“Don’t write what you know. Write what you fear,” a famous writer once said. (I think it was Stephen King, but don’t hold me to it.)
That bit of advice has been on my mind of late. Over the years I’ve been plagued over by some recurring nightmares. I’m talking gnarly, bad-ass, they-should-put-me-on-a-couch dreams. I’m wondering if I should consider mining a few of them for writing material.
Assuming one can calibrate a Fear Factor by analyzing dreams, here are some of my worst fears:
1. The sun starts to act strangely in the sky and then blows up, casting the earth into freezing darkness.
2. I’m trapped on an alien planet, being attacked by the locals. I am required to a) fight the aliens while b) figure out how to get back to Earth.
3. I’m being attacked by a grizzly bear, but a pack of dogs shows up and helps me fend it off.
4. I’m being chased by a guy with a gun. I somehow find a gun, turn and fire, only to have the gun misfire. Sometimes the dream ends on a more optimistic note, and I manage to beat him senseless with a handy object.
5. I have to land a plane after the pilot dies.
Based on these dreams, it sounds like I should be writing an episode of V, Airport, or the Dog Whisperer.
Maybe it’s real-life fears that should inform one’s writing, not dream-fears. Here are some things I’m actually afraid of in real life:
1. Losing a loved one or friend. That’s got to be everyone’s top fear.
2. Walking into a spider’s web. I have nothing particular against spiders–I’m just terrified by the prospect of one going for a ride-along in my hair.
3. Being hit by a tsunami (never mind that I live on top of a hill).
4. Being hit by a home-invasion robbery.
5. Having to land a plane after the pilot dies. (Dreams and reality are in agreement on this one. Maybe I should consider flying lessons.)
I have in fact mined a few of these fears in my fiction. I’ve had a home invasion-style assault in one book. Fear itself even becomes a character trait in the series. One of my characters drives his daughter crazy with constant warnings about all the possible bad things that could happen to her.
Do you mine your fears in your fiction? What are some ways your personal fears manifest themselves in your stories?
I am deathly afraid of serial killers (and have been since I was a kid). Who knows where that came from?
Anyway, a lot of my short stories have dealt with this and I often use my dreams as the basis for stories. I figure if I’m going to have scary dreams I might as well get something from them!
Ah, serial killers! I finally had to stop watching Criminal Minds–it became too brutal and scary in depicting the work of serial killers.
I think it is absolutely essential to know what your Lead character fears. It’s one of the things I do first when planning a book. We can take how we feel about a fear of our own and “meld” that feeling into the character, for whatever fear he or she has. In that sense, it’s like what method actors do, and that’s not a bad thing. It gets the blood pumping on the page.
One summer when I was in Kyoto for the Obon Festival, a motorcycle gang straight out of Akira stopped the proceedings swinging machetes and wearing masks, two men to a bike. They drove around in circles, revving their engines and making howling noises. Everyone froze and just watched them, let them do their thing, even the police. I’m not sure if I was scared or just awestruck.
Either way, ever since I saw that I’ve been sort of obsessed with organized crime in Asia. And I put a lot of what I’ve learned into my new ninja novel.
Clown masks are scary to me and I just finished a short story (for a Halloween blog chain) where my narrator is killed by a man in a clown mask and orange Afro wig.
Swinging machetes, Fletch? Yikes–that sounds like a bad guy from one of my dreams. Diane, I agree that clowns are inherently scary–I was afraid of them even before I heard about John Wayne Gacy. Jim, I also think in terms of what each character is afraid of (and hopes for), even secondary characters.
My personal fears inspire my writing. Nightmares, sleepwalking, and sleep-paralysis have provided me with some freaky experiences, so I remember what those were like when I describe characters’ reactions to frightening situations.
Losing loved ones is a common fear–and I’ve thought about losing the memory of loved ones. How bad would that be? Forgetting people you knew, and losing a part of yourself with that.
Steven, you really hit on something close to me. I was 18 months old when my older sister (age 5) died of leukemia. I’ve tried all my life to retrieve actual memories of her, beyond what I’ve been told by others. Losing her, and not having reliable memories to draw upon, has been the great sadness of my life.
Mining my own fears for fiction is something I’ve always done, but instead of using the fears directly, I try to get my characters feeling a certain fear about something different.
I’m afraid of spiders and will run in circles doing the heebie-jeebie dance if I walk through a spider web (and I’ll scream very loud if the spider web drapes itself across my face). I’ll use the way my skin feels, the way I involuntarily jump around and the way a sick feeling cramps my stomach and have my character experience the same when she sees a snake or faces off with machete wielding motorcyclists (Fletch – that would have been amazing to watch).
Sandra, there is nothing creepier than a spider web dragging across your skin. We had a couple of resident spiders that kept spinning webs just outside our front door. Long after they were gone, I kept doing an arm-waving, jerky dance every time I went near that door. I must have looked extremely odd.
