I’ll tell you the truth.
I’m going to talk about the thing that no one wants to talk about. The thing that writers who are trying to help other writers pretend not to have. Fear.
Yesterday, I was not hitting on all cylanders. I attempted a podcast (which will be up shortly) that I wasn’t really happy with. I even gathered a few people together to talk about writing and wasn’t very happy with how that turned out either. Later on, when I was thinking about getting to that re-edit I thought back to my evening and decided that I might be better off getting to it tomorrow since it was clear that I wasn’t really happy with my performance. I was pretty ok with that and sat down with a book that I bought to help spark my creativity. I got so into it that I read for several hours. It even sparked me to want my book to be as good. I read until I got to tired to stay awake.
This morning when I woke up somehow that great spark of hope turned inwards on itself into fear and self-doubt. I contemplated beginning the re-write and nothing I thought about writing seemed like it was going to be good enough. I managed to let my fear take over.
A book I got recently called ‘The War of Art’ by Steven Pressfield, talks about “Resistance” in terms of what keeps people from rising to their potential and fulfilling their desires. You’d think he would tell us that “fear is the mind killer”, which in some cases it is. But his feeling on fear is this:
“Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do….. Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That’s why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there would be no Resistance.”
He goes on to talk about other interesting ideas reguarding resistance and how to over come it. I’m not quite through with the book but I find that it has a lot of truth in it. I’m still scared of failing to write something people will like, or not writing it well enough. It’s likely going to be a fight I’ll have to work through until the book is finished and maybe even during the next one. But I do want to write this and I do think it can be really good.
So if you think you’re alone in your fear, if you think you’re alone in your fight against Resistance..y.ou’re not. I’m right there with you. Let’s fight it together. 
Tags: book, fear, resistance, steven pressfield, war of art, writing
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Comments
I love this!
Resistance, fear, doubt… all of it is, I think, part of taking the risks that creativity requires, and therefore something artists/writers of all types suffer from, even the most accomplished among us. Thanks for sharing your experience on this; it *does* help to be reminded of the “not-alone” .
Great post Kimi. I’ve heard great things about ‘The War of Art’. Glad to see you tackling your fear and pushing through resistance
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