Facing Ones Fears

I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog that I write for various reasons. Sometimes it’s because a story is rattling around inside my brain and I can’t seem to dislodge it until it takes shape on the page, and sometimes it’s a mechanism to help me cope with life/stress. But there’s another reason I write too: facing my fears.

Yes, part of it entails the process of putting my work out there for others to read – it’s scary – but that’s not what I’m really referring to. It’s the other fears I face as a human that I’m talking about: losing someone important to me, conflict, etc. Sometimes I write about difficult circumstances and situations to face my own fear of them.

Why? I think it’s in part to prepare myself for the inevitable. A theme that crops up in many of my stories is the loss of a loved one. I’m no stranger to the grief the death of a close family member elicits, but I still fear losing certain people in my life. I write about death in my books because it’s an inescapable part of life, but also because I think I’m trying to prepare myself for the future.

What would I do if [person] is suddenly gone? How would I react? As I plot my stories and certain characters are slated to go, I often consider how I’d react to their passing as the character closest to them. Not all of my characters cope well with their losses—and I’ll admit, I haven’t always done so myself.

I recently announced I finished writing Serpentus, which has a few pretty dark themes. It was difficult for me to write, and the main character did lose a few people along the way, but they weren’t terribly close to him. Grief wasn’t the difficult part of that book—it was the concept of losing one’s freedom to act, to be utterly under someone else’s control that really bothered me. I know it’s irrational to think that mind-control will become something I personally have to face in this world, but it’s still a terrifying idea to consider.

And mind-control is a big theme in Serpentus. I was forced to consider what I’d do if I was forbidden to act or speak without being given an order—and if those orders went against my conscience, what then?

As I said, there are some dark concepts in that book—and a lot of rage/depression on the main character’s part.

These are just a couple examples of how I face my fears in the form of storytelling. I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes my stories are unpleasant, sometimes they’re brutal and ugly, but I always try to add a sliver of hope—and a happy ending (if not at the end of a book, at least at the end of a series.)