E. B. White, an author who suffered great anxiety about both writing and public speaking, said: “I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.”
I can only echo, “Amen.”
Many readers assume that those who write for a living seldom have to confront fear of writing. Writers, too, succumb to this myth, believing that while one personally may have to struggle with the demon fear, other writers don’t. The truth is that fear is a universal experience for anyone who puts pen to paper. Everyone who writes has to summon from some deep place inside the courage to write, the nerve to write true.
For writers, courage is “the first essential,” said Katherine Anne Porter.
Cynthia Ozick wrote, “If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.”
It is revealing, I think, that both Ozick and Porter link the word “essential” with courage when describing the task of writing.
“You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer,” Margaret Atwood wrote. “An almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.”
I like the simile: Courage as the physical quality that provides stability and balance, allowing us to the traverse the unstable, slippery terrain of both our psyche and our material.
In his book THE COURAGE TO WRITE, Ralph Keyes perfectly captures the litany of fears a writer can get lost in. “Whenever I start writing a book, my fears follow a predictable path,” he writes. “First I’m scared that I won’t finish it, that I’ll be exposed as a fraud who conned a publisher into thinking he could write a book. When I do complete a manuscript, I’m afraid my editor won’t accept it. If my editor does accept the manuscript, I’m worried that critics will hate it. If critics don’t hate it, I’m sure no one will buy my book. And even if readers do buy my book, there’s danger that they won’t like what they read. They might find it laughable. Worst of all, someone I know may ridicule my efforts. These are the types of fears that keep me, and anyone who presumes to write for public consumption, awake at night.
Rejection, ridicule, failure, the fear of being wrong: The Four Horsemen of dread. Add to them the trepidation of revealing that which we fear we should not disclose. It requires a certain dauntlessness to expose particular topics to our readers. I think of this as the “I can’t write about that” phenomena.
A participant in a writing workshop I gave in Kenmare, Ireland one spring was the wife of the local vicar. In response to an assignment on characterization, she wrote a strong and enchanting story about a male stripper with a tattoo on his bum. After the class, she confided in me that the boy in the story was her son. By the end of the workshop she felt safe enough to share that news with the others in the class, but she said she could never publish the piece because of what people would think about her, her son and her husband the vicar.
To mine the rich territory, we must find the courage to write the one thing we feel we can never write about, the subject that makes one break into a sweat to even consider divulging. This is the pay dirt, the very thing we must write.
Ralph Keyes writes, “A warm flush of embarrassment is like a dowsing rod pointing its quivering tip right at deep wells of rich material.”
I think we don’t extinguish our fears as much as write in spite of them, and in the process we discover that many of our fears are phantoms born of our own imagination. And those which are not, we survive. We don’t die when we get a poor review, but actually go on breathing and live to write another day. We discover that breaking taboos not only does not isolate us, it connects with others.
When I allow fears to pollute my mind and silence me, I remember that the root word for courage is derived from the Latin “cor” and that the French word for heart is “coeur.” I remind myself that my heart remains the sturdiest of the writing muscles.