"Fears About the Self"

I get up every morning and do some writing meditation in my journal. Usually it is with some coffee and some fruit or yogurt or even nothing. I also do some reading. It is my fun time and I have some music going usually classical. No one is stirring in the house not even the cats for this time of the year I have the electric blanket on and they love the warmth. The dog is outside and will soon hit the screen door and someone will usually let her in.

Ah, then the hard part comes after my bath and I am dressed. Sitting myself in front of the computer in my office and starting my writing on whatever project I am going to work on in the morning. Oh, it is so hard to get started. I have the music that I listen to which does not interfere with my concentration. The heat is on.

And I am scared. I am scared I will not be able to write as well as I did yesterday or that I won't be able to get myself together and write at all. I am scared that what I do put down will be pure crap. I am afraid that I will never get the book I am working on published or even finished. I don't even know what genre it will be for it has changed so many different times. If I get it published, no one who tries to read it will like it. No one will understand what I am trying to do. No one will like my characters and I really care for them. How will I get the editing done and the letter describing it mailed out? At that point I either eat myself silly or I go back to bed and sleep. When I wake up, I feel awful because I really did want to work on my book and other things.

There is a book that someone told me about that addressed many of the problems that I have for I have had them for many years. I have never stopped my writing meditation but I stopped writing stories and books but not in my head. I stopped putting them down. I used to think I was the only one who did this but I have discovered other writers who do this. They report it as a struggle to put the stories down on paper.

Anyhow, the book is "Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards of Artmaking" by David Bayles and Ted Orland (The Image Continuum: 1993) actually does address this issue and others. I keep it around so I can re-read it now and then. I got it in 2005. The authors say in their chapter, "Fears About Yourself", that when you act out of fear, your fears come true. I think that is probably right. They give the example of a oarsman who had recently learned how to work the oars and moves the new boat across the water. There is only one rock that is dead center in the water. He zigs lift and zigs right to miss it. And then he crashes right into the rock. He was afraid of the rock.

The authors state there are two families of fear when you are writing. There is fear about yourself as a writer and then there is the fear about what your readers will think about you. The fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work while the fears about your readers prevent you from doing your own work.

Well, the authors don't have any magic words that will make one's fear go away. In any situation where there are troubles or problems I have always found that the answer is always mindfulness. You have to get in the present moment and stay there. It is not easy doing that. It is like listening to music and hearing each note. Sometimes you can do it and sometimes life feels like it is going a million miles an hour. Right now, life seems slow because things are quiet and Roger Eno is on the stereo. The grandchildren that were visiting have gone home. Everyone is lying down. Other times, it is not so easy. I am always reminded of this television program years ago called Doogie Howser, M.D. or something like that. He was a doctor and an youngster. At the end of the day and at the end of the program he would sit at his computer and write about his day and the audience would see the words appear as he read them. That is what this blog reminds me right now.

I have written about a writer who makes herself put her fanny in a chair and does not do anything else not even search the Internet about her favorite actor (she loves Sam Neill and I do too and just wanted to put his picture in here.) or anything until she gets her work done. She works by the time. She works at least two hours even if all she can do is put one finger on a key. I sit down and think I need to do some exercise, put the crock pot on for soup for dinner, read my blogs including this one, feed the dogs or cats, make some business calls and on and on. I have discovered that my doorbell does not work. I have not fixed it. I have a table out there for packages. Jehovah Witnesses have not given up. They leave their magazines on my door. The real reason that I do all of that is fear. Who am I fooling?

As the end of the book states, it all comes down to choice between giving your writing your best shot and risking that the villagers will come for you with their torches and pitchforks or not tying at all and feeling unhappy that you let those moments slip by and doing nothing. At the end of an evening in which I watched some empty television programs I try to remember what they were about the next day. I can't. But I can remember what I wrote about years after I put the words down even if they never found the light of being published. They seemed alive to me. That's a good choice.