[I tell beginning writers to be] “stubborn. Be tenacious. Commit yourself to the inevitability of failure. Sentences are going to fail, chapters … whole books … [P]ay close attention to [your] own life. Don’t avoid your own passions and fears. There’s a tendency, I think, to sublimate it all, or to become so oblique as to avoid entirely that which has hurt you or that which has jerked you awake at night. I know of no rule that commands a writer to be subtle at all costs. At times, I believe, it doesn’t hurt to be blunt.”
– Tim O’Brien, American novelist, b. 1946, in The Writer (July 2010)
(painting by Leslie, pastel on garnet paper)
“We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for the final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us…. The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation and that always seems fraught with danger. We fear the very visibility without which we also cannot truly live … and that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which is also the source of our greatest strength.”
“[T]he more we try to pretend that fear doesn’t and shouldn’t exist, the more we hurt our own chances to create whatever it is [we] dream about. … I don’t think fear is a shameful thing that we must rid ourselves of. It is a natural part of taking the risks that writers do. And the logical reaction to fear should indeed be bravery.”
“I have come to understand that creativity and fear will forever be linked — because creativity always asks us to move in directions of unknown outcome, and fear HATES unknown outcome.
Many of us set goals and resolutions this time of year. And while many of us do form new, productive habits as a result, we are occasionally blocked by fear. So, for January, a few of my favorite quotes on fear and writing.
Go forth, the tellers of tales,