Slay Your Fears with Nancy Chase

Today's Slay Your Fears guest blog post comes from Nancy Chase! She's written a really fantastic post about fear and being a writer, which I know a lot of us can relate to.

Check out the full post after the jump!

Fear and the Writer

by Nancy Chase

I told myself I was working on my book, when I wasn’t. I told myself I was too busy, too tired, too distracted. I told myself I was lazy, and needed to work harder. But the truth was, I was afraid.

I started out life with all the signs of being some kind of young writing prodigy. I learned to read by age four; began writing stories and poems for fun by age seven; wrote, directed, and starred in a play by age eleven; wrote for and edited my school’s literary magazine throughout high school, got a perfect score on the verbal section of my PSAT exam in half the allotted time; and published my first story in a paying magazine by age eighteen. I wanted more than anything to be a writer. So why did it take me until age 49 to finally finish my first novel?

Fear. Fear is the rot that gnaws at you until your productivity collapses in a heap of rubble. Was I actually busy, tired, distracted, and lazy during all those years? Of course, at times. But no more so than hundreds of other writers who actually did produce books at reasonable intervals. If I’m honest with myself, I have to admit I probably wasn’t even more afraid than most of those writers. I was no great prodigy of exceptional fear. I just hadn’t learned to deal with it in a productive way.

To my credit, I never actually gave up writing. I kept trying different things to get around my fear. I wrote (and published, and occasionally won awards for) poetry when I really wanted to be writing novels. I worked as a magazine editor. I ran my own business as a freelance book doctor. I attended writing workshops, joined writing groups, and read writing magazines. I tried everything I could think of except actually enduring the fear and doing what I really wanted to do.

Somewhere along the way—and perhaps this is especially so for those who display talent at an early age—we get the idea that creativity is supposed to be easy. It’s supposed to flow from a pure fountain of inspiration, followed by immediate, seemingly effortless success. Oh sure, we’re prepared for there to be challenges, but in an abstract, movie-montage sort of way. We imagine staying up until dawn, drinking way too much coffee, as we furiously type our climactic scenes. We imagine collecting a few rejection ships before our eventual, inevitable discovery by a keen-eyed agent who snags us an amazing publishing contract and movie deal. We imagine being comforted by indignant friends when that ONE reviewer says something snide about our beloved book. We imagine all these things and think ourselves prepared. We think we know how it will be.

What we don’t imagine is being crippled into years of immobility by insidious, creativity-eating fear so stealthy we don’t even recognize that’s what it is. We don’t imagine being frozen at the starting gate before we can even begin our race.

“I have writer’s block,” we say, excusing our lack of progress as if we’ve chanced to catch a slight cold that will soon pass if we get enough rest and drink plenty of fluids. Or we bury ourselves in other activities, other pursuits, always somehow giving our writing last priority, something to be done when all other responsibilities are completed—a time that our flurry of other tasks safely assures will never come.

By “we” I of course mean “me.” I did all those things. For years I managed to do just enough writing to fool myself into believing I was still “working on it,” while my twin fears—that paralyzing duo, Fear of Failure and Fear of Success—secretly worked in my subconscious to ensure that I never actually finished any of the projects that were most important to me.

So what changed? How did I finally conquer my fear, finish my first novel, and now have no doubt that finishing all the next ones will be easier from now on?

I failed. I gave my all, for ten years, to the only thing I’ve ever loved as much as I love writing, and ultimately failed at it.
Let’s back up a decade. With my writing creeping aimlessly along at speeds that make George R.R. Martin look like the Roadrunner of cartoon fame, I detoured instead into tackling a different lifelong dream: running my own small farm.

For ten years I did just that. I raised heritage breeds of horses, sheep, pigs, cows, and chickens. I learned to shear sheep, spin wool, milk cows, churn butter, render lard, make soap, butcher chickens, cure bacon, and all the rest. I worked seven days a week, 365 days a year, tending emergencies, births, and deaths late into the night, sleeping in the barn when necessary, or not sleeping at all. When I wasn’t doing all those things, I was on the computer working on ways to market the livestock and other products the farm produced. I almost never had a day off, even if I was sick, and sometimes more than a month would go by without me even leaving the farm at all.

I’ve been kicked in the back by a horse, attacked by a hormonal ram, threatened by an angry boar, got tendonitis from milking the cow, caught e-coli from a sick calf, and collected a few permanent scars from injuries on the job. Every day, in every kind of weather, whether I felt like it or not, I did the work. I didn’t wait to be inspired. I didn’t make excuses. I did the work.

All of this is my long way of explaining that, when not frozen by my crippling fears, I demonstrated for ten years that I was perfectly capable of throwing my heart into my chosen vocation, and still loving it even when it was difficult, tedious, backbreaking, or heartbreaking.

Farming is a beautiful, idyllic, rewarding endeavor. But over time, it’s also a lifestyle that grinds you down and eats you alive, physically, mentally, emotionally, and financially. After ten years, my body, my soul, and my bank account couldn’t take it anymore. A chronic knee injury, unable to heal because my farm chores never allowed it any time to rest, was the final straw. Unable to walk without excruciating pain, I spent a despondent year selling off all my beloved animals and feeling like the biggest failure in the world.
But something happened in the aftermath of my great failure. I looked around and discovered that I was still here. Going through it hadn’t destroyed me, hadn’t injured me at all. In fact, I felt pretty good, like spring after winter. Like sun after storm.

When I started poking around my old writing files again, I started to feel even better. No longer exhausted by farm labor, I found myself with energy to write again. Sometimes the words came easily, and when they didn’t, I was able to push onward anyway. Compared to carrying hay, feed, and water for 60 sheep, 30 pigs, 4 cows and 30 chickens during a February sleet storm while sick with the flu, forcing myself to meet my daily word count goals even on days when I didn’t feel like it didn’t seem all that hard.

In the wake of my great failure, my fears have taken on a whole new (and greatly diminished) perspective. If what I write today is terrible, so what? Nobody is going to die because of it. I’ll just write something better tomorrow. If what I publish doesn’t make much money, well, that’s life. I’ll just apply myself to figuring out better marketing methods. If (and yes, I really did fear this—fear of success, remember?) somehow in the future I become a runaway bestseller and find my deeply reclusive nature overwhelmed by the demands of fame and intrusive fans, then I will learn to be appreciative and gracious while still maintaining firm boundaries to protect my personal time and space that is so important to me.

The thing is, I still have all the exact same fears. I hear them running in the background of my thoughts. But they no longer sound like ominous prophets warning me away from disaster. Now they sound like children scared of shadows, with no power to freeze me into immobility. I’ve been through failure and out the other side, more or less unscathed. I trust my ability to weather the storms, and as a result, my writing productivity has never been better.

~*~

Nancy Chase writes fantasy, science fiction, fairy tales, and paranormal fiction, often inspired by mythology, dreams, folklore, or history. Born in Maine, she now lives in Virginia, USA, with her husband and an ever-changing family of pets.

Be sure to follow Nancy on Facebook and Twitter