A Writer's Fear

Writers write the first draft in solitude, but writing is best perfected when shared.

The writer starts alone. They turn up, take a seat, face the blank page, silence the inner critic and put words down. The writer must overcome their fears by fighting, tricking, or ignoring them. If the writer perseveres, they rewrite, edit, and polish until the prose runs as smooth as their skill and experience and expertise allow. Only then, the writer might consider the piece finished (or at least ready for readers).

All this effort is, at most, only half the story. Writing is, sometimes, the easy part. Sometimes sharing is harder.

I’ve been writing stories since I was a boy. I’ve rarely shown my writing to anyone as I write for myself. In the first draft, I write fast and love to tell myself the story in the raw. However, going back and fixing it up, rewriting and polishing — well, that takes me a lot longer. The closer I get to finishing, the longer it takes. I remind myself of the 80/20 rule: that the last twenty percent takes eighty percent of the time. But that’s not why I’m scared.

The first half of Stephen King’s On Writing is a memoir. He calls it his Curriculum Vitae as a writer. It tells of the trauma he faced as a boy and why it influenced what he writes about.

I’ve had my fair share of childhood trauma: I’ve seen my flesh cut to the bone, my blood stream from my face, my finger broken to the side. These incidents were indelible. Darker themes fascinated me. But they did not fill me with fear.

When I was a young teenager, the casual joking cruelty of those that should have known better would affect me to a much more debilitating degree than the physical injuries I’d had growing up. If I did anything that brought attention to myself, I would be told I was fat, or stupid, or ugly. All couched as jokes, all just for a bit of a laugh. I heard no compassion in their words. No healing, only hurt. Told enough times, you start to believe it.

I understood what they said was cruel. Those words and phrases left me feeling devastated. If their raucous laughter was anything to go by, they got a huge amount of joy out of their verbal attacks. It’s just banter, they’d say. He’s fine with it, they’d say. Look, he’s okay, they’d say. He’s laughing.

Yes, I was laughing, but I wasn’t okay.

To cope, I ate more. My eating became part self-fulfilling prophecy, part self-harm, and part rebellion. I did the thing that made me more of a target, but I did it on purpose. It seemed like something I had control over.

I fled inwards and lost myself in stories: books and comics and computer games and films and television. Characters from these stories became my role-models. From them, I learned right from wrong and good from bad in clear and focused ways. Any lingering confusion I might have felt disappeared.

Then, I began to write. I took all that dark, exciting, painful, beautiful stuff in my head and I made things with it. I lost myself again, but this time by telling stories. Creating something of my own was so much better than consuming anything else. It didn’t matter if what I wrote was awful, or that my inspiration showed through the cracks. All that mattered was that I made it mine through the lens of my experience. Yes, I wrote the graphic scenes of horror, but I also began to explore my feelings.

Although writing stories haven’t healed me yet, it has helped. A lot.

I still have a fear of unsolicited ridicule, which is why I find it so hard to finish pieces and share them. I still fear being taunted and laughed at for just being me.

Well, here I am, just me, being me. Writing it down anyway.

But that’s only half the story. The rest is finding the courage to share.