What are you afraid of? Poor sentence structure, such as that question? Or something else?
Writers may not fear ghosts, goblins, ghouls, or other Halloweeny frights. But anyone who writes—and especially those who write for publication—must face his or her fears, or choose some less terrifying profession, such as bomb squad technician.
Some of us dread ridicule. Rejection. Insignificance. Poverty. Shall I keep going? They’re all part of the writing life.
Writing anything takes courage. To overcome self-doubt. To silence the voice of a teacher, perhaps, or the fear of not being very good. Writing for publication means conquering the fear of rejection, the sting of criticism, the imposter syndrome that plagues everyone but the real imposters. Novelist Neil Gaiman famously said,
I was convinced that there would be a knock on the door, and a man with a clipboard (I don’t know why he carried a clipboard, in my head, but he did) would be there, to tell me it was all over, and they had caught up with me, and now I would have to go and get a real job, one that didn’t consist of making things up and writing them down.
Exactly. Maybe you stuff down that fear long enough to pound out a few hundred words. Maybe you tremble before publishing that blog post. Or maybe not. Maybe you’ve been ghosting your work-in-progress, treating it like a sweetheart you can’t quite break up with (there’s that poor sentence structure again!).
Whatever your writing fears may be, don’t give up. Don’t give in. Keep writing. Assault the beachhead of fear and inertia that seems so daunting … until you break through, and look back, and see it for the bump in the road it was.
How about you? What are your writing fears? How have you conquered them? How are you conquering them?
