The Seven Fears That Hold Back Writers 1 — Fear of performing

Is putting words on paper daring? Risky? Vandalism? Obviously not, especially when it’s not really paper. I can erase this text with a few clicks. If I really want it gone, I can overwrite it or even smash my hard drive. I can be sure I’m not connected so no words will live in a cloud beyond my control.

And yet…

And yet… many writers behave as though they have one chance to get it right. As if the mere act of typing out something offensive or daring or incorrect puts an indelible mark on their souls.

You cannot call back words you speak to someone and your Tweets may live forever, even if you nuke them, but the page you’re typing is not permanent or public. There are realities many writers can’t accept emotionally. These fictions are hard to overcome.
    •    No one needs to see your early drafts.
    •    That first wrong sentence is not eternal.
    •    Writers often need to warm up like musicians, dancers, and actors.
    •    Writing weird, embarrassing, and even offensive stuff can open the door truth and beauty.

Last time, this was on my list of seven fears:

Fear of performing — Performance anxiety doesn’t need an audience. All by yourself, when you face a blank screen or a fresh sheet of paper, you can be overwhelmed by an sense you won’t be able to put words together that make sense, change minds, or move readers. There are special instances of this, such as the inability to respond to a pressing deadline. Or to be funny on command.

I’ve faced blank pages so often, their existence no longer intimidates me. (Well, not for long.) The repeated act of putting down horrible prose without suffering horrible consequences helps insulate me from the voice that still bubbles up within me, telling me I have no right to foul the purity of a blank page. That fear is recognized and dismissed.

But sometimes it feels like the first sentence or page is a waste of time. It feels like throat-clearing I should no longer need. (My wife says, you can should all over yourself if you’re not careful.) So fear sneaks in as anger at myself.

Or I may simply be disgusted by the act of typing.

Or I may be confused by too many things battling to be put down and threatening to be forgotten.

Anger, disgust, and confusion. These are disguises that fear of performing may wear. If it is anger, I need to force out a bad sentence, making it clear that warming up is acceptable. The act itself moves me from feeling it is a rookie mistake to seeing it is what professionals do. When typing feels wrong, that’s often a good thing. Creative modalities can shift, and I’ve found paying attention to keyboard phobia gets me to dictate or grab a pencil. Warring ideas? The confusion is probably good news. It just means a linear approach (my usual writing of full sentences) will be too slow. Typing or printing fragments, even individual words is usually the way to go. Often, I segue into analysis with charts or thought balloons that capture everything and make it available for prose with special clarity. Chaos is frightening, and sentences aren’t always the best tools for bringing order out of chaos.

Okay, that’s one example of fear of performing, with the emotional covers, risks, and possible solutions I promised last time. If you want to become a resilient writer in the face of blank page fear, planning your writing the day before, dictation, learning different ways to capture ideas can prepare you. (Mostly, it comes down to figuring out what’s going on, creatively.)

What about deadlines? These can be motivators, but the stakes can create pressures that work against using them productively. To get my first writing job, I had to read a scientific article and type out a one-page story explaining the research and make it interesting on a sixth-grade level. On a typewriter that was unfamiliar. Within a half hour. The article’s words blurred, and my heart raced for a minute or two, but I ultimately found it fun, pretending I was explaining it to one of my brothers. I knew that if I failed completely, I’d still have a job and income going forward. But I think I would have choked if I’d been unemployed when I met this challenge.

While it’s possible to have a learned reaction to deadlines (negative or positive), I suspect context is everything. I once had to ghostwrite a book against repeated deadlines, with a list of conditions that kept growing, while I was suffering from vision problems. Not good. And I’m not happy with how things turned out. But the key was NOT to let that deadline experience become THE deadline experience for me. I purposely took other deadline work afterward, with low pressure and better circumstances. I needed to work my way away from fear that threatened to be traumatizing.

Breaking up work into smaller pieces with multiple, self-imposed deadlines can take the fear out, too. Every successful step builds confidence. A plan, scheduled work with 50% more time than is planned, accomplished in an environment free of distractions, can make all the difference. Resilience comes from facing a lot of deadlines and meeting them successfully. One danger — putting too much time into planning. Planning is one of the most lethal distractions of all for creative people.

Of the three examples of performing fears, the toughest for me to beat was being funny on command. While I wrote a few humorous stories early in my career, they did not emerge deliberately. All of them were inspirations, written in one sitting. Until recent years, almost all my fiction has been drama, not comedy. Even when I had comic ideas, I couldn’t convince myself to write the stories. Fear hid behind internal narrations like “I’m not funny, he’s funny” or “I can tell a joke, but I can’t be funny on paper.” Denying the talent and claiming I didn’t understand the rules of comedy protected me from trying. Like everyone, I had a fear of saying something funny and not getting a laugh (or worse, getting a pity laugh).

Now, not everyone is funny, but I suspect fear keeps a lot of people from finding out what they can do. I have been lucky in that I had to write humor on command as a speechwriter (humor in someone else’s voice). I got to hear audiences laugh at my jokes. I got encouragement from people who write humor professionally.

I still can freeze up. Nowadays, when that happens, I try to look through the eyes of characters with odd points of view. Or I write in the style of another humorist. Or I brainstorm with another person whose humor I like.

I’ve come to the conclusion that (within limits of talent and taste), being funny on command is very much like scaring people or thrilling people or doing work that brings tears to readers/audiences on command. And here’s how to be ready to be funny (or scary or tear-jerking):

    •    Have some success eliciting reactions. This can be seeing people respond or being encouraged by a colleague or mentor.
    •    Learn the skills (set-ups, timing, clarity, turning it up to eleven) and practice them.
    •    If possible, get into the right head space. Find that voice. Or find a suitable proxy in a character. Or imitate someone who does it well.
    •    Be willing to get down the idea in a suitable shape (for humor or horror or heartbreak), and leave “sweetening” it to later. If the shape and idea area right, it will be easier than you’d expect. You’ll also be ready to bring in an editor or another writer to help.

I’ve explored three examples of fear of performance, but there are a lot of other ones. And for each of these, there are other ways fears disguise themselves and many different approaches to finding solutions. But I hope there’s enough here for you to recognize this problem and try a few things to find your own way back to the joy of putting words on paper.