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Have you ever had to overcome your fears? Australian writer and journalist Meg Mason had to do just that after a failed book manuscript. Despite having spent months writing 85,000 words, she deleted the entire manuscript and asked her publishers not to read it. She vowed to never write fiction again.

However, her debut novel Sorrow and Bliss was released to rave reviews last summer. Meg joined Emma Barnett on Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour to discuss how she overcame her fear of failure and started writing again.

She shared her best advice on how we can all feel the fear and do it anyway.

“After the failed manuscript, I needed to rehabilitate myself from the lowest place, when you have no confidence,” says Meg. “So, I would start every morning by writing out everything I was scared of on paper: ‘I can't do it. I don't have the talent.’ I’d just put it on the page and then one day I started replying to myself. I would write: ‘But it's okay because…’ So, it became this conversation. Some days I'd need to write for half an hour, and other days it was two minutes.

“There wasn't a day when I sat down and I wasn't scared. All my fears were real and I couldn't just say that I wasn't afraid. So, I had to acknowledge them all individually. It literally felt like I was getting it out of my body and it was very separate. Then it was something I could put to one side and attend to later.

“I decided: ‘I'm going to write now and then I'll come back to them.’ And usually, by the time I finished writing, they weren't relevant anymore. Be that as it may, I'm going to do it anyway. That was the phrase that got me through it.”

“I used to write out the most ridiculous encouragement to myself, almost like positive affirmations,” says Meg. “Bearing in mind I was starting from quite a deep pit, the only positive things I could think of to start with were things like: ‘You’ve chosen a really good font to write in today.’ It was the most pathetic endorsement in the world, but it was all I had.

“I began from there, but I could see my confidence building. If you do it despite how afraid you are, you start to see you build your confidence. It's that incremental build up."

“Remember that everybody finds it hard, whether it's writing or ceramics or gardening, or whatever it is,” says Meg. “These things are hard. They're all really challenging because they're so important to you.

“I think that's the thing to remember: If you're frustrated, it’s because you value it and it's meaningful to you. That's why you must continue with it.”

“I found it really useful not to talk about it too much with other people,” says Meg. “You start to feel that there's expectation on you and I think your own mental monologue is enough to contend with. I was really contained about who I talked to about it.”

“There was a library in the art gallery in Sydney, where I used to go and write,” says Meg. “You had to walk through one of the gallery areas to get to this library and it struck me for the first time that every single one of these paintings was produced by someone who would have doubted themselves.

“The painting looks complete to us, but it might not have turned out how they wanted it to. They would also have been ridden with insecurity in comparison to other artists. And one of those days, I just thought: ‘Oh, we all feel like that's something we have to overcome.’ That was quite a revelation that we all struggle in the same way.”

“No one's coming to save you,” says Meg. “My belief all through my 20s and 30s was that it was fine because someone was going to fix it for me or bail me out. I got to 40 and had this career crisis and it just struck me one day that it's all down to me. I will be the one who will either do this or not do this, and therefore determine the next few years of my life. No one's going to help me, so I just have to do it.

“That’s how I got myself to start again. Because it was all up to me. There was no cavalry about to arrive and make it easy for me. So, that was a massive learning curve. You need to realise that it's all down to you.”

“After I'd failed at that manuscript, I could have never written again and it would have made no difference to anybody except me,” says Meg. “I would have been the one who felt heartbroken forever that I didn't write a novel. It was almost a sense of no one cares, so I have to care more than anyone.

“So if there's this thing that you want to do, only you can do it. And you have to have the faith in yourself that it is worth something and that there’s a reason to apply yourself to it. You will never feel satisfied until you try this thing. So even though it’s absolutely easiest to think: I can't do it, it's too hard. I'm not good enough.’ I think to feel like you're truly doing what you're here to do, you just have to feel that fear and do it anyway.”

Head to Â鶹ԼÅÄ Sounds to listen to the full interview with author Meg Mason on Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. You can also hear any other episodes you’ve missed. Join the conversation on and @bbcwomanshour.