Whether we live on farms or in city apartments, grow up in logging camps or in suburban homes, move all over the world or remain in just one town, take on unusual jobs or work at home, we too often get to thinking that whatever we would write would not be important or interesting enough for others to read. We are shy about what we might write and too often start to believe our reflections on experience and our taste in subjects are not worthy of words on a page. We also suffer from doubt that we can write what we have to say well enough. And we suffer from fear of speaking up, from the idea that we don’t have the right to speak up. We worry we will offend people or might not get things right to satisfy everyone.

When I feel this way, I like remembering what the Nicolas Cage character, who was immortal and, therefore, without the five senses of us humans, said in the film City of Angels when he was courting the mortal character played by Meg Ryan. As she cut a pear, he asked, “What’s that like? What’s it taste like? Describe it like Hemingway.” She answered, “Well, it tastes like a pear. You don’t know what a pear tastes like? and his reply is good instruction for all writers, “I don’t know what a pear tastes like to you.” Our writing’s reason d’être is to describe what an event, person, dilemma, or memory tastes like to us; what we hear, touch, smell, see and taste helps us make our writing come alive. When we involve the five senses with specific details and images and allow ourselves to use metaphor and associative thinking to explore the subtext of our subjects, we begin to explore universal human experience. When we do that, not only do we learn more about what has shaped us, what we can offer the world, and what we will do as consequence of examining our experience, we also create writing that has meaning to others. Through our writing,  others relive feelings and perceptions they have had and often times overlooked or not taken the time to reflect on. They grow as we grow. You can use these understandings to override any fear that your writing will not be welcomed and will be judged unimportant, whether by you or your intended audience:

• First, realize that only you have lived your experience and it is yours just as the dreams you have while you sleep are yours. No one would expect you to not describe a dream you had merely because it was yours or because you might not be remembering it correctly or in its entirety. Feel about your writing as we start that you are as empowered to write your experience as to have dreams from it.

• Second, accept that what you write as a first draft might not be as rich as the ideas and feelings seem when you think about writing them. Writing allows you to see and perceive more than you could otherwise, but your ability to say what is at the bottom of your heart and mind takes time. Learning the techniques of the writing craft helps, and luckily, every writer has access to such learning through writing classes, writing books written by writers, magazine articles by writers on writing and attendance at writing groups for peer response to our work-in-progress.

• Third, remember that writing is something you will get better and better at through experience and willingness to enter and enjoy the revision process. Few writers have the good fortune of producing perfectly shaped writing each time they set words on the page. It is actually a surprise when a piece arrives almost whole. Most often, writers write and look for what is shaping up in their words; then they apply the craft of writing to find the rest of what their piece wants to be or the rest of how to evoke their subject. Understanding this will make you comfortable with the process of putting your words on the page as best you can and then learning where to go with them.

• Fourth, your writing is smarter than you are. When writers proclaim this they mean that their words led them to deeper connections than they would have made if they hadn’t started to write their experience. Wisdom is a consequence of writing about something, rather than a reason for writing. To write, you must have a desire to write. Gaining knowledge and insight is a result of the explorations you’ll make through writing.

• Fifth, to live fully, you must be heard. Sometimes you write to read your truths to people who come to hear you read. Sometimes you write to send your truths out for publication. If you are not writing what you want to write because you fear someone else’s reaction, you are muffling not only your voice but also your presence in the world. You are not here to be invisible; you are here to be part of the whole. The more you immerse yourself in the writing life, whether online or in person in groups, classes and conferences, the more you will honor writing and believe passionately that you deserve to write.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” offers us motivation to overcome fear of being visible. The last two lines of the poem go like this: “burst like a star: for here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.” There is a place in which you are already seen; you must write to see that for yourself.