Writing Through Your Fears
Everyone is afraid of something in this life and I’m yet to meet someone who isn’t.
Believe me, writers are no exception.
In a 2013 online discussion, Stephen King11/22/63 confessed his biggest fear was Alzheimer’s.
Mystery writer, Laura Lippman,And When She Was Good is claustrophobic and afraid of submarines. “If the result of climate change is that we have to live/travel underwater—well, then I am truly sunk.”
Author, Brad Meltzer,The Fifth Assassin has a much longer list of fears:
“I’m afraid of heights, snakes, normalcy, mediocrity, Hollywood, the initial silence of an empty house, the enduring darkness of a poorly-lit street, evil clowns, professional failure, the intellectual impact of Barbie dolls, letting my father down, being paralyzed, hospitals, doctors, the cancer that killed my mother, dying unexpectedly, dying for a stupid reason, dying painfully, and worst of all, dying alone.”
Here’s where my biggest fear comes in.
Actually I have two: homelessness and suffering a serious stroke.
I come by the first fear—homelessness—honestly. Raised by a single mom in the 1950s, we lived a kind of nomadic existence on the San Francisco Peninsula. I never knew where we’d land from day to day. Talk about anxiety. Something I’ve never managed to rid myself of. (Terrible sentence but you get the drift.)
The second fear stems from my thirty-year career in higher education as a learning disabilities specialist. I often worked with students who had moderate to severe head trauma, disabilities that often left the student unable to speak, read, and/or write. As part of the disabled student services team, we worked to retrain as many skills as possible.
In 2009 I had a mild stroke in the right eye, compromising my peripheral and lower vision. I have to warn you, if you happen to find yourself someday in Arroyo Grande, California, and shopping in the produce aisle at Trader Joe’s, please walk to my left, or you’re liable to end up in the banana bin. Trust me, this almost happened.
Have I written about my fears?
The first fear, yes. When I started writing for literary magazines in the early 1990s, I based many of my short pieces (fiction and memoir) on my nomadic youth. But I have to admit I hadn’t tackled my fear of strokes—until just recently when I wrote the short story, “Words.”
JMS Books is offering “Words,” Wordsas a free download. It’s a gay romance, very short and fewer than 4,000 words—the word limit for this piece. “Words” follows a gay couple from the late 1970s to the present. A lot of ground to cover, I agree. Was I successful? I honestly don’t know. You’ll have to tell me.
I hope you’ll take a chance on the free download and let me know what you think. Again, it’s a very short story and not a novella—my favorite form—so there isn’t much wiggle room, especially with a 4K-word limit.
Here’s where you can find the FREE download for “Words,” including a short synopsis and excerpt:
http://www.jmsbooks.com/index.php?mai...
Q: What is your worst fear?
Is it something you feel comfortable talking about? If you're a writer, have you written about it?
Until next week then,
The best is yet to come,
Paul
Believe me, writers are no exception.
In a 2013 online discussion, Stephen King11/22/63 confessed his biggest fear was Alzheimer’s.
Mystery writer, Laura Lippman,And When She Was Good is claustrophobic and afraid of submarines. “If the result of climate change is that we have to live/travel underwater—well, then I am truly sunk.”
Author, Brad Meltzer,The Fifth Assassin has a much longer list of fears:
“I’m afraid of heights, snakes, normalcy, mediocrity, Hollywood, the initial silence of an empty house, the enduring darkness of a poorly-lit street, evil clowns, professional failure, the intellectual impact of Barbie dolls, letting my father down, being paralyzed, hospitals, doctors, the cancer that killed my mother, dying unexpectedly, dying for a stupid reason, dying painfully, and worst of all, dying alone.”
Here’s where my biggest fear comes in.
Actually I have two: homelessness and suffering a serious stroke.
I come by the first fear—homelessness—honestly. Raised by a single mom in the 1950s, we lived a kind of nomadic existence on the San Francisco Peninsula. I never knew where we’d land from day to day. Talk about anxiety. Something I’ve never managed to rid myself of. (Terrible sentence but you get the drift.)
The second fear stems from my thirty-year career in higher education as a learning disabilities specialist. I often worked with students who had moderate to severe head trauma, disabilities that often left the student unable to speak, read, and/or write. As part of the disabled student services team, we worked to retrain as many skills as possible.
