That Other Writerly Moment -- Fear!
No promise of money.
A fear that your life will slip away little by little.
You will forever be aloof, behind the times, poor.
Fear is also a kind of writerly moment. Fear makes you do strange things.
The fear made me write a novel, publish a novel before I turned 21. It was more than fear. It was panic.
I was afraid that if I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t have an opportunity to do it ever again. Life problems would find me. Get a girl pregnant. Go to war. Die in a car accident. Develop an irrational love for accounting. That would be the end. I needed to do it now.
A writer sits down somewhere. He or she commits to a void. To scream into a void. Virginia Woolf said, you need money and a room of your own to be a writer. But there are others things that are hard to account for. It’s a lonely thing to write, and it’s lonelier still to strive to be great at writing. It demands so much of you. Fear of failure is with you. But fear of greatness should also be with you because it will drive you to despair. It will drive you deeper and deeper into your own worlds.
I have these vivid memories from time to time of these moments in high school where I worried I would be unemployable. I had this idea that I would work at a grocery store for most of my twenties filling out notebook after notebook for no reason -- my mind would become a labyrinth of unfulfilled hopes and desires. Fear drives you away from writing toward more practical pursuits.
So, what drives you back? How do you find your way back to the notebook. It’s the fear that you’ll get trapped in a world without writerly moments.
A fear that your life will slip away little by little.
You will forever be aloof, behind the times, poor.
Fear is also a kind of writerly moment. Fear makes you do strange things.
The fear made me write a novel, publish a novel before I turned 21. It was more than fear. It was panic.
I was afraid that if I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t have an opportunity to do it ever again. Life problems would find me. Get a girl pregnant. Go to war. Die in a car accident. Develop an irrational love for accounting. That would be the end. I needed to do it now.
A writer sits down somewhere. He or she commits to a void. To scream into a void. Virginia Woolf said, you need money and a room of your own to be a writer. But there are others things that are hard to account for. It’s a lonely thing to write, and it’s lonelier still to strive to be great at writing. It demands so much of you. Fear of failure is with you. But fear of greatness should also be with you because it will drive you to despair. It will drive you deeper and deeper into your own worlds.
I have these vivid memories from time to time of these moments in high school where I worried I would be unemployable. I had this idea that I would work at a grocery store for most of my twenties filling out notebook after notebook for no reason -- my mind would become a labyrinth of unfulfilled hopes and desires. Fear drives you away from writing toward more practical pursuits.
So, what drives you back? How do you find your way back to the notebook. It’s the fear that you’ll get trapped in a world without writerly moments.
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