I'm told, over and over, the trick is to be more confident.
I think the trick, rather, is to learn to write through the fear. I get this all the time. There’s no point at which there is no fear; there’s no point at which the confidence is supreme and the fear completely vanishes, and the book suddenly becomes a thing of gold, a perfect thing. People learn to live with, and through, fear in entirely different ways.
I’m a bit odd. I hate fear.* I hate fear more than pretty much anything. I consider it soul-destroying, self-destroying. I understood way back (at fifteen, I think), that fear of a thing was actually worse than the thing itself. Living in fear was wore than taking the chin-hit. I hasten to add that this is because I lived in a relatively safe house with relatively safe parents, in a neighborhood where walking down the street was unlikely to get me shot by, say, police. I understand that in some ways, my methods of dealing with fear come from a solidly middle-class privilege.
When I realized that i was actually afraid of doing something - not cautious, which is the smart side of fear, and doesn’t eviscerate me mentally in the same way - I would immediately go and do that thing. Because doing it, facing it, was still not as bad as living with the burden of the fear of it. This sounds extreme. Let me explain. I would not randomly jump out a window because I was afraid of falling out of it, for instance.
But the skiing is a good example (I don’t ski). Assuming I wanted to ski, I would ski. I would have the experience of all past successes; I would have experience and knowledge of how to handle things that I have handled before. And damn it I would do it because I was afraid. In *that* sense, it would look like confidence to the outside. Experience sometimes allows me to negotiate with fear (sometimes I can’t, because fear is a thug). On the inside of my head, I would be angry enough at the fear that there would be a wall of “F You, Fear”.
People often think i’m fearless; I’m not. No one is fearless. But my way of coping with fear is possibly not everyone’s way of coping with it (my long-suffering husband feels it is unusual).
My husband’s way of coping with it is different. He can look away, just slant his vision so that fear doesn’t take up the whole of his viewpoint. I think writers suffer from over-focus, so that isn’t something I can do. But: he can live with fear, can lessen it objectively, and can work alongside it.
In both cases, we have given up on the idea that we will feel no fear. We fear things. We have had to learn how to live with fear, to move through it.
To write through it, even when we have spent a year and a half writing a book and then torching all the work and starting over four times. That kind of thing.
ETA: * my own fear. I hate my own fear. I should have made this clearer.
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I think the trick, rather, is to learn to write through the fear. I get this all the time. There’s no point at which there is no fear; there’s no point at which the confidence is supreme and the fear completely vanishes, and the book suddenly becomes a thing of gold, a perfect thing. People learn to live with, and through, fear in entirely different ways.
I’m a bit odd. I hate fear.* I hate fear more than pretty much anything. I consider it soul-destroying, self-destroying. I understood way back (at fifteen, I think), that fear of a thing was actually worse than the thing itself. Living in fear was wore than taking the chin-hit. I hasten to add that this is because I lived in a relatively safe house with relatively safe parents, in a neighborhood where walking down the street was unlikely to get me shot by, say, police. I understand that in some ways, my methods of dealing with fear come from a solidly middle-class privilege.
When I realized that i was actually afraid of doing something - not cautious, which is the smart side of fear, and doesn’t eviscerate me mentally in the same way - I would immediately go and do that thing. Because doing it, facing it, was still not as bad as living with the burden of the fear of it. This sounds extreme. Let me explain. I would not randomly jump out a window because I was afraid of falling out of it, for instance.
But the skiing is a good example (I don’t ski). Assuming I wanted to ski, I would ski. I would have the experience of all past successes; I would have experience and knowledge of how to handle things that I have handled before. And damn it I would do it because I was afraid. In *that* sense, it would look like confidence to the outside. Experience sometimes allows me to negotiate with fear (sometimes I can’t, because fear is a thug). On the inside of my head, I would be angry enough at the fear that there would be a wall of “F You, Fear”.
People often think i’m fearless; I’m not. No one is fearless. But my way of coping with fear is possibly not everyone’s way of coping with it (my long-suffering husband feels it is unusual).
My husband’s way of coping with it is different. He can look away, just slant his vision so that fear doesn’t take up the whole of his viewpoint. I think writers suffer from over-focus, so that isn’t something I can do. But: he can live with fear, can lessen it objectively, and can work alongside it.
In both cases, we have given up on the idea that we will feel no fear. We fear things. We have had to learn how to live with fear, to move through it.
To write through it, even when we have spent a year and a half writing a book and then torching all the work and starting over four times. That kind of thing.
ETA: * my own fear. I hate my own fear. I should have made this clearer.