According to Ralph Keyes, if you aren’t scared to write, if you aren’t facing demons when you face the blank page (and some call this writer’s block), then you may be:
- kidding yourself
- writing banal, inane, trivial stuff
- not writing at all
E.B. White worried over every word. Margaret Atwood said that you need a kind of physical nerve to write, “the kind you need to walk a log across a river.” Donald Murray talked about his writing students who had nothing to say on the page, because they felt silence, anxiety, panic and terror. “Good,” he says, “You are at the place from which writing comes.”
The Courage to Write can help you ground yourself and continue writing in the midst of a vortex of fear. Keyes offers strategies for facing fears and putting them to work. We feel naked when we put our true thoughts on paper. We feel exposed; surely the entire world will find out what fakes we are, what liars, what wimps. Then there are those dark, dark places where we lose ourselves, with honest writing. Erica Jong claims that everyone has the talent, “What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark place where it leads.”
Writing takes courage. How do you find it scary?
Keyes, Ralph. The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear. New York: H. Holt, 2003.
photo from Queen Califia’s Magical Circle Garden, Nikki de Saint Phalle