I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
- Dune by Frank Herbert
If you search for information on the role of ‘fear’ in a creative process you quickly discover opposite reactions: fear as the fuel and fear as the killer of creativity. Which is it?
Fears about yourself (or bravery vs fearlessness)
Fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work, while fears about your reception by others prevent you from doing your own work.
- Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland
We all have fears about ourselves, and many of these have the potential to get in the way of getting started (or finishing things). Many of these fears, however, are not unique to any one of us. In fact, it seems as though there’s a banality to most fear. This is an idea I think I first encountered in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic. She has a section called ‘Fear is Boring’, and of this she says:
I noticed that my fear never changed, never delighted, never offered a surprise twist or an unexpected ending. My fear was a song with only one note — only one word, actually — and that word was “STOP!”
She goes on to differentiate between fear that is useful and fear that is not useful:
Your fear will always be triggered by your creativity, because creativity asks you to enter into realms of uncertain outcome, and fear hates uncertain outcome.
Art making requires accommodating a tolerance for uncertainty. But fear is designed to keep us safe — it’s clear that what we need is bravery, not fearlessness. Becoming numb to the fear won’t be possible, if it is just part of the human design to keep us breathing. But the capacity to stretch our bravery limits will be required to tolerate the uncertainty that is part of the creative process.
There are plenty of good reasons to be afraid. Art making is vulnerable, and demands a degree of self-exposure. To quote Jeanette Winterson (in Written on the Body), what you risk reveals what you value.
Fears about others (or the Big Fear behind everything)
Part of what differentiates an art object from any other mere object is, I think, the desire to create something that counters the solipsistic fear at the heart of a lot of human experience. This is a fear about connection. My desire to be understood both triggers and yet, somehow combats my fear that I’m the only one out here. This seems ridiculous on the surface, but I think if you dig down, you will hopefully know what I mean - the big risk is identity-threatening. It asks: what if nobody else gets it? What if I’m the only one? On some level, we suspect this can’t be true, but it’s so very hard to know this. I make art as an act of hopeful outreach. As a prayer for commune.
We can sit back and extrapolate out our own sensations by interacting with art - always with the hope for recognition. As Olivia Sudjic says in Exposure:
I can experience the fear of exposure vicariously, view myself through the prism of another or see my own thoughts estranged... It is a compelling sensation that can make you want to seek out the book's author to tell them 'me too'.
This desire to both experience art and then to reach out and react is incredibly meaningful. It’s precisely why art polarises people - why fans become big and voracious fans, determined that an artist can do no wrong, or somehow just speaks your language. Our very identity and selfhood is on the line in the most extreme cases. This sounds hyperbolic but sometimes, it is simply accurate. This person, this fellow human, understands. I am not alone.
Leaning in and digging down
We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves…
- Audre Lorde
I want to hone an instinct for the kind of fear that is worth pushing through. I think knowing the difference between the kind of fear that is just about me, my baggage, versus the kind that is relevant to my survival, is essential. But it takes time to learn. After all, as Lorde has said, we fear the ‘yes’ as much as the ‘no’, often times.
Growing patient and non-aggressive (to paraphrase Natalie Goldberg) means learning to reflect on the specificity of the feelings. Tapping into the feelings will grow our awareness of them - the same way that mindfulness asks us to simply ‘note’ what we are experiencing. This awareness means digging down, not letting the feelings to blur together or numb out. There is an element here of developing the underlying artistic urge to observe.
To quote Art & Fear yet again:
Ask your work what it needs, not what you need. Then set aside your fears and listen, the way a good parent listens to a child.
What do you need, and what does your work need? They are two different things. While we ought to address our own needs and fears, there is something to putting aside the repetitive and very human fears that we will experience (again and again, probably forever) in favour of being the parent our work most requires to get done. Here’s one more from Big Magic:
You have treasures hidden within you… bringing those treasures to light takes work and faith and focus and courage and hours of devotion, and the clock is ticking, and the world is spinning, and we simply do not have time anymore to think so small.
Fear means thinking safe, thinking small, and tracing old ground. Embracing uncertainty - and the possibilities of creation that come with it - will require us to think bigger. What more might fear teach us, alongside the capacity to really pay attention?