Producer's fear.

I am paralyzed by fear every day. To get it out of my head, I agree that I am willing to try something interesting or creative even if I fail. So when the project or piece fails, I am not surprised or upset. And of course the more you fail, the better you get at it: Success is what happens to people who aim too low. The trick is to resolve to attempt things without caring whether they are good enough. Sometimes a project blows up in my face and becomes unpleasant and I still muddle through to the bitter end because I know I am learning something about failure along the way. Loss and failure are where wisdom lurks. And you can be affluent among other ffluents only to realise the only thing that matters is wisdom and how much you paid to acquire it.

So this sort of homespun thinking gets me through each day. The thing that's cool about getting involved with creative projects is that you can help push them along without having any skills to do so. If you start telling people you like a certain movie, and why you like it, eventually you'll have a modest readership that thanks you for being able to go see movies they've heard about but never planned to see. And if you didn't want to do the actual writing, fine, you could at least edit the writers and get them all in place; producers are always needed and there is no school to learn how to become a producer. This is sheer field work, grunting on behalf of a product.

     -- from correspondence to Cara L.