The Fear

My hero, Neil Gaiman once said "Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins." You can read the rest of his post on his blog at http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2004/02/on-writing.asp (I really recommend reading it. It is interesting and witty and wonderful to see inside a creative persons head)

Too often, in my case, the blank piece of paper is winning. I will look at it and my spine will go cold. What do I know about writing? What could I possibly write that other people would want to read? In fact - there are no ideas left inside my echoey empty head so I can't write anything anyway.

And so, coward that I am, I write nothing.

In the above post, Mr Gaiman writes that:

"I think for me the tipping point was when I was a very young man. It was late at night, and I was lying in bed, and I thought, as I often thought, "I could be a writer. It's what I want to be. I think it's what I am." And then I imagined myself in my eighties, possibly even on my deathbed, thinking that same thought, in a life when I'd never written anything. And I'd be an old man, with my life behind me, still telling myself I was really a writer -- and I would never know if I was kidding myself or not."

I worry that this will be me - that I will fool myself for the rest of my life, that I am a writer - and never write anything for fear of proving myself wrong.

So that's me, fear stripped bare. And no, I don't want to go to my grave having done nothing. I want to conquer this fear and prove myself one way or the other.

So blank piece of paper - en garde!