Do you regularly experience writing fears?
You know, like fear of failure, rejection, writer’s block, not being good enough, etc.
If so, congratulations! You’re perfectly normal.
But during this Halloween season, let me warn you—your writing fears will prevent you from reaching your goals if you let them.
They’ll distract you. Make you think you’re too busy to get your writing done. Delay your publishing efforts. Keep you hiding rather than marketing your work.
To help you out, I’ve gathered seven ways you can gleefully destroy your writing fears below.
Yes, gleefully. Because you have to be a little crazed to successfully shut these writing fears down! (Picture a writer with a sharply pointed pen going after his fear demons with well-targeted adrenaline-fueled stabs.)
7 Tips for Destroying Your Writing Fears
1. Identify the Writing Fear
You can’t fight something if you don’t know what it is. Start by asking yourself, “Is fear holding me back?” You may not even realize that it’s doing so until you take some time to reflect.
Think about the most important writing goal that you have right now. If it’s to publish a book, ask yourself if you’re doing everything you can to reach that goal. Give an honest answer. If it’s “no,” then ask yourself “why?”
Are you secretly afraid that if you write your story it won’t be any good? If you submit it to an editor or agent, you’ll be rejected? If you self-publish it, you’ll get bad reviews? These are all common fears to have.
Sit with whatever fears you discover. Reflect on them. Ask yourself why you feel the way you do. Explore the feelings.
Tell yourself it’s okay. You should be compassionate with yourself. But realize that you can’t let these fears stop you.
2. Connect the Excuses with the Fear
If you’re not sure if fear is holding you back, ask yourself what excuses you normally make for neglecting writing or the other activities you need to do to reach your goals.
Some common ones include:
- I’m too tired
- I’ve got too much else to do
- This is a dumb idea—I need to try another one
- I’ll do it next week
- Life is too crazy right now
- I’m stuck so I’ll wait until something breaks loose
You may have others. The trick is to realize that all of these excuses are covering up for fear. You’re afraid that your writing won’t be any good, so you’re avoiding it.
Plus, it’s a lot easier to make excuses than it is to buckle down, put in the hours, and do the daily work required to be a successful writer.
Remember that excuses will leave you feeling powerless and unfulfilled. You may be tired, but you’ll feel a lot greater sense of accomplishment if you get in those 100 or more words today.
3. Embrace the Writing Fears
My great-aunt used to say that you could find something good about anyone. It’s just that with some people, it takes a little longer than with others.
Fear is the same way. Yes, it can stop you from succeeding as a writer, but it also has some good qualities.
For one, it tells you that what you want to do is important to you. If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be afraid of failing. That means whatever you fear, you must make sure that you do.
Afraid of submitting? Start submitting today. Afraid to do a podcast interview? Start pitching podcasts today. Embrace what fear is telling you—that this thing you’re afraid of is important, and it’s time to face your fear head-on.
Second, it can make you work harder to reach your goals. If you’re afraid readers won’t like your story, for example, you may pay more attention to plot, characterization, and pacing, and invest in the beta readers and editors you need to make it shine.
Fear is not always the bad guy. Recognize when it may be helping you out.
4. Pull the Anxiety Closer
I’ve been a musician all my life, and I’ve faced numerous situations that were scary. Usually, they involved playing a solo in front of a lot of people.
Until recently, whenever I felt my heart pounding and my mouth drying out, I’d do everything I could to stop the fear. That included breathing deeply, drinking water, admonishing myself for allowing fear to take hold of my body, and forcing my focus more intensely on the music.
As you might guess, most of these methods fail to help me relax. But I’ve learned about something that can: pulling the fear or anxiety a little closer.
I read about this somewhere and I can’t remember where. But the idea is this: rather than trying to block out fear or run away from it, you bring it closer to you. You can do this by acknowledging that yes, you feel afraid or anxious. Feel the symptoms in your body. Allow them to exist without the need to shove them away.
The final step is to act as your own supportive rock. In your imagination, embrace yourself as the scared person you are. Yes, you’re scared or anxious, but it’s going to be okay. We can do this.
It sounds kind of corny, but I’ve tried it in performances and it does help. The fear doesn’t go away, but it has helped me to perform better under pressure. I encourage you to give it a try when fear is trying to stop you from doing something important to your writing career.
5. Realize the Consequences of Giving Into Fear
This is something we often fail to do as writers. We let fear delay us from accomplishing our goals, but then we delude ourselves into thinking we’ll get to these goals tomorrow, next week, or next month.
If you’re not regularly working—and working hard—toward your writing goals, you need to revisit those goals. Sit down with them and ask yourself: What will my life look like if I don’t achieve these goals?
It could be that you’ll be just fine, and you won’t care. In that case, your goals aren’t very compelling to you, and you may want to consider creating new goals.
But most likely, if you look 5, 10, or 20 years into the future and imagine not achieving these goals, you’re going to feel a sense of loss. Write down what that life is like—that life where you don’t become the writer you want to become. How will you feel about life and yourself?
This sort of exercise can help you realize what your goals mean to you. In turn, they can encourage you to get back to work despite the fear, because you know what will happen if you give in to it.
6. Forget Succeeding and Think About Growing
Too often we get caught up in worries about one particular project succeeding. But this is the wrong mindset to have as a writer.
Most writers want a lifelong career. The idea is to write one story, then write another and another. It’s not about creating one work that will sustain you for life. It’s about growing with each work you produce.
When you adopt a growth mindset, you permit yourself to fail, and that’s one of the best ways to gleefully destroy fear. If failure is just one more step on the journey, that means it’s not such a big deal. In truth, multiple failures often lead to success a lot faster than endless time spent on one project trying to make it fail-proof.
No writer is perfect, and no piece of writing is perfect (though many often seem to come close!). Don’t expect perfection from yourself. Just do your best to improve with each story you write and that will be enough.
7. Bring on the Pain
One of the biggest weapons fear possesses is the threat of pain.
For writers, this is often psychological pain. We suffer mentally and emotionally after receiving a rejection or bad review, and struggle psychologically when we can’t make the story on the page fit the story in our heads. We work for years on a book and despair when it flops on the market.
All of this is truly painful. The thought of going through it (or going through it again) can easily bring on fear.
Yet it’s near impossible to avoid these types of pain and continue to have a writing career. That means we have to embrace the pain with the pleasure when it comes to the writing life.
The more you can say “yes” to the pain the less fear will be able to stop you. It can help to remember that most of the incidents that bring on pain also educate you. I can’t remember one painful setback that didn’t teach me something about the writing life and the publishing industry.
You can also take pride in your battle scars. All writers have them. They make you part of the club. See yourself as the warrior that you are, look fear/pain in the eye, and say, “Bring it on!”
How do you gleefully destroy your writing fears?
Main image courtesy of Dmitry Demidov via Pexels.