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The Terror of Writing Success: Why the Fear of Success Might Hold You Back More Than the Fear of Failure
A few years ago, two writer friends and I tried an exercise from a book I’d been reading about “making it” as a writer called “Word Work” by Bruce Holland Rogers. The exercise asked us to write down all the benefits of writing your most authentic work, and then all the awful things that might happen if you wrote what you really wanted to. The results surprised all of us.
First of all, you have to know what it is that you really want to write, more than anything. It could be a memoir, it could be crime fiction, it could be children’s picture books. It could be fabulous articles for Medium! It’s the writing you feel inside you have to do, the writing you crave to be able to put on the page.
If you thought we’d all just write down benefits such as money and fame, then you’d mostly be wrong. Sure, they were in there, but fame ended up on the awful list rather than the benefits list. Money was more about simply earning a living in order to be able to write more, and write what we wanted to without pressure. Fame and best-seller status implied heavy deadlines and pressure from publishers. Being stuck in one series with no freedom to branch out.
We discussed J.K. Rowling and not being able to shop at the supermarket or go to…