In 2009 I had a mild stroke in the right eye, compromising my peripheral and lower vision. I have to warn you, if you happen to find yourself someday in Arroyo Grande, California, and shopping in the produce aisle at Trader Joe’s, please walk to my left, or you’re liable to end up in the banana bin. Trust me, this almost happened.
Have I written about my fears?
The first fear, yes. When I started writing for literary magazines in the early 1990s, I based many of my short pieces (fiction and memoir) on my nomadic youth. But I have to admit I hadn’t tackled my fear of strokes—until just recently when I wrote the short story, “Words.”
JMS Books is offering “Words,” Wordsas a free download. It’s a gay romance, very short and fewer than 4,000 words—the word limit for this piece. “Words” follows a gay couple from the late 1970s to the present. A lot of ground to cover, I agree. Was I successful? I honestly don’t know. You’ll have to tell me.
I hope you’ll take a chance on the free download and let me know what you think. Again, it’s a very short story and not a novella—my favorite form—so there isn’t much wiggle room, especially with a 4K-word limit.
Here’s where you can find the FREE download for “Words,” including a short synopsis and excerpt:
http://www.jmsbooks.com/index.php?mai...
Q: What is your worst fear?
Is it something you feel comfortable talking about? If you're a writer, have you written about it?
Until next week then,
The best is yet to come,
Paul
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Hi,Brita, and thank you so much for dropping by and commenting. I suppose if I were truly honest I'd agree and have to put my husband, Bob, at the top of the list. He had a terrible fall the night before we were to be married--trying to tell me something? Guess we over celebrated with wine and martinis to the tune of a midnight ER visit and 16 stitches in Bob's head. Plus a very broken flower pot in our living room--he fell smack dab into it. So, yes, we aren't immune to any of these things you mentioned. I don't dwell on them either but we sure experience them with great frequency as we age. If not us, our friends. I think "Words" is the closest I've come to writing about these unforeseen calamities in life. Take care and again, thanks so much for being here. Hugs your way, Paul
Great piece, Paul. I braved Goodreads even though I have a huge fear of Internet trolls and this is their native habitat. :-) Even the Boomer Lit group I thought was safe is infested with them, so I've left the group and I'm only coming to GR to read your blog. I have a fear of homelessness too. I faced those fears in order to write my novel No Place Like Home. I think it helped me work through some of the anxiety.
Hi, Anne, and thank you for coming here. I really appreciate the support. I love this little weekly chat with my readers. Yes, I figured that was the case. I loved No Place Like Home and can recommend it highly. I'm not sure of your situation when you were growing up but mine definitely left its mark. The uncertainly continued until I was 16 and then miraculously things evened out. Still, the fear stays with you. Writing about your fears and facing them does relieve some anxiety as you mentioned. Take care and hope to see you next week. Hugs your way, Paul
Uh oh, you’ve gone and asked for comments on your story again. And since you seemed to be okay with them the last time around, I couldn’t resist. And for anyone else reading this, there are spoilers.
Things I Liked in "Words" (in no particular order):
1. Blake’s character in general. Everything about him is interesting--from his “tribe” to his love at first sight, from his “usual not to worry comforting tone” and tackling things head on to his sobbing uncontrollably when alone. I wanted a more intimate knowledge of him--I wanted to know his thoughts. I wanted him.
2. The falling asleep on the first date was great: “prepare to be thrilled,” indeed. (loved that one)
3. The “You won’t like them, but you’ll meet them” line.
4. The chilling peek into the whole AIDS revelation and the lack of information and how people were scrambling to play catch-up trying to save their lives.
5. Stan. Yes, I liked Stan, but I felt he was hiding from me. He thinks ninety percent of folks wouldn’t love him. A provocative statement, yes. Now I want to know why, but he doesn’t say. When he got the test results, “he sighed in relief.” I suspect that, given how convinced he was that he had the disease, there was a more powerful reaction—one I would have liked to share with him. You did a fine job with his thoughts and feelings and reactions after the stroke. But I would have liked to know more of him pre-stroke so that the contrast would be better defined.
6. The repetition of the line about running his hand down his neck to his shoulder (even though I have an “issue” comment about it below.) Very nice way to anchor the story and give it a finished feel.
7. You made me cry. And I would have willingly spent a lot more time with Stan and Blake if you had chosen to expand their story.
