C.W. Thomas

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Face Your Fear And Fuel Your Writing Part 7: Do What Scares You

Over the next ten weeks I'll be examining fear, mining from my own experience and from what I've witnessed in my peers. Hopefully this will hit some nerves (good nerves, though!) and help other writers navigate the waters of fear and find success.

#7 Do What Scares You

I was a very shy, anti-social teenager. I was nerdy. I was awkward. I was like red meat for playground bullies. When I grew up and took a job at a local newspaper I had a hard time coming out of my shell—making phone calls, interviewing people, walking up to police officers and politicians and striking up a conversation to "get the inside scoop." People terrified me, and, honestly, they still do. I much prefer to live in my little bubble.

But I actually love talking to people now. After six months at the newspaper making phone calls to complete strangers felt like second nature. I could walk up to anyone on the street and strike up a conversation with them. To this day I'm continually embarrassing my wife because I'll talk with anyone about anything.

My point is simple: It's worth it spending time doing the things that scare you because the more familiar you get with those things the less intimidating they will become.

Be smart about it, of course, and assess whether this thing you fear can do you harm. If the answer is yes, don't do it. Obviously. If the answer is no, then I invite you to make a point of doing that very thing as much as you can until you exhaust fear's charge around it.

This process will likely take time, but once you beat down that fear by wearing it thin you'll find yourself a more confident person.

The Rest of This Series

Part 1: Identify Fear
Part 2: Admit You're Afraid
Part 3: Shift Your Focus
Part 4: Overpowering Perfectionism
Part 5: Navigating Hardships
Part 6: Retrain Bad Habits
Part 7: Do What Scares You
Part 8: Hold Your Course
Part 9: Be Logical
Part 10: Fearing Fear

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Face Your Fear And Fuel Your Writing Part 6: Retrain Bad Habits

#6 Retrain Your Bad Habits

Do you tend to write and rewrite an endless succession of drafts, unable to decide when a piece is finished? This is actually a common problem I hear from many writers. They often struggle to get any work done on other parts of their work because they're continually revising one particular chapter—usually chapter one.

Or maybe you're on the flip side of this problem and you hesitate even starting on a writing project because it feels too daunting, you haven't fleshed out the next chapter, or it just seems too difficult.

If you can relate to this, try setting some performance standards for yourself.

Give yourself a time limit. Say, for example, that you just keep revising and revising and revising chapter 2 of your awesome novel. Tell yourself that today you're only going to work on it for 10 minutes and then you're going to move onto chapter 3. If you're on the flip side of this problem and you can't even get started, give yourself 10 minutes to sit down and write. MAKE yourself do it. Whatever happens, happens, and then you can go procrastinate by watching TV or scrolling through Facebook. Just. Do it. Once your writing starts to come out you'll find your flow, but, like all good habits, it will take discipline and practice.

The point is to balance all the time you're wasting—be it procrastinating on a task or spending too much time on said task—with time spent on things that actually advance your goals.

I have a personal rule I try to follow when I'm working on a book: I won't create more than three drafts of a chapter before moving onto the next. Oh, I'll come back to those chapters when the book is finished and revise some more, but not until all the rest of the chapters have had the attention of three drafts. The point of this is so that I don't get in my own way.

Like any practice, the more you implement whatever standards you’ve set, the more reliable you will become. Experiment with your own ways to accept and move through your resistance.

The Rest of This Series

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Face Your Fear And Fuel Your Writing Part 5: Navigating Hardships

#5 Don’t Make Things Harder Than They Need To Be

Here's the truth about fear. It makes things hard. And if you’re used to approaching your writing life from a place of fear, you’re likely to believe that being a writer is really hard. You may even dread sitting down to write. Over time your subconscious is going to wake up to the belief that: writing = bad. And then you won't find yourself carving out time to write anymore.

Fear gets us all knotted up in such a way that we have to work twice as hard at writing, publishing, promoting and presenting just to overcome our own resistance. Such an attitude lands you shoulder-to-boulder, on an eternal uphill climb. This gets tiring fast.

