Fear Of Success…

I have heard that a writer’s greatest fear is not of failure but of success. I laughed the first time I heard it. Fear of failure is an easy problem to understand. Fear of success, that’s just down right silly. However, the more and more I thought about it, it made sense, but if you stop and examine it, the fear is pretty much the same thing as fear of failure because once you have published, your level of expectations shift from “what if” to “what now”.

Before publication, you can take all the time you need/want to write a scene over and over again. You can crank out a non-edited book in a month or take three years to tweak and spiff-up a four-hundred page novel. You can write in six different genres from YA to Sci/Fi to Romantic Suspense and switch back and forth between them all to your hearts content. You can even start and stop over twenty manuscripts when your writer’s ADD kicks in (I know I did).

Once you are published however, your editor may want a follow-up to your novella and maybe another to fit into an anthology with fellow authors. You are on deadlines and have guidelines to adhere to. You may be asked to stick one genre so as not to confuse your readers. And you have expectations that before publication you lamented, “If only I had those problems.” But once close or already there, you get sweaty palms and heart palpitations at the words, “send me a proposal.”

A published author has proven they can do it and are expected to do it again and depending on their publisher with a certain level of regularity. Publishers don’t want a one-book-wonder. They want a bankable name who has a readership who will purchase subsequent works.

But what happens when you, a published author, sits and stares at a blank page because you cannot make up your mind what your heroine looks like or if you have a strong enough plot? Or worse yet you are one-hundred and thirty pages into a book and you think, “Damn this is crap. What was my editor thinking when she bought my other books?” (not that this is happening to me, no never.) You may worry that your second release is due out soon and you fear that NO ONE will buy it or the third book. It stifles creativity to the point of considering a career change. “Would you like fries with that?”

From what I have heard of authors, this is not uncommon in the least regardless if they have three or thirty-three books under their belt. As far as I can tell, though, there is only one way to get past this fear (well two, but offering fries with the Big Mac might not be for everyone). Write, write and write some more. Don’t let yourself fall out of the habit or get so far behind that your editor has forgotten your name. Write. It’s what you do.


This had been a dramatization – no authors were harmed in the writing of their neuroses. Please join us next week when we delve into the voices inside you head: “You want me to do what with my keyboard?!?!”