As an amateur freelance journalist (ie unemployed), I thought it would be a good idea to enter a young writers’ talent contest.

But when it came to writing my entry, it was like trying to squeeze literary blood out of a stone. I could hardly begin to write a sentence because I was totally intimidated by the thought that my writing had to be at least as good as the previous winning entrants’, or a 800-word mini-Ulysses. I laboured over every word and metaphor, edited ceaselessly and stared at the blank face of a Microsoft Word document for time immemorial. By the date of the deadline, my entry was still incomplete. It was never sent off.

In other words, my fear of not being able to produce something good or original was making the creative process tortuous and anxiety-ridden. And the Creative Heebie-Jeebies (my own professional diagnosis) can happen in all kinds of situations: from being unable to put paint to canvas, lest you make an irreversible mistake; to inching along on a film project, hell-bent on the “perfection” of every frame. 

Why are so many of us struck by a paralysing bout of fear during the creative process? Todd Henry, CEO of Accidental Creative, a company that helps creative people generate ideas, believes that we are afraid of our own potential – or, our limits: “We live in that tension of, ‘What might I be capable of?’ and ‘What if I’m not good enough?’ We’re afraid of coming to the end of ourselves.”

And making contrasts between yourself and your peers – plus James Joyce and the rest of the literary canon – can make the creative process even more off-putting. “It’s really unfair for us to compare our in-process work with the completed work of some of our heroes,” he says. “When we do that, we fail to realise that they had to resolve the creative process themselves, in order to get to the end product.” 

Author David Whitehouse’s starting point for his debut novel, Bed, came from “the tiny idea of a character who dropped out of society, by never getting out of bed again.” But he soon found that he was responsible for the expansion of “a whole world of things and characters. Every time I tried to think of it as a whole, I freaked out – I just shut down and didn’t do any writing.”

He managed this prodigious task by “smashing it up into really small pieces, which is why the chapters in the book are so small.” Todd Henry advocates a similar strategy: “Do something small, start a vector, build some momentum, and once you do that it becomes easier and easier to start. It’s always starting that is the difficult part.”

Of course, one of the biggest fears of creating is having your output judged harshly by others. Gem Barton, university lecturer and designer, reflects that: “When you’ve put so much time and effort into education, doing everything you can, working and interning for free, the last thing you want at the end of it all is to put your heart and soul into something, attach your name to it, and for people to say, ‘Well, I’ve seen better.’”

“You have to be really good at hunting down and destroying those thoughts,” says Todd. “When you’re in the creative process, you have to be able to venture out into uncomfortable places. If you don’t, then you’re going to end up with something far less than you’re capable of.”

Perhaps what we need to do is embrace the struggle that often comes hand in hand with creativity: the creation of something from nothing can be no easy feat. “Until it’s realised, then it doesn’t exist,” notes David. “I don’t believe that there are people that make art who don’t struggle in some way. That is the process; that is the nature of it.”

Image: man on wire by image munky, available under a CC BY-NC 2.0 license.

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