world has ever seen.

But the best class I will ever teach will never equal the satisfaction I feel from a well-crafted sentence, or paragraph, or chapter. No student can ever matter as much to me as my first book did -- or my next.

Way back in 1983, actors Robin Williams and Walter Matthau teamed up for a quiet, now long-forgotten movie called The Survivors, in which Williams played a character who, spurred on by a few strange turns of fate, leaves civilization for a military survivalist camp in the Vermont woods in the dead of winter.

Near the conclusion of the movie, after the survivalist camp-leader guru has been exposed as a fraud and they are headed back to New York, Williams' character has a moment of clarity at the absurdity of his decision, and stands in the middle of a snowy road stripping off his clothes. Freezing and directionless, understanding that there's no going back, he questions why he ever left his fiancée and his comfortable lifestyle in the first place.

"What do I do now, Sonny?" he cries with bewilderment, addressing Matthau's character -- who responds paternally by covering him with his coat, and leading him to shelter.

Williams' soul-searching lament has been running through my mind constantly these days. The strict discipline that the tenure application demands are behind me now; a full-year sabbatical looms on my horizon if my tenure application is successful; my brain is full to bursting with ideas, my pen is poised, and I'm desperate to write something.

What do I do now, Sonny?