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I’ve been thinking a lot about fear lately. Not the ax-murderery, jumpy-outy kind, although Halloween is a great time to write about this topic.

And not even the existential kind brought about by the current world situation, although there’s certainly plenty to fear there too.

I’m talking about the more quotidian flavors of fear, the ones brought on not by actual external events worth being frightened of, but by our own minds. The kind that can stand in the way of the full expression of your craft and career, and even your self. The kind that can shape our art, our writing careers, and our lives.

On a recent episode of the Smartless podcast, Michelle Pfeiffer told the story about auditioning for Scarface, the biggest role she’d ever been up for. On her first audition she blew it out of the water.

Then she was brought in to read with Al Pacino, who didn’t want her for the role—and this time she just blew it. And she continued to flounder every time director Brian De Palma had her come in to read again.

“Over the course of two months, I just get worse and worse and worse because I’m just afraid,” she says. “And by the end, I’m bad.” Pacino’s resistance to hiring her grew—“and I don’t blame him,” she adds. “I’m bad. And Brian finally comes to me and says, ‘You know, doll, it’s just not going to work out.’ I’m like, ‘I know, man, I’m sorry.’”

Fear as Foe

When Pfeiffer told this story I felt it viscerally. I’ve been at auditions where I knew fear was making me worse and worse, putting me so much in my head and making me watch myself, judge myself, so that my art got more and more distant. It wasn’t about the work at that point, but my desperate need to prove that I could do the work. 

I’ve had moments where I froze up onstage completely: In one audition for a musical I was literally tripping over my own feet learning the choreography; in another my throat closed up and I was able to produce only a strangled croak. Singing and dancing definitely weren’t my strengths as an actor, but I’d studied both for years and could move and carry a tune well enough under normal circumstances; it was fear that shut my skills down completely.

But it’s not just acting where I’ve experienced that kind of paralysis. Even now, if I’m struggling with a course I’m creating, or something I’m writing, or a presentation starts to feel like slogging through putty, I can almost always trace the source back to some kind of fear: that maybe I’m not good enough, that I don’t know what I’m talking about, that I can’t do it, that what I’m trying to do exceeds my skill or talent or knowledge.

It’s an unhealthy self-awareness, where you’re so in your head, while simultaneously so minutely observing yourself from an external perspective, that you freeze up and shut down. If we don’t try we can’t fail. If we don’t push ourselves, we will never fall short.

For authors that may mean staring at a blank page in paralysis; abandoning a story because you worry you can’t finish or can’t do it justice or aren’t good enough; never submitting or sharing your work because you’re afraid of what people will think. It can mean agreeing to things you don’t really want to do, taking less than your writing is worth, or never even trying to do it at all.

Michelle Pfeiffer knew what was hampering her in the auditions for Scarface. “I didn’t feel worthy. I didn’t feel like I had the chops. I didn’t have any experience behind me. I had zero confidence,” she confesses. “Fear is the worst; it’s an actor’s enemy. It just completely undermines you.” 

So after blowing audition after audition, knowing Pacino was growing ever more entrenched against her, when De Palma called her back a month later for a screen test, she recounts, “I show up and I don’t even give a shit because I know I’m not getting this part.”

And she nailed it. “It was my best work of the film. Of course.” Letting go of the fear that had stifled her talent and skill restored her creative freedom. The scene called for her to have a major emotional outburst in a restaurant and she gave over to it completely, swiping dishes off the table so forcefully that a flying shard cut Pacino’s finger and “there was blood everywhere,” she recalls.

“I think that was the day he was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. She’s not bad.’”

She got the part.

Fear as Friend

Letting go of our fear can be a powerful tool for freeing our full creative range. “Before you show up to do your performance that’s your mantra,” Pfeiffer joked with the Smartless hosts: ‘I don’t give a shit. I don’t give a shit.’”