Things I had issues with:
1. Point of View. As I recall, when I was a young reader (back when we put dimes in our penny loafers so we could use the pay phone if the bleeding was bad enough that we’d actually have to tell our parents where we were,) the omniscient point of view was, if not the norm, quite common. But now I prefer the limited point of view of one or two characters. The all-knowing narrator seems intrusive and drags the reader away from contact with the characters. And in your story, it removed the immediacy and intimacy when the narrator was describing rather than the characters living it: “they knew they were about to experience something extraordinary.” Well, that’s good to know, but I don’t feel anything about it nor experience it vicariously. Of course I realize you had to summarize a few decades in a short space, and an omniscient narrator works well for that, but I think it robbed the story of some of its emotional depth. I much preferred to be in the characters’ heads.
This does bring up another issue I had—the uncertainty of just whose head we were in. It wasn’t until the last paragraph in a couple scenes that there were any thoughts shown. Of course you might have intended omniscience for those scenes as well, but I couldn’t tell. So I spent the scene wondering whose view we were viewing. More internal monologue would have enriched the scenes and prevented my focusing on figuring out whose head (if any) we were in.
2. Hiccups: odd little things that made me stop reading and think about what I’d just read:
a. Why was Stan asking Blake’s name when we already knew it? (oh, yeah—the omniscient POV vs. character POV—but it still pulled me out of the story.) And Blake’s response when asked his name: “Blake, last time I checked.” The first time I read it, it just sounded like an odd choice of words. But the second time through, I realized it suggested he’d answered the question at least once before during the evening of drinking. So maybe other people would have assumed that, and I’m slow to catch on. Or maybe it needed a few words of explanatory backstory.
b. I didn’t immediately realize who was talking when “a hand wrapped around Blake’s waist (comma) and a warm body spooned into him. ‘Where’d you come from?’” I had to stop and ask was it the warm body talking or Blake talking?
c. “A week or month without a memorial service…” I would have flipped it and said “a month or even a week without a memorial service…” Yeah, picky, picky, picky, but it made me pause to think. Oh, on a related note, could you get results of an AIDS test in a week back then? (I have no idea—I just know it takes longer than that to get a god-damned PAP test read now, so it made me stop and think—not because of your writing, just because I wondered what the technology was like and how long people had to wait back then.)
d. “Occasional easy chair” I was wondering if that was an occasional chair (which seems to be one kind of chair) or an easy chair (a different kind.) Because “occasional easy chair” made me think there were a few easy chairs scattered throughout the living room and you would occasionally come across one. And since Stan had a “small dinette set,” it probably wasn’t a large house, so how much furniture could there really be? (Yeah, my mind works like that.)
e. “I’ll show you plenty” sounded like a response to a previous comment (or a private joke?) about showing each other something. There was no previous comment, but I had to think about whether or not there had been one, again pulling me out of the story.
f. “His ardor apparently cooled by the softening of his erection.” Shouldn’t that be the other way around—the softening occurred because the ardor cooled first? Or was that supposed to be “his ardor apparently cooled--as evidenced by the softening…”?
g. “Stan put a hand behind Blake’s head and ran it down Blake’s neck to his shoulder.” Okay, yes, I know it’s silly, and I know that normal readers will assume that “it” is the hand and not the head. But it still made me pause for a second. (hiccup) And while I love the repetition of the image, I wasn’t content with the phrasing, especially since it was such an important uniting piece of the story.
h. The kisses in the kitchen. First there was a “long, lingering kiss.” Then “he kissed the back of Stan’s neck.” Then Blake kissed him again, “longer and deeper.” And all these kisses seemed to take place within the same minute or so of time. So I’m envisioning this scene and thinking that Blake is flipping Stan around to kiss the front, the back, the front again. I was getting dizzy. Oh, and the fact that Blake “rushed” to Stan. I don’t see Blake rushing—too frantic for such a confident man-- especially not in a small kitchen when they’re standing a few feet apart. I think instead he might walk, step, head straight for, march, stride, slide, glide or even sashay on over. (Okay, maybe not that last one…)
Of course, most people probably would not pay any attention to these things. I admit, I have a huge honkin’ case of OCD banging around my brain. But after a few too many hiccups, my mind starts wandering, and I find myself thinking about what to make for dinner and did the cat pee in the bathtub again, and I stop paying attention to the story.
But still, some of the points may be valid and might be of use to you. The second time I read the story, all the hiccup items made more sense because I’d thought them through. But if there are more folks like me (god forbid), they likely won’t read it twice, and you might lose some readers along the way.
