Gibbs A Williams posted in Writers' Group.

Aug 23, 2019, 1:06 AM
Experience of One's Attitude Towards Anxiety and Writer's Block

Serious writing is difficult at best. This is so because serious authors are forever pushing through fixed and familiar boundaries daring to explore unknown unfamiliar territory. In this effort there is an exclusive reliance on the power of words to identify and describe their unique perspective of the raw data of their particular slice of reality. Dedicated to objectifying the subjective is hard enough but it is only part of the never-ending struggle to find the just-right words. Additionally there is continuing painful and disturbing anxiety which is often experienced as an unseen enemy force often having the power to interrupt the creative process dead in its track by preventing the author's fingers from guiding their pens or pressing the chosen keys on their computer boards - resulting in their feeling 'stuck' in the mud of writer's block. What is going on here?

Kierkegaard offers the most cogent explanation of this unwanted state of affairs. He says that "to venture is to cause anxiety" . Freud and other explorers of psychodynamics add that most people tend to prefer the relative comfort and security of the known to the relative discomfort and insecurity associated with experiencing the unknown.

I used to believe that being in psychoanalysis having learned to cope with anxiety would free me as an author from the affliction of intellectual and verbal paralysis caused by the experience of free-floating adrenalin (the physical part of anxiety) interfering with my capacity to think straight. That is, if I could survive a panic attack and know for certain I would not die then I could rest secure in the fact that once I had successfully stood up to the bully of anxiety I would be forever free from the fear of being stuck by a attacks of anxiety. Nice fantasy.

What I came to realize was that each foray into the unknown and the unfamiliar is experienced with the same degree of anxiety no matter how many times one has successfully mastered the various times before.

My psychoanalyst told me an instructive story which should make my point clear. He was best friends with a famous opera tenor who 'confessed' that before each performance until the curtain arose he would throw up with stage fright.