JWTSB: Part 3 – The Fear

Ok, so this post is a bit late in the day. I hope you’ll forgive me – I hit a tiny little itty bit of a deadline to get the first draft of Juliet Bell Book 2 knocked into good enough shape for my co-author to take a final look before we send it into our editor at Harper HQ. In order to further earn your forgiveness though, I’m tackling one of the biggest and gnarliest topics for any writer, whether they are brand new and shiny or jaded and wading through the draft of book seventy-eight. Today I’m going to talk about The Fear.

What is The Fear? The Fear can take many forms. It can be the feeling that you’ll never be as good a writer as the author of whatever awesome book you’ve just read. It can be the feeling that the idea that felt so golden and shiny six months ago has turned to dust under your fingers and you don’t have the skill to bring it back to being something wonderful. It’s the feeling, when an idea first strikes, that the story is too big or too important or too complex for a little brain like yours to be able to tell. It’s the feeling when your last book got rejected EVERYWHERE that you might as well not bother writing the next one. It’s the feeling when your last book got a really good deal and then sold slightly less than the publisher was so obviously hoping and you think you’ve blown your chance and clearly don’t have what it takes after all. It’s the feeling when your last book went perfectly – it sold to a great editor, it was marketed beautifully, you were garlanded with awards – that you’ve peaked and whatever you do next will be a horrible disappointment to all the people who’ve put their faith in you so far.

The Fear is the feeling that stops you writing and The Fear happens to us all.

Sometimes The Fear is contained to the feeling X thousand words into your draft that this novel is crap and you will never be able to make it good. I’m not sure I’ve ever met a writer that doesn’t feel like that at least once (and usually more than once) during the process of writing and editing each book.

Sometimes The Fear is bigger and more amorphous. It can masquerade as normal procrastination to start with until you get to the point where you realise that you’re ironing your guest pillow cases ‘just in case’ and you haven’t actually opened your manuscript file for three weeks.

So what can you do?

1. Take a break. Sometimes your brain simply needs a rest from the thing that is stressing it out. Walk the dog. If you don’t have a dog, walk yourself. Take a bath. Go to the gym. Do something creative but small – something with an achievable end point. Baking is good, because at the end you will have cake. I’m told by people less cake oriented that painting, knitting, and sewing have similar properties (but less calories).
2. Let yourself write stuff that isn’t brilliant. Very often The Fear tells us that we’re not good enough – it mentally highlights every slightly cheesy, ill-phrased line in a manuscript and tells us that it will never get better. Well on this point, The Fear is wrong. Cheesy, ill-phrased lines can be rephrased. Sometimes their cheesiness might even tell us something about the character who’s speaking them. Stuff doesn’t have to be perfect straight away. If the stuff in question is a novel, it won’t be perfect straight away and that’s all right.
3. Break things into bitesize chunks. The Fear can put us behind schedule, and the enormity of getting back on track can be overwhelming so we end up doing nothing. Just do something, even if the something is simply opening the manuscript and reading what you wrote last time. If you’re editing, break it down into steps and tick off one step at a time. A novel is massive. There will be lots that doesn’t work  – don’t let the scale of the problem overwhelm. Break it down. Baby steps. Doing something tiny is way better than doing nothing at all.
4. Talk to people. You are not the first writer who has felt like this. You will not be the last. Just hearing people confirm that helps.
5. Believe that you will get through this. In my very personal experience, ultimately you can’t go around The Fear. You can’t jump over it. The only way is through. That might mean that things get worse before they get better. That might mean moving from fearing that your manuscript is a mess to knowing with certainty that your manuscript is a mess. It might mean admitting how sad you are about how things turned out with the last book before you’re ready to move onto the next. But you can get through those feelings. And you will. Believe that you will.

And hopefully over time what happens is that The Fear diminishes down into a fear and finally into a memory of a fear. Good luck.

If you’re suffering from The Fear, or any other writing quandary, and would like some more personalised support please either contact me or check out my For Writers page for details of courses and manuscript critique services. 

Author: Alison May

Writer. Creative writing teacher. Freelance trainer in the voluntary sector. Anything to avoid getting a real job... Aiming to have one of the most eclectic blogs around, because being interested in just one thing suggests a serious breakdown in curiousity. View all posts by Alison May