How does one muster the courage to keep writing even when no one has asked for her to write? How does a writer handle restlessness and disappointment?

The author Ralph Keyes writes in The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear that when he started out as a writer, he had no idea that courage would be part of the job description. He said that after his tenth sleepless night, it did dawn on him that there was more to writing his first book than recording good words on paper. He felt anxiety elbow its way into his office to sit beside him. He has since learned of the anxiety felt by writers as famous as E.B. White and John Cheever.

We can take a lesson here that part of being a writer is having the courage to write despite the anxiety it makes us feel about what we have in us to say. And, we can take the lesson that we are not alone in experiencing writer’s anxiety. It is part of the job description.

Why do we do this then? Louise Desalvo addresses this well in Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives when she opens her book with words from Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing. Bradbury felt the opposite kind of anxiety than Keyes describes.

For Ray Bradbury it went like this:

Not to write, for many of us, is to die.

I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow. An hour’s writing is tonic. I’m on my feet, running in circles, and yelling for a clean pair of spats.

Desalvo says in her own words:

What, though, if writing weren’t such a luxury? What if writing were a simple, significant, yet necessary way to achieve spiritual, emotional and psychic wholeness, to synthesize thought and feeling, to understand how feeling relates to events in our lives and vice versa? What if writing were as important and as basic a human function and as significant to maintaining and promoting our psychic and physical wellness as, say, exercise, healthful food, pure water, clean air, rest and repose, and some soul-satisfying practice?

Anxiety is with us as writers — both about what we will reveal when we write and what we will not have the chance to reveal if we are not writing. Far from a lose-lose proposition, it is a win-win. We must write to become more human; to do that, we must find the courage to write and to believe that after we write, we will feel good having written. Why do we take up such a challenge, such a lifestyle?

Joseph Campbell wrote that although people are always saying they are looking for meaning, as in the “meaning of life,” what they are looking for is the experience of being alive. And that is what we as writers do: we search for and shape meaning from experience to stay alive to life itself. This week, I offer you an exercise in several steps that has helped participants in my online class “Writing Is a Friend with Extraordinary Benefits” look into how they do this and why they must. It offers a way of reflecting on your writing and learning more about restoring the sometimes elusive experience of being truly alive.

Here goes:

1. Look at the writing you have done at points this year.

2. Circle five to seven nouns or adjectives that you seem to use more than you realized. Can do a word search for the chose ones in some of your documents to see how many times you have used them in this year’s writing.

3. If you had to make those five words fit into one category, what would you name that category? Be imaginative — you might come up with lyric phrases to name the category, phrases such as “above and below,” “still and moving,” “without words but with music.” Use whatever comes to you that seems imaginative.

4. Now write five one-sentence statements about what it means to you that you can see this category in your writing. Write what comes to you and write with confidence that what you say is worth saying even if you don’t quite understand what you are saying. For instance, “I often see words in a category I have named “transformational,” and, to me, that means I may not feel so much changed as I want to feel changed.”

5. Next, write five questions for yourself about your use of these words in your writing. For instance, “Why do I long so much for change in my life or in the lives of those around me?”

6. After you have written the five statements and the five questions, do freewrites attempting to answer the questions. Choose one question in particular and spend time writing an answer that satisfies you. Then do another and another until you have answered all of the five that interest you.

How does it feel to you to have written the answers to your questions? I am going to bet you feel indebted to your writing and encouraged to keep at it despite the two kinds of anxiety it promotes. Living with the dual anxieties described by Keyes and Bradbury becomes instead an excitement, a way to look forward to what you will discover as your write.

Sometimes, I find that by taking a walk alone, words come to me unbidden. I dictate them into my phone or stop for a coffee to write on a notepad or a napkin if I have forgotten my own paper. I practice listening to phrases that arrive while I am doing anything rhythmic and taking in images: laundry, stirring a pot, hanging clothes to name a few actions. When my body is engaged in repetitive acts, my mind produces interesting phrases. I like trusting that this will happen and that the phrases will compel me to use an hour a day for the creative tonic Bradbury describes.

Not that I think you should procrastinate starting or renewing your writing regime based on what you found in your written reflections from this week’s exercise, but here are a few links for more encouragement:

Joyce Carol Oates, “Why We Write About Grief”

“Joyce Carol Oates on Writing, ‘Don’t Give Up’”

Sue William Silverman, “The Courage to Write and Publish Your Story: Five Reasons Why It Is Important to Write Memoir/Essay”

If you type “courage to write,” “writing to heal,” or “why writing is important” into your search engine’s browser, you will certainly find lots more links to follow and lots of writing that will help you feel part of the writing tribe and, therefore, a bit less anxious because of shared experience. But don’t forget, the more you read writers on writing, the more time you must also give to your own writing.

This is my New Year’s challenge and greeting.