A Blog Were I Admit My Biggest Fear
When I tell people I’m a writer the conversation goes something like this:
“What do you write?””Porn…but just the Dialogue””Really?””No…I write stories, short, novels, film scripts, comics, I just write.
After a quick who is on first routine about what I write until I find out that they are really asking about genre not medium, I tell them I write splatter pop. After explaining that it’s a horror style that is heavily influenced by pop culture, they always follow it up by asking since I’m a horror writer, “what scares me?”
The trick to that question is I can not answer it, but only because the list is way to long as the answer is basically everything. I mean that in multiple ways, first I am literally scared by most things as I have extreme anxiety and paranoia, but I also mean I can take anything and imagine a way in which someone could see it as an object of absolute terror. I do not have to be afraid of cucumbers to understand that there are those that are afraid of them (Hi Undertaker!). If I write that characters truth, then it will be legitimate fear that is shown by them. I do not suffer from coulrophobia but can easily write a character who does, why would it be any more difficult to write one who has ostiumtractophobia.
But that is a slight cop out answer, slight bit of sleight of hand to baffle them with bullshit and not answer the question in a meaningful way. The real answer, the thing that actually scares me…its not the things you write quality horror stories about. Its not being a good enough father for my daughter, its never living up to the man my wife has always thought me to be, its going back to being that selfish teenager that acted in ways that disgust me know, its reaching for a bottle so I don’t have to hear the noise in my head anymore, its turning into the monster I was raised to be. These things are elements of a good story, hell some of them are elements for the greatest stories ever told, but they are not the hook, the meaty tasty umami rich answer that people are interested in when they ask that question.
It’s strange, those big flashy answers like clowns, or vampires or the dark, those are ones you build a story around, but those small personal ones, those are the ones that inform my characters, that give the characters that extra dimension and make them characters and not caricatures. Spider-Man isn’t Spider-Man without that need to uphold Ben’s teachings, the fear of failing him again, Batman ian’t Batman without his inner fear of not avenging his parents. In The Mist, Punisher’s biggest fear wasn’t the creatures, it was his son suffering, its why he makes the choices he makes at the end. It’s not the big flashy fears that scare writers, it’s the small personal ones that we know each person has, and what they will do to prevent confronting or otherwise facing that fear.
So to answer that question, “What scares me?” the answer is simple, whatever is scaring the people Im near the most, that is the most frightening thing to me right now, not for the thing itself, but for what it will trigger in those around me. People…people scare me.
I’m Nate, your you, let me let you go now.
