Oddball Sources of Inspiration, Part 1: FEAR

See end of post: Two free books for someone who writes a short-short inspired by their fears.

"I have come to understand, through my own writing and through working with other writers, that fear is a friend of the writer. Where there is fear, there is buried treasure. Something important lies hidden -- something that matters -- like the angel waiting in the stone that Michelangelo began to carve." -- Pat Schneider in Writing Alone and with Others

Pat Schneider’s book devotes an entire chapter to the various flavors of fear that haunt writers. She elevates that fear into something grand. She says in some sense that the call isn’t to write about what you know or what you don’t know, but to write about what you are afraid to know.

When I finished her book, I put down the mid-grade comedy I was working on and spent the next two years on something altogether darker and closer to home. Which is to say, a story about a daughter facing down her fear of her father. (In about two weeks a link on the right side of this page will take you to the first few chapters of my being-submitted YA novel, Everything that Happened).

We bend our lives around our fears. At least I do. I spent all my conscious years until I was 26 afraid my mother would die of lung cancer. Then she quit smoking. I was so relieved. Two years later she developed a cough; the year after that she died of lung cancer. My constant worrying -- and trying not to worry -- didn’t change the outcome. But it consumed a lot of energy.

I’m afraid of everything. I’m afraid my husband will stop breathing in the middle of the night. I’m afraid one of our dogs will get sick and die (and of course they will, eventually, every one of them). I’m afraid of buildings falling, the world ending, disappointing friends, jumping into cold water, my plane falling out of the sky. I’m certain my vigilant fear is the only thing that keeps the plane aloft. I’m afraid of car accidents, the unkindness of strangers, brain aneurysms, swine flu, and panic attacks.

Oddly, I was not afraid of having a child. How could I have missed that raising kids is like winning the Nobel Prize in fear? Now I add to my list things like pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders (aka PANDAs!), lead paint on toys, and saddling my son with my anxiety.

Of course I’m also afraid to write. And even more of not writing.

I’m afraid of all those books I haven’t read. Last night we dropped into our local bookstore and Ann Patchett’s book Truth & Beauty: A Friendship fairly screamed at me from the shelf. I knew I was screwed as soon as I picked it up. And sure enough it was 2am before I could put the damn thing down. It’s not like I don’t have kids to get to school. The book was a well-written train wreck. Why did she write it? Why did I have to read it? Sometimes there is good reason to fear books -- they get so under the skin.

"In the folklore of magic there is a ‘spirit familiar.’ The wild thing that frightens us so when it is hidden, guarded in our unconscious, becomes our spirit familiar when it is named -- still full of power, still magical, but power released for us, not power caged and threatening." - Pat Schneider, Writing Alone and With Others

I think writing fiction is a particularly clever way to uncage our fears and put to use their powers. Our deepest fears speak in the language of dreams, not facts, even if there were once facts to go with them. There is so much pressure to be grown up, to be good, to make sense, to cover for our irrational fears, or to act as if we’ve outgrown the childhood ones. Making up stories untethers us from the limits of our own circumstances and lets us play out the possibilities without excuses or qualification.

For years I thought I had to shove past the fear or I would never find work I love. Now I think maybe that’s all wrong.

The image of our fear becoming power once uncaged reminds me of Max’s journey in Where the Wild Things Are (Caldecott Collection) -- still IMHO one of the most profound and delightful picture books ever made.

And speaking of Max’s journey, this from actor Lauren Ambrose who is apparently doing one of the voices for the movie:

"I often take a role without knowing what I’m supposed to do, what’s required of me. Figuring that out is a process, and for me that process starts with fear. Every single time I begin a job I think, I’m a fraud. I’m going to get fired. What am I doing here? They’re going to find me out. But you can’t tell yourself you shouldn’t feel that way, because that doesn’t help. What helps is really living with what it feels like to be that afraid, and beginning from there. The fear is the way through."  - O Mag, Sept 2009.

In Buddhist practice, people like Pema Chodron (Places That Scare You : Guide To Fearlessness in Difficult Times (07 Edition)) talk about leaning into uncomfortable feelings. Leaning into the fear. What if I stop running from what scares me, or spinning tighter circles inside of it, and instead approach it with curiosity? It’s a box with shiny beetles inside. It’s a cave with a troll waiting to tell me something I don’t know. It’s a tippy boat with my name on the side and it’s going to take me somewhere new.

I still pretty much suck at this, but I’m practicing. Writing into my fears has led to some dark days. But, as my full-of-light husband says, the dark days make the light ones possible.
So I invite you to take a leisurely look at your own personal treasure box of whatever it is that scares the crap out of you and then write a page or two about it (as fiction or fact).

I’d be honored to post some of those pages here if you feel like sending it out into the world (email to fgardner@igc.org and paste your writing into body of the email). In fact, I’ll send free copies of the Pat Schneider and Pema Chodron books mentioned here to the third person who sends me such writing.

Digital illustration by Stephanie Williams.