The Fear of Sucking
The biggest obstacle for most creatives is trying to get over the fear of being less than perfect.
I write a lot. Nearly every day I am writing for at least half an hour. I can write stories, articles, and pieces for at most 8 hours. I am a machine when it comes to writing. I usually write at least one article a day and most days I also write short stories, and/or poetry.
But that doesn’t mean that I always think I’m doing a good job.
I am still plagued with the fear of sucking on a weekly, if not daily, basis. Before I even touch the keyboard, there’s a lump in my throat:
“What if I suck at this?”
The fear of being less than great at something can be equally as demoralising as actually being bad at something. I get scared that my work is less than perfect and that no one will want to read my work. Clearly I must be terrible at it because I don’t write like the literary greats or like the lecturers who taught me how to write at university.
Everyone has this fear
I have spoken to some of my most creative friends and found they have the exact same fear. Even artists, photographers, and other poets have said to me at one point that they are scared to do a bad job.
“What if I don’t say something profound?” A friend asks as we both discuss writer’s block.
This was a sentiment shared by most of my writing class at university. Despite gaining entry to the course on the basis of a portfolio, many of my fellow students felt constrained by the idea that what they would submit for assignments wasn’t great.
In their mind, their work didn’t say anything groundbreaking, or tell a new story, or even emulate the styles of the most notable literary writers. I felt the same. I tried so hard to submit work that I thought the lecturer wanted to see instead of writing what I wanted to write. In a desperate attempt to be relevant and ‘deep’, I would write whatever I thought was aesthetically pleasing.
By ignoring my originality and perspective, I was forgetting that the greats don’t start off great.
You are not born great
Greatness isn’t a gift, it’s earned. You cannot expect to start writing, or painting, or even selling and be immediately amazing at it. It takes time to develop, evolve and grow.
If you start off at an expert level, what is there left to learn?
What is there left to strive for if you’ve already achieved greatness without any work?
To face the empty page and write is an achievement in itself. Many people haven’t even gotten that far. As a yellow dog once told me, via the amazing Adventure Time:
“Dude, sucking at something is the first step at becoming sorta good at something.” — Jake the dog, Adventure Time.
You will make mistakes. It’s a part of the learning process. If you let fear control your life then you will not achieve anything because you won’t have tried.
How can you win the race if you never entered?
Some days I will write badly and that’s okay. That’s what editing is for. Some days I’ll write well and that’s also okay. But if I don’t write then I won’t have tried so I’ll never get better.
Just ignore that fear of sucking for a couple of minutes and just maybe you’ll achieve something great. Or at least you’ll be moving in the right direction.
