I’m continuing a theme of how to get yourself to write. Last month I talked about the moment when a friend, colleague, or total stranger can say that one inspiring thing you need to hear to spur you to glorious completion. Today, I’m going to talk about the things you whisper to yourself that stall that effort. They add up to fear.
Fear, in an artistic sense, is a gelatinous cube that threatens to engulf you and digest you slowly over a millennium. Its six sides are:
1. Procrastination
2. Writer’s block
3. Self-Perception
4. Indecision
5. Denial
6. Self-Doubt
Any of these phenomena can indefinitely stall your project. They prevent you from seeing what’s on the other side of doing The Thing (i.e. writing the chapter, writing the book, developing the character arc, or any other aspects of creating new work).
I recently experienced all six of these things for a project. The fear-jelly swallowed me whole, threatened to acid-burn my skin and otherwise make a mountain of goo out of me if I didn’t somehow find a way out.
Here’s how I fell into this slow-moving monster's trap:
I decided to learn calligraphy and use it to make a gift for my friends. I bought myself some supplies and books. I told my friends and family about it, and THEY bought me supplies and books. Then I gave myself a project and a deadline, thinking those would help me focus and learn The Thing.
But I pushed my deadline by a year (procrastination). The reason was I felt I hadn’t yet developed the skill (self-perception) so I put off ever starting (indecision). I also felt that, though I had never actually tried calligraphy, it would take too long to learn (denial) and once I did learn, I wouldn’t be good anyway (self-doubt). By the time these elements came together, I was already long past the original deadline and now worried it might never get done (writer’s block) because of the aforementioned factors.
One afternoon, I cleared my calendar. I pulled out the dusty calligraphy set and laid it on my kitchen table. It came with paper. I laid out the pens and YouTube told me how to load the ink.
And I started writing “Baked Potato.”
Why baked potato? Because I was hungry and baked potatoes are delicious. I chose unimportant words on purpose, taking the Project out of the exercise. I told myself I’d just practice. What does the pen feel like? What happens when I pull it toward me? Ooh! A nice smooth line! What happens if I go the other way? Oops – don’t do that again – it’s like a needle scratching a record.
I practiced different swoops; checked my work against an instruction manual. “The key is to always pull the pen toward you. An ‘O’ shape is just two curves pulled toward you, joined together.”
Soon I had something that looked like calligraphy. I enjoyed doing lower case a’s, and I got real fancy with the lower case g’s. Each miniscule and majuscule looked cleaner and better formed than the last. I started using new words like “majuscule.” And I gasped for air as I made my way out of the fear-cube and wiped errant globs of its sticky ichor from my fingers … no wait, that was just ink.
I felt great. I did The Thing. And I didn’t know I was in the Fear Cube until I was out of it.
The six sides of the Fear Cube were entirely self-made. I couldn’t see that at the time, of course. I could have picked up a pen at any point in the last year and started working. I could have had these revelations a lot sooner. But I was afraid of failing, of not being good right away, of never being the level of good I wanted to be.
But I KNOW this about me. I know that if I want to learn something new, I can. I’ve done it many times over the course of my life. It’s literally baked into the process of learning anything. As Bob Ross once said, “People continually say, ‘I can’t draw a straight line. I don’t have the talent, Bob, to do what you’re doing.’ That’s baloney. Talent is a pursued interest.”
Fear blocks us from that pursuit. It prevents us from getting driver’s licenses, it makes us miss out on important life events, and if left unchecked it can consume us.
Fear is a system in the machinery of our bodies that protects us from the unknown. Evolutionarily speaking, it kept us safe from predators. But the thing about a predative gelatinous cube is IT DOES NOT EXIST. That fear is the emotional response to worries of our own making.
Now am I great at calligraphy? Heck no. But I’ll get better.* I just need to put in the time and claw through the fear.
What scares you about writing? Or starting anything? Let me know in the comments and let’s see if we can chart a path through it.
*****
* My main gripe with A.I. image prompt users who call themselves “artists” is that they never got over their own fear or self-perceived lack of talent, education, skill, etc. More on that here; but until I wrote this post I never made that connection.
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