The full famous quote from Frank Herbert’s “Dune” has Lady Jessica murmuring, “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings obliteration. I will face my fear and I will permit it to pass over me and through me.”
As 2025 dawns, I find myself repeating the mantra, whispering it to myself, holding it in the back of my mind, trying to fight back against a terror.
Look, I started writing things down as soon as I could hold a pencil in my chubby little hand. I wrote my first poem at5. My first (bad and derivative – thankfully now long vanished) novel at 11; my first GOOD novel (all 150K+ words of it) at 14, in pencil, in harcover notebooks I still have in my possession. I won a national writing award at 12. I started publishing stuff while still in my teens. I published my first book in my early twenties. I wrote a fat fantasy while working in a science lab, in between waiting for experiments to come to a conclusion. Amongst many other writing milestones, all of that.
I did all of this on my own, by myself, writing being a solitary occupation. I sat down – applied butt to chair, as some have put it – and picked up a pen or, later, turned to a typewriter or drew a computer keyboard closer and opened a document, and just wrote. On my own. I knew how to do this. It was innate, instinctive, as easy and as inevitable as breathing. I knew how to accomplish having written – I gained the experience, as I walked this road, to know when what I had put down on the page was good. I was a writer, and I was a judge of my writing,my own first reader, my own (inadequate, as writers always are) first editor, the one to decide if there was anything amiss with the story and if there was how to fix it. I was a one man band of a writer, I simply knuckled down and did it. It was who I was. It was what I did. It was inseparable from me; if it had been a part of my physical body it could not have been severed from me without killing me. It would have been as though somebody had cut my heart out of me.
The first time that instinct left me, plunging me into an inner silence, was in the aftermath of the worst breakup of my life, from a relationship which I had firmly believed would have been the one to last, to carry me forward into middle age, into old age. It wasn’t to be and in the wreckage that followed my inner voices went silent, and for almost a year I wrote nothing at all – until some inner whisper told me, in no uncertain terms, “Write, or die.” So I started again, slowly, limping, trying to find the old path on which I had been travelling…
…and then I met the man I would marry, and everything changed. Our relationship literally began as a literary partnership, as we co-authored what might be the world’s first email epistolary novel together, writing to one another as the characters in the book. That was just the beginning. In the safety and security and the complete sanctuary of his love and his faith, he became a pillar of my process. I wrote a dozen or more novels and unnumbered stories during our time together, some of which were luminous. Everything I wrote I would take up to him, show him, read to him – he became my first reader; then he would take it and edit it and make it BETTER, my first editor, and boy was it convenient having one in-house. He became my one-man cheering squad, and took on publicity, marketing, creating and maintaining my website, doing all the scutwork that goes on in the background of a writing career, unasked, unremunerated except in my love and my admiration and my respect, a job he self-selected for and did occasionally with frustration (when things wouldn’t work the way he wanted them to) but never with an ounce of regret and always full of a glorious vision of the future.
This was a good thing. It was a good thing that I grew to rely on. Writing a novel became a process wherein I created the story and the narrative out of the weird spaces of my own brain but it was a creation leavened by his input, his insights, his own innate creativity. He trusted me to sometimes simply hand me back a page of a manuscript with a red line drawn down the text and a single word beside it – “FIX”. He didn’t presume to tell me how, or even what, his input was that something wasn’t working and he knew that if he pointed that simple fact out to me I could do something about it. One thing I grew to absolutely treasure was when I would trot up with a brand new short story which I had cobbled together in the past couple of hours and I would read it to him and he would listen and sometimes laugh or cry as the story required, and when I was done he would look at me and say, with deep love and admiration, “I hate you”. Because he too was a writer but for him it was never an instinct like it was for me and he knew hat he could no have written a story in that short span of time, let alone a good story like the one he had just had read to him. If i got the “I hate you” comment I knew I had done well.
And then he died.
I entered my second desert of silence. He was gone, and with him a process honed for decades – I was also plunged into a process of being the sole caregiver for my ailing mother in the last years of her life – there was no room in my head and my heart for stories, and as for telling them, well, the person who was my first bulwark just wasn’t there any more. There was a huge yawning chasm where Deck used to stand. There was nothing to lean on any more, and there didn’t seem to be a bridge across that canyon of silence that plunged down into a precipice so deep that I couldn’t see bottom. The voices stilled once again and I iived inside that silence, curled up into a ball, whimpering occasionally.
I had half a dozen projects in various stages of planning or mid-writing. All of them had been dropped and put away when Deck was in his final months, and then after he was gone, and then mom’s decline and fall that folllowed. Back in the days of my early forays… well, they were just writing projects, like many others had been. I had written on my own before. Like I said, I knew how to do it. I HAD done it. I had published proof of it. And yet… and yet… now suddenly I was bereft, lost, terrified. I could not bring myself to look at them let alone contemplate adding to them. I had lost my support system, completely. How could I ever do this again? How do I go back to doing it… ALONE…?
But that little whispering voice of “write or die” had started, if not to speak, then at least to breathe again.
And so, almost five years after I had abandoned it, I found myself circling a manuscript I had started a long time ago, a story I had wanted to write forever. A story I had wanted to share with Deck… but that was not going to happen. That was in the past. That was gone. HE was gone. *The story was still here*.
Five years into my silence I started looking for words again.
On my own.
Terrified. Terrified that I could no longer do this at all, that losing him had lost me everything, that I was permanently crippled by this. But a word I put my mind’s hand on here and there would purr at the touch like a neglected cat which was eager to find affection.
So here I am, repeating the Lady Jessica mantra – I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings obliteration. I will face my fear and I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
I will face my fear. Fear is the mind-killer.
I will return to my story, and read through the parts of it that have already been set down, and see if I can recapture the place where I strayed off the road.
I’m going in.
Wish me luck.
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