My prompt for this blog is an article by Samina Ali posted on Literary Hub on November 27, 2024. [1] The author holds a workshop yearly at the Stanford Continuing Studies Program. He makes the argument that many new writers give up writing as a career out of fear. His examples are common; “I’m too old to write a book. No one is going to read this. I’m not trained as a writer. I’m not talented.” He rejects those fears because they miss the larger point of success in writing. It’s not money. It’s not fame. It’s not publication. We write, he says, because we can “wrestle a sentence to the page.” We can “discover a fresh image or witness a character come alive in an unexpected way.”
That’s true. But writing through fear is infinitely more complicated. Fear is a reaction to a perceived threat or danger. It can be rational. It can keep you safe by warning you of potential danger. But fear of writing, like fear of success in any endeavor, is irrational because we can never know whether we can “write” without ignoring fear and plowing ahead.
Writing is easy. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “all good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath.” “You can do it if you want to live in the company of disobedient words,” Karl Krolow said. Flannery O’Connor was right when he said writing “is what’s left when everything has been explained that makes a story worth reading.” If a would-be writer wants a safe, secure, life they should switch to numbers, not words. Accounting is never fearful, just boring.
Fear and failure are first cousins. They come from the same language tree and feast on the same poison—lack of effort. There is an old adage about the man who threw a stone on the ground and missed. When a writer walks away from writing out of fear, he is throwing a draft down before the first rewrite, and the second, and all the other drafts that often result in a good story.
Rudyard Kipling put it this way. “Treat success and failure as the twin imposters they are.”
Writers share a common voice. They don’t talk about writing abstractly or out of context. Writing is about work. Don’t think about writing as success or failure. You will have good writing days and bad ones. Working bears its own weight. Success in it can wait. Keep on working on writing. It will become a passion. Passion beats fear nine times out of ten.
Sailors share a common belief in four things that are no good on the ocean; anchor, oars, rudder, and the fear of going down. The first three won’t help if you give in to the last.
Treat fear like you’d treat passive voice. Delete it and activate your verbs. Writing, like everything else in life, is fraught with indecision, frustration, hurt, denial, remorse, rejection and never-ending failure. But when it works, when the words fly, the story erupts, the characters wake up and live on the page, and the ending stuns you, then you’ve saved the day and the work. Keep writing, success is just around the bend of the last paragraph.
[1] https://link.lithub.com/view/602ea7e7180f243d6533a9b4memd5.ya3/fb87ea3e
I am an author and a part-time lawyer with a focus on ethics and professional discipline. I teach creative writing and ethics to law students at Arizona State University. Read my bio.
If you have an important story you want told, you can commission me to write it for you. Learn how.
I am an author and a part-time lawyer with a focus on ethics and professional discipline. I teach creative writing and ethics to law students at Arizona State University. 
My latest novel is Hide & Be. 
If you have an important story you want told, you can commission me to write it for you. 