The Writing Life Too

The sky is the color of pewter and the forecast calls for more rain. While the blooms continue, yesterday I was running an errand in a small town at about 500 feet and it was snowing. In January when I was visiting Mexico I was struck by how easy it was to be in country not ruled by fear. Now, I’m no Pollyanna, and I don’t think that Mexico is without problems, corruption, or poverty, especially in the border region. I think our government policy toward Mexico shouldn’t involve building walls, but rather figure out how both countries can build more jobs.

But back to fear. Saturday I mailed the final draft of my manuscript for my upcoming book to my editor at Writer’s Digest. It will be published in July and is called Bullies, Bastards & Bitches, How to Write the Bad Guys in Fiction. I wrote an introduction that describes the physiological wiring involved in fear and why we capitalize on readers’ fears as writers. It’s something I also talked about in Between the Lines, particularly in chapters on suspense and tension: "Fiction isn’t written to make readers happy. Its purpose is to jangle their nerves, make their hearts race, give them goose bumps, and disturb their sleep. A happy reader is a complacent reader, and a complacent reader is one who nods off instead of turning the pages until dawn. The urge to keep reading comes from many factors, but mostly from suspense. And suspense is a technique that requires sleight of hand and is tied to our reader’s primal instincts and fears. Your job is to unsettle your reader even if you’re uncomfortable being sneaky or sly or if such traits come naturally."

Here is an early version of the opening that describes why we capitalize on a reader’s fears and physiology: "The world is a dangerous place. Or at least that’s what we’re taught as children when we were warned about stepping into oncoming traffic, playing with matches, accepting candy from a stranger, and running with a pointed stick or scissors. But children know that bigger dangers loom because monsters, witches, ghosts, and villains all have more fright power than sticks or on-coming traffic. These creatures invaded our nightmares, were depicted in movies and Marvel Comics, heard in fairy tales and myths, and told around campfires with the flames crackling and licking and a chorus of night sounds adding an extra shiver to the ghostly tale.

In childhood we also first meet real-life bad guys and learn that cruelty is an inescapable reality. These harsh lessons come in the form of the neighborhood or classroom bully, a sadistic cousin, a teacher who seemed to have it in for you, and creepy strangers at the mall. So at an early age we learn distrust and unease because life holds dangers and we realize that it takes resilience and courage to navigate through our days.

This particular legacy of childhood lingers into adulthood and fiction writers can capitalize on this fact, remembering fear’s potent hold on us as children and how difficult it was to feel vulnerable. In fact, it’s a fiction writer’s job to remember childhood’s hard lessons about vulnerability and dangers and stir up those memories and fears in readers. You see, readers are consciously or unconsciously drawn to vulnerable characters in precarious circumstances that are the heart of fiction. We enjoy reading about menace threatening a character in fiction since it’s safely removed from us, yet we can still enjoy the thrill ride because we’re well acquainted with fear and feelings of vulnerability. So in essence, readers tell authors bring on the baddest of the bad guys, the scariest monster, the freakiest sociopath, the most depraved killer—and we’ll flip through the pages, attention focused on the carnage."

While I was working on my chapter on horror fiction and monsters, I came across a terrific interview with Peter Straub at www.darkecho.com that you might want to read because his remarks about fear and how to create horror are fascinating. Straub remarks: “I had a connoisseur's...appreciation of fear. Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary. I knew his whole family, his older brothers Terror and Panic, his little sister, Nightmare, their charming parents, Chaos and Destruction, and all their cousins, Rage, Depression, Denial, Guilt, Shame, and the rest of the brood. I had first made my acquaintance with these enlightening folks in my seventh year, about twenty seconds before being struck by a car and at the moment I noticed the proximity of the vehicle to myself and understood that an unhappy collision was in the cards."

In fact, I researched extensively while writing this book, especially when it came to writing about horror and sociopaths. I particularly enjoyed Martha Stout’s book The Sociopath Next Door as a resource along with the research of Robert Hare. Stout, who until recently taught at the Harvard Medical School has written a practical examination of what terror and fear politics have done to our minds and to the very biology of our brains. In this timely book, The Paranoia Switch: How Terror Rewires Our Brains and Reshapes Our Behavior and How We Can Reclaim Our Courage. Stout explains "how terror rewires our brains and reshapes our behavior--and how we can reclaim our courage." It’s exciting to find professionals who can draw the line around fear—who realize that it works in fiction and drama, but should not be the means that politicians use to control a populace.

Here is an excerpt Stouts book posted on the Huffington Post: “When the president of the United States behaves in ways that redouble the population's fears, his behavior is a psychological issue. When the White House uses advertising specialists to instill in our minds terrifying visual images of mushroom clouds above American cities, American psychologists should be concerned, to say the least. When our chief executive dwells yet again on "death and destruction" in a speech he makes as we observe the sixth anniversary of our national trauma--and tells us that if we hinder his war policy, our enemies will "come here to kill us"--it's time for professionals who know about the effects of psychological trauma to speak up. As such a professional, I invite any person of reasonably sound mental health to engage in this brief and illuminating fantasy:

Imagine for a moment that somehow the American presidency falls to you, instead of to George Bush, and that, for reasons known only to you and your conscience, you accept the position. Not long after you move into the Oval Office, the United States is hit by a disastrous terrorist attack. Counterterrorism measures that should have been attended to long ago must now be designed at emergency speed--protective systems for the skies, the ports, the nation's nuclear facilities, its food supplies--but you can see that, just now, your stricken countrymen are scarcely able to think at all. Their physical and psychological landscapes have been disfigured by inscrutable "others" from a distant part of the world, and they are deeply traumatized and subclinically paranoid. The resonance of their fear is almost palpable. In this uniquely vulnerable state of mind, three hundred million people turn to you en masse, and, prepared to trust your answer implicitly--to cling to it, even--they ask you the following question: What should we do now?

I believe that, as you looked out on millions of your countrymen lost in fear and grief, you would experience an overwhelming desire to help them. You would earnestly want to bring them some comfort and peace, so they could protect themselves, heal, and rebuild. And--exiting this little fantasy exercise and returning to the reality of the last six years--perhaps, like me, you've been repeatedly saddened to witness that not everyone in such a rare and influential position experiences a desire to assist his own nation in recovery and real self-protection.

That some of our leaders didn't display this sort of heartfelt reaction has been understandably difficult for Americans to acknowledge out loud.”