Fear and loathing at the inkwell

“It sometimes makes me wretch, just the thought of writing,” said an author whose book launch I attended last night. This was not said in jest as part of a routine of good natured badinage, or as a novel sales pitch. He meant it.

“There’s a moment of deep anxiety. A quandary. A kind of self-loathing brought about by sudden self awareness: the realisation that what I’m writing is absurd and that I can’t improve on it. It’s the fear of failure. At that point I get the nausea.”

It’s a common complaint: some writers just hate putting pen to paper. And because so few authors have immutable deadlines, many choose to procrastinate rather than scribble. Professional writers are not alone: blogging amateurs are similarly constrained by fear. How do you overcome the fear of writing, or graphobia? Jacques Derrida had a couple of ideas, shown in the film above.