Fear as an Inhibiting Force

Since I got such interesting responses from my post, Hope as a Driving Force, I thought it might be helpful to look at it from the opposite angle:

Fear as an Inhibiting Force

As much as a character's hope drives her forward, her fear keeps her from budging from the safe zone. This is where the trope of the reluctant hero comes up again and again in popular literature. Bilbo Baggins is practically dragged from the Shire by seven dwarves (er, I may be confusing him with Snow White). Anyway, the fear of the unknown is a classic one--universal within all of us. But people also have very specific fears that hold them back, keep them from facing their adversary or their potential or their own flaws.

On Monday I talked about hope in the context of my character Tapti Singh in a YA time travel/coming of age novel. Today I'm going to switch WIP's and talk about fear in the context of Graylyn Stephens. 

26-year-old Graylyn Stephens, a quality assurance customer service rep, knows all 112 ways a toaster can malfunction, and that 11 of them involve electrocution. She's also the unluckiest girl on the planet. Tired of landing in pot holes and hospital beds, she takes up extreme sports in an effort to chase the bad luck away.

Graylyn is pretty much afraid of everything. She isn't cursed with agoraphobia, per se, but she goes into every situation in her life fearing the 'three things that will go wrong before breakfast.' Self-fulfilling prophesy dictates that three horrible things do happen to her... every day of her life. These bad things range from the annoying (dropping her towel in front of her high school crush) to the tragic (her parents dying in a car accident during her first year of college, leaving her to take guardianship of her teenage sister). And everything in between.

Graylyn's fears keep her from doing anything she really wants to do, because--well, if you can't even walk out the door without tripping, why would you want to risk failing at your lifelong dream?

You may be wondering, if her parents' untimely deaths didn't pry her fingers from the safe zone, then what possible inciting incident would?

It's not too much of a spoiler to tell you it's her own car accident/near death experience.

Being unable to move a single muscle without incredible pain does something to you. Having the very real force of instant pain holding you back requires you to face those intangible things that have been holding you back in life. This I can tell you from personal experience. Some parts of Graylyn's story are embarrassingly autobiographical.

When Graylyn makes the switcheroo from unlucky to in charge, the story gets massively more interesting. She still has fears, but she's keeping them at bay. Of course, it isn't until she faces those fears thoughtfully--taking responsibility for them--that her character arc is complete.

Here are a few of the fears she lives with every day:

• She's afraid she'll never find love, thanks to the competition of her little sister, the chastity vow she took at her father's request in high school before he died, and the behavior of a couple first class jerks.
• She's afraid she'll never have meaningful employment, thanks to having to drop out of school to take care of her sister, and the fact that she's been at the same company ever since.
• She's afraid her best friend might be in love with her, and she's afraid she might love him back, threatening the solidity of her one consistently good thing: his friendship.    
• She's afraid to speak up for herself in mixed company, sure everybody is judging her before she even opens her mouth.

As you can see, many of these fears are strapped to blame. 

Most people go from fear to blame pretty easily in an effort to avoid responsibility for their own choices. 

Think about your own fears and how you may be blaming something/someone else for what's holding you back. Heck, I even do it with my writing. "I can't finish this story because I a) have no time with three kids, b) don't have the knack for structure other writers seem to have."

Your characters will probably do that, too. 

What do your characters fear, and who/what are they blaming for their failures? Once you know that, you'll know exactly what they need to grow as characters.

Happy writing!

Naked Words! Put Something Decent On!

So we've all had that naked dream, right?

Actually, I don't remember having a naked dream, but I'm sure it happened and I just blocked it out to protect my delicate psyche. I have, however, had plenty of dreams wherein I felt completely humiliated for one reason or another. Which is basically the same thing as a naked dream, in principle.

At the crux of the naked dream is the uncomfortable feeling of being exposed--warts and all--against our will. It is characterized by embarrassment, stage fright, and perhaps some jiggly running (I apologize for the mental image, but hopefully you were only picturing yourself, right?).

Stephenie Meyer, acclaimed author of the Twilight Saga and The Host, talks about her own stage fright here: STEPHENIE MEYER ON SEQUELS. (Spoiler alert, but really, WHO hasn't read these yet?)

I'll quote her here for those of you who don't want to spoil the fun of reading New Moon on your golden anniversary:

It's hard to explain how joyous the writing process was for me when I was creating Twilight. It was something I did for fun and excitement, with no concern for what anyone else might think, because no one else was ever going to read it. With New Moon, I knew people were going to read it. And some of those people were going to have bright red pens in hand while reading. I knew enough about the editing process to know that there were painful changes ahead; the parts I loved now might not make the final cut. I was going to have to rethink and revise and rework. This made it very hard to put the words down, and I had a horrible feeling much like stage fright the whole time I was writing.

Last night I got to thinking about my own stage fright and how it affects my writing, which it does...a lot. Of course, I can't claim any special reason for this. I'm not Stephenie Meyer writing sequels to the beloved Twilight. Nobody knows who I am, except for Mandy Hubbard (hee hee), and even fewer people have actually read my long form work, like the 3 novels gathering giga-dust on my hard drive. I can count the person who's read all of my work on one finger. By the way,

THANK YOU, MOM!

But after reading countless blogs, books, and author interviews about 'how NOT to write a novel', I'm suffering from a mild case of Faux Pas Phobia. Of the writerly variety.

The symptoms of Writerly Faux Pas Phobia are as follows:

• inability to reread anything you've written without gagging
• crippling anxiety over: sentence structure; overuse of adverbs, adjectives, pronouns, proper nouns
• WRITER'S BLOCK, or the feeling of being stuck in the mud whenever you try to write more than a sentence.
• reading the classics ad nauseam and comparing your writing to the likes of Austen and Poe.
• talking to dead authors about your writing, even if in whispers
• snapping at family members who call your writing just "good"
• typing with one hand on your forehead

Basically, like me, you've read too many how-to's and now feel like nothing you ever write will ever be good enough for the market. Or maybe you've had a little bit of success, and now feel compelled to keep up with that success in everything you write.

I've thought of three ways to get over this fear, which is really just insecurity. *I cannot vouch for the effectiveness of these methods.

• Pretend your audience is naked. (Okay, this has never really worked for me.)
• Write a story for your kids, nephews and nieces, cousin's kids (and not for publication). In short, write something for fun. That is why you started writing, right? 
• Say it with me: "It's only a first draft. It's only a first draft. It's only a first draft."

Wooh. Well, I don't know about you, but I feel much better! 

No? Well, maybe more wisdom from Stephenie will help:

The good news is that I got over—or rather got used to—the stage fright. Book three was much easier in a multitude of ways. I learned a lot through the New Moon experience, and I grew as a writer. Even better, my characters grew and matured in interesting ways that gave me so much to work with throughout the rest of the series!

 In closing, there is no published author in the history of time who has received only positive reviews--not even God himself. Art thou greater than He? (We'll discuss the God complexes of writers in another post.)

So go tell your WIP (work in progress) to GO PUT SOMETHING DECENT ON! And get on with the joy and the pain that is writing. See you in the query trenches.

Oh, and tell me: how do you get past Faux Pas Phobia?