How to overcome the fear of starting to write?

Literature & Writing Writer's Block
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Hello, fellow writers,

I wrote my first story when I was 14, then it took me four years to start the next one. Since then, I haven’t written or even started another story, but I’ve collected tons of ideas, and new ones come to me every day.

I really want to turn these ideas into stories, but my perfectionism prevents me from just getting started. There’s always something I have to do first, something I need to research, or the inertia of everyday life takes over. I constantly feel like I can’t start until I’ve done everything, researched everything, and have a very precise plan for the entire story.

How do you manage to just start and write? I often wanted to participate in NaNoWriMo in the past, but never got around to it because I was “afraid” of not being good enough.

Of course, the only way to improve is by writing. Sol Stein wrote in Stein on Writing:

The ballet dancer practices the technique of his art. The pianist wears down the keys of his instrument with daily, patient finger exercises. The painter strives for perfection in a still life by drawing the object from different perspectives; he practices finding the best perspective, experiments with colors and textures, and makes sketches before painting a picture in oil. Through practice, one learns to put into practice what one has understood in theory. Only writers seem to expect that they can achieve mastery without practice.

How do I put aside my pride in order to plunge headlong back into the danger of a blank page and experience new adventures?

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Hi SighingAuthor. I’m my own worst enemy because I’m a perfectionist. But, I’m also a “pantser” as a writer.

I can only tell you the things that helped me. As with so many things, your mileage will vary.

First, I took a lot of writing classes. Some with The Writers Studio, Gotham Writers Workshop, and similar. Those regular assignments helped me actually put some of my ideas onto the page. And learning how to give and receive criticism was helpful. Also, seeing other writers’ work made me better understand how many rounds of revision will be needed before anything is ready for presentation.

That helped me with the second point, which was to stop worrying about if my stuff was good enough to publish and what readers would think. If I had that in my head, I’d get the writer’s equivalent of stage fright or performance anxiety and never write anything.

I tend to try to edit before I even have any idea of what I’m working on. I found that things like word sprints made me just write whatever came to mind because I didn’t have time to polish it.

For that, a website like 4thewords.com was helpful, along with the weekly Poets & Writers prompts.

I also follow the WriterUnboxed.com website’s daily blog posts. They have items for writers at all stages of their careers, and I quickly found that even published authors will encounter stories they’re frightened to write.

Following writers like Chuck Wendig John Scalzi, V.E. Schwab, and Marie Brennan on social media and their blogs can help too. They all report times when a story is hard to write or outline their struggles with revision. V.E. Schwab’s monthly newsletter is amazing for that, along with her information about how she works.

Finally, give yourself permission to learn and make mistakes. No one’s writing is perfect. Every book on your bookshelf is the product of a team of people who helped the author polish their ideas until they were ready for the public. Don’t compare your early work to those polished drafts. It’s not fair to your writing.

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Hey, the first draft sucks, but you can use a plot model like save the cat to create a scaffold for the story. If for your POV’s you can define their over goal, overt obstacle/antagonist, inner goal (family, love, etc) and their inner lie (whatever trauma gives them a false negative view of themselves and the world) then you have enough structure to fill in the rest. Know your ending or close to it to direct the story to get there.

Scrivener is fantastic software to help get you there, if as you write you need more info use a symbol (*/%/#, etc) to mark spots where you need more info and search and fill in later. Or use comments to highlight parts of a scene that needs more work. You can go on and come back later. Use word targets to set goals to keep you accountable. This is only scratching the surface. You can do it and the more you work and learn the better you will become.
I have Scrivener projects just to hold information I have read, courses I’ve taken, or books I read to help me write. See two examples below.

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I think David Gerrold said, “There is no piece of writing so terrible that it can’t be improved, but a blank page is just a blank page.”

I also like Anne Lamott’s one-inch picture frame trick: you don’t have to write the whole story. Just write what you could see through a one-inch picture frame. Not Frodo’s long, grueling trek to Mt. Doom, but Frodo sitting at his desk reading a letter from Bilbo when Gandalf knocks.

