On Writing Into Your Fears and Anxieties

We as people, especially those of us with anxiety disorders, spend a great deal of time playing the “what if” game. We are, in a way, already playing with fiction. Why not channel our imaginations and extend our “what ifs” to the page?

This is a craft prompt. This exercise isn’t meant to be therapeutic, so if at any point, you start to feel anxious, distressed, or triggered, please take a step back and care for yourself.

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Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been afraid of almost everything. Of leaving my mom’s side, of getting lost in the grocery store, of going to friend’s birthday parties alone. As I got older, I grew afraid of people leaving, of people hating me. I was afraid I would never come out, that I would never look how I want to look. That I would fail a million times over.

Getting married and beginning to talk about family planning only added a host of fears to the already long list. But more than anything, I was terrified I would have to embark on this parenting journey alone. I felt ill-prepared and anxious, certain I’d screw our child up. My wife, Ash, wasn’t even pregnant yet, but already, I could feel my fear ballooning inside of me. This relentless, snarling animal of a thing. This insistence that people aren’t promised, that this beautiful, loving life is just temporary.

When I set out to write I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, I didn’t intend to write into my very real fear that Ash might die during childbirth and that I might be left to raise our child alone. But that’s exactly what I wound up doing, only I made my narrator, Kris, ambivalent about parenting so that it’s even more difficult when she loses her wife and must raise her baby all on her own.

I found that fear was an excellent vehicle for plot because fear is one of the most powerful emotions there is. Fear is truth-telling; it reveals what we care most about. Fear uncovers what’s underneath all the posturing, the performance, the curated image we present to those around us. Leaning into my fear, exaggerating and amplifying it, allowed me to write deeply into Kris’ grief, anxiety, and depression, because it was a situation I had already imagined for myself hundreds of times over. Using my worst fear helped me to channel Kris’ emotional depth to the point of method acting. And while method acting made it difficult to pull myself out of that psychological space from time to time, it also enabled me to close the distance between writer and narrator, to live out Kris’ life on the page in an authentic way.

We as people, especially those of us with anxiety disorders, spend a great deal of time playing the “what if” game. We are, in a way, already playing with fiction. Why not channel our imaginations and extend our “what ifs” to the page? Why not use that fear to create tension and plot in our fiction?

Take a few minutes to write a list of things that terrify you. Try to push past your most immediate concrete fears, like spiders or snakes, to get to the abstract fears that haunt you, the ones that take up a significant amount of mental and emotional energy, the ones that steal sleep from you.

Fear is truth-telling; it reveals what we care most about. 

Then choose one of your fears and spend a few minutes writing about why you’re afraid. Even if the fear seems irrational, you can reach deeper, past the surface. For example, I am terrified of getting a blood clot. There’s no rational reason for this—I don’t smoke, I don’t take birth control, I exercise every day. But it’s not the blood clot specifically I’m so afraid of—it’s the manifestation of my fear of dying, specifically of dying now that I’m finally happy.

Next, answer these questions related to your fear:

• How long have you had this fear? Is it new, old?

• Can you remember the source of this fear?

• How far will you go to avoid this fear?

• What are some consequences of your fear? How does it affect your life?

• When you encounter your fear, how do you feel in your body?

• Where does the fear live in your body? Is it a part of you or extraneous?

• How does this fear affect your senses? What does it taste, smell, look like? It is always the same or does it shape-shift?

• How do you deal with your fear? Do you stuff it down? Do you make light of it through humor? Do you overcompensate?

Now that you have established a fear for your character, you’re ready to make your character’s worst fear come true. But you’ll want to exacerbate this fear to enhance dramatic tension. Think of why this fear coming true would be extremely problematic and challenging for your character. Say they have a severe social phobia. You may want to force this character, for one reason or another, to attend a huge gathering soon. Maybe their loved one died under mysterious circumstances, and they want to go to the funeral to try to investigate further.

You’ll likely have several ideas related to increasing dramatic tension. Take the next few minutes to write a list of possible one-sentence plot synopses, for a story or novel. Don’t overthink it, just let them flow out of you. Brainstorming is not a time for judgment.

Once you’re done, choose your favorite synopsis and expand it into a one-paragraph synopsis. Then expand it into a flash fiction piece or short story. You may be surprised to see just how easily the story develops when you play into a character’s fears.

When I think about writing into fear, I think of it as a vehicle for action and inaction, both of which are helpful in crafting character and plot. Much like desire, fear drives so many of our decisions and shapes our approach to life. It can lead to impulsive, ill-advised decisions; it plummets us into chaos. Fear can also make us avoidant, so avoidant that we fail to fully live our lives. Oftentimes, fear becomes the wedge between who we are and who we want to be, and what is better for creating inner conflict than that? If you know someone’s deepest fears, you know exactly how to hurt them. And so much of writing fiction is intentionally hurting our characters, whether emotionally, spiritually, or physically, to see what they do with their pain, and how they handle adversity.