Fear of Failure?

When I meet people and they hear that I studied writing or that I like to write ( I seldom say I’m a writer because I’ve never been one to have confidence), they inevitably ask me about it. “What are you writing now?” They say, or “What do you like to write?” Their eyes light up and their cheeks flush and they inhale just a little too quickly. They try to hide their crush like any self respecting acolyte, but it's overtaken them already and I don't want to disappoint. 

There is no way I can admit the truth--that I am a displaced writer, an orphan searching for a place to land after ejecting (in black robes and a mountain of debt) from the hallowed halls of my university home. I cannot tell my admirers that most of my writing is memos and forms from my boring 9 to 5 office job for which I am 8 years and $80,000 overqualified. I cannot say that the rest of my writing is nothing more than my release into my own pensive: a reliquary for the deep darkness in my soul that can never come to light. 

So instead I am expertly vague. I mention the bare bones of a couple of projects I started two years ago and never finished. I tell them about the new project I am “conceptualizing,” but have yet to put words to paper. Only occasionally am I brave enough to tell an echo of the truth: “nothing,” I say, and I watch the light leave their eyes. They will not fall in literary love so easily again.

I am afraid to disappoint the few people who believe in me, but I am even more afraid to disappoint myself. For all my solutions and advice, most of me is just that chaotic creative who can't buckle down and focus and is still so afraid of failure. If I am fully introspective, though, I realize that there is another part that is not afraid of failure at all; she is afraid of what will happen if she succeeds.

And why is that? What self actualized woman, fully educated with a vision of who she wants to be and where she wants to go succumbs to a fear of success? How can such a fear even exists in me?

Do you have answers? I don't, but I don't doubt that even if you don't have answers, you've likely experienced my same fear. Let's work to overcome it together.

The one thing I do know is this: Fear does not define me. If I let it rule my success or my failure, I am letting it win. That cannot happen, and so I press on toward the vision. Adoring acolytes or not, the next time someone asks me what i'm working on, I will have a literary answer, and it will not be a lie.

Will you?

And the Oscar Goes to…

Tonight (well, last night at this point) was the Oscars. I don’t normally watch them, and I only saw maybe one or two of the movies that were up for awards (I don’t’ get out much between the thesis writing and the… well… thesis writing), but I watched them tonight because there was a party and there was champagne. Who wouldn’t watch the Oscars if there was champagne (Besides Neil Patrick Harris was hosting and wasn't he sexy as hell)?

Anyway, watching the Oscars got me thinking about hope. I’m sure not all of the nominees were necessarily waiting at the edge of their seats waiting to be called, but at least a few of them were. Wouldn’t you? We do the same thing all the time: I hope against hope that I will get famous someday or at least make a nice cushiony living off a career that seldom suffices to pay most people’s bills. I hope I will meet the right man and fall madly in love and raise beautiful children together who will grow up to be successful in their own rights. I hope to always have friends and to own a home with a yard where I can keep a garden and maybe some chickens.

Some of my hopes are realistic and perusable, and maybe some of my hopes are too outlandish to really believe in, but it is important that I keep them. It is important that I hold onto hope itself in all its forms because when it comes right down to it, hope is really all we’ve got – ever. Sure, sometimes a hope becomes a reality, but before it is reality you made it real in your mind and heart and that realness that it held in your mind guided your actions to make it a reality.

Hope (or it’s absence) is fodder for a writer. Without hope, there’s no story. So what do you hope and strive for? What does your character hope and strive for? Figure that out, and you are well on your way to creating what someone might call art someday – there’s a slim chance that you’re the next Hemingway, but keep hoping (and writing) and maybe someday your hope will come true.

The Mythical Writing Process (plus some intriguing thoughts about goat cheese)

When I was seven I wrote a three act Easter play involving a girl and an Easter rabbit. I don’t remember the play, save that it was a spectacular success, by which I mean that my mother and father and their friends were blown away by my prowess and creativity.

Despite my wild success wading in the shallow end of playwriting, I have never written another play since. Why, you ask? Well, the only reason I can pin down really has to do with why I struggle to even write stories when I wrote loads of them in grade school and middle school and high school and even college:

I’ve lost my process.

Yes, that link to the great Muse, the glorious sparkling dust of creativity, which so generously blessed me with endless stories and unquenchable drive has left me to rot here in graduate school in Wichita Kansas, with not an ounce of intoxicating inspiration (though I do have a nice bottle of intoxicating single malt scotch).

I visited Mexico as a teenager on a humanitarian mission. Together with several other teenagers, I visited destitute villages and helped them repair their homes and build schools. Motherly village women stuffed us full with fresh-made tortillas cooked on ancient cast iron wood burning stoves and slathered with creamy cheese made from the family goat’s milk and aged in pouches of stomach lining.

Goat cheese ages slowly, curdling first as it festers in the sun. Bacteria spreads, separating the solids, fermenting them. Maybe a bit of salt is added, the pouch kneaded. Maybe herbs or jalapenos are thrown in on occasion for a spicy kick.After the cheese has fermented long enough, its removed from the pouch and strained. pressed. refined.

Cheesemaking is a complex process. It requires knowledge, yes, but it requires experimentation and patience much more. The cheesemaker has to be willing to try new methods, and revise what’s not working. The cheesemaker must wait patiently for the cheese to age -- finish -- refine.

Writing is the same -- There has never been an ethereal muse fueling my mind with inspiration or feeding me with a cosmic umbilical cord to the divine; I’ve just forgotten how to work at attaining what I want. Somewhere along the line I decided my education should make it easier for me to write breathtaking prose without need for revision. Now I stare at a computer screen paralyzed, desperately begging a muse who isn’t there to save me from myself. Meanwhile, the rural Mexican woman are watching their cheeses, kneading them, refining them, turning them into masterpieces. They don’t need divinity to reach down with a dose of inspiration; they just work toward perfection daily, for the rest of their lives.