Writing a novel is “terrifying,” it says here

From Writer Unboxed: When You Are Your Own Antagonist

First paragraph: There is nothing trivial about writing a novel. Regardless of the surface appearance of the story, its genre, its apparent complexity or simplicity, its length, or its intended audience, to create a story is to create a universe. And an act of creation is at its core, terrifying.

Wow, does that look overwrought.

I’m trying to think of appropriate adverbs for the prior sentence. Let me see. How about this:

Wow, does that look astoundingly, stupendously, egregiously overwrought.

The post goes on: What if it’s terrible? What if no one reads it? What if it doesn’t sell? What if no one likes it? What if no one likes me? The post then recommends hope as an antidote to fear, and that’s all very well, but how about this as an alternative:

Writing a novel isn’t terrifying.

Honestly, I want to take this author out for hot chocolate, plonk a friendly spaniel in her lap, and say, “Listen, don’t take all this so seriously. Pet the puppy! Relax! Enjoy writing it! Enjoy discovering how you write! You can worry about whether the novel is any good or whether people will like it later, after it’s finished. And if you decide it’s not that great, so what? Put it aside and write something else.”

***

How many of you have written a book, or some part of a book? How did you feel about it? I’m just wondering. When I started writing, I was in grad school and I was doing it just kind of … to do it. For fun, I suppose. To speed up my typing (real reason) and because I’d read a novel that annoyed me (don’t remember which novel, sorry).

I wasn’t thinking, “What if it’s not good enough to get published?” I wasn’t thinking of it that way at all, just as something to play with. I put it down for months at a time, without feeling bad about that, because so what?

Now, looking back on this period, I wonder how much of that was just me and how much of that was the complete absence of nonstop advice about writing and the total absence of self-publishing as a thing. (All right, near total, you know what I mean.) I really can’t tell. I have never, not once, taken writing advice seriously. I have always, right from the beginning, just opened up novels to see how authors handled something or other, whatever I was trying to do. I didn’t want anybody to critique anything. I didn’t want to show it to people. I mean, not before it was finished. So … maybe the ocean of writing advice wouldn’t have distracted or bothered me. I’m not sure.

I do sort of suspect that it might have been highly beneficial not to have the easy option of sure, just throw it out there, why not that is the default right now. (I’m pretty sure this is the default? An assumption that since you’ve started a novel, you must finish it and self-publish it? Or at least an assumption that if you have finished a novel, you ought to publish it?) I wonder if the easy option to self-publish anything you want might have led to this sort of overwrought advice that takes writing so seriously, like you have to do it right and make it work or … what? Or it’s not worth doing, I guess.

I would say that if you don’t enjoy writing, there are lots of other worthwhile hobbies. There are times when writing is unavoidably stressful, I do think that’s true. Those times occur when you hand the finished book to a reader and wait for feedback, or when you hit publish and wait for reviews. I’m usually a bit tense at those moments. “A bit tense” isn’t “terrified,” and if I were terrified for any large proportion of the whole writing and publishing process, I’d do something else.

***

Also, I realize some people just are very histrionic in their approach to everything and declare they’re terrified when they’re nervous. I don’t really get that, but I sort of hope that’s what the author of the linked post means: that she is mildly nervous about writing, not terrified. But she sounds like she takes the whole thing way too seriously.

People have been telling stories since the Stone Age, if not before, and honestly, we’re pretty good at it. Don’t say, “To create a story is to create a universe.” No, it isn’t. It’s a story. Relax and tell it.