Scare Yourself: write from your deepest fear

Feature image: [Alessandro Pautasso]

What have you got to lose? 2015 is well launched. Maybe you think back to promises you made your writing as 2014 began. Maybe you kept them. Maybe you didn’t. Over thirty years of writing professionally (whatever that means these days!), I’ve learned that I’m terrific at breaking promises – to others, to myself and to my writing.

What I’m not terrific at is taking an action that scares me. I’m even worse at living with the grayness of not taking those actions – so I take them. I went off Facebook two weeks ago – hardly my deepest fear, but the fiendish site was eating my time and my brain. They have been two very long weeks. In that time, I’ve written a new piece for Matador Network, Ash Springs, worked on a new short story, Tiger, and played hundreds of games of Scrabble.

I don’t know what would scare you, but I’d bet that cutting back on the internet might be a good place to start. Love to hear from you how this experiment works out: Take one week away from whatever you do compulsively. Take fifteen minutes to write about your response. Send it to me as a reply to this post. (And be sure you’ve got Scrabble on your computer.)