Thursday, February 19, 2009

Fear- Life's Greatest (first posted April 2007)

Starting a new novel is much harder than it sounds. This will be my fourth novel, not counting a couple that were never finished, and I keep thinking it will get easier each time. But this time it’s harder. Maybe because this time I know someone else besides my wife will be reading it.

When I told my critique group members that one of the emotions I was feeling after getting signed by an agent was fear, no one was more surprised than myself. Why on earth would reaching this milestone cause fear? You’d think fear would lessen as my career progressed. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said “fear defeats more people than anything else in the world..” I couldn’t agree more. Fear kept me from having children until I finally mustered up the courage to become a father. Maybe the upside is that I’m a better father because of waiting, but it also means one of my children never got to meet their paternal grandmother, and the other was only two months old before she died. Fear robbed me of the joy of watching them together.

It’s much the same story with writing. Fear kept me from seriously attempting to write a book for several years. Once I beat that, it prevented me from sending my work out for a couple of more years. And now that I’m making real progress, it’s rearing it’s ugly head again. It’s a clever thing, fear. It knows what scares you. It knows just what to say to get you out of that chair and do almost anything else rather than allow you to live up to your full potential. Whether or not you believe in the devil himself, there is indeed something assailing our spirit, holding us back at every step.

So last night, I sat down at the computer and forced my fingers to start to work. I typed “Chapter one” and wrote a paragraph. It wasn’t a bad paragraph either. It’s nothing that would set the literary world on fire. But it was decent. More importantly, it was progress. With each key stroke, that awful little voice that tells us we are nothing, that we are crazy for believing anyone would ever want to read something we wrote, that we aren’t worth being loved, or that we can’t lose weight, or that we can get a better job… that voice grew quieter.

Fear will always be there, lurking in the dark parts of our soul. But there is one remedy: courage. And how do we find our courage? Courage is, quite simply, choosing not to listen to fear. It is action, whereas Fear is inaction. So, face it head on by doing exactly what it doesn’t want you to do.

I doubt that I will ever be able to eliminate fear, but I can do the next best thing. I can rob of its power, until it becomes a laughing stock, a faint shadow of a once great and terrible monster. John Quincy Adams wrote that courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air. The beautiful thing is, that talisman exists in each and every one of us, just waiting for us to find it.

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