So, Why Don’t You Write?

Those of you who follow this blog know two things about me: First, I use this as a form of therapy. It is the only blog I use as a monologue to myself where I externalize my thoughts on writing, writers and the writing process. Second, I haven’t written anything here since September last year. These two things are related.

It’s not that I haven’t been writing. I have. To the tune of approximately 2,000 words a day as I build up to my goal for this year of actually writing 5,000 words per day, every day until the end of December. At the same time I’ve been procrastinating. There are books that need to be written and I am not yet writing them and posts that really need to be added here and I am only now getting to them. And the reason is I’ve been afraid. Not deadly afraid for my life kind of fear, nor that special fear you get when you’re alone in a dark place and think you’ve heard a noise in the darkness you’ve never heard before.

Writers get a different kind of fear. It creeps up on us not because we fail but because we sense that we have begun to succeed. The moment we have an audience, the moment a book catches attention and the response begins to come back and it is mostly positive and mostly encouraging and mostly inspiring we freeze up. To us, the moment this happens, we are like a deer in the headlights.

I will try to explain it. Each book is a journey. Each journey is a piece of us. A writer doesn’t just put words in a book, that is an easy thing to do. He puts in ideas, and thoughts, discussions and hopes, dreams and expectations. It is a largely unconscious process that takes place as words go from inside the writer’s head into the vehicle that will capture them, freeze them and deliver them to be consumed by the reader.

This process works best when we are unaware of it: that’s when the ideas and the thoughts consume us and the dreams and the hopes drive us. Writing then takes place and hard as it is, it is also easier and feels truer. And then the attention comes. And suddenly the realization dawns that the journey is being shared by countless others who also bring their hopes and dreams, thoughts and ideas with them.

And that’s when the questioning begins: Am I up to it? Are my words good enough? Can I pull it off and write another book like that? Will I be sufficiently good, perceptive, smart, insightful to capture all those dreams and hopes readers have? Will my agent be impressed? Will my publisher love it? Will the reviewers say it’s amazing? And because the answer to all these questions is, invariably, “maybe” doubt seeps in and that’s the point where the writer starts to worry not about writing the book that needs to be written but whether his best work is behind him and he is now on a downward spiral.

Those of you who read The Sniper Mind know, of course, that all pressure is generated internally. We do this to ourselves. For me, who actually wrote it, the pressure becomes even greater because it suddenly provides a baseline to judge all my new efforts by. Did this sentence sound profound? Was this new insight sufficiently smart? Will this new idea resonate with everyone? Am I actually hitting the mark?

I am writing here again; so you know that I have an answer to all these questions. It is provided by the title of this particular blog post but it was a change in context that actually helped me see it. For me writing and breathing are synonymous and I don’t find either an easy thing to do (I will explain that last bit in another blog post, some other day). Suffice to say, for now, that I need to do both to actually feel alive.

Put like that the choices became obvious: life or death. And if life then everything else that comes with it is part of its process which is what it is. Death only comes when we get to the part of the journey that is clearly “not-life”. And by all this I mean that basically in my writing I am just doing my absolute very best, delivering each day without holding back. By focusing on that I don’t worry about how my writing is perceived or whether I am living up to some self-imposed standard to impress my readers or if my agent, publisher and reviewers think I am doing a wonderful job. I am driven by what I seek.

Truth is always liberating and writing should always be about truth. It is then at its most true.