Informational article on How to Work With Our Fears

[Sunny Irene Roth]

How to Embrace Your Fear as a writer

Irene S. Roth​

So many writers are plagued by fears when they write, regardless of whether they are beginning writers or more mature writers. They have so many negative thoughts and feelings about their writing career and their ability to complete these projects. This negative mindset can wreak havoc with a writer’s self-confidence and overall productivity levels.

So, it is important to get a handle of these fears and embrace them. Yes, I did say embrace your fears. The reason why I believe this is important is because if you don’t embrace your fears they will embrace you and your writing time and possibly whole writing projects. So, we have to get a deal with these fears and come to terms with them.

Here are a few ways to do embrace your fears.

• Sit down with your writing journal and write down all of your fears. Take your time coming up with your list. Be as honest as possible. You may want to spend a week or so compiling your list. One way for you to generate this list is to carry your notebook with you at all times, especially when you sit down to write. As soon as you have a negative thought make sure that you write it down right away.
• Spend a week or also writing down all your negative thoughts about your writing. Again, spend as much time as you need. But usually a week or so is a good amount of time so that you could take note of any recurrences.
• Once you have your list of fears and negative thoughts, look at both. Write them down on a separate sheet of paper. Then, choose one negative statement and one fear to work at stamping out over the next few week. Choose one that isn’t very emotional but yet consistently on your mind. Then decide to replace it with a more positive statement over the next few weeks. Decide what this statement will be and practice it in real situations such as when you sit down to write.

For instance, if one of your negative statements is that I will never finish this project, change this statement to I plan to finish this project this time.

By taking these steps, you will be gaining self-confidence as a writer, and you will be embracing your fears. This is a recipe for success and for happiness as a writer.

Try it!