Angst essen Seele auf

Oh, sorry. That's a Fassbinder movie, isn't it? Well, so what? It's still a good title for this post.

As we've discussed elsewhere, writing for me is an anxious process. Oh, when I’m in the zone, I don’t consciously feel the anxiety; I just feel hyperalert. Afterwards, however, I realize my whole body has been rigid for the past three hours.

The rest of the time, when I’m not at the keyboard, the anxiety is all too apparent. I worry when I walk from place to place. I worry when I wake up at 3 AM. I worry in a Doctor-Suess Green-Eggs-and-Ham rhyming-couplet sort of way (Would you worry in the rain? Would you worry on a train?…). And I don’t have only the usual writerly worries (e.g. I suck) or the accompanying self-aggrandizing worries (e.g. I suck on a heretofore-unseen, colossal scale) or the sidebar paranoid schizophrenic worries (e.g. Is somebody putting something in my toothpaste?). Oh, sure, I have all of those (and my toothpaste has been tasting odd of late), but in addition I have any number of worries that are more specific to the work in progress.

Novelist Lawrence Block has long advocated writing down one’s fears about a project so as to exorcise them. Here's seventeen of them. There's more where these come from.

1) This book isn’t enough like my previous book.

2) This book is too much like my previous book.

3) I don’t know where this is headed, and as usual I’m floundering.

4) I think I know where this is headed, but I don’t know how to get there.

5) I think I know where this is headed and I’m taking too long to get there.

6) I think I know where this is headed and it isn’t worth getting there.

7) I have too many points of view and that makes the story diffuse. (One editor rejecting my previous book noted that a thriller required a “hero” to “lead the narrative charge,” and that these "ensemble" things might be all very well in other genres, but not in this one. She was wrong, but her comments still haunt me.)

8) I have too few points of view, and that makes to story too cramped.

9) I have the right number of points of view, but they are from the wrong characters.

10) The chapters are too long, too long, tooooo lonnnnnnngggg…(They are. They really are. I think.)

11) I’m plunging forward too rapidly and need to think this through more.

12) I’m thinking too hard and second-guessing myself and need to plunge forward to get some momentum.

13) The story elements and situations are almost cliché.

14) The story elements and situations are too offbeat to be of interest.

15) The main character is too passive, and since the story is largely about him overcoming his passivity and confronting his past, this flaw can’t be remedied and the whole edifice is being built on sand and I’m writing a story that can’t be told. By anyone. Ever.

16) Every major character has a major backstory that needs to come out and I'm not sure how the hell I'm going to manage it, and in fact I probably can't.

17) I don’t know enough about this topic to write about it. In fact, who the hell do I think I am, writing about this topic in the first place? To write about this topic effectively, I’d have to learn five foreign languages (three of them spoken only by obscure jungle tribes), and spend several months--no, make that years--traveling, and get a PhD in Cultural Anthropology. And one in Biology. And Ecology. And History.

There. Though I'm not sure I've exorcized my fears. Exercised them, more likely, and they'll come jogging back up to my door, fitter and glowing with health.

Was that the doorbell?