Fear. The single word evokes an emotional response and every fiction writer tries to weave some element of that emotion through out their stories regardless of their genre. It can be fear of not getting the girl/boy, losing the job, fear that the character will become someone evil (like Frodo with the Ring in The Fellowship of the Ring or Luke Skywalker in Star Wars as two simple examples), or fear of losing the day, or not being able to bring a criminal to justice, or of the giant dragon or other monster…or being entombed alive. Fear resonates throughout our stories in some fashion or the other.

Fear also resonates in the writer himself. Wither they are new to writing or have been writing and well published, there is an element of fear. It can be the fear of failure, that the story they are working on will not be successful and that they have wasted their time in writing it for all the months it took—or that the story will be such a failure that it will bring the sound of the pounding hammer driving home the last nail in the career’s coffin lid. It can also be the fear of success. The fear that the story will launch them into the arena where they will have to produce stories like the trapped princess in 1001 Arabian Nights while perhaps not earning enough at it to quit their full time job that interferes with their writing schedule and may cause a missed critical deadline or the interference of everyday life that comes with family or friends. It can also be the fear of creative burnout or even the fear of trying to write something outside of their norm or expected genres.

It may stand in the shadows behind the curtains waiting or behind a door ready to pounce. The question that every writer faces is what to do about the specter that sits on our shoulder like a demon whispering in our ear. Some writers learn to cope with that fear and to muzzle it—or write in spite of it. Other writers let it stop them from creating the stories that come to them and they kill the muse like an unfertilized neglected plant—or all out “musicde”.

If I am a writer, what should I do in the face of this fear? One is to ask why you are writing in the first place. After all, writing is a lonely job with no guarantee of any success. Very few writers will ever make it big and some will never be published. So why write? A second thing to do is to explore the power and the priority of your response to the first question…is it enough to push you past the fear? A way to think of this—imagine you are afraid of heights and are standing on the ledge of a building. The ground is far below and seems to spin as you look down. You gulp and cling to the wall. Why jump? Why even get on the ledge? Well, you are there because of a raging fire inside the building and you are trapped. Your only way to live is to jump off the building and hope that the firemen below holding the inflatable cushion will catch you and not let you die in the fall. What do you do? If your reason to write is as compelling as the fire in the building…do you jump and hope or do you stand there clinging to the building and let the muse within become cremated ash?

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for updates on my stories, blogs and events.

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