When you find yourself working at a pace that feels unreasonable or exhausting, take a step back to consider whether or not fear is at play. Being driven to accomplish and succeed can be a very useful quality in the writing life. But your drive could also be the fear of failure in disguise.

Sometimes, just being still is all our writing lives need from us. I've even heard it said that the subconscious continues to work when we're asleep. I can attest to this. While working on Children of the Falls, the first book in the series ended up becoming so long that I split it in half. Suddenly I found myself in need of another title, and I struggled for days to come up with one. Then one night I dreamed of giving book 2 the title of book 1, and I woke that morning with a whole new title for book 1 sitting on my tongue.

So, take a break. Take a nap. Give your brain some rest and then come back. More will happen creatively.

Now imagine a writing life that isn't so hard, that's made a little easier because the creative juices flow a little more freely. Fear doesn't have any time to take hold because you're having too much fun! I’ll bet you could work faster and more efficiently—and even get better results—without fear weighing you down.

The Rest of This Series

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Face Your Fear And Fuel Your Writing Part 4: Overpowering Perfectionism

#4 Overpower Perfectionism

If you were to ask me if I'm a perfectionist, I'd have to say yes. It's one of those things that's like, "Once an addict, always an addict." Even though I'm living a life of recovery from perfectionism, it will always be a potential pitfall.

The conclusion I've reached after years of battling perfectionism is that perfectionism is not a helpmate. It's a hindrance. Though there is a side to perfectionism that can drive you to make something better, there is another side that just delays, and delays, and delays... and ultimately gets you nowhere.

Many of us have this idea that we’re meant to be perfect as writers. Instead, try thinking of your writing as akin to your fingerprints. They are what they are—unique patterns that exclusively represent you—not good or bad or better or worse than anyone else’s.

Instead of trying to perfect your writing, then, strive to get acquainted with this pattern and become more and more proficient at expressing it. There is no endpoint in this process, and we will never arrive at “perfect.” So why not give up the chase right now, and just enjoy the resonance and beauty of our humble, flawed writing as it is? As Leonard Cohen sings, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

Rather than “perfect” as an end goal, try setting your sights on “finished,” and see if that gives you a bit more appreciation for the light that seeps in.

The Rest of This Series

Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Face Your Fear And Fuel Your Writing Part 3: Shift Your Focus

#3 Ignore the Endgame... For Now

Fear almost always has to do with the unknown. What if they hate my poetry? What if my books don't sell? What if the publisher says I suck?

But if you KNEW your book was going to successful and loved, you'd run to the post office to mail your manuscript as soon as possible, and probably even pay the exorbitant price of overnight shipping. If you KNEW your parachute would open and that you would land on the ground totally unharmed, you might give skydiving a try. Right? (Hehehe...)

Fear tends to be focused on projected outcomes—which we cannot definitively know. So, why not use fear as a signal to turn your attention to your process instead? When you give your attention to following through on a goal, taking steps to improve your craft, researching places to submit, or reading that book on marketing, you are creating a forward motion that makes it harder for fear to hold you back.

You don't have to TOTALLY ignore the results you want. Obviously, there are long-term goals to consider here, but when the ultimate result becomes your focus it distracts from all that can be accomplished in the now, especially the creative stuff.

Now, you've got an unfinished something sitting somewhere don't you? Go attack it, dude!

The Rest of This Series

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Face Your Fear And Fuel Your Writing Part 2: Admit You're Afraid

Fear can be so damaging, crippling us to the point of leaving us stagnant. Heck, writing this series of blogs was intimidating enough at times. I'd ask myself, "Why am I doing this? Do I even know what I'm talking about? Who am I to write about fear? I'm no expert!" And the more questions I asked, the more fearful I became of writing this. Surely there are experts better equipped than this poor sap.

But, hey, I've felt fear. I know what it's like to hover over that blank page and wonder if I'm good enough to write what I want to say. I've opened that letter of rejection just dreading the criticism. I've read those emails from readers calling my work... all sorts of nasty things.

But, fortunately, when it comes to fear, I've had my small measures of success in rising above it. So maybe I've got a thing or two to share that will help. Like how conquering fear isn't really about conquering fear. It's simply saying, "Yep, I'm afraid."

