Fear of public writing  can be almost bad for careers as fear of public speaking.  
I’m not writing about the kind of phobia where putting fingers to keyboard leads to full-blown anxiety attacks.
I’m writing about the kind of fear that creates 1,020 websites dealing with writing phobia, where people say things like “I was so traumatized and terrorized by the prospect of committing my imperfect thoughts to words on paper that I couldn’t even begin.”

Despite such terrors, fear of writing is not a public menace.  Just look at all the blogs and articles and websites that pop up daily. But writing is a real pain to many otherwise brilliant professionals, especially fundraisers and salespeople.   

Why them?  Because their skill is with people; with talking and listening.  It’s a world of possibilities, optimism, and friendship.  Slapping words on paper is lonesome.  It’s also horribly concrete.  Written words are never perfect.  Worse, they stay there forever. Years later, they might come back to haunt you and make you look stupid.

Faced with that, what keeps writers at their computers?  Here’s what we know that the phobics don’t.

1.    Perfection is the enemy of the good.    What’s the use of a brochure that doesn’t get out until the information has died of old age?
 
2.    Just get it on paper.  You can go back and edit later.  Or get a colleague to edit it for you.  

3.    Speaking of information, that’s what people want, rather than deathless prose.  They also want to hear your story.  More on this next week!

4.    In today's information glut, your words will never haunt you.  Google “fundraising” and you get 28,900,000 hits.  “Marketing” gets 638,000,000.  So keep it short and timely.

5.    Writers love to write, the same way other folks love to hang out with people and talk with them.  So if all else fails, hire a writer!