Scared sh#tless IS a writing strategy

take from the me...if you aren't crapping yourself, you need to dig deeper

Every two weeks, I say to my partner D that my memoir is “screaming at me”. He has no clue what I mean, as in, he doesn’t hear silent screams of memories and self-righteous sentences in his head while he is on work calls, driving or walking our dog, Cooper. #luckybastard

Do you know the frustration of a ping! from your backmind, that place where the best writing nuggets live? You know the kidney jab that happens when your pen is at home or your phone is dead? How does it hit you?

I want time to work on my book so badly I keep threatening to cut and run.

“Maybe I’ll just get in the car and drive north until I run out of Canada,” I say to my bestie."

“Dude, that would take weeks, maybe months…largest land mass in the world and all that, right?”

I’m craving time to just be in my next book. I need dozens of blocks of six hours and I don’t have them readily at hand. Who ever does.

The conundrum of writing…we crave the time to pour out what we’re channeling but we know from exerpeince that we would waste that time wiping down the baseboards or picking paint splatters from the windows if we had it. Amiright?

I toggle between … I should take a month off and I should commit to squeezing my memoir into the cracks around my client’s projects.

I’ve done the calculations to the penny of how much money I would need to disappear, as in off-grid cabin in the woods disappear (think Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney except less Scottish and less diabolical). I try inventing lines to refuse new clients, but no one would believe any of my excuses (I have the anti-poker face and can’t lie in writing) and I don’t want to tempt fate with a health scare or family emergency.

I’m scared sh#tless that the book will pass me by. That what seems like mint quality ideas will seep out of. my pores in my sleep.

When I DO get to the page, outlining chapters in by book proposal, I’m scared sh#tless my agent will say he doesn’t think he can sell it.

I’ve been coaching writers for 15 years. I know this…more of us are writing while scared sh#tless than are writing with calm collectedness. I’m in a club with my companions.

Our friend Elizabeth Gilbert wrote in Big Magic that, “Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner.”

Human, I am.

Scared sh#tless, I remain.

Trusting the nervous energy of creativity to take me deeper just because I was willing to say it out loud. Thanks for listening.

Photo by Minh Pham on Unsplash