I’d like to say a few words on behalf of fear.

This is probably not going to be a popular position. Among my writer clients, and certainly in the culture at large, fear tops the list of the so-called "negative" emotions. ("I have no respect for fear," I was once told by a TV producer. "Never let ‘em see you sweat," urged a well-known deodorant commercial.)

However, I believe feelings are neither good nor bad; they just are, and the more access we have to them, the more authentic we are in the world. And the more truth, power and relevance our writing has.

Which sounds good only in the abstract, I admit. Because for a writer paralyzed by fear---whether in mid-sentence, mid-meeting, or mid-career---the feelings of anxiety, danger and potential shaming self-recrimination are very concrete. Who wouldn’t want to banish fear?

I certainly did, many years ago, when research for a screenplay led to my attempting a climb of the Grand Teton, a mountain peak in Wyoming. Though at this particular moment, I wasn’t exactly climbing. I was sitting on a ledge, a good thousand feet below the summit, shaking. Andy, my climbing instructor, asked me what was going on.

"I’m afraid," I said, glancing up at the forbidding rockface.

"Good," he replied. "Otherwise, I wouldn’t climb with you."

He went on to tell me about his own fears, which were still with him after climbing all over the world, including four trips to Everest.

"Fear keeps you in the here-and-now," he explained. "Which keeps you alive up here. So stay in touch with it---and just keep slogging up the mountain."

As it turned out, "staying in touch" with my fear wasn’t the problem. It was staying in touch with anything else---everything I’d learned, practiced, rehearsed in my mind a dozen times the night before the climb.

Then, as I found the next hand- or foot-hold, or made the next traverse, I slowly began to understand what Andy had been talking about. The fear became a part of how I was taking in each moment; a feeling in a mosaic of feelings. Not something to be pushed away, or willed out of existence, but a kind of electrical current running through the circuits of my experience.

The fear was a prod, a warning, a partner in each split-second of decision-making. It stopped my breath, which reminded me to breathe again. It tensed my muscles, which reminded me to relax them. At 15,000 feet, with yawning emptiness falling away below me, it focused my attention---and then some---on the inch-wide crack in the rockface, just wide enough for curved gloved fingers to jam in.

By the time I’d reached the summit, aching and exhausted, the exultation I felt, the shout of triumph that escaped my lips, was as much an honoring of the fear that had accompanied me up the mountain as it was the relief of surviving it.

Which brings me back to that producer who said he had no respect for fear. He might as well have said, "I have no respect for an integral part of myself." Like most of us, he was giving a negative meaning to his fear---that it was a sign of weakness, some shadow part of himself that, if acknowledged, would say something damaging about him.

But every healthy person has fear, and uses it to negotiate in the world. To assess situations, and avoid danger. Even so-called "imaginary fears"---like the belief you’ll die if your script is rejected---are signals of potential danger, of painful consequences to be avoided. As we explore and understand the meaning we assign these fears, we hopefully learn the tools to co-exist with them.

Even moreso, as writers, our job is to mine these fears, and their particular meanings for us, so that our work becomes vivid and multi-dimensional; that it hums with life.

If we try to sequester our fears, leave them out of the equation, then much of our creative energy---that "electrical current" I experienced on my climb---is drained away. No fear, then no release from fear. No anxiety, then no anticipatory rush.

It’s as though, to scale the mountain of our writing craft, we need excitement and fear to get us to the top.

Which leads me again to that windswept summit of the Grand Teton, where Andy and I stood those many years ago. He asked how the climb had gone for me.

"I was half excited, half terrified," I told him.

"Sounds about right," he said.