#2 Admit You're Afraid Without Letting Fear Take Over

When we're afraid, there's a plethora of inner voices that come to life and tell us all sorts of lies—that we're not good enough, that no one cares about what we have to say, that we're alone, that we're too weird... whatever. These negative thoughts can short-circuit our creativity if we let them, so it's up to us to re-wire our thinking so that we can short-circuit fear.

In the film A Beautiful Mind, when someone from the Nobel Prize committee asks schizophrenic mathematician John Nash how he silenced the voices that threatened to interfere with his work and his life, Nash replies something to the effect of, “I didn’t. They’re talking to me right now. I have simply made a choice to stop engaging with what they’re saying.”

This is every writer’s opportunity with fear—to learn to live with the negative stories that get airtime in our minds without letting them limit what we know we are called to do.

Chances are good that your fear is just trying to protect you from feeling pain. And this is good. This is the way we are wired as human beings. But fear can usually be reasoned with. Once you convince your mind that even if that manuscript gets rejected, you're going to be ok. Even if your beta readers are overly critical, there will still be some good feedback to mine from. Tell your fear that you'll never reach your goals without taking some risks. Once you convince it that you’re going to be just fine, it will likely let up, and eventually even shut up for good.

The Rest of This Series

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Face Your Fear And Fuel Your Writing Part 1: Identify Fear

You stare at the blank page.

You hesitate dropping that manuscript in the mail box.

You look out at the audience with your book in your lap and butterflies in your stomach.

For a writer, there are many things that can trigger fear. Sometimes that fear is so intimidating that we don't move at all. Our books don't get written. Our poems don't get read. Our words don't get published. And that's when fear becomes a problem.

Over the next ten weeks I'll be examining fear, mining from my own experience and from what I've witnessed in my peers. Hopefully this will hit some nerves (good nerves, though!) and help other writers navigate the waters of fear and find success.

#1 Identify Fear

Fear is neither good nor bad. It’s simply an emotional reaction that lets us know where we are meeting or anticipating challenge. Fear can be healthy when you're doing something like touring the Grand Canyon and you don't want to fall over the edge. The fear of gravity is merely self-preservation at work. So is the fear of rotating lawn mower blades, live electrical wires, and great white sharks (actually, my shark fear may have more to do with seeing Jaws when I was eight, but, never mind...)

Fear becomes a problem when we do (or don’t do) something to try to avoid feeling it. For example, if we let the fear of rejection prevent us from sending in that manuscript, we are ensuring that we’ll never realize our aspirations.

It can be difficult identifying fear when it's subtle. If you’re overperforming, underperforming or avoiding performing altogether, chances are good that fear is in play.

For example, did you ever consider that the piece of writing you just can’t get right—and therefore endlessly revise—may be a reflection of your fear? Fear of perfection, maybe? Fear of pleasing others? Fear of not measuring up to someone's standard? When we find fear at the root of a challenging habit or behavior, we are fortunate—because with awareness, we have choices. And choices lead to progress :-)

Where might fear be creeping into your life?

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Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Face Your Fear And Fuel Your Writing Part 7: Do What Scares You

#7 Do What Scares You

The Rest of This Series

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Face Your Fear And Fuel Your Writing Part 6: Retrain Bad Habits

#6 Retrain Your Bad Habits

The Rest of This Series

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Face Your Fear And Fuel Your Writing Part 5: Navigating Hardships

#5 Don’t Make Things Harder Than They Need To Be

The Rest of This Series

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Face Your Fear And Fuel Your Writing Part 4: Overpowering Perfectionism

#4 Overpower Perfectionism

The Rest of This Series

Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Face Your Fear And Fuel Your Writing Part 3: Shift Your Focus

#3 Ignore the Endgame... For Now

The Rest of This Series

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Face Your Fear And Fuel Your Writing Part 2: Admit You're Afraid

#2 Admit You're Afraid Without Letting Fear Take Over

The Rest of This Series

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Face Your Fear And Fuel Your Writing Part 1: Identify Fear

#1 Identify Fear

The Rest of This Series