Fear and the Fledgling Writer

Let me start out, by saying that I should be working on “Sliver and Dust.” I’ve been obsessing over it, loosing sleep, becoming a caffeine soaked cliche of myself, and it’s almost done. There are plenty of aspects to the book that make me nervous. I’m going to surface for air because the thought occurred to me to wonder if all writers feel that way. I wonder if discomfort is an indicator of an interesting project. I think to myself, that there is too much of me in this, and most of it is a lie. What does that say? Maybe that I’m a masochist, or that fear is inseparable from creation. But hey, who wouldn’t enjoy tossing prose ladened Molotov Cocktails at their personal boundaries and general discomfort with judgement? Amiright?

I want to throw this out into the Writer-sphere. I’ve mentioned on a few occasions that fledgeling writers get a lot of advice, today I’m also going to assert that we, much like the veterans, harbor an unnecessary amount of creative guilt and/or fear. We’re lucky, though, nobody knows we’re holding the talky stick yet. And that means we can say anything in the ever-loving creative fuck we want. Doesn’t that mean we’re pretty much obligated too?

Okay, okay. Just maybe I’m formulating theories at random, in an effort to cope with being relatively unknown. Shit happens. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t some small kernel of validity in my zygote ink jockey ranting.

There is an unrivaled level of freedom when it comes to shouting into the void. It’s why we spill our ugliest secrets to the bartender and not to our nearest and dearest. For an established writer there is an established level of censure. It’s a given. There are people besides readers to please. There is a brand to uphold. Certain compromises are expected, social standards have to be met, a voice has to be maintained, and deviation from the formula isn’t always welcomed with wide open arms and an atta boy/girl slap on the ass.

When you’re a relatively unknown writer, you dream things up, and you talk to yourself like a nut, and you hope like hell, that you can express yourself to your audience with enough resonance that you become a spectacular secret that also makes book sales. Books sales are important. There are too many choices in the world that aren’t really choices, too many carbon copies wrapped in different packaging. As a writer you can choose to be safe or not. You will be judged either way. Judgement is the barometer of any creative. Anonymity gives a dubious illusion of safety, perhaps, but it’s there.

We have the opportunity to build ourselves, cobbling the worlds in our head together out of insecurity, chaos, desire, and words. It could be bullshit, mostly lies, life is like that sometimes. It’s the glowing coals of truth that give it authenticity; the burning fleeting moments where we feel all of it too deeply to extract. How are we supposed to do that if what we’re working on isn’t terrifying, isn’t obsession level exciting? The truth is, I never was any good at coloring in the lines. I’d rather be an oddity than “borrow” someone else’s tried and true formula, but let’s face it formulas are tried and true because they work. If you’re going to be different, you have to be different exceptionally well. It’s enough to make anyone nervous.

That said, I’m taking my series and we’re going streaking.

What say you?

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