Writers fears: “it is a feeling of anguish caused by the presence of several doubts about the book’s performance”.
We have all been through the writers fears and many of us are still going through it. Whether we like it or not, and no matter how much we want to pretend otherwise, fear is something that lives in one way or another with any writer, and it is a set formed by several monsters that we must face.
Effort in Vain
I don’t think it happens only to writers. Anyone who has dedicated time and effort to a personal project to then expose it in some way to the public is afraid that all that dedication will not be rewarded. Whether in the form of visits to the web, followers, comments, or, above all, in sales of their books, a creator will always fear that their work will not have good feedback.
Misunderstanding
The writer’s tool is language; it’s a universal truth. And if there is something that scares us, writers, it is not being understood. Not only in the social aspect, but also in the narrative. There’s a fear of not knowing how to use our only tool, and that what we want to convey with our fictional universe or our story, does not reach the readers. But, as in everything, it is a matter of practice. The use of language as a tool is closely linked to the learning process: reading, writing, and correcting. Read, write, correct. Read, write, correct… The repetition, the practice makes progress, and as in other professions, its use is never fully perfectly mastered.
Rejection
It is complex and one of the most challenging fears to deal with because it can attack us in various ways, and it can also hurt us a lot.
The first type of rejection we writers encounter is very similar to misunderstanding: social rejection. The one that makes us believe we’re not good enough. But who is? The best-sellers? In the literary world, quantity does not always mean quality.
The other type of rejection we writers fear the most is from publishers. The dream of every writer is to publish, and if it is with a publisher, so much the better, so when we send our publishing proposal and publishers subsequently reject it, it is normal to feel rejection and fear. But this fear, although common, is the easiest to fight. How? Well, firstly because there are many authors who have sold millions of books and whose first novels were not accepted the first time; and secondly, because now there are other ways to publish without the need for a publisher.
The blank page
One of those little evils, when we are immersed in writing a novel, is the dreaded blank page. Not knowing how to continue the story we want to develop is the result of poor planning or lack of concentration. Although it affects us more often than we would like, it is not the end of the writer’s world and, normally, it is something that we end up overcoming sooner or later.
Plagiarism
After hours and hours spent planning, writing, proofreading countless times, and rewriting, and after we make the important decision to publish our work on a website, what we writers fear most is plagiarism. That someone will take our work of years and take advantage of it. The proper thing to do is to register our writings with Intellectual Property (we also talk about this topic in our DSW blog) before making them public in any way, but, even with those, this monster is constantly stalking us. Every profession has its own monsters, some stronger than others, but monsters nonetheless. The literary world is a difficult one, with many hurdles to jump. But we should not be afraid of that which is easy to do, and that is none other than to face what we fear. And you, what are your fears as a writer?