But the thing about artists—and our art—is that we very often do give a shit. A giant one. And pretending we don’t when something important hangs in the balance—a contract, our book sales, a story that means a lot to us—can feel all but impossible. Denying it can even make the fear worse, give it more destructive power.

Accessing your creative power often means you just have to operate in spite of the fear—in the presence of it. Pfeiffer was only 23 when she shot Scarface—opposite one of the biggest stars in the world who she knew was on the fence about her, on a testosterone-charged set in a testosterone-charged story, and with her biggest and most recent film credit being the frothy musical Grease 2.

We underestimate the positive role those fears can play in our creative process, if we can coexist with them.

“I was terrified. Every night I was terrified,” she says. “I didn’t feel worthy. I didn’t feel like I had the chops. I didn’t have any experience behind me. I had zero confidence.” 

She focused on the work, taking it so seriously that even as filming stretched on, she kept losing weight so she could believably portray a cocaine-addicted character in a downward spiral. Her performance garnered critical and audience acclaim and launched her into a career as one of the highest-paid leading female actors, with a string of major award nominations and wins for subsequent roles.

I don’t know Michelle Pfeiffer’s acting process, but I sure as hell recognize her approach: You have to feel the fear and do it anyway.

To me that means finding a way to release the result—the way she did in auditions where she finally decided to let go of the hope of winning the role, or during filming—and focusing on the work itself: what you’re doing and what’s important about it to you, what lights you up about it.

But that has to come from internal motivations, rather than external ones. Not “I want to publish this book” or “I want to be a bestselling author”—outcomes you can’t control and which will almost certainly freeze you up in the creative process—but “I want to tell this story in this way, because it matters to me for this reason.”

The fear will still be there—it’s the province of those inner demons we all have, who have taken up permanent residence in the caves of our psyche. There’s no banishing them, and there’s no suppressing them. We just have to learn how to create with them in the room.

Read more: “Doing Creative Work Amid the Shitstorm”

But I think we underestimate the positive role those fears can play in our creative process, if we can coexist with them.

Psychologist Adam Grant in his excellent book Think Again talks a lot about how fears like impostor syndrome and other anxieties aren’t actually enemies to be vanquished, the way we often think of them, but part of our creative process and growth—healthy self-awareness.

It seems natural to feel some fear when you’re reaching beyond your current grasp, trying things you’re not 100 percent sure you are yet capable of. It’s even normal to be afraid of things you have done before, and do all the time—as any experienced author who’s ever stared at a blank first page and a blinking cursor knows.

Cliff diver Molly Carlson confesses that she feels some measure of fear with every dive she makes—but she’s learned to harness and use that fear in service of her sport: “For me, fear should always be there, because it almost motivates you to protect yourself,” she says. “It motivates you to be smart in your decisions, be calculated in your decisions. If we weren’t scared every time we jumped, then we would be making those mistakes.”

That resonates hard for me—I tend to overprepare for almost everything I do, certainly professionally. I write countless pages of material that winds up in a discard file, have far more research and references than I can ever fit into a presentation, and often create extra slides and material as backups just in case it goes more quickly than I’ve timed it or writers have questions I may want to illustrate. I rehearse my workshops and speeches multiple times—no matter how often I may have done them before—and am often tweaking right up till I present them.

That’s born out of some measure of the fears and anxieties I mentioned earlier: failure, impostor syndrome, perfectionism. I can’t pretend those aren’t part of my emotional repertoire, so I acknowledge them, and I let them fuel me to push myself a little harder, stretch a little past what I can easily accomplish.

It can sometimes feel like a wild ride, but it’s one where I’m the one with my foot on the accelerator and my hands on the wheel—not careening around on a roller coaster, out of control.

Fear Is Just a Feeling

Even if you don’t fear actual physical danger, it’s scary to try something new, to maybe reach outside your comfort zone or forge a path where no one yet has–or to go after something you desperately want.

