You Will Come Up With Something
Anxiety. Writing. The best of friends! I have piles of journals that I un-ironically filled with writing about how hard it was to write.
Why does writing make us so anxious? I doubt aspiring bridge engineers spend days procrastinating on a bridge design because they’re anxious about if they’re “really engineers.” (Engineers: please let me know if I am wrong about this.) For me, and I know I’m not unique, there’s a whole mess of different reasons. Fear of failure and fear of success. Bad work habits. Fear of change. The fear of accessing difficult emotions through your characters. The fear of moving to Los Angeles.
Most of the time, these anxieties lead to the same place: procrastination town. There’s plenty of productivity blogs with hacks to beat procrastination and I could write about a bunch myself. (A few years of therapy is the best “productivity hack” I’ve ever found.)
But I want to point out one reason for writing anxiety that I rarely see mentioned in these places. Probably because it’s so obvious it sounds almost too dumb to name:
The fear that you won’t be able to come up with anything.
It’s not that you’re worried what you’re going to write is bad (though you’re probably worried about that, too). You’re worried that you won’t be able to write it at all. But I promise- you will come up with something.
Last month I was given a writing assignment. Three years ago, I would have freaked out. I would have cleared my schedule so I had ALL THE TIME to work on it, then thought about whether or not I could actually even do it the entire time, then do it at the last minute. It would have felt awful. But this time, I figured it would probably take me a week to complete. I worked on it for a week. I finished around when I thought I would, and I handed it in. I had virtually no anxiety about getting it done. Why couldn’t I have just felt that way the whole dang time?
Because I didn’t always know that I would come up with something. Now, I’ve done it enough times to know that I will.
When bridge engineers want to engineer a bridge, I doubt they’re worried that they’ll be able to “come up with something.” Because they’re going to come up with a bridge. The same is true with stories! But it’s much harder to see stories that way. Because stories are a little bit magical.
A good story is good precisely because it obscures how it was made. That’s the reason I wanted to make stories in the first place: they seemed like magic! Like they must have emerged from the head of the author fully-formed. Writing was impossible because it was literal magic; you had to be a wizard to do it.
I wonder if there’s some number of stories that you finish and you suddenly get the sense: oh yeah! A story is like a bridge! You build it beam by beam. You need to have certain things to make it structurally sound, and every bridge is a little different so it takes some time to figure that out. And then you make the bridge pretty or particularly useful or emotionally gratifying by adding fun architectural touches and cool lighting (or, you know, whatever makes bridges exciting). Is the number three stories? Ten stories? For me, it was about eight years of writing, most of the beginning and middle of that time taken up by not writing very much due to anxiety.
Of course experience doing a thing makes doing it easier. But I do wish someone had said this to me. You need to sit down and do the work. Once you finish some stories, you’ll feel more confident that you can do it. A little bit of that writing anxiety can slip away, making it easier to write, making it less anxiety-producing. A virtuous cycle. You will come up with something.