I was inspired to write this post by the Summer 2016 issue of the Journal of the Society of Authors (UK), which opened with these words from the editor, James McConnachie: ‘All authors live with fear.’
Did you know that to be an author is to live with fear? Perhaps for some writers that is not the case, but in my experience – and that of the many authors I have worked with over the past decade in my job as editor – fear is ever present.
Here are the fears I struggle with on my own author journey:
- Fear of the words not coming: The start of every writing session begins with this fear. The time is now, will the muse visit? Will words flood out of me onto the page? Will the hazy idea in my mind form as I want on paper?
- Fear of being consumed: When the words do come, the resulting euphoria is engulfing. Who’d want to let go of that feeling, the entire driver for writing in the first place? Not me. But I must, because I can’t just write all day and night: I’m a mother, a wife, a businesswoman too. I fear the need to write taking over; I fear letting others down because the writing is consuming me.
- Fear of running out of time: There is always the sense that I must complete what I have started and wish to start. Not next month. Not next year. Now. Because life is too short not to do what you were put on this planet to do, and for me that is writing: I am my best self, my most authentic self, when writing.
- Fear of being vulnerable: The most compelling of all the fears. Writing a book is easy; publishing and marketing a book, not at all. If you write as I do – heart and soul on paper – then by sharing your book, you are opening yourself up to a whole world of difficult emotions. As James McConnachie put it in The Author, ‘it is not just our professional personalities that are up there on the podium but our innermost intellectual and emotional selves’. Even fantastic reviews of my books can derail me; it feels like someone’s shut me in a Perspex box and is surveying my naked body. Quite honestly, authors are such sensitive souls it’s a wonder we manage to publish at all.
How do we authors publish, then? Why? Ralph Waldo Emerson put it best: ‘Always do what you are afraid to do.’
If being an author wasn’t difficult, frightening, if it were easy, then the books wouldn’t matter, the time I spend writing wouldn’t mean what it means.
The final book of my Ceruleans series, Darkly, Deeply, Beautifully, is dedicated to my children with these words: Everything I write is my legacy to you. The stories are my legacy to them, but more than that, the act of writing is my legacy: through my writing I tell my children to not be defined by fear, but by doing what they are afraid to do.
Megan Tayte bio
Once upon a time a little girl told her grandmother that when she grew up she wanted to be a writer. Or a lollipop lady. Or a fairy princess fireman. ‘Write, Megan,’ her grandmother advised. So that’s what she did.
Thirty-odd years later, Megan is a professional writer by day and an indie novelist by night. She writes romance – sometimes sassy, sometimes soulful – to make readers smile/sniff/sigh/swoon/long to escape to a beautiful corner of Britain with a dreamy guy.
Megan grew up in the Royal County, a hop, skip and a (very long) jump from Windsor Castle, but these days she makes her home in a village of Greater Manchester. She lives with her husband, a proud Scot who occasionally kicks back in a kilt; her son, a budding artist with the soul of a palaeontologist; and her baby daughter, a keen pan-and-spoon drummer who sings in her sleep. When she’s not writing, you’ll find her walking someplace green, reading by the fire, or creating carnage in the kitchen as she pursues her impossible dream: of baking something edible.
You can find Megan online at:
http://megantayte.com/
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/13478850.Megan_Tayte
https://www.facebook.com/megantayte
https://twitter.com/megantayte
https://www.instagram.com/megantayte/
To Purchase any of Megan’s books:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Megan-Tayte/e/B00TDH4XLS
http://www.amazon.com/Megan-Tayte/e/B00TDH4XLS