Fear and Coping

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

The longer (and to some extent, the more successfully) one has been writing, the easier it is to see that there are no rules or recipes. There is no “right answer” for most writing questions. There is only “a possible right answer for this story” or “an answer that will probably work for this writer.”

Back when I was a newbie, being told this was terrifying. So terrifying that I kept searching for someone to tell me it was wrong. Failing that, I wanted something from my own experience that I could use to deny it for as long as possible. I want the One True Answer really, really badly. Not a formula, of course, just an answer that would reassure me that I was On the Right Track.

Sadly, what my experience taught me was exactly what my more experienced colleagues had been saying: There Is No One True Way. No Right Answer, except maybe for grammar and spelling questions (and even then, sometimes you need to play with them deliberately to get the effect you want–dialog in a foreign accent, for instance, or a subliminal sense of the alienness of an imaginary civilization).

On top of that, even the possible-for-this answers you occasionally find keep changing on you. What worked for your last book stops working on the next one. That thing that you painfully trained yourself to do over the course of writing four or five books, is suddenly the only possible way to handle your next story. The thing that’s been your go-to way of getting unstuck for the past decade starts making things harder every time you try it, instead of easier.

These are the things that drive experienced writers crazy (in the classic “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” definition). When you know from experience that something used to work, it is easy to assume that you did it wrong this time. So you try again, but it still doesn’t work…and the more often you used it successfully in the past, the harder it is to realize that no, it isn’t you screwing up, it’s just the normal way writing progresses. It’s time to let go.

But letting go is frequently quite hard. This makes writing feel like forcing oneself to repeatedly leap off the top of a cliff, hoping (but never entirely sure) that one will figure out how to fly on the way down. The first time is terrifying, but the second time is worse, because one is quite certain that one has forgotten how since the last leap. By the time you get to the tenth or twelfth time, it is worse still, because by then you have enough experience to know that eventually things stop working…which means, logically, that eventually you will leap off the cliff and end up a messy smear on the ground, instead of figuring out how to soar once again.

When you step back and look at what you’re doing, the paralyzing fear of the more experienced writer (that everything will stop working at once, that this thing is too stretchy to ever achieve successfully, that everyone is going to say they’ve lost their touch) and the paralyzing fear of the first-time writer (that they’re doing it wrong, that they’re missing something obvious, that they’re going to make a complete fool of themselves in public) is all the same fear.

Because it’s not actually fear of jumping off a cliff. It’s fear of doing something new and unknown. Fear of not knowing how. Fear of not getting it Right. Fear of not being perfect. Fear of being told one isn’t perfect.

You can avoid it for a while, but it catches up with most people sooner or later. There are two basic ways of “handling” the fear. One can try to avoid it or hide from it–stop reading reviews or comments, stop getting critiques, stop submitting or publishing it. Eventually, this can lead either to the person stopping writing entirely, or to becoming the kind of perfectionist who revises and re-revises the same book for a couple of decades. (Obviously, this can get very counter-productive when taken to that kind of extreme.)

Alternatively, one can embrace the thrilling-leap part of the process. These are the writers who, consciously or unconsciously, find new things to explore with every new project. They dig deeper and deeper into the characters or explore more side characters; they switch genres, or deliberately experiment with specific aspects of writing (structure/plot/style/whatever); they decide to write a play, or poem, or movie script; they test-drive editing other people, or start a small press, or do some non-fiction, or do an on-line serial or fanfiction. Again, some of this can be counter-productive when it comes to writing more novels.

The thing about handling fear is…this, too, depends. It depends on what the writer is most afraid of, why they write, which methods they instinctively gravitate toward, and whether their chosen coping mechanisms are detrimental to what they want from their writing. Shoving finished work in a drawer doesn’t seem to have had a particularly bad impact on Emily Dickinson’s output. It obviously affected whether she made any money from her work, but if she didn’t care about that part, then it wasn’t a problem for her.

To put it another way, coping mechanisms are fine if they let you get what you want out of writing and/or publishing, no matter what it looks like to outsiders. If the coping mechanisms get in the way, you probably need to reconsider. And if what you want from your writing changes, you may very well need to find a different coping method.