Fear and Being a Writer

"If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood," -Peter Handke

Now that I'm eyebrow deep in editing - don't even get me started on how awful it is - I realize something that I've always held within me.  Every writer has it - the rationally irrational fear that their novel won't be perfect.  That we can edit and edit and edit but it will never be what we want, like clay drying out to an unmovable state.

I am finding this fear to be viscerally real. With a 100,000 word novel, I find that there are so many components and trashed ideas and ideas in the making and bad things and good things that it will always be this swirling whirlwind.

But not only in terms of the writer, that it will always be stressful and frustrating to us, but that our worst nightmares will come true. That everything we've poured our heart and soul into won't be perfect.  Then it won't translate to the reader. And then we have failed.

This week, we had to do a speech on fear, and I spoke about the fear of oblivion. That I will never live a full enough life.  That I missed it.  That I missed another gem that this life had to offer. And this is what I fear so deeply about my writing.  Not that I will never get published or that people will hate my book or that I'll never make money off of it, but that my readers will have missed the point of the story.

And I pray that no matter how verbose my writing, how Swiss-cheesy my plots, how foil thin my characters, that why I'm writing shines through anyways. That the never-ending message of Christ shows through and wipes away any impurities and strikes the heart of my reader.  Because if it does that, then I have succeeded in ways beyond any words.

As always, keep writing my word-shakers,

~The WordShaker