Hi! This particular fear was once sent to me via Twitter by a writer. So, let's take a look at this classic writers' fear and see how we feel about it. I’ll share my response to the fear, then I’d love to hear your own thoughts in comments.
Tell you what: why don’t we find out if you’re writer material or not? What’s the worst thing that can happen - you try to write and fail and decide you’d rather be a car mechanic or an accountant?
Who’s going to even know you once wanted to be a writer (besides all the friends you told, and all the strangers you told on Twitter, obviously: let’s forget about them, cough)?
Until you try, you have little way of knowing whether you have the word ‘writer’ carved through your entirety, like a stick of rock. Still, if the desire burns within you, you should at least have a damn good stab at this before deciding it’s not your bag.
Decide what you want, then make it happen. Or at least try. Please don’t pre-emptively rule yourself out of the game. Even if you do try and fail, you’re allowed to try again, as many times as you damn well please. That’s the nature of writing and writers. We all learn by failing. Nothing teaches you a lesson like a good failure. So brace yourself for failure and give this a shot.
Chances are, you won’t decide to opt out of writing after just one project. Neither will one project, if I’m being brutally honest, necessarily transform you into a professional writer or propel you into the big time. The chances are it’ll never be made or published. Might not even be read.
That sounds discouraging and counter-productive, right? But it’s true and there’s an important point here. The vast majority of writers have to write loads of things, in order to learn their craft. Over time, they become sufficiently skilled to write something remarkable - to tell a great story in a fantastic way. That kind of achievement takes time and practice and failure and frustration and joy.
What I’m trying to do here, is take the pressure off you. It’s all too easy to pile too much pressure on yourself and think that your first story has to be Citizen Kane or War And Peace. Even though, as discussed previously, here on Scary Truths Of Writing, an edge born of fear can provide a useful and powerful motivation, too much pressure is bad.
Your first goal should be to write and finish something - not to change the world. Of course, I’d dearly love you to prove me wrong and sign a seven-figure deal with your first project, and you might well do so, but that kind of anomaly will probably only happen when you loosen up, cut yourself some slack and don’t expect your first, second or indeed seventh project to be amazing.
I wrote seven feature scripts before my eighth, Stormhouse, was made into a film in 2011. I made several abortive attempts at writing novels before I wrote my first published novel, 2005’s Friday The 13th: Hate-Kill-Repeat… and then privately wrote a few more before my next, The Last Days Of Jack Sparks, actually hit shelves. I’m pretty sure that’s somewhere around the average for writers. It’s good to keep this kind of long-term plan in mind, so you have a sense of scale and don’t demand ludicrously high achievements from yourself, right off the bat. Write as well as you possibly can, at all times, but don’t panic and give up because you feel your work isn’t about to make anyone’s head explode with astonishment.
What is ‘writer material’ anyway? Consider the vast array of writers who ever lived. They’re as varied as the human race themselves.
The only traits they almost certainly all share are imagination, persistence, a sense of story, determination and basic writing skills.
If you have a couple of those when you’re starting out, then I have faith in you. I also have faith that you can develop the others in time.
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All comments on this topic welcome below! To what extent do you relate to this fear?
Also feel free to nominate one of your own writer’s fears in a comment, if you’d like me to tackle it in a future post! Thanks to everyone who already did this - and rest assured that I didn’t forget. You may have noticed that this new blog has been slow to start, and that’s because family illness has slowed my work down this summer, but now I’m looking to hit you with at least one post each week.
I will get to those pesky fears and deal with every last one of them, so be sure to subscribe using the box below if you haven’t already.
UPDATE
I have now left Substack, as of Jan 2024, due to the founders’ stance on platforming Nazi content.
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