by Martin Cozza

You are lucky. You get to take off work and write for two months, thanks to a grant and to your spouse, who’s off for the summer and can watch the kids all day. You’ve started a novel, and it’s going pretty well. You rent a writers’ studio at the Loft, since you have to get out of the house. And you can ride your bike to the Loft—no parking worries. You have time! You have space! You have a project to work on! You are lucky! Yes!

You lock your bike, get into the building, get to a desk, flip open the computer, get it whirring. There’s plenty to do: Open a folder. Open the file. Scroll down to where you left off. No—you have to scroll back up and read a bit first. No, not like that—really read it this time. Take out the comma after “cardigan.” Change “luminous” to “glowing.”

Now you are there: the blank page. Stare at it. Appreciate it. It is a wonder.

Put the comma back in after “cardigan.”Go ahead, play a little Minesweeper. You actually are writing, you know. The mind must relax. You get your best ideas playing Minesweeper. Maybe you need some coffee. Of course you do! Writers drink coffee. And the coffee people downstairs are so nice. Plus your wrist is getting sore from Minesweeper. Okay, back at it. Let’s get serious. You get to check e-mail if you write 100 words. You don’t write 100 words. You check e-mail anyway.The New York Times! The Gray Lady! Right here at your fingertips. You think about how stunning it is to have all this information at your fingertips. People in history might have died for the privilege. You refuse to dishonor them by not reading the Times. Based on this same principle, you track down the lyrics to “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” by the Ramones. Based on this same principle, you Google yourself.

There’s a lot of talk going around about motivating yourself through positivity, through rewarding yourself and being kind to yourself. Finding what’s working in your writing and your habits and cultivating it rather than beating yourself up for what’s going wrong. Celebrating your successes, not dwelling on your failures. I don’t dispute the wisdom of this approach—it’s wonderful, it’s useful, and I’m sure there are reams of research supporting its effectiveness. I use it with my own children, and it works (sometimes). But then there are people like me. People who were raised on the sarcastic quip, the sharp aside, the threat of eternal damnation. People who pondered their own worth in dim chambers under the glow of stained glass, with a cheek against a cold stone pillar and a voice echoing from the vaulted ceiling, speaking of our intrinsic unworthiness. People like me will not often respond to positivity. Positivity takes our motivation away. We think: If you don’t think I suck, what do I have to prove? If I have nothing to prove, no failing to make up for, why should I do any work? If I’m good, kill me now!

If you’re like me, no amount of believing in yourself, no extent of reward, will get the most out of you as a writer. You need fear. Not the light at the end of the tunnel but the black at the bottom of the pit out of which you are trying to claw your way. So to break the cycle of Minesweeper/coffee/Ramones official website, as I finally did this summer, you need the threat of failure. What finally got me going was this thought: If I can’t write now, when the conditions are perfect—grant funding, no kids underfoot, nice quiet studio—then I’ll never write. If that happened, I would not be able to fool myself: I would have failed. I would feel deeply, deeply terrible. It would be time to move on to actuarial science or dog grooming or pouring concrete. Now that’s motivation. Not quite the threat of eternal suffering in hell (another very effective threat), but still. So if you’ve been kind to yourself, rewarded yourself, and celebrated your strengths, and in the end it has left you cold, hasn’t pushed you to produce your best work or as much of it as you want to produce, there’s always good old-fashioned fear of failure to drive you back to the computer to rework that sentence or plunge into the next scene. You’ll feel terrible if you don’t.

Martin Cozza’s fiction appears in the current Colorado Review and the Best American Fantasy anthology and has been published in the Missouri Review, Columbia, Massachusetts Review, Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has held three Minnesota State Arts Board fellowships and a Yaddo residency.