Battling Fear

As a survival mechanism, fear is very important.  It keeps us alive.  We heard a strange noise, we are afraid and our adrenalin increases so we can run away or stay and fight.

But when fear becomes so intense that we do not act or we act out of fear then fear itself is the enemy.  In my view this sort of behavior is rampant.  It dominants much of why we hate and dislike others:  we fear the differences.  And it is the cause behind much violence because if I hate you enough to act on it, then I am likely to harm or kill you.

In terms of writing, fear can stop you from committing words to the page.  You fear failure or perhaps you fear success.  We call it writer's block.  I've written about my experience with writer's block early in this blog so I won't repeat it.  Instead, let me talk about fear.

Fear and I are old companions.  I've never been afraid to fail; hell, most of my life is about failure.  I was the embodiment of Charlie Brown, you see.  Rather, I had a fear of success.  It is easy to fail.  You don't try very hard and fail is assured.  Succeeding is much harder and for many years I was afraid of succeeding because then I had to maintain that level of success.  People expected it of me and at the time I was ruled by the expectation of others.

But when I burned out and had to relearn how to write, all that went away.  I let go all those mind games (one never really knows what other people expect of you) and focused on making peace with myself.  You see, one of our biggest fears is we aren't who we think we are.  I think I'm a nice person but in fact I'm not. I'm a mean, insensitive, bastard on some level and I had been fighting with myself about this for years.  But when I stopped fighting and harnessed that mean SOB for writing, things began to click.

These days I see no point to be afraid of too much.  Sure, you want to be afraid of radiation exposure or anthrax, but the odds of such exposure are small.  But if you are afraid of someone because they are different I see no point in this.  My advice is to exam those feelings honestly and objectively.  I think you will find there is no ground for them and you might even discover nice people you can be friends with instead of fearing.

And I'm not saying it is easy to combat one's fear.  It took me months and occasionally I relive the experience.  But it is worth the effort I think especially if fear is holding you back from writing or experiencing some part of life.

So fight your fear and come out writing.

I Have a Dream Too

Today is a holiday in the United States to honor a man who had a vision and dream of a better world for all.

It would be hubris to compare myself to such a one but I too have a dream-- a writer's dream. I dream of being published. While that time may be close at hand it does not feel that way.

But I am also concerned about the walls that still exist along the road to publication. I think they are still quite high. I may have scaled them at last but many have not. Of course many do not want to. They take the path of least resistance: self-publishing. But I think that's because there is tyranny surrounding the publication process. I dream of a world without this tyranny, one in which all voices can be heard.

Then there are personal dreams of finishing the fantasy series I started. Seven books is a lot to write and I only have partial drafts of Books 4 to 7. So I wonder of I will finish it. I don't have any intention to abandon it but accidents happen. I would hate to leave my readers hanging.

But today is a day to envision the world as it should be and not as it is. To dream our dreams and find ways to make them happen. To strive to make the world a better place.

So what's your dream?

Sometimes I Get Lost

There's a line from the Shelley poem, "The world is too much with us." by which the speaker of the poem laments that far to often we forget to stop and appreciate the things around us. 

I've have frequently felt that; it is easy to get caught up in the world and all the things that come at you.  I frequently lose sight of what is truly important to me and get caught up in the crisis of the moment instead of standing back and taking stock of what's going on.

But that's life.  My task is to stay on the course I've set for myself while the storms of life battered me and threaten to out me off course into some rocks or shoals or coral reef.  And that's not easy.  It requires I remember my plan and a steady hand on the tiller.  It requires strength.  Not physical strength, but strength of character and resolve.  The ability to see something through to the end.

I don't know that I am that strong; I suspect I'm more persistent (a good trait in a writer) and too stupid to know when to quit.  But the effect is the same.  I reach my goal but not after getting lost in unfamiliar territory.

The best advice on this is a line from Hamlet, "To thy own self be true."  Know your mind and stay the course.  Ignore the siren song of intrusions, personal disasters, and emotional upsets.  The writer, in this way, is part Jedi knight, mastering fear, anger, and hatred, and part scientist, seeking to reveal the truth through his or her writing.

That's probably a bit over romanticized but still true, I think.

So hang in there and do the best you can.  After all, each of us is only human.  We will falter and stumble and fail.  And when we do, we need to get up, dust ourselves off and start all over again.

Anticipating the Future

Like most major cities, Boston's residential areas are divided into neighbors. As a boy, I grew up in Mattapan, at the southern end of the city. I was happy there for eleven years living in a two-family house. My grandparents upstairs and my father, mother, and brothers downstairs.

The summer before I entered junior high school we moved to a suburb south of the city. There I discovered my ability to weave tales and focusing on writing. It is amazing that I did this because we were not welcome by the town we had moved to. That fall, my two older brothers and myself were harassed mostly for differences in our religious beliefs, but partly also because we were outsiders and the neighbor was quite xenophobic. That Halloween our house was egged and overall we were made to feel very unwelcome.

I remember dreading going to school each day, fearing the harassment I would have to endure. But most of my fears never materialized. One of the curses of having a good imagination is I can always envision something far more awful than reality actual produces. I suppose that's one reason I write fiction; my reality is by far more uneventful than my stories. But I digress.

The moral of that experience I realized many years later: anticipating the future is pointless. Worrying about the future is equally useless because mostly of our fears never come to pass. Life has a way of throwing curves and when you least expect it. These are little tests of character. I usually failure at them but I don't worry about them. I learn from each experience so that the next test is easier to deal with.

I also try to stay focus and deal with the present. If I'm lucky I plan a little for the future too. I don't plan too far ahead because often, when I do, it is for naught. Something happens to make those plans impossible. For example, I plan in October my vacation the following spring. My wife and I decide to go to Atlantic City. But that winter a bad storm damages part of the house and the money that would've gone to vacation must now go to repair the damage.

Moral 2: We need patience. As writers we need a lot of patience because we wait a lot of the time. We wait for stories to be accepted. We wait for them to be printed. We wait for reviews. We wait for our careers to take off. The anticipation can be as crushing as fear or doubt, two of my best friends and two of my worse enemies.

This is another reason why I deal with the present because if I get too far ahead of myself, I waste time planning for things that never happen. However, I must admit I'm terrible at waiting. I really hate waiting  and my only trick to get through it all is not to think about it. That's not hard; usually there are lots of other things that need my attention.

Most of us have a thick skin since we deal with reviews and critiques regularly. We also know how to focus on our work or we'd never gotten anything out the door in the first place. Using those skills, you should be able to cultivate a new one: the ability to ignore the irrelevant. By 'irrelevant' I mean things beyond our control or things we cannot change. For example, once the story is out of my hands and published I am forced to accept the comments of others good or bad. I am forced to accept the publication schedule of the publishing house that I submitted my work to. So there's nothing for me to do but stay focused and keep writing, promote the book, show up for blog tours, or a book signing, or whatever else I plan to do to sell my work.

We need this ability because without it we are likely to stress over things that are out of our hands. And, speaking strictly in medical terms, stress is far worse than fear or doubt. Stress can kill if you do not control it. Stress can keep up at night when you should sleep and stress can eliminate all coping mechanisms you have turning you into a non-functioning mess. Consequently, if you don't have this ability yet, I recommend trying to cultivate it through regular practice.

So stay focused and keep writing. The future will take care of itself.