What Are Your REALLY Afraid Of?

When I was a little girl, often my father's mother would babysit us. She was from Russia, and what I remember most was she made me drink tea. Before bed. Tea I hated the taste of. She also used to curl my long hair by wrapping it in newspapers (old technique . . . especially if you were poor, as she was after she came to America). She was a pessimist, but it was only much later that I understood why--she had been wealthy in Russia, the Communist Revolution destroyed everything she and her family had--they murdered people she knew . . . family, she came to America, penniless and alone, lying about her age (she wasn't even 18 yet), struggled under great poverty in the melting pot of the lower East side of NYC. What was to be optimistic about? So I don't think I understood her because I was just too young to grasp all that. She was a chronic worrier. But now, of course, I realize she had everything in the world to worry about. But what I most remember was she was TINY. I mean, teeny-tiny, maybe 90 pounds soaking wet. In baby-sitting parlance, this meant that, were a bad guy to break into our house, were a marauding band of crazed mutants to break into our house, she would merely be a fragile little snack cake for them. THIS I understood quite clearly in third grade.

Overactive imagination? Oh yes. After all, I've become a novelist. And one night, my sisters and I worked ourselves into a shrieking mass hysteria because we were certain a man was waiting outside our bedrooms to kill us. We saw his shoes there at the doorway, lurking there. We screamed, we cried. My grandmother was hard of hearing.

Now, the other part of this is my parents frequently partied until at LEAST dawn. Many a time, in later years, I'd leave for high school and they would be toddling in. One New Year's Party were threw lasted until January 3rd. So our mass hysteria lasted until amost dawn when my parents came home to shrieking children and a sleeping mutant snack of Russian origin. The serial killer outside our bedrooms was ACTUALLY a pair of my father's shoes. Just shoes.

So it is with writing fears. Recently on the blog, some people opened up about a fear of rejection. But that's not it at all. You don't fear the rejection letter. A rejection letter is nothing more than shoes. What you FEAR are the mutants. The mutants could be:

• The Mutants of Humiliation. Now that I have this awful rejection letter, SOMEONE out there knows how pathetic a writer I am. I am embarrassed.
• The Mutants of Reality. Now that I have this awful rejection letter, I have to face something I am not ready to about my writing--that I need to learn more craft, that I am not "ready" to send this out there even though I thought I was.
• The Mutants of Inner Tapes. Now that I have this awful rejection letter, that negative internal tape I love to play over and over and over again . . . is just louder and louder and louder. That I've wasted my time. That I am kidding myself. That my mother/high school English teacher/ex-boyfriend, etc. is right.
• The Mutants of People Who Know Better. You know them. The negative bloggers. The people who have given up. The people who tell you that you can't succeed.

See? A rejection letter is just a SHOE. It's the mutants. What are you REALLY afraid of?

The other half of this story is that in the light of day, the shoes weren't terribly frightening. They were JUST shoes after all. When you bring the mutants out into sunlight, as ANY zombie-movie fan knows, they will turn into a shriveling, burning mass of flesh and die. Mutants can't take sunlight.

LEARN what your REAL fear is. Then bring it out into the light. Then you can move forward bravely. You need not fear being a snack cake.

Thoughts? What are you REALLY afraid of?

Bad Clowns

On the way to the circus yesterday, Baby Girl suddenly confessed a mortal fear of clowns. She might have told me this BEFORE I spent $150 on third-row seats. I spun a tale of the difference between "evil clowns working for the Dark Side" and the "good clowns who only spread cheer." She didn't buy it. Nonetheless, she ended up meeting some very nice clowns--not the evil ones--and had a wonderful time. There is even photographic evidence she laughed at the clowns, and she got to do a tug 'o war with four of them in one of the rings.

Which got me thinking . . .

We've had discussions on the blog before about 1) fears, and 2) quirks. When I ask what do you fear most on this blog, I get a lot of very serious answers: death, a child dying, Alzheimer's, fire . . . . illness.

But I realize too, that a lot of us have completely nonsensical fears. I mean, they make sense to US, but . . . to the rest of the world, we perhaps look a little nuts. Which then is more like a quirk. And we've talked before how sometimes writers can go on quirk overload. I've been asked to critique things that get so cluttered with oddity, and my only reaction as editor is WHY? So I think as writers, when we ponder quirks, they should feel less tacked on, more organic. They can still be completely nonsensical. Can still enhance the story. But . . . somehow they are rooted in that sort of nonsensical neurosis, which makes sense in the character's universe. That they are not quirks of the writer's cleverness but of . . . the character's reality.

For example . . . Baby Girl wants a hamster. But she cannot abide gerbils because they have tails. The logic on this one escapes me. But there you go. It HAS a logic. It might not be YOUR logic. But there's an order to it. A rule of quirkiness.

Me? In a strange hotel room when I am on the road, I cannot even contemplate sleeping until I look under the bed, in the closet, and in the shower. Now . . . I am not sure what I would do, should I discover the boogeyman in any of these places, but there you go. I was a chronic "check-under-the-bed" kid. Still am.

Another fear-quirk? Jumping spiders. You see . . . spiders are fine. I actually usually capture them and put them outside. But once, after I got divorced, I went to kill (pre-Buddhism) a spider. And it jumped. High. I was utterly freaked out. And for the first time, I didn't have a man in the house to kill it for me. Frankly, that was about the only good thing about marriage. Having a handy spider-killer. So I did what any self-respecting fraidy-cat would do. I called my best guy friend on the phone and he TALKED ME THROUGH killing the jumping spider. And the entire time, I kept shrieking, "It's trying to kill me. It's jumping because it wants to get up to my neck and kill me." Jumping spiders? Still kind of freak me out. Daddy Longlegs? Not so much.

I always make sure, in my humorous novels, to include these oddities. But I would never just have a character sketch that said, "Afraid of jumping spiders." I might put, "Afraid of jumping spiders. Long story." Or "Afraid of evil clowns. Don't get her started on the topic."

Maybe it's just a difference in my mind. But I really think when you talk about organic writing, it helps to not just "tack on" oddities, but root them in real lives.

So here are mine:

1) WHATEVER is under that bed

2) JUMPING spiders (only . . . regular creepy crawl ones . . . fine)

3) Evil clowns (not the good ones)

4) Rats (but not mice)

5) The serial killer up the street (he may not REALLY be a serial killer, but the guy seriously freaks me out)

6) Close talkers. PLEASE respect my space when you talk to me. Hence number 5.

7) Confined spaces. Even after death. When really . . . will I care? But I think I will. Hence I will be cremated and PLEASE no pine boxes, family. (It's all spelled out in my will, along with my song selections for the party I want you all to have.)

I could go on. And on. I am a neurotic mess. But in my life . . . it's organic.

Thoughts? Anyone afraid of evil clowns? Does anyone else think about the difference between neuroses and tacked-on quirks?