The Fear of Writing
For a writer, writing is an extreme sport filled with fear. It has the adrenaline high of ascending new heights, diving into territory inherent with risks and coming out feeling fine, and the post-adventure mood dips of a work being over, a book having been completed, a ‘chapter’ survived.
But there is a little more to it than just that. Because writing is a synthesis of ideas the moment you commit them to paper you also stamp them with your personality. They become an indelible part of who you are, elements to your identity that you cannot shake off, or replace without leaving fatal holes behind.
The fear of committing all that to ‘paper’ for the world to see is counterbalanced by the fear of the ability that defines you, which no one fully understands (not even yourself), vanishing. Evaporating one day. Disappearing as mysteriously as it appeared.
In the days when the struggle of writing took place in the dark, away from prying eyes, writers wrestled with these inner demons and found solace in drink and drugs and other vices. Activities that writers as diverse in subject and style as Hunter S. Thompson, Philip K. Dick and Hemingway would use as springboards: when you touch upon the lowest depths of your human frailty you find the resolve to make one more push, rise one more time, to the heights of the vision granted by your mind’s eye, until you really cannot any more.
These days are a little different. A writer writes in a very public way. Not only are works and thoughts and ideas shared with their readers but the readers themselves become part of the complex construct that guides a writer. And the fear then intensifies. What if my next book, story, chapter is not liked? What if I cannot see the next trend? What if my readers desert me? What if I simply cannot write any more?
Implicit, within that last question is the acknowledgement of the difficulty of defining what writing really is. It’s not the ability to spell, nor the skill to string words and sentences in a grammatically correct order. It’s more like the ability to see something beneath the surface of the world, abstract it, and then render it in a code that increases access to it, by those who see it.
Because no one really knows how this is accomplished, no one can tell you how to avoid losing it. So writers live in fear. Fear that the next work may be their last, fear that their skill is driven by the consumption of a perishable commodity they are busy using up. Fear that one day, they will wake up and be writers in name only…
But there is a little more to it than just that. Because writing is a synthesis of ideas the moment you commit them to paper you also stamp them with your personality. They become an indelible part of who you are, elements to your identity that you cannot shake off, or replace without leaving fatal holes behind.
The fear of committing all that to ‘paper’ for the world to see is counterbalanced by the fear of the ability that defines you, which no one fully understands (not even yourself), vanishing. Evaporating one day. Disappearing as mysteriously as it appeared.
In the days when the struggle of writing took place in the dark, away from prying eyes, writers wrestled with these inner demons and found solace in drink and drugs and other vices. Activities that writers as diverse in subject and style as Hunter S. Thompson, Philip K. Dick and Hemingway would use as springboards: when you touch upon the lowest depths of your human frailty you find the resolve to make one more push, rise one more time, to the heights of the vision granted by your mind’s eye, until you really cannot any more.
These days are a little different. A writer writes in a very public way. Not only are works and thoughts and ideas shared with their readers but the readers themselves become part of the complex construct that guides a writer. And the fear then intensifies. What if my next book, story, chapter is not liked? What if I cannot see the next trend? What if my readers desert me? What if I simply cannot write any more?
Implicit, within that last question is the acknowledgement of the difficulty of defining what writing really is. It’s not the ability to spell, nor the skill to string words and sentences in a grammatically correct order. It’s more like the ability to see something beneath the surface of the world, abstract it, and then render it in a code that increases access to it, by those who see it.
Because no one really knows how this is accomplished, no one can tell you how to avoid losing it. So writers live in fear. Fear that the next work may be their last, fear that their skill is driven by the consumption of a perishable commodity they are busy using up. Fear that one day, they will wake up and be writers in name only…
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Zara, thank you so much for adding it here too. That's where the real magic happens, that tiny interstice where a connection is made and a reader suddenly understands something that is truly new and exciting and maybe, even, empowering.
Love this David. "The ability to see something beneath the surface. It's so true
Hatherley wrote: "Love this David. "The ability to see something beneath the surface. It's so true" Thank you.
David Amerland on Writing
Writing has changed. Like everything else on the planet it is being affected by the social media revolution and by the transition to the digital medium in a hyper-connected world. I am fully involved
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It’s more like the ability to see something beneath the surface of the world, abstract it, and then render it in a code that increases access to it, by those who see it.
Render in understandable code.
Never thought of writing as code before +David Amerland but that's it. Even in narrative fiction the world we construct and the characters within it and the way they interact is the writer's code.
Hey, read this. Decipher it.
And unlike the logic of coding, each reader uses his (non-politically correct but grammatically accepted pronoun usage) personal code to "de-code" the story.
Great resonance in this article.