The Anxiety of Choosing

By Eric Maisel, PhD

Choosing provokes anxiety. Even such small matters as choosing which cereal to bring home or which television show to watch can create a little tendril of anxiety. How much more anxiety is generated by trying to choose between spending two years on this novel or on that one! Even more significant, every mark you make as a painter or word you put on the page as a writer is a choice: when you create you are constantly choosing, which means that a certain amount of anxiety will most likely always attend you as you create.

Should you send your character to Paris or New York? Should you add just a little more red there in the corner? Should you include this lovely scene in your screenplay, even though by including it you will be making your screenplay slightly too long? Creative people face these choices continually.

Typically artists are unaware of how much this anxiety of choosing is affecting them and causing them to flee the encounter. Our first line of defense against anxiety is to get away, and when it comes to creating it is all too easy to get away by not showing up at the blank page or the blank canvas. The anxiety of choosing will do that to us.

Accept that you have a million choices to make as a creative person, one after another after another, and that all this choosing is bound to provoke real and significant anxiety. The answer is not to avoid choosing! Rather, you must choose, and you must commit to your choice for exactly as long as it makes sense to commit to it. You must choose between killing off your heroine’s lover or sparing him and giving her a happy ending: you can’t do nothing, since that means you are not writing your novel! Since the answer is not to avoid choosing, it must be the following one: to master the anxiety that wants to well up as, day after day and year after year, you bravely choose and bravely deal with the consequences of your choices.

Next: The Anxiety of Possibility »

About the Author | More by Eric Maisel
Eric Maisel, Ph.D., is America’s foremost creativity coach and is widely known as the creativity expert. His most recent book is Mastering Creative Anxiety. This article is based on or excerpted from the book Mastering Creative Anxiety © 2011 by Eric Maisel. Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA.

4/24/11