We all know what’s bad for our writing, right? Confusion, procrastination, fear. These are the things that plague us, torment us, block our creative process, and turn our writing to mush. We read blog posts about how to conquer them, we practice exercises to get around them, and we spend a lot of time berating ourselves when we’re in their clutches.
But I’m going to say something radical here: These three demons of the writing life aren’t always bad. In fact, they are often helpful and even necessary. We can think of them as friends in Halloween masks. Let’s look at them one by one:
Procrastination
Before I write, I need to walk around the room talking to myself. Sometimes I make a cup of tea as I talk. Sometimes I look out the window. Sometimes I doodle. Sometimes I clean something. All the while, talking, talking, talking.
For years, I felt guilty about this behavior. I didn’t have enough time to write as it was, and instead of diving in right away as I thought I should, I was just wasting the precious hour or two I’d set aside.
It was an interview with Alice Munro, one of the premier writers of our time, that changed my perspective. Munro said that a lot of her process involved just sitting. She told the interviewer that she’d sometimes be sitting in a chair staring into space when her daughter left in the morning, and when her daughter came back in the evening, she’d still be there. It was necessary, she said. It was part of how she wrote.
After reading Munro’s interview, it dawned on me that I wasn’t wandering around muttering to myself out of laziness or lack of focus. I was working with ideas: generating them, sorting through them, discarding some and developing others. When my mumbling and walking were over, all that stuff poured out onto the page.
Yes, it might be wonderful if I could just jump into my writing head first. But we can’t always choose the way we write. If you find yourself procrastinating, ask yourself this question: Am I acting from laziness, lack of focus, or anxiety? Or is this a useful part of my process?
Confusion
Every time I teach a writing class, I have at least one or two students come to my office—sometimes in tears—because they are so confused about their essays or stories they don’t know what to do. Each time this happens, I shock them by saying that confusion is good.
Confusion means you’re thinking. You’re delving. You’re diving deep. Chaos never feels good, but neither does childbirth. The jumble of ideas, the riot of words, the ever-changing images: these are the stuff of creativity.
Clarity, of course, is where you want to end up, but there’s absolutely no way to get there except through confusion. So, the next time you feel like you’re spinning helplessly, relax and enjoy the ride. Let it play out, and see where that hodge-podge ends up. Life is enormously complex. Why would you expect writing about it to be simple and neat?
Fear
“Were an antidote discovered to literary anxiety, writers would be deprived of a powerful ally,” writes Ralph Keyes in The Courage to Write. Instead of talking about fear as something that can be “tolerated, confronted, and made less ominous,” he says, we can think about it as “an invaluable part of the writing process.”
Fear is a natural response to risk. When our distant ancestors heard a threatening growl in the trees, the rush of adrenaline that surged through their veins made them alert, aware, and ready to respond. Fear wakes us up. It puts us on our toes. It stimulates our energy.
People who take risks—the skydiver, the race-car driver, the mountain climber—don’t try to avoid fear; they seek it out. Fear is what makes them feel alive, what makes life thrilling.Writers need to see fear the same way they do: as the friend who pushes you farther than you would ever go on your own.
Sure, fear can ground you if you let it. But if you learn how to harness it, it can also send you soaring.