Fear is almost guaranteed to stop even the most passionate writers from achieving their personal and professional goals. That’s how powerful fear can really be. You may not even realize that you’re afraid of writing, or not writing, or that no one will like what you’ve written — because we’re prone to avoiding fear by avoiding the tasks we’re scared of.
Overcoming fear is a practice just like meditation or exercise. You can’t get better at it unless you actually do it, just like writing itself. Whatever scares you the most throughout your writing journey, it might be time to finally run toward it instead of keeping your distance.
Fear Is a Powerful Emotion
Humans are quite literally designed to be fearful. It’s a built-in survival mechanism; people learn to distance themselves from or defend themselves against things that could harm them. Like bears. If you came across a bear in the wild, your fear might save your life.
Sometimes, our modern brains don’t know how to tell the difference between a threat — a bear — and something that feels scary, like writing a book. Many of us respond the same way to the idea of having to sit down and write a story as we would to seeing a bear. We run from it, or hide from it, to protect ourselves from the danger we perceive.
Writing a book probably won’t kill you. but your brain doesn’t know that. Similarly, your fear of never writing a book, or getting published, or getting paid to write won’t hurt you. But it often stops aspiring writers from even trying — because who wants to run headfirst into a bear? Not your brain, certainly.
But Fear Isn’t Stronger Than You Are
The things you do to avoid doing what you want to do — procrastinating, self-sabotaging, always planning out your stories but never actually writing them — aren’t your fault. Writing is hard, and your brain probably really doesn’t want you to do it because it’s going to be uncomfortable and scary. It may not be your fault, but there’s a lot you can do to push through your fear.
This goes beyond believing in yourself, though you do have to do that too to some degree. You also have to figure out a way to trick your brain into believing that what you’re about to do isn’t actually that scary. Different methods work for different people, because all of our brains operate differently. But I can tell you what I did to force myself to finish writing this blog post when, to be honest, I sort of wanted to scroll through TikTok for 20 minutes instead.
I broke this writing task down into very small, almost comically tiny pieces. I physically wrote them down, too. Navigate to the website. Open a new post draft. Outline the main points. There are days when this is the only thing that works. Publishing a blog post, for me, is still a scary thing. This bear has been with me since the beginning. But when you really look closer at it … it’s just another animal who’s more afraid of you than you are of it. Not that scary then.
Having Written Only Requires One Thing …
Here’s the simple truth: You have to write the thing if you want the thing to be written. No one is going to do it for you, and AI would do a very bad job of trying to imitate your unique writing voice. You have to do it. Even if it’s scary. Even if you have to make silly little lists to get yourself to do it. It feels harder than it actually is. Every single time.
You’ll make every excuse in the world not to write today. My dog woke me up before 4 a.m. this morning; I’m still here writing. Of course there will be times you really can’t squeeze in a writing session; that’s just life. But when you have the opportunity to write, and you don’t take it — you’re the only one at fault.
Succeeding as a writer is mostly about overcoming your mental roadblocks and just writing despite your brain’s many protests. Because if you actually sit down and write something, you’re already doing more than most of the aspiring writers out there. Most of them will spend their whole lives saying they want to write, but they never will.
Face down your bear. Write the thing. You’ll be glad you did.
Meg Dowell Writes 