Monday, April 1, 2013

Is fear preventing you from writing your book?

By Dennis Mellersh

Fear, and particularly fear of failure, can be a major roadblock in realizing your desire to write a book.
You are taking the steps to learn about how to write a book, and you want to start practising the knowledge about writing that you are acquiring through your studying  and research.
And yet… you feel it is still too early to start writing.
It’s not too early.
Learning to write is a progressive activity; writing is not a skill you learn by studying and taking instruction in every conceivable aspect of writing, and then at some magical moment, setting pen to paper and starting to write.
Rather, you need to be practising your writing at each stage of your learning process.
Mostly what holds us back in our writing efforts is fear:
  • Fear that our book will not be good enough in the eyes of others
  • Fear that our writing will not meet our own expectations
  • Fear that “the publisher” will reject our book
  • Fear that the critics will think it is no good
And the list of writing-based fears goes on…
 
Throughout history such fears have affected many famous writers who worked work in different genres:
 
  • The renowned poet Emily Dickinson kept most of her poems in a drawer and the poems were not discovered until after her death
  • The brilliant naturalist Charles Darwin withheld his seminal work on evolution  for decades, largely due to fear of the anticipated public and scientific negative reaction
  • Some well-known published novelists, with an initial successful book to their credit, “dried-up”, sometimes due to a fear that they would not be able to repeat their earlier success
Fear is normal. But giving in to fear can prevent you from becoming a writer.
 
The key is to recognize the fear for what it is, an emotion; and to have the courage to discipline that emotion and write what you feel despite the fear.

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