"Don't think! Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things; you simply must do them." ~ Ray Bradbury

Or as someone else put it "Do, or do not. There is no 'try'."

"There is no spoon." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO0pcWxcROI&feature=relmfu

I'm afraid of everything when I write a script. I agonize over whether or not I have a good concept and if I should pursue the story further. Unfortunately for my Mom, she has to listen to me ask her the same questions everyday: If this was a movie, would you watch it? Are you just saying that because I'm your daughter? Do you think I should stop? Are you sure?! Fine.

Thank you for reposting this, Scott. Your thinking and perspective on this desolating aspect of the creative process is a prayer from the desert answered. Pax.

I'm in a phase with my writing where fear isn't the big issue. Maybe because all my fear is used up in other parts of my life and there's none left to allocate to writing! But maybe also because I'm in a stage in my life overall where I feel comfortable with experimentation and failure. "Permission to fail" is, in my experience, a powerful and freeing component of a creative endeavor.

Am I the only one out there that sees a problem with the WAY Hollywood treats writers as the main reason for the fear bug? You quote two writing legends, who, once they started to engage with Hollywood started to lose their way and their sanity. I once saw you tweet a quote from Budd Schulberg's "The Disenchanted" (The writer is the most powerful person in this town - never let him figure that out) And it turns out to be the most truthful quote about Hollywood I have ever read. Also - there's Rod Serling's "The Velvet Alley" that was part of Playhouse 90, which pulls the curtain back on the Hollywood trick when a drunk producer spills the beans to a young writer about how they have no ideas and simply feed off the writers to keep themselves lunching and schmoozing and living a fantasy life compared to the average working man. Nothing has changed except the amount of cash a writer can extrapolate from the studios with a sale. Fear has a very deliberate source. It's not some accident of writing - even though writing can be a frightening task. Writers should reject the notion that "fear" is some phantom from nowhere that's standing in their way. What fear really is - is a smokescreen intentionally placed in your way and kept there by those who have successfully crossed the line to the other side. When William Goldman said "nobody knows nothing" that was just him preaching from the other side.

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Valid point, Michael. Here I was trying to write about the existential fear of writing, but did provide evidence from Faulkner and Fitzgerald which obviously demonstrate the impact of the Hollywood system on them creatively. As a balancing point, there's the Max Millimeter post Why We Hate Writers, which goes to your point: Writers have enormous power in that we can create ideas, we understand and can craft stories. And THEY can't survive without stories and the people who write them. Which circling back to my OP is really the subtext: Don't let fear, of whatever sort, get in the way of embracing the Spirit of the Spec. We DO have power, the power of creativity, individual initiative, knowledge of the craft, etc. Sounds like I should do a follow-up post. Thanks for that, Michael.

Michael's post struck a chord with me as well. It's fear of being ripped off. I know that's irrational and the solution is to just "break through that wall" and send the scripts to everyone, but the fear remains.