I have dreams about missing a meeting that I’m supposed to be at. I either can’t find the right room while the meeting is going on or I somehow forget that I was supposed to go until the day after. That may not be as much about fear as a desire to be prepared for the meeting and I’m not sure it would make for a good story.
As for real life, I’m not sure that there’s anything I can say I’m really afraid of. There are a few things that I have a healthy respect for and a few things that disgust me, but fear is something else. That’s not to say that my heart doesn’t beat a little faster when my imagination gets ahold of it, but that goes away soon enough. There’s something about knowing that whatever happens you’re going to be okay. There are plenty of ways to die, and I’m not anxious to try any of them, but I’m prepared to pass through that veil into the undiscovered country when that day comes.
Whether it is a fear, healthy respect, or disgust, I agree what these are for our characters is important because there are some things that our characters will do or refuse to do because of them.
I think one of the factors with most of us here is familiarity with real crime / war / violence. Our minds tend to be closer to the edge of the scary on a regular basis.
My only real personal fear is being stuck in a space I can’t turn or backup in. Not necessarily claustrophobia, I can be in small spaces, as long as I can move. But in a crowd or a space where both of my shoulders are touching something at once and I can’t rotate…get me out. And there’s a surprising amount of spaces like that when you where a size 50 regular coat.
I’d say my main fears are along the lines of a home invasion, or even a war or natural disaster occurring when I am no where near my family to protect them. I feel pretty secure in my own way, but at a loss to protect my family when we are apart. That’s why all my kids are black belts or football linemen, and my wife is comfy with a gun and clean a moose.
But the biggest fear I have is one of my kids getting kidnapped or molested. The black belt can help, but they’re still just kid sized warriors.
In no particular order:
1) Spiders. A 12 gauge shotgun response to a web is not an over-reaction in my house.
2) Heights.
3) Tightly enclosed places.
4) A tightly enclosed place located in a high location and which is full of spiders.
^^^
ha that’s hilarious. Yeah, #4 would suck.
For all you folks (like me) who fear spiders, I broke my middle finger and “set it” myself over a little spider.
Two little ones crawled out from behind this head rest while I was cleaning out our hot tub. I tried to hit them with the broom and just as I slipped and fell into the puddle of water, I watched the spiders fall into that same water source.
I felt my finger crack when I landed, but by golly I jumped up and ran into the house (sure the spiders were crawling all over me) and in all this, I noticed my middle finger was bent perpendicular to the rest of my fingers. I reached down, grabbed my finger and yanked it back into place, because I needed it in order to get out of my clothes!
If anything, I impressed the doctor.
Fear of ignoring the temptation to do something risky, and paying the price.
I fear certains ways of dying, but when I write, I’m more apt to dig into my empathy for others & give a voice to the victims of crime. Maybe that distances me from things that can keep me up nights. Nice post, Kathryn.
Well I couldn’t draw from dreams b/c I rarely have any. Yeah, yeah, I know the experts claim we always dream. But to me, if I can’t remember having one, it didn’t happen. The rare few dreams I do have are dumb. LOL!
Interesting–I’ve not really gone at it from a character’s deepest fear but from using characters to try to know the unknowable. I’ll have to have a chat with the main character’s in my current project and see what they’re deathly afraid of….
BK Jackson
It sounds like spiders are in the lead when it comes to scary! Timothy, I have a similar recurrent dream to your missed meeting one. In the dream I have to take a final exam at Wellesley, but I’ve missed all the classes. Recently I’ve become more lucid in that dream–I remind myself that I already graduated, so I don’t have to take their stinkin’ exam!
Here’s a nice one.
I discover a spider. I’m horrified.
My husband, hero of mine that he is, grabs a tissue and heads over to intervene – he grasps said spider with said tissue, and she opens up and HUNDREDS of tiny spiders race out of her body, swarming all over everything.
I’m still screaming over that one!!
Ew, Paula! I’m getting the creeps just imagining all the baby spiders.
I have two very irrational fears: being in water over my head and snakes.
Probably the result of those two things causing my death in each of two previous lives.
My biggest fear IS fear. That four letter word wreaks havoc on our entire planet, let alone me. I spend most of my time working through dispelling fear so much so, that I’m too afraid to think about answering this in detail! LOL!!!
However, I applaud your honesty in mining your own fears, Kathryn, both in dreams and life. I have discovered that when confronted in a dangerous situation, I choose fight over flight. I’ve had an attempted home invastion and a few other frightening experiences where the adrenaline surge kicked in and I was ready to fight to the end. Luckily, I have some great angels and the bad situations never got out of hand. Thank God!
Great, gutsy post, KL.
I believe writing mysteries and having my amateur sleuth catch the killer helps with the fear that in real life, I’d be dead in that situation. Not everything wraps up so nicely in reality, so it works out better in fiction. Ditto on spiders and snakes, but I’m more afraid of mean-minded people.