FEELING THE FEAR, BUT WRITING ANYWAY!

 

Nothing kills a writing project quite so quickly and so certainly as procrastination.

Procrastinate long enough and you lose momentum, you lose enthusiasm and - perhaps most lethal of all – you start losing faith in the idea of it. You start to forget why the writing of the thing mattered so much to you in the first place, and you begin to question whether its really any good, worth carrying on with.

It's odd, but most writers find themselves daunted by the act of sitting down in front of a laptop or pen and paper (whichever is your preferred method) and trying to make sense of the things that have been bubbling away in their heads. Writing can be an exciting job sometimes, don't misunderstand me, but it's those moments when you're trying to catch a hold of those stories that are running loose inside your head and try to pin them down coherently onto a blank page that can be terrifying. There are times when they lose all sense of logic or meaning in the transition from thought to word. Sometimes those ideas squirm and slither alarmingly beneath your fingertips, and ultimately break free and get away from you.

This is The Fear.

A lot of writers think they're alone in feeling The Fear when sitting down to write. Myself included. For a long while I thought I was the only one who felt like this. That it must be something in my head that was faulty, like I was wired up incorrectly. While those around me appeared to be positively exploding with confidence, churning out books and scripts with swaggering ease (as it seemed to me), I was tapping away at the computer, chipping slowly at my work, all the time fighting off the urge to distract myself from writing with all sorts of trivial nonsense. Was there something wrong with me?, I often thought. Do other writers have something inside their head that I'm missing?

Several years ago, I was chatting with a friend of mine – an editor for a major US publisher – and we were talking about work (not actually talking about writing, writers seldom talk about the actual writing process), and I told him that the act of writing itself was relatively easy. The hardest part about writing is getting yourself onto the chair and in front of the computer (I think I actually said something a little cruder, like 'getting your arse in that chair'. We'd probably had a few drinks at the time, so you'll have to forgive me).

And it's true. Getting yourself into whatever room you work in and getting yourself sat down in that chair in front of your desk is about 70% of the battle.

It's The Fear of That Room.

Writer Douglas Adams often spoke of the ways he would distract himself from writing during the later 1970s. How he would often take two or three baths a day, not because he needed them, but because they were a distraction from work, from even thinking about writing. As a result of his procrastinations, Adams regularly found himself missing deadlines, and would often joke “I like deadlines. I love the 'whooshing' sound they make as they go by.”

In his book, The Writer's Tale, writer Russell T. Davis talks openly many times of his absolute fear when faced with sitting down to write a new script. When asked when he starts writing a script, he replies that he will “leave it to the last minute. And then leave it some more. Eventually I leave it till I'm desperate.” But even then isn't the point when he starts work. Like many writers (myself included), he will procrastinate to the point of absurdity. Not taking multiple baths like Douglas Adams, but find a sudden importance in the ordinary and mundane. “My inability to start on time is crippling,” Davis explains. “Any social event – people's birthdays, drinks with friends, family dos, anything – gets swept aside and cancelled, because there's this voice inside my head screaming, 'I HAVEN'T STARTED WRITING!' I wake up, shower, have a coffee, watch telly, go to town, buy some food, potter about, buy a magazine, come home, e-mail, make phone calls, watch more telly, and it goes on and on and on until I go to bed again, and a whole day has gone. It's just vanished. Every single minute of the day, every single sodding minute, is labelled with this depressing, lifeless, dull thought: I am not writing. I make the time vanish. I don't know why I do this. I even set myself little targets. At 10am I think, I'll start at noon. At noon, I think, I'll make it 4pm. At 4pm, I think, too late now, I'll wait for tonight and work till late. And then I'll use Tv programmes as crutches – ooh, must watch this, must watch that – and then it's 10pm and I think, well, start at midnight, that's a good time. A good time?! A nice round number! At midnight, I despair and reckon it's too late, and stay up despairing. I'll stay that way till 2 or 3am, and then go to bed in a tight knot of frustration. The next day, the same thing, Weeks pass like that.”

Sound familiar? Yep, does to me too.

Davis's successor as showrunner on Doctor Who, Steven Moffat felt the same way. Confessing to Davis in an email that he experiences days of such utter panic and fear that he often feels like sticking his head out of a window and shouting “I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M DOING!!”

Writing can sometimes be a hard slog. And some days dragging yourself across into that chair feels like an impossible task. A Herculean effort.

That's why it can be a sole crushing experience for a professional writer to be on social media at the moment. Social media is absolutely littered with, what I call, the In-Love-With-Being-A-Writer Brigade. There's now a growing number of “writers” (I use the term advisedly) who are much more preoccupied with the idea of being a writer rather than the written word itself. They spend so much of their time (not to mention so many of their tweets and Instagram posts) on creating a writing persona, placing an over-exaggerated importance on identifying themselves as writers, that as a consequence the very craft of writing itself, and the projects they’re supposedly working on, become practically irrelevant. And the hashtags!! Oh my god, the endless hashtags!! To them, being a writer is all that matters, and the actual writing itself (the hard nuts 'n.' bolts graft of sitting down and writing for a living – writing to pay the bills) barely causes them to break into a sweat.

I was chatting with an author a few weeks ago (the writer who's novel it is I'm currently developing into a TV series* ) and they spent quite a chunk of the conversation talking about the sections of the novel they were unhappy with, that they could have done much better, and would be more than happy to have removed from the final TV adaptation. I sympathised with their problems. Explaining that, when I was a kid, I would often fantasise about hold my finished, published novels in my hot sweaty hands, gloat over them, read them from cover to cover. But, as a professional writer, we know that it doesn't work like that. That's childish naivete. We can't sit down and read them like we read novels by other authors. We see the faults, the clumsiness, the missed opportunities, the parts that make us shudder with embarrassment.

This is what being a writer is all about – the fear, the self doubt, the worry, the sleepless nights – in short, the bloody hard work!

It's not about posting photos of glasses of wine standing next to a notepad in the sun, nor using endless hashtags to reinforce that you're a Real. Proper. Writer. Honest!

The Fear is something very real, and something we have to deal with at some point in our writing career – and it's usually an on-going process. It's something I have to deal with regularly. Hardly a day goes by that I don't doubt my ability or my talent. Whenever I sit down to start a project, the first words through my mind are “I CAN'T DO THIS!!!” But then I start writing and The Fear quickly subsides. Then, whenever I deliver a piece of writing, I think “THIS IS IT!! THIS IS THE ONE THEY'RE GOING TO HATE!!! THIS IS THE ONE THEY'LL REJECT!!” But then you get a reply, saying “This is great”, or “Just a couple of notes”, which you incorporate into your second draft, and it's done.

Scott 10 – The Fear 0.

Luckily, I'm not one of those who needs talking down from the ledge when dealing with the dreaded Creeping Self-Doubts. As soon as I get feedback that things are going well, I can shake The Fear off pretty much straight away.

Being a freelance writer, you seldom get feedback. Sometimes you get a few notes. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you click 'Send' and you get a reply that simply says “Thanks”...and sometimes that's it.

You have to assume that it's OK. After all, it's not a “Thanks, but no thanks!”, so it must be OK, right?! And you move on to the next project.

No wonder we feel The Fear, eh?

* See previous post!