Wearing a mask?

Hai­ley, from Wis­con­sin, writes:

“How do you find the courage to write? I write near­ly every day, but I find myself a lit­tle afraid of it.” 

1. Writ­ing is hard. It is always daunt­ing, even if some writ­ers do not acknowl­edge it. 

2. If you write for a liv­ing, or wish to as I do, it is scary to know you must write some­thing pub­lish­able if you are going to pay the bills. 

Joke: What is the dif­fer­ence between a large piz­za and a writer? With a piz­za, you can feed a fam­i­ly of four.

3. Folks who do not write—even your near­est and dearest—do not get 1 and 2 or the joke. 

4. But gen­er­al­ly, I sus­pect, most peo­ple become fright­ened of writ­ing because they feel they are going pub­lic about their thoughts, emo­tions, and expe­ri­ences. It is rather like the kind of fears of pub­lic speak­ing. You sense that when you are up front, every­one is look­ing at you. You are right. They are look­ing and lis­ten­ing to you and prob­a­bly mak­ing judgments. 

5. How­ev­er, when a read­er reads some­thing you wrote—unless you hand it to them and say—“Read this. I wrote it,” they do not know it is you. More­over, if you write about some­one you know, say Mary, and in your sto­ry, she is called “Alice,” and the event you expe­ri­enced took place in Alaba­ma, and you set your sto­ry in Alas­ka, there is even less connection. 

As a very young writer I would hand a per­son some­thing I wrote and say, “I copied this out of a book. What do you think?” 

As he often did, Oscar Wilde said it best: “Man is least him­self when he talks in his own per­son. Give him a mask and he’ll tell the truth.”