Edit: Or if that’s still too much? The desk itself, cluttered with memorabilia from Bilbo’s adventures. Maybe including a plain wooden box with a boring (hah!) gold ring on a chain.

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Back when I struggled with this I decided to write a 250 word story every day. Just that. It didn’t need a start or a finish, that’s hardly enough to do more than wander about the middle, but that’s what helped. So what if the story was about a poorly fleshed out character walking into a dark room? Maybe that’s all it needed to say, all they needed to do.

I told myself I would never read them. You put them to paper, you struggle, then turn the page—and now you aren’t terrified about being good enough for yourself. Had a bad day with it? You’ll never see it again anyway.

How did I think of so many stories? That didn’t matter either. I wrote a story about my tea pot, which was sad and cold because I wasn’t using it. Another about a girl that thought she was a tree, because of a shadow in the park while I was trying to think of a story.

Sometimes I struggled to get to 250, other times I struggled to edit down from 700. It slowly became more often the latter.

Eventually I broke my rule about never reading them again. I actually liked some of them, I recalled. So I did, and not all of them were horrible, and there was no shame in the ones that were. By that point I was writing again, and a lot, the rules didn’t matter any more; they had served their purpose.

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Another useful tip. You can do anything for five minutes. No matter how stressful it is, it’s five minutes, then you can do something else.

So set a timer and write for five minutes. Doesn’t matter what, just write.

Do that every day for a week, then up the time to ten minutes. Same thing.

Pretty soon, you’ll get interested in what you’re writing and ten minutes won’t be enough.

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This. Over the years I’ve learned that what works for me sometimes, won’t always work another time. I think of writing as building. I read, I run, I watch movies and shows. Everything I do gives me something to add to my toolbox. If I’m reading, I’m learning, and that gives me experiences and understanding that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I add that to my toolbox. If I’m running, I’m planning and that’s like taking out a level and double checking its balance or going over measurements to make sure they’re right. Watching things is like stepping back to take some time off.

Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty five minutes. With every word you write, you’ve added more to what you had before. You’re closer than you were. There really isn’t some universal secret, it’s just work. You start with something that doesn’t exist and you make it exist.

Everyone is different. Write, edit, and write some more. Do your best. It’s not always fun, or rewarding but if you love it anyway, you’re on the right track.

“Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” - Gloria Steinem.

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@RuthS // I think deadlines would be a big help. It’s often the case that you only start when the deadline is approaching. A few years ago, I actually made the mistake of thinking that I shouldn’t even start writing because my first attempts weren’t as good as the books I had read. Fortunately, I realized pretty quickly how foolish that thought was. Thanks for the websites; I’ll check them out.

@GoalieDad // Wow, you have a whole pool of information. I think I need to create a compendium like that too. Where do you get most of your information from?

@kewms // Thanks, that’s a great trick; I’ll make a note of that. Looking at something through a window and describing the scene actually comes to mind very often. I often have little scenes like that in my head and jot them down briefly, but never write them out.

@AmberV // That’s great advice! 250 words definitely sounds doable, especially in the long run. Since you mentioned that you had trouble reducing the story from 700 to 250 words, should the stories be a maximum of 250 words, or is more always better?

@alexxtholden // It’s similar for me. I try to get something useful out of everything. Recently, I heard two specific words in a song, and a story immediately popped into my head. I always try to get something useful out of books, documentaries, and movies.

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The heart of the problem isn’t that you are afraid. The problem is that you are allowing your fear to stop you. The solution is simple: feel the fear, and write anyway. The word for action in the face of fear is courage. Be courageous. Write.

Funny thing: you are afraid because your mind has decided that the embarrassment of writing something substandard will literally destroy you. When you write despite the fear, and you do not die, your mind starts to doubt the fear. Every time you stand up to the fear and create some pages, the fear will become less.

