“Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last.”
Ralph Keyes
When an idea is a seed in your mind, it is the most perfect it will ever be. This is an inevitable and painful truth, as true for you as it is for F. Scott Fitzgerald. That seed is a little gem of perfection, and you can see it… or the important bits anyway. The bits that make that idea so electrifying to write. They’re clear as a summer lake in your head. The perfect arc, the incredible fight, the gut-wrenching backstory. It’s so vivid, so perfect.
Then the idea forms roots, weaving them into your head as it prepares for it’s launch into reality. The characters flesh out a little more, you can see the eye-catching scenes, maybe even the semblance of the structure you’ll squish it into. You get a little excited as you think of a quirk to make that character more distinct, a line to make that scene more poignant.
And then, it happens.
You sit down at the blank page and that idea breaches through the walls of your imagination, a sapling stretching out through your fingers and into reality. And soon enough, it hurts.
You see in the sober light of day how threadbare a character is, how confusing the set-up, how purpose-less the middle. Like a giant redwood born into a bonsai-sized glass box it strains against the boundaries of reality. Each moment of seeing your dream in the cold light of day hurts.
After a while the fear sets in. The fear that you’ll never make the idea into a semblance of that perfection you first glimpsed, that the idea’s not enough to even build a piece of work off of. Or worse, it is, but you’re not good enough to do it.
Then like that the same piece you couldn’t wait to write becomes something you dread. A constant reminder of your inadequacy. Every time you open it up you feel it’s branches straining against the glass box that you can only expand through painful, concerted effort. Like pulling a mountain apart atom by atom.
Then, maybe, you stop. You put down the pen and never pick it up again. It’s roots wither softly in your mind as you go about your life. The painful reminder of perfection you once glimpsed shoved away into a darkened room, where you can no longer see the branches straining for life as it decays in the dark.
The thing is, the fear, the reminder of your inadequacy is a deep and true sign that the thing you’re writing, is worth it. You only fear the story that you know deep down that only you can tell. Something the world needs, even if it’s only one little kid’s world ten years from now tracing a finger down the dusty spine of a book shelf. Your tiny tree could be the shelter they need to grow their own. Just as mine was grown under the shelter of Pratchett’s tree.
The Fellowship Of Ink 