The morning skies are quiet and there’s a rosy sunrise burning through the firs. It was cold again last night–down into the 30s and I’m wearing heavy socks and I’m nestled under a cozy throw in a muted pumpkin shade. Towering storm clouds are taking over the skies this November as a Pacific front sweeps through.  Amid the downpours there were pauses and I met friends, slipped out on errands and walks. Leaves are still clinging to the trees so despite the churlish skies, the orange and reds cheery.

But my mood isn’t. I woke too early, unsettled and grieving.  Recently a lovely, remarkable friend died of cervical cancer and my 94-year-old father has decided he’s ready for hospice care. As my older brother wrote in a group text thread, “I’m not ready for this.” But his decision is understandable based on recent health calamities.  So I’m traveling to Wisconsin to spend time with him and meanwhile I’m just trying to sit with this heavy feeling of dread and sadness. Trying to accept what’s coming. And it’s awful.

Part of me is taking notes about the dread, the bereavement, the uncertainity. Unfathomable. . Part of me is still reeling from the election where the worst people with the worst ideas are going to take charge of our government. Part of me is trying to focus on the now, and simply trying to concentrate when I need to concentrate. So it’s a lot and I cannot recommend enough that you write as you’re trudging, reeling, and trying not to freak out. As you write, get into your body, all the tight muscles, churning stomach, and achy, sleepless bones. While your racing brain adds its disharmony.

When you write fiction your protagonist’s greatest fear  is central to the story. About half my editing clients are thriller writers and I often point out where their stories need a deeper viewpoint. Viewpoint characters are your readers’ portal into the story. Some genres like thrillers need extra intensity because big doses of menace and uncertainty, coupled with high stakes are woven through. Thus, readers need to settle into characters, experience what they’re going through. Hearing what they’re thinking and saying. Writers need to inhabit their viewpoint characters and even if your character is far different from you. Ethan Canin suggests, Don’t write about a character. Become that character and then write your story.* 

Which is why writers need to track their nervous systems’ messages whenever possible. Not in a constant doctor visit to yourself, but pay attention especially since there’s so much to mine from our reality.  Then translate some of stress hormones into their characters. Or, interview others about how their bodies react during stress responses. Writing fiction means you’re promising readers you understand what it means to be human. While there are, of course, joys and happy endings that happen in fiction, it’s the jabs and spikes of terror, sadness, and disappointment that often supply the stories high points. Calling misery a high point seems odd, but tapping into your reader’s emotions is a pact you sign when you write. You’re promising them an emotional experience that will surprise them.

Each of us has stories etched into our memories from childhood. Yesterday I was thinking about I’ve got to thank my dad again for how hard he worked and those many years of bone-deep tiredness and  heavy responsibilities to a family with six kids.  My girlhood memories are entwined with the weird happeninsg in our neighborhood and small town–the window peekers and bullies, senseless and early deaths.  All augmented by Twilight Zone episodes and my reading habits.

Ray Bradbury was a prolific author, best known for writing Farenheit 451 who mined his childhood for this story concepts. He grew up in Waukegan, Illinois, a then smallish town perched on Lake Michigan’s shores and had an influential extended family. When he was 13 his family moved to Los Angeles, but his boyhood memories remained strong. And menace often lurked in those recollections.  Bradbury’s book Zen in the Art of Writing, a collection of essays, describes his  common sense process, describes writing as a cure to life’s cruelties and suggested,  You must stay drunk of writing so reality doesn’t destroy you.

What he mentions often is  how he kept returning to his boyhood as source material for creating fiction. In fact, the first short story he sold “The Lake” came from memories after he started making simple lists of those memories. And those lists turned into more stories. After he’d sold three stories under a pseudonym he writes, That money took me to Mexico and Guanajuato and the mummies in the catacombs. That experience so terrified me that I could hardly wait to flee Mexico. I had nightmares about dying and having to remain in the halls of the dead with those propped and wired bodies. In order to purge my terror, instantly I wrote “The Next in Line.” One of the few times that an experience yielded a story almost on the spot.

Did you notice his ‘in order to purge my terror’?

Bradbury generously describes his adventures and experiences that became stories and how he wrote a story a week in order to survive since he was only paid $20-$40 each. He muses, I don’t know if I believe in previous life, I’m not sure I can live forever. But that young boy believed in both and I have let him have his head. He has written my stories and books for me. He runs the Ouija Board and says Asy or Nay to submerged truths or half-truths. He is the skin through which by osmosis, al the stuffs pass put themselves on paper.  I have trusted his  his passions, his fears, and his joys. He has, as a result, rarely failed me. When it is a long damp November in my soul, and I think too much and perceive too little, I know its high time to get back to that boy with the tennis shoes, the high fevers, the multudinous joys, and terrible nightmares. I’m not sure where he leaves off and I start.

It’s a bighearted book and I heartily recommend it to all writers. I love how he keeps remindsing usthat humans have always been storytellers. That stories are all around us. My thoughts wander to our ancient ancestors gathering to storytell , their firelight gatherings. Imagine the darkness that fell in those long-ago times before electricity and light pollution and industrial clamor.  The vast aloneness of it all.

What about you?  Can you disguise your fears as fiction? Or do you prefer to lay them out in all their rawness and truth? Is there a happy ending waiting on the scrapheap of your fears?

In an interview Stephen King said, “I just write about what scares me. When I was a kid, my mother used to say, ‘Think of the worst thing that you can, and if you say it out loud then it won’t come true.’ And that’s probably been the basis of my career.”

What scares you most also most captures your imagination and curiosity. What scares each person is his or her own darkness. So tell that story as only you can tell it.

It’s a long, damp November in my soul. But I’m going to keep witnessing and getting it down in words.

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

*If you’ve never read Ethan Canin’s short story “Emperor of the Air” you’re missing out. It’s spectacular. And that first paragraph–the literary equivalent to a chef”s kiss.