In the case of most problems with writing, the solution is usually to do more writing.

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Yes, when I think about it, I have a rough idea why I’m afraid to start writing. In theory, I can always improve. If I start a story now that is close to my heart, it might not be as good as it could be if I had written it in the future. But I think I can still revise and improve the story. I’m just afraid of ruining what might be a really great idea because I don’t have that much experience yet. Should I maybe practice with writing prompts instead, for example with 250 words per day?

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Yes, it was a hard 250 goal, which meant having to edit and think about what I was writing, as well as just blurting out words. It helped me look at what I was saying, and find the fluff, cut it out, find better ways of getting that idea across. If the idea is to really try and tell a story with such a small quantity of text, you can’t cheat with lots of extra words, or you’ll run out of budget. I made it sound a bit like I just dashed off words without caring, and maybe some days that was the case, but the idea was always to grow from it. It was a small enough goal to not be intimidated by, something I could do on a lunch break, but that hard 250 made it more challenging as time went by, and it became easier to just hit the raw count. It allowed the exercise to evolve into something more than just willing myself to wake up in the morning, so to speak.

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Ah, so if I understand correctly, the writing sessions should be 250 words, preferably no more and no less, because then I learn, for example, to focus on what I want to express with the story and also learn to delete “unnecessary” words or paraphrases.

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Yup, at first it was hard to just get there, for me anyway. But very quickly I started to spot places where I realised I could have said something with three words instead of ten, and now I have seven more words to explain this part of the story over here… It slowly gets you into that mindset of not just typing or scrawling, but crafting, which is where you want to be. But first you have to type. :slight_smile:

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It’s not unusual for a writer to return to themes over the course of their career as they develop more skill and more life experience. Even if a specific story fails to achieve your ambition, that doesn’t mean the idea is “ruined.”

My current WIP stands at about 60,000 words. The Scrivener project for it also includes nearly 25,000 words of false starts and deleted scenes. But I had to write the 25,000 in order to find the 60,000.

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There’s no law that says you can’t give the same great idea another try some time later with more experience.

And where would that experience come from, other than making “mistakes”? A lot of them.

The harsh truth is that nobody gives a damn about great ideas. There’s no “idea generator” job in any creative business. Ideas are nothing. Execution is everything.

Give the same idea to ten of the greatest contemporary writers and they’ll come back with ten wildly different stories. Some of them will likely “ruin” it.

There’s just one person who can get it right. Maybe it takes ten years and hundred bad versions. But if you don’t do it, nobody will. And nobody will ever read it. Guaranteed.

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@AmberV // The apparent simplicity of 250 words (as opposed to the idea of writing an entire book) somehow got me hyped up, so much so that I would want to start right away if it weren’t already three in the morning and I had only slept three hours the night before. :sweat_smile:

@kewms // I have to admit that it hadn’t occurred to me that I could just start a new, better attempt in the future if I had already failed a few times, instead of just thinking that an idea was ruined.

@November_Sierra // The funny thing is that I always say that even the best idea (to exaggerate) is worthless if it’s not written down.

// Do any of you have experience using writing prompts for practice? Are there any good websites where you can find them?

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The articles are a combination of my reading the manual and combining info into one area, info from the forums here, Oliver’s monthly seminars and Reddit’s scrivener info. I have a scrivener learning project that I pull from and list of stuff to add in the future. I like images as they reinforce the info and give people another way to absorb the info.

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Creating a Scrivener learning project is a great idea. This way, I can play around without breaking anything and finally tackle the collections feature that I’ve been interested in for a while but haven’t quite understood yet.

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And you’re damn right. :slightly_smiling_face:

Most (if not all) masterpieces started as crappy first drafts. You see the final product – rewritten, refined, rearranged, rewritten again, over and over – compare it to your current writing skills and – despair. Not helpful.

Maybe start with the intention of writing something really bad. You’ll fail, but upwards.

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(Not that any of these are necessarily “failures,” just re-interpretations of the same idea.)

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