Breeding and Writing: Mortal fear combat tactics

 

–by Tracy Lucas

 

Today, I’m working on a heartbreaking article. I interviewed a woman who lost her perfectly-healthy, nine-month-old son to a freak infection just a couple of months ago.

I’m selling that piece elsewhere, so I can’t go into all the details here. But it’s been affecting me all day, and I can definitely tell you that. I even dreaded calling, despite the fact that I had the idea for the story in the first place. I wanted to talk to her, yet I found myself putting off having to think about it. Having to ask those questions. Having to know the answers.

It’s difficult, horrible stuff, and I don’t even know the family personally.

I remember when my own son was tiny. (Well, tinier. He’s two.) I was terrified for him every day. I checked his breathing every five minutes throughout the night, worried to death about SIDS or sheet entanglements or robbers or fires or—

You get the gist. You name it, I worried about it.

I was paralyzed with fear on a pretty regular basis.

I still kinda am. That doesn’t exactly go away. It lessens, once you move past the one year mark and once the psycho mama hormones stop pumping quite so insanely.

(You think I’m kidding, but I swear to God I would have shredded anyone who hurt my son in mere seconds. With my teeth. Gladly. I’m a little more human now. A little.)

But through those first few hundred days, everything scared me. I sweat through every car ride, every doctor’s tongue-click, every bath and every meal. I wondered for a while whether my child would ever be capable of chewing without choking on some piece of whatever-it-was, and whether I’d ever again know the feeling of being able to eat my own meal instead of militantly guarding each morsel of his from fork to stomach.

I couldn’t look away. He might die.

It was that big in my head; the possibility loomed with that likelihood.

I was going nuts.  I’d heard it was common to do so after delivering a new person onto the planet, but that didn’t help. Each niggling fear was eating me alive, and the terror just stacked, levels and levels deep.

There was no rest.

So what did I do?

I kept not resting. And I wrote. I wrote obsessively on all the things that might befall my little boy, all the horrors which I was sure awaited him just around every corner.

I had stories of his drowning in the bath, becoming the sole victim of a car accident, drifting away in his sleep and never coming back to me. Of waking him cold and blue-lipped, of discovering him upside-down in a bucket, of feeding him something and finding him allergic.

I couldn’t stop.

All of the nightmares came out of my head and into the most secret of my notebooks. I haven’t even submitted those stories anywhere yet. I can’t. They’re still too close. (That, and my family wouldn’t get it. I’d probably have child protection service staff on my doorstep in a second.)

So I hid them, the same as I’d done my fears. I tucked them away into a nook only I know about and I tried to forget.

I was extremely ashamed of myself. I couldn’t believe such awful, morbid thoughts came out of my head—and especially about my darling baby boy. I didn’t know how to take what I’d written, much less release it into the publishing wild.

Then I rediscovered David Erlewine’s blog. Most specifically, I remember, it was a short story called “Not Really” which completely scrambled my mommy-brain. His original blog is long gone, unfortunately, since he’s one of those folks who keeps committing to longer projects and pulling it down. (STOP IT ALREADY, DAVID!) The story, though, was also published at Keyhole, thank God, so I can show it to you here.

He wrote many, many pieces about the countless disasters that mentally befell his fictional children, and posted them right beside his profile photo which included his smiling kids on the couch. They’re cute, fine, and very much alive.

I tease him because so many of his stories revolve around children’s deaths.

But reading them helped me. It reminded me—because somehow, I’d yet again forgotten—that sometimes our  worst fears  make the best material.

Yeah, it’s hard as hell. And yeah, it’s raw to write them.

But we all have nightmares. It’s sharing them that releases the fear into the ether and strips its power over us, and of course, if we do it right, the fears belonging to our readers, too. Picking the scab is counterintuitive, but some things do have to be aired and left to dry. Ya gotta get the pus out or it festers.

(Eww. I know. Sorry.)

Me? I haven’t yet had the guts to dive back in and submit any of those stories of my own, but I do find that the older, longer-ago stories I’ve written that do the best are the things that scared me the most to write. In time, I know these twisted baby-fate stories will be that way, too.

In time.  Not yet.

Which leads me to my question, dear reader and writer.

What scares the hell out of you, and what do you do about it as an artist?