What To Do If Fear Of Failure Stops You From Writing

You can love writing but keep yourself from doing it.

Sometimes, it’s just too hard to start writing. The fear of failure can be so overwhelming, it blots out any feelings of hope or joy or excitement that you want to feel when you’re in the creative process.

And, logically, if you never let your writing materialize on the page, you can’t fail, right? If there’s no story/novel/essay/blog post to show the world, the world can’t judge it as good or bad, a success or failure.

If you want to write, if you love writing, if it’s something you truly want to do freely and joyfully, the fear of failing can be one of the biggest obstacles in the way of actually writing.

But it doesn’t have to be that way! Even if it’s been years since you last wrote, you can start again today if you shift your mindset just a bit.

When we fear failure, what we really fear is that a belief or expectation we have will come true.

For example, maybe the belief is that anyone who reads your writing will think it’s horrible and they’ll tell everyone that you’re a fraud and no one will want to read your work.

Or maybe the expectation is that whatever it is you’re going to write should be impeccable straight out of the gate, so anything less than perfect is pointless.

Or maybe you simply believe that there’s no way you can produce something worth reading.

Regardless of the specific fear holding you back, the best thing you can do for your sanity and your writing is this: get rid of any expectations you have.

When you write without expectations, the stakes are lower and failure is much less scary.

The only way you can write without expectations is to literally tell yourself that whatever it is you’re about to work on doesn’t have to amount to anything in particular.

No one ever has to see it besides you. It doesn’t matter how bad you think it is or if it reads completely differently than you imagined. You just have to trust yourself when you say this so you can fully surrender even the smallest iota of expectation you might be holding.

One way you can accomplish this is by having short writing sessions on a regular basis, ideally writing by hand.

Short can be one sentence, five minutes of freewriting, ten minutes of responding to a writing prompt, half an hour of writing a few new pages in an old story. Very often can mean a couple times a day, once a day, every couple of days, or once a week. You’re the only one who knows for sure what works for you, but…

If you need a recommended starting place, here it is.

Write at least one sentence of creative writing (the emails you send for work do not count!) every single day, by hand if you can. If that one sentence felt ok, write another one. The two can be unrelated, or they can connect.

Remind yourself that whatever you put on the page doesn’t really matter at all.

The fact that you’re writing matters more than what you’re putting on the page.

What you write doesn’t have to amount to anything! It can truly just be a single sentence that you never look at again or use in any of your work.

Maybe it’ll turn into something more, sure. But you won’t know that right now, and you don’t have to know that right now. It just doesn’t matter. All that matters is you showing up to write something on that piece of paper.

When you break it down to the simplest level like this, you remove any opportunity for fear of failure to stop you from writing. If you’re writing without worrying that the words must become something specific, the stakes are much lower and there’s just not as much for you to fear.

Expectations get in the way of honest expression. Give yourself the freedom to write free of those limitations.

Do you think you’ll give this technique a try?

Have you ever struggled with a fear of failure that prevented you from writing?

What helped you overcome it, if anything?