by M. L. Buchman
Or perhaps, the fear of exploring?
I think that one of the primary jobs of being a writer is to constantly test and push boundaries. We are explorers of emotion and circumstance.
The Uncomfortable
Sometimes this means writing the uncomfortable.
ONE
The first truly uncomfortable, scary uncomfortable scene I ever wrote was for my first publisher on my first book. They kept pushing me to put more and more sex in the book. They wanted me, as a male romance author, to go over the top. (The fact that I was writing a fantasy novel was apparently beside the point.)
Finally sick of it, I wrote a crude, blatant, erotic over-the-top scene to show how ridiculous I could be. "Perfect!" And it ended up in my humorous fantasy novel. That taught me a hard lesson.
Let's just say that I'm glad to have since redrafted that title. And that scene, which didn't fit the rest of the book at all, has been purged. It's now safe to read my Deities Anonymous #1, Cookbook From Hell: Reheated.
TWO
The second one was for a writing class. The challenge? Write something like you've never written before.
Hmm... Up until then I'd never written a first-person story. And I'd never written a true villain. And I never write horror.
I wrote a villain who makes Hannibal Lecter look, well, maybe not cuddly, but at least approachable. And I got so far into his first-person head that he never even got up to the word "I". In ten thousand words (long short story) I never even learned his name. It is the single most chilling thing I've ever written. For over a decade that character shouted and screamed, demanding his novel based on the short story. I will never give it to him. I think he finally realizes that as it's been almost 20 years and he pops up only occasionally in my thoughts.
Why won't he get his novel? Because I have a criteria that controls all my writing, other than that one story. A message of hope. A message of belief in people. Oh, I've written villains since, but they are villains, not glorifications of the most evil aspects of people.
I'm not critiquing those who read or write horror. I'm just saying that it isn't me and isn't my choice.
THREE
However, I'm a huge fan, as a writer, of pushing into personally scary territory. I once heard Norman Mailer say that, "A character must be at least 5% me or it doesn't come to life on the page." Over time I've decided that his number is a little low (I'd go for 15-20%).
It's scary, as a writer, to put a chunk of ourselves on the page. But that's where the good stuff lies, the heart and soul of a character out there wearing our hopes and our fears. Of hopes quashed and fear realized...and the eventual triumph if I'm the one doing the writing. :)
Those are the hardest scenes to write, the ones that are personally scary. "Am I putting too much of myself on the page?" I'm not sure you can. Because that is where the characters come alive for me.
MODERN DAY SCARY
We business professionals, though, we authors have a new and different scary problem to contend with.
MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Whitewashing, LGBTQIA+...
PC RULES! It is far scarier as an author to face the demands of "politically correct", and the possibility of immediate and brutal backlash, than to face our inner selves.
How do we know? How do we anticipate?
MeToo began three years ago last week (about two millennia late in my opinion, but we won't get into the Council of Nicea in 325 AD that purged women from most of the positive roles in the Bible). Whitewashing is now so severe that last week Gal Galdot (an Israeli) was slammed for taking the role of Cleopatra (Egyptian) because the two cultures haven't lived in close proximity for the last 2,000 years (oh wait, it was more like the last 4,000). Chinese-American actors are being slammed for taking on "pure" Chinese roles. And... Yeah, you get the point.
So how do we confront this as writers? I'd like to share a post I recently made on a writer's loop where this was being discussed.
