Writer's Block: Fear of Failure

Today, since I have done nothing but write essays, I present to you an essay about Writer's Block So, behold. Enjoy. Ignore documentation. It's necessary.

(Also ignore bit CITATION things. That's me being too lazy right now to figure out how to document websites with no author and no page number.)

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I banged my head on my desk and groaned. It was midnight on a school night, and here I was, sitting alone, my workspace illuminated only by a silver desk lamp hovering over my laptop. A blank document blared white light on my face on my laptop screen, where I had just left an sentenced unfinished. A verb dangled like a rock climber without equipment, threatening to fall into the blank emptiness below if I didn’t block its exit with a period. What on earth did I think I was doing?  Did I actually think I could finish this novel before my eighteenth birthday? Sure, I was seven years into it, but I had over four hundred pages typed and I was far from finishing.

I’ve had writer’s block for nearly a year…and I’m not talking about the writer’s block some authors (including myself) have claimed when they’re really just lazy. I’m talking about full-on, physically painful writer’s block that begins to make you wonder if you’re really a writer at all. Writer’s block is defined as “a psychological inhibition preventing a writer from proceeding with a piece” (Merriam-Webster). All who have done any sort of writing—essays, emails, letters, stories, poems—have suffered from it. Some, like best-selling author Tom Clancy, claim writer’s block is “pure laziness,” because he can finish a novel in a year and a half and only get writer’s block for “11 minutes” (qtd. in Hiaasen 3E). For some, this may be true. For others, though, writer’s block is a much more real threat.

Writer’s block can be caused by an array of different things. Loss of interest in a piece is one of the main problems, in which there is only one solution: Write something else. When you are interested and excited about writing something, however, and freeze up whenever you sit down to actually write it, something besides laziness or disinterest is at work. Art correspondent for the South Florida Sun, Rob Hiassan, diagnoses writer’s block as such:

“Fear — that’s the rub. Writers often fear their writing isn’t any good. Writers are fearful that others won’t like their work. They fear their best work is behind them, waving at them in the rearview mirror and laughing. Behind the scenes of great literature have been writers battling great periods of creative dormancy. William Shakespeare suffered ‘the utter pain of blank . . .’” (3E).

Seems legitimate, right? I came to realize this painful truth while writing the end of my first novel. I poured my heart into four hundred pages of prose, and when it came time to tie it all together into one heart-rending conclusion, I was terrified that it wouldn’t live up to my expectations, or that if I didn’t write the absolute perfect ending, my entire novel would dwindle off into mediocrity.

Other fears are sure to cause writer’s block as well. Award-winning thriller writer William Deverell talks about his own experience with fear and writer’s block, explaining, “My fear was, my Can-Litish father would disapprove if I wrote in the genre which I eventually did” (qtd. in Ross C.7). J.K. Rowling, world-renown best-selling author of the hugely popular Harry Potter series, even suffered paralyzing writer’s block, explaining, “I’ve only suffered writer’s block badly once, and that was during the writing of Chamber of Secrets. I had my first burst of publicity about the first book and it paralyzed me. I was scared the second book wouldn’t measure up . . .” (CITATION)

This fear of failure paralyzes writers perhaps worst of all. Dancers can save a flawed performance with just a few perfectly executed moves. In art, nearly anything goes. In writing, a bad work can’t be saved by a few good lines. In writing, everything must be constructed perfectly to represent reasonable thought. Stories must have a sense of believability to them, and characters must be as realistic as possible (and people wonder why writer’s have issues).

Could there possibly be a cure for writer’s block, then? Is there a cure for a crippling fear of failure? Sure there is: Just write. Deverell mentioned his fear of his father disapproving of his writing; he continues the story by saying, “What finally happened was, I got a page out and the dam burst” (qtd. in Ross C.7). Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, famous french novelist and screenwriter during the late 1800s and early 1900s, claims, “Writing only leads to more writing” (CITATION). In my experience, it’s true; the more you write, the more you want to write. And when you push past the barriers of your fear and throw yourself recklessly into your writing, you are throwing kindling on the spark of your ardor. Passion drives good writing more than anything in the world. Rob Hiaasen writes, “Think harder about a singular passion. This story, too, must be about a passion for one simple thing. The passion for a story.”