Our Job as Writers is to Face the Fear + Write Anyway: The Power of Vulnerability in Your Writing (Part 3)
Lately I've been thinking about how to help other writers, especially on what it takes to be successful.
For the purposes of this article, I define success as writing your stories.
Let's tie vulnerability to that. What is vulnerability? I realized I jumped right into this topic without defining the key term.
Vocabulary.com says:
"Vulnerability is the state of being open to injury, or appearing as if you are."
Oh boy. Who wants that?
But often it's the fear of that vulnerability that keeps us from writing.
I notice what keeps many writers from writing is this fear.
What do you fear? Writers often tell me they fear success, of who they will be once they've finished their book.
For other authors, you may fear the work because that means you need to say NO to something else.
All acts of creating require you to say YES to it and NO to everything else.
Sacrifice. Sacrifice signifies the death or letting go of something.
Recently I told a friend that I wanted to be writing fiction 5-6 days a week and not just 2-3 days a week. The first thing she asked me was, "What are you going to give up?"
That stopped me in my tracks and got me thinking.
What will you give up so that you get to your writing?
In my opinion, our job as writers is to feel the fear, open ourselves up to perceived injury (vulnerability), and write anyway. It's as simple and as hard as that.
You may have heard the famous quote:
"I only write when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes at nine every morning."
(Discussion on the source of this quote here.)
I was chatting with another book professional this week who reported that when asked how to finish a novel, Nora Roberts (author of more than 209 romance novels) said, "Write."
Our jobs as novelists is at once simple and terribly complex.
We build worlds that at first existed only in the ether. Then we must sit down and pour words from our hands that flow from out mind, soul, and heart.
Simple words. One word follows another in a linear fashion. The tools of our trade are only in 7 groups: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, conjunctions, prepositions, articles. That's it. That's all we got.
Your job: write. Even if you think you can't. Even if you think you have nothing to say today. (That's where free writing as timed writing comes in.)
Your job should you choose to accept it is to become excellent at the sit down and write part.
Once you can produce content, once you can get the story from inside of you to the outside of you, then you have a new lesson to learn.
And that is to improve your craft and learn the awesome tricks of creating a story the reader loves and doesn't even realize they're reading. They think they're living it.
We writers did something magical: we disappeared the wall between this world and another. Nothing more amazing and magical than that. In my opinion. We get to be word wizards.
But one step at a time. Today you face your fear and you write through it. Get to know your fear. It's been your companion for a long time now. May as well make friends with it. How do you do that? Here's some tools I use.
My favorite tools are questions. When I journal, I ask questions like: - What's up?
- What am I so afraid of?
- And I use sentence starters like: "So what I'm trying to say is..."
- and "What I'm really trying to say is..."
- "I want..."
- "I don't want..."
- and more questions: "Why can't I do this...?"
- and "What's going on with...?"
Please use my questions tools. Here. I need to underscore that the way through your fear, procrastination, writer's block, is through. Through the forest of your fear. That is, write.
You don't become a writer by wishing for it. You actually need to do it. This is not a sexy statement. I won't win any Nobel prizes for this discovery. (Not really mine. This discovery belongs to each writer. Make this discovery for yourself.) But what I will have and what you will have is a body of work. What we will have are books in the hands of our readers. For that to happen, we need to take the risk -- despite all our fears. I know you can do this. If you want to. (If you're not starting despite your deepest wish to be write, then you may be ready to get some support. We can succeed together. Let's chat.)
Are you ready to be fiercely compassionate so that you can let whatever you fear spill onto the page in your journal or in your stories? Can you sit down and write anyway, despite the fear?
I know that writing is hard for many of us. And, I know that you can learn to make friends with the process, so that you can get the stories burning inside out you out into the world. And I for one can wait to see them.
Let me know how it goes! As always, I'm happy to hear from you.
Hugs, Beth
♥
| 
