3 Common Writing Fears and How to Swim Past Them
By Michelle
I was 7 years old, standing at the tiled edge of the pool, with all my classmates looking at me. I looked at the water. Gulped in a breath.
This was an elementary school swim class. I had on a life jacket.
We were supposed to practice floating in the deepest end of the school pool. The end where if you looked too long, you would get nervous, knowing the water level went over about three times your own height.
The teacher, unfortunately, had called on me to be the first to jump into the deep end as a demonstration.
I thought about standing there frozen, for ten minutes more, thirty minutes, until the class ended.
But the next second later—I shut my eyes. And jumped.
A loud splash, as the water went over my head, followed by a feeling of weightlessness. And then—I floated, buoyed up by the life jacket, and took in a breath of cold air at the surface. Relief.
Writing is similar to that. It can be scary, to be placed in a new environment where you may feel like you don’t know how to direct yourself.
The secret is that you already know how to write, the same way that a young narwhal already knows how to swim soon after being born. You’ve already practiced that skill many times, without knowing it.
Have you ever told your friends about a disastrous cooking experiment you tried? Tweeted about a terrible-but-funny interaction you had with customer service about something you ordered?
In all those instances, you told a story. All writing really does is record it so it is observable to others.
If writing your story in a college essay (or any other essay) still seems difficult, there may be 3 common writing fears you are facing:
#1 This writing task will take too long!
Yes. Writing does take time. It’s a process of thinking, brainstorming, drafting, revising.
Give yourself permission to just get started on the writing in short chunks, to relieve some pressure. For example, you can set a timer for just ten minutes of writing time. If you feel like you have more to write after ten minutes, you can keep going.
And if you stop after ten minutes, perhaps you have come up with a good main idea or a couple bullet points for a paragraph. Take a short break for 2 minutes. Try again for ten or fifteen more minutes later that day. Later, with more practice, you can extend this writing time to thirty minutes or even an hour.
#2 I can’t think of the right words.
For the first draft, the words don’t need to be the best. Simple sentences will work, like in a children’s book. The cat sat on the mat. I saw two apples and gave my friend one.
Do you have the most important elements written? Who was there? What happened? When and why? You can speak aloud to yourself about it just to get it rolling, like “in my college essay, I want to write about the time I…”
#3 My writing won’t be any good.
Writing is a flexible art and also frustrating for that reason. This fear is one that can only be met head-on by doing the writing.
A scribbled stick figure can be the first step towards a beautiful painting. Three paragraphs of thoughts, experiences, and rambling opinions can become a later foundation for an emotional and effective college essay.
And if it’s reassuring, you’re in good company for this fear, as seen in the author Franz Kafka’s diaries:
January 30. The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again, prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.
February 7. Complete standstill. Unending torments.
Be like a narwhal. Jump in and keep swimming fearlessly into your writing.
