I Am Sick of the Myth of Creative Fear

What’s the worst that could happen?

I am not afraid to write. When I played music, I was not afraid. The various artists I know are not filled with angst or paralyzed with past abuse. This is not to say they did not have it. But it does not own them as creatives.

Writing is not hell. It is erasable. Think about that. Our band had a song whose chorus was ‘nothing lasts forever, some things never change’. Fear is a tool, not a great weight that paralyzes people. Buddhism teaches us that emotions are simply thoughts. Meditation teaches us that thoughts are as substantial as wisps of smoke in a breeze. When you watch them, they dissolve in importance.

When I finally got traction with my first novel I discovered wonder again, wonder that I had as a young man and destroyed with too much maturity and intellectual analysis. I read books with that sense of wonder and in search of it. When you sit down and write 600 words every day, as I did with that story, you enter a zone of the unknown.

But it should not be a fearful place. You are making it, it is not being done to you. One of the issues I have with so much self-help and analysis is that it starts with the negative. Something must have gone wrong with me and I’m going to find it, damn it. The reality is that many artists work because it offers a window into worlds that throw light on things. It may be an escape for many but it is not an escape into an underworld of fear or insecurity, at least it doesn’t have to be.

When you create windows into worlds, which is what I think artists do, it helps to remember that you are the creator, the boss. Up to a point. That point is where those windows reveal something you did not see coming. This is where people falter. Why did this happen in my story? Why did that song go down that dark path? What does that patch of red in my painting mean and where did it come from?

These questions are not scary. They are only scary if you let them be. But they are only wondrous if you let them be too. The point is that in art, you have a choice. Nothing is stopping you from making it. And it’s very likely no one is watching while you are making that choice. So stop thinking and go for it. The worst that can happen is you throw it out and start again.

That’s how we create.

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