If you let go of worrying about what people think and just write what means the most to you, maybe it will be terrible and you’ll never find a readership. If you venture into a new genre maybe your fans won’t follow you. If you put your most naked and vulnerable self on the page, you’re showing your belly and inviting anyone to tear into it.

But that fear can often be the fuel for your process. It can be your friend, and I’ve come to think of it that way. Whenever I’m feeling this kind of fear in the work I’m doing, I remind myself that it means I’m stretching myself. It means I’m not staying in my comfort zone or resting on my laurels or stuck in a rut, but pushing myself to do a little more than I might have been capable of yesterday, to learn something new, to try something just a bit outside of my comfort zone. And that means I’m growing, both as an artist and hopefully as a person. Not only am I not stagnating, but I feel as if I’m working to be better all the time.

There’s an exhilarating freedom to making friends with your fear. If you accept that it’s just there but it’s not going to kill you and that it can be a handmaiden to creativity and growth, then you can stay tapped into your core impulses and drives—the fertile seed of your creative process—rather than hamstringing it by worrying about consequences or other people’s reactions, all of which are beyond your control.

I get a rush of fear-based adrenaline before almost every presentation. But I’ve learned to regard it as energy now, the heightened state of awareness and presence that will make my presentation more immediate and alive.

If you accept that your fear is just there but it’s not going to kill you and that it can be a handmaiden to creativity and growth, then you can stay tapped into your core impulses and drives—the fertile seed of your creative process.

I read once about a Buddhism-based pain-management approach where instead of thinking of pain as something bad to be vanquished, you regard it as simply a sensation. I try to think of fear that way too. It’s just a feeling, and I can coexist with it.

I start by acknowledging it instead of fighting it: Okay, this is scary as shit. Then I dig even deeper, identifying all of the specific things I’m actually afraid of: ridicule, skepticism, disinterest, being proven wrong or a fraud, falling on my face. Once I can acknowledge these fears, it’s easy to rationally address them: to realize that these worst-case scenarios are unlikely; often our fears are wildly overstated.

Sometimes I take them to ridiculous extremes to help me see that: “The whole literary world will point and laugh.” “I will be publicly dragged, held up as a cautionary tale for the ages about incompetent editors.” “I will speak gibberish and drool.”

Clearly none of these things is going to happen—for starters, most of the world does not care how I do in a ninety-minute presentation for a fraction of the writing world, which makes up a sliver of the Earth’s population. Realistically (and historically), it’s unlikely I’ll be reduced to nonsense words and slobbering.

But even more to the point, it’s ridiculous because my fears are simply not reality. I am not a fraud—I’ve worked successfully in my field for decades. I do know what I’m talking about. These negative messages are just intrusive thoughts—and I get to decide how much power I give them.

Thinking of fear as my friend and a sign that I’m on the right track in my creative growth has significantly reduced its power over me.

Fear is often used as a method of control because of that extraordinary power to freeze people up, to render them silent and compliant and passive. For me that’s another compelling reason to learn to “feel the fear and do it anyway”—I’m unwilling to give others that much power to dictate the quality of my life or how I live it.

We seem to be living in a time when fear is being deployed on the daily, for just these reasons. But if we understand that fear is simply feelings and thoughts and don’t let it keep us from acting and speaking freely, we rob those who would cow us into submission of the ability to control and manipulate us. Instead we can let our fear fuel our fire to stand up for truth and the values we believe in.

Fear can paralyze you—or it can empower you.

Remind yourself—in art and in life—that it’s a part of the process. We feel fear when we’re stretching ourselves, and that means we’re growing, as artists and as people.

And that means we’re really living—authentically and fully and on our own terms.

Your turn, authors: How does fear manifest in your writing, and your life; how does it hold you back? What techniques do you have for dealing with it? Do fears outside the sphere of your writing (like the state of the world) affect your creative work? What do you do to give yourself some psychic space from it so you can write?

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