“When you make friends with fear, it cannot rule you.” ~ Anne Lamott

Poetry is something I feel very confident writing, it’s when I try to write something more … fear consumes me.

My muse and I know that terror all too well, unfortunately.

I’ve been working on my book now for ten weeks and I have a reasonably solid outline, awesome universal character trait lists for each of my characters. I have pictures of the settings, I even sketched some of them. I did my homework so why wasn’t I writing the story.

FEAR

That nasty four letter word held me hostage for the last couple weeks until yesterday. I stared at my computer and decided today was the day that demon wasn’t going to win anymore. I wrote for 4 hours straight and threw 1302 words onto 6 pages. I did it.

I turned it into Raz, the man teaching the writing class I’ve been taking. I waited for another email, one of quite a few that over the past ten weeks I’ve dreaded opening. Instead, I got a text message that simply said: “You nailed it.”  Three words I hadn’t expected because of that nemesis fear.

Life is too short to let fear make big decisions for you.

What I learned was fear can also be my friend and motivator if I simply change my perspective so I took Eleanor’s advice.

“Do one thing every day that scares you.” Eleanor Roosevelt

So instead of sitting on my laurels and embracing the confidence boost, I tossed my story out to my writing group for critique.

I loved hearing the voice of my character come alive with Pam reading. It’s one thing to read your own work but it’s another to hear it. It still needs a bit of tweaking, there were places where she stumbled reading but the overall consensus was they were invested and wanted more. My character was likable and sounded real. The pacing was good and when it stopped they wanted more.

I embraced my fear this evening and shared my story. I’m ready to do the edits and write more. Fear and I are going to become best buds because like Lamott said, it can’t rule me unless I let it.