Release What Fear Is Holding

Practice. Spend twenty minutes making two lists. The first is Requirements: everything remaining that is craft, ethical or legal, each with an observable test and an estimate of the time it will take. The second is Delay: tasks and reasons that have no test. Compare their lengths. If the first list has an end, put a date on it and name the exact artifact that will be released, checked in the form readers will receive it. If the second list is the longer, say so plainly, and choose the smallest release that is still real.

Fear often goes unrecognized as fear, because it shows up as care, one more pass, a few facts to confirm, a better moment to send. Craft work is real, so there is always a task that justifies waiting.

Not all delay is fear, and nothing here tells anyone to stop being afraid. Some delay is craft; Horace advised keeping a poem nine years. Some is ethical, since the people portrayed in a memoir may need to be consulted (Practices 79 and 80), and some is legal, or a matter of safety. Some is simply honest, because the book has a hole in the middle. The two lists separate those reasons from the one condition this practice is about, in which delay protects the writer from exposure more than it protects the Work.

In 1855 Walt Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass, took part in its printing at a Brooklyn shop, and issued it himself, in an edition of 795 copies. He left his name off the title page; outside the poems themselves it appears only in the copyright notice. He sent a copy to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and when Emerson replied with a letter of praise, Whitman handed it to a newspaper without asking. Nothing here claims to know what he felt. Admirable or not in its details, the record shows a release as a series of dated acts that did not wait for a state of readiness.

Our guess at why fear persists is that before release a Work holds every possible reader at once, including the ideal ones, and a finished manuscript in a drawer can seem to have only admirers. Release collapses that crowd into the actual readers, who are fewer, slower and stranger. Delay preserves the imagined audience and forgoes the real information.