This guest post was written by Brian Rella. Brian is a writer and avid horror fan who recently launched his first book, Monsters & Demons, a book of twisted fairy tales that you can purchase on Amazon. You can also follow Brian on his blog and on Twitter (@Brian_Rella).

When asked why he wrote horror stories, Stephen King once said that he wrote about the things that scared him the most.

Are You Writing with a Fear Filter?

He went on to say, writing horror stories was therapeutic in a way; a method to overcome his own insecurities and phobias.

Isn't that cool? Not only does King entertain us with terrifying tales, he also uses his writing as a way to explore and maybe rid himself of his most deep-rooted fears.

Why You Should Confront What Scares You Most

It's no secret writing is a craft that takes practice to captivate and engage readers. When we write, it’s challenging to get the scenes we imagine onto to the page exactly as we envision them.

But, writing is also difficult on another, more emotional level. Confronting the things that scare us the most is at least as challenging as the craft itself, if not more so.

I felt that latter struggle first hand, when I was writing the short stories for my book Monsters & Demons. In the book I wanted to make every story count. I told my editor each story needed to be a “10”.

When my beta readers and editor told me some of my stories were “pretty good”, I said, “Pretty good? Why just pretty good?” I asked my editor, “Be brutally honest. What’s wrong with my stories?” I wanted to know exactly why my stories were just “pretty good” and not “10’s”.

Most of Us Have a Fear Filter

It turns out I was filtering my writing through my own fears.

Unfortunately, this removed all the suspense and horror from the stories. My plots were predictable, re-used tropes that readers had seen over and over again.

I asked myself some hard questions and dug deep to figure out why my stories were falling short, and here’s what I realized.

The subject matter of what I write, horror and dark fantasy, involves some very disturbing topics. Vampires, werewolves, zombies, and macabre can be frightening, sure, but they are not nearly as terrifying as psychological terror at its best.

In my short story, “Harvey” for example, I wrote about a four-year-old boy having nightmares about a menacing clown in his closet (his parents thought they were nightmares anyway).

I have a four-year-old and subconsciously, every time an opportunity arose for my story to take an extraordinarily dark turn, putting my child character in an evil, life-threatening situation, I pulled back and softened the action because of the character's parallel to my own son.

At the time I was writing the story, my son was going through his own battle with nightmares. It sounds obvious, but it was difficult for me to identify the parallel in my mind and then separate my emotions from it.

However, my fear for my own son, and more specifically, the filter I was putting on my fear, was watering down my writing.

How to Go From “Pretty Good” to Truly Frightening

In another story, “Arraziel”, a young girl, Jessie, is stuck in an abusive relationship with her soon-to-be step-father, and the implication is that he is going to sexually abuse her.

That repulsed me as it would any normal person.

Once again, the feedback I was getting on the story was mediocre, and I realized I was toning the story down because of my own disgust with the subject matter. My story was suffering because of it.

It took a long email exchange with my editor for me to deconstruct all of this, but once I acknowledged what I was doing and made a conscious choice to write the stories without my fear filter, my stories went from “pretty good” to creepy and suspenseful—exactly what I was aiming for.

You CAN Break Free and Write Without Fear

How do we break free from our fears and write uninfluenced by our own biases and phobias?

The same way we write everything else: we practice and share. We sit down, put our fingers on the keys, turn the mental filter off, write, and then ship. Send your internal editor to his or her room and face your fears on the page.

Don’t be afraid to write something you, your mother, or your wife might find disturbing. Don’t be afraid of people judging you.

Just let the words flow, raw and pure.

Writing This Way Is Harder Than It Sounds

This is harder than it sounds. When I was polishing the final draft of my stories for Monsters & Demons, I asked myself all these judgmental questions and had doubts about what I wrote.

In the end, I changed a few things, but left most of my really disturbing scenes as they were.

My hope is, my readers won’t be reading “pretty good” stories, they will be reading terrifyingly awesome stories!

Do you think you write with a fear filter? Let us know in the comments section.

PRACTICE

Are you writing with a fear filter?

Pick a subject that scares you and take fifteen minutes and write about it. Do not edit. Do not filter. Just let the words flow even when inclined to hit the backspace or delete button to correct spelling errors.

And by the way, there are many topics to choose from that are not typical horror tropes. For example, The Fault In Our Stars is a non-horror genre story where the author, John Green, wrote about a very difficult topic—children with cancer.

When your time is up, please share your work in the comments. And if you share, be sure to leave honest feedback on your fellow writers' pieces… brutally honest feedback!

Happy writing!

This article is by a guest blogger. Would you like to write for The Write Practice? Check out our guest post guidelines.

2.2k
Share to...