The Courage to Write a Book

School started this week at community colleges and universities around my city. I ought to be enrolled, a slight thrill of anticipation pumping through my knowledge-starved mind. But nope, this term I won't be gracing the halls of Marylhurst University.  I can't. I work full-time at a hospital and I have two teenagers at home....and if you haven't heard, I'm writing a book. The on-deadline-writing-a-book kind of book. It typically consumes about 20 hours of my waking life a week, the equivalent of a part-time job. And though I can be amazingly productive and multi-task, I am no Super Woman. Last  time I checked, my day still only had 24 hours in it. (If you are willing to give up some of your daylight hours to me, please send 'em! Then I could get more done!).


It's hard work. I knew it would be. For the first time in the more than seven years I've been blogging and writing, I feel like a writer. Writers write. God knows that I've penned more words in the last year than the last two or three combined. Seriously.

This explains why my blog has become very quiet. I can't blog. I ought not to be blogging right now. I have writing and the swamplands of edits to sludge through, sentences to wrestle down like a Swampwoman alligator hunter. I have writing stuff to do!  Last week my publisher (who is a guy in California who started up an independent publishing house) spent 90 minutes with a thorough explanation of what revisions he is recommending. "Are we at square one?" I asked him when we reached the end of the word doc that outlined his editorial notes. "Can I possibly make this deadline with this much work still left to do?"



"You're not at square one," he assured me. "You have a lot of content, but yes, you have a lot of work to do, but I think you can do it."

And that, my blog reading friends, is why my stomach hurts almost from sun-up to sun-down and I'm not sleeping well. I have a book inside me that is about to birth. The contractions are coming together, furious and hard, I have to remember to breathe. "It's almost time to push," I tell my laboring writer self.

My fave writer guru is Ralph Keyes who wrote, The Courage to Write. I have read this book three times in the last seven years, and began it for a fourth time over the summer.  Ralph perfectly captures my angst and fear of failing in this excerpt:

Only after my tenth sleepless night did it dawn on me that there might be more to this business than recording good words on paper. By the time I started my first book, there was no escaping the fact that anxiety had elbowed its way into my office to sit beside me, scrutinizing every word I wrote. Much of this anxiety showed up in disguise. It expressed itself as stomach trouble, irritability, and restlessness. During toss-and-turn nights I’d jot notes on a pad beside my bed (like marijuana-inspired brilliance, such notes were seldom of any use in the light of day). Seven-day weeks became routine as I tried to build walls of research and rhetoric strong enough to protect me from marauding critics. When a friend offered me a relaxing massage to ease my obvious tension, I turned the offer down from fear that getting too relaxed might keep me from finishing my book. I had trouble even thinking about anything other than getting the book done. Doing so might destroy my concentration, I feared. Taking a weekend off, or even spending an evening with friends might break the writing spell forever. Then I might never return to my desk. I’d no longer be an aspiring writer. Instead I would be revealed as an impostor: someone who said he could write a book but couldn’t.

 And there is lies for me. The reason I am moody and difficult to socialize with these days is because I am terrified of falling flat on my writerly face in front of family, friends,  co-workers and my writing colleagues.  I am scared of failing.

But Brother Ralph, as I have come to call him in my mind as I reach for his book for courage and hope, tells me that my fear is normal to the writing life and that I can harness it for good. I sure am trying.

One thing I know to do is to say it out loud. I occasionally will tell a trusted friend how nervous I am. Ralph calls it page fright.  That helps. I have also found that if I take a few days off to rest my mind and writing juices, that once I return to the white fields of a blank screen, that I write with renewed vigor. Rest and recreation makes a difference, though Lord knows it has been hard to "be present" when I worry that I won't make my deadline.

And what if I don't? Yes, we can extend. It won't be the end of the world. In the next week, my publisher (the guy in California) and I will reevaluate and make a decision to keep the deadline or push it out into 2012. I have to tell you : I really, really, really, REALLY, want to make it to the deadline so this book can be released into the wild November 11, 2011.

So that's the deal. Writing a book is hard work and takes courage.  But not writing it is even harder.

What about you? What performance fears are slogging their way through your life these days? How do you summon courage?