The Ladder of Fear

It’s incredible how much fear and trembling is involved in building a career as a writer. The trick, I suppose, is to use that fear as fuel to drive your creative engines, but surely even glass-half-full people spend days chewing on their own souls. In fact, I'm told that even the most successful novelists never quite step off the top of the Ladder of Fear.

The first Rung. You really want – no, need -- to write, and you even have a story to tell, but you don’t yet know if you are capable of completing something the shape and scope of a novel. I let self-doubt like this keep me frozen on the first rung for years. It was here that I hid behind the fact that I was an illustrator (“we don’t DO words, okay?”) so that I could postpone the potential discovery that I was incapable of doing the thing I really wanted – no, needed – to do (chew, chew, chew…)

The Second Rung. I sometimes think half the blogosphere is comprised of people stuck here. This is the place for those who have completed a first draft or three, but now have to face the considerable challenge of wrangling and revising and cold-sweating it into shape in order to win an agent/publishing deal, despite nagging self-doubt, a demanding day job and a steady rain of rejection. As is well known, getting beyond this is about ten times harder than writing the damn stuff in the first place. The ground is littered with broken dreams and empty wine bottles, but at least you don’t have to stand in them.

The Third Rung. Here’s where people who have publishing deals end up, twitching but probably half expecting the fear to ease up from now on. Only it doesn’t. Because despite having a measure of acceptance, not to mention industry professionals to guide you, bad books still get published, and what if yours is one of them? What if you get horrible Amazon reviews? Or worse still, what if you don’t get reviewed at all?

This is where I am, tormented by the fear that come 2012 my name will be very publicly stamped on a block of 80k words that right now I can hardly control, let alone judge. I do know that there are good bits, but I also know that good bits just aint good enough. Nobody wants to actually eat the Curate’s egg.

The Fourth Rung. I can actually see this from where I cling, and I can well imagine that having to write a second book that matches up to the first (in only a fraction of the time) must be pretty scary. And I can also see how the aviator who crashes is worse off than the aviator whose plane is still on the runway. But I can’t quite feel this fear yet. It belongs to someone else. Though it is waiting for me.

The Fifth Rung and Beyond. Having got published will you manage to stay published? Will you earn enough to keep writing? Will you match up to your ‘earlier promise’? Or will you write something foolish on your blog and ruin your reputation? Or perhaps you'll just swallow a poisonous toad and die before you can finish your breakout novel? God alone knows, and maybe he’s even up there somewhere, but from where I stand the ladder disappears into the clouds and I can’t see much. Except, is that a Nobel Prize for Literature falling my way? Or just a stick of dynamite? And is that Neil Gaiman I can see, trembling fearfully as he reaches rung fifty-seven?

(chew, chew…)