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Ralph Keyes observes in his book The Courage to Write, \u201cThe trail of literary history is littered with those who fell along the way because the anxiety of trying to write paralyzed their hand\u201d1.\nWriters' Anxiety\nIf you\u2019ve begun to reflect on troubling, traumatic memories, you've likely encountered fears. Some of those fears are personal and some, professional.\n\nDigging for personal truths almost always leads to increased anxiety in the life of a writer. Keyes notes this causal relationship:\nThe closer they get to painful personal truths, the more fear mounts\u2014not just about what they might reveal but about what they might discover should they venture too deeply inside. To write well, however, that\u2019s exactly where we must venture. Melville admired most the writers he called "divers," those who dared to plunge deep inside and report what they found. Frederick Busch thought this need for inner exploration was what made novel-writing so daring. "You go to dark places so that you can get there, steal the trophy and get out."2\nKeyes profiles several "diver"-authors, each willing to go to dark places because they knew they needed to steal the trophy and get out. The first person he first highlights is E. B. White.\nThe Fears of E. B. White\nAs a child, White was scared of darkness, girls, lavatories, speaking in front of people, the future, and the "fear that I was unknowing about things I should know about.\u201d3\n\nHis anxiety didn\u2019t dissipate in adulthood, either; it simply shifted. He grew up to fear that \u201cthe brakes would fail on a trolly\u201d or that he would collapse on the street, and he continued to fear public speaking.\n\nWhite also worried\u2014to the point of obsession, it seems\u2014about his writing. Keyes said, \u201cHe rewrote pieces twenty times or more and sometimes pleaded with the postmaster of North Brooklin, Maine, to return a just-mailed manuscript so he could punch up its ending or rewrite the lead.\u201d4\n\nWhite said, \u201cI am not inclined to apologize for my anxieties, because I have lived with them long enough to respect them\u201d5. White not only respected his anxieties,\xa0but he\xa0also seemed to funnel these fears into his projects\u2014working them out, as it were. His readers can clearly see fear exhibited in such characters as Stuart Little and Wilbur the pig.\n\nHe risked negative responses to his work each time he sent off a project to be published. This added to his anxiety\u2014no wonder he pleaded with the postmaster!\n\nE. B. White wrote to discover his fears.\n\nHowever, he also wrote to discover the courage he needed to confront those fears.\nThe Courage to Confront Fear\nMerriam-Webster's definition of courage is this: mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty.6\n\nCourage, then, isn\u2019t the absence of fear. We discover the courage we need when we venture in, when we persevere, when we write despite the fear\u2014whether or not we write about the fear itself.\n\nKeyes believes \u201c[a]ll writers must confront their fears eventually. The sooner they do this, the better their work will be." He also clarifies that the courage we need to do the work doesn't mean we "conquer" our fears.7 In fact, he seems to agree with Steven Pressfield's claim that to silence Resistance, which includes anxiety and fear of all shapes and sizes, we must do the work.8\n\n"Working writers aren\u2019t those who have eliminated their anxiety," writes Keyes. "They are the ones who keep scribbling while their heart races and their stomach churns, and who mail manuscripts with trembling fingers.... They learn how to keep writing even as fear tries to yank their hand from the page\u201d9\n\nKeyes goes on to suggest that anxiety is a necessary element of a writer's life, arguing anxiety energizes our work, infusing it with truth and energy absent from safe, surface-level writing. \u201cTrying to deny, avoid, numb, or eradicate the fear of writing is neither possible nor desirable," he says. "[F]ear fuels excitement.