Jean, My God this is so good and such a thorough reading of this short. Would you like to be a beta reader for me? I'd truly love it. I'm serious. My email is on my website, paulalanfahey.com. I've never had anyone give me such a thorough critique and I mean it. I absolutely love it. These are all things writers don't see or think about BEFORE they send in their work. About the AIDS test. Yes, I took it twice or maybe three times during the mid to late 1980's. It usually took about a week. I don't remember results coming back earlier. If any knowledgable readers are reading this, please chime in.
Cause and effect have always been issues with me and I see your point. I'm not very logical and seem to be ruled by my emotions most of the time. What you said about the kissing scene at breakfast and the ardor and the erection make a lot of sense. Now. Darn! All of your points are valid and I welcome them. I'm trying to remember the POV I used. Here's what I think. The opening and closing POV is first person. What I was trying to show there was Stanley's early stages of dementia that came and went and were bound to get worse in the future. The forgetting of Blake's name yet the familiarity he felt toward him. You're right, the middle scenes are objective POV mostly and they do keep you at a remove from the character. Was conscious? I don't know. It's still difficult for me to deal with the AIDS crises and anything set in a hospital so that may be the reason I used it. I'm not always conscious of POV when I write but i know when I write out of it. Hope that didn't happen here. Again, this is a wonderful analysis and I do appreciate it. I hope you'll stay around. I can use the feedback as most of us are still learning. I'm definitely somewhere on the learning curve. Don't forget about the beta reader. I'm serious. :) Paul
My biggest fear is dying before my mom. She has already lost one child and I witnessed how bad it affected her. I don't want to be the reason for her to feel that way again! Otherwise I trust my life to the Lord that anything that happens to me he will see me through. Love your books, got Words but haven't read it yet.
Hi, Susan, I had a similar fear in the mid 1980s. My mom was recently diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and at the same time, Bob, my partner-now husband, and I were dealing with doctors who were trying to figure out treatment for our best friend who had AIDS. I remember telling one of my colleagues at work that I prayed I didn't die first because I'd be leaving my mom ill and alone. The fear of AIDS at that time was indescribable. I completely understand your fear. Thank you for those nice words about my books. It's so nice to hear that people like them. All my best and thank you for your honest comment. Hope you'll come back next week. Paul and Stay Well!
This was a brave and compassionate post, Paul, thank you for sharing your honesty with us. I consider myself really lucky that, although I had a single mother and she struggled to do the best for me and my sibling, we never had to worry about something to eat or somewhere to stay, even if that was often only because of my wonderful grandparents. But like others, I worry a lot about something happening to my husband and sons, something I can't fix *growl protectively*. Second to that is the fear for myself, but I wonder if that's natural as you get older? My mum has dementia now, although she seems to be happy in herself and reasonably fit for her age. Would I want to have dementia with a fit body, or suffer vice versa? Neither, of course, but I think we all worry. Anyway, thanks for the thought-provoking post. The one thing I *don't* worry about is my determination to keep looking forward rather than back, and to enjoy as much as possible of life. Seriously, if I went tomorrow (God forbid, not least because no one else knows the password to the bank accounts and the online grocery shopping LOL) I would be glad of all I *have* done, not what may be in the future.
And gosh, that's all got very deep, very quickly :).
Hey, Clare, what a lovely response. I'm so sorry about your mom. I had a very good friend whose husband had dementia and it was very sad. I'm glad your mum seems happy and has good health. It is very scary. Of course I didn't mention my all time fear which of course would be losing my husband. I don't know how I'd cope. But I'm like you. I look forward and try not to think of these things as I make my very careful steps into the future. I hope I'm talking about important things here. I think I am and trying to figure out how to find interesting topics for readers and writers alike. Thank you so much for dropping by and hugs and love across the pond right at ya. <3
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Massive stroke is another. My mother suffered one in '92 and then several more into '99, when she died of the worst one of all. Since then, my brother has had one, so those kinds of things a bit too close for comfort.
My worst fear, after losing a child, is losing my husband. As we get older, I worry more and given that he was recently diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease, the fear is magnified even more. That old thing about "Stuff just doesn't happen to us," no longer applies.
No, I haven't written about any of these fears, they are too raw for me actually. Yes, I'm comfortable talking about them, no superstition involved in that regard. And I don't dwell on them either. But they are there - stark and real.
Hugs my friend. I've got the short story and I'm going to read it soon. Can't wait.