The instinct for most of us when experiencing fear is to do all we can to make it go away. Sometimes that means reassuring ourselves we have nothing to worry about, other times it means putting energy into crisis-managing against something that might not happen anyway. Yet, as writers, being too quick to get away from fear can mean rejecting our most reliable source of inspiration.
Nobody fears what doesn’t matter to them: every fear we have – from spiders to elevators, global warming to social anxiety – is a ‘what if ’ story we’re already telling ourselves and, like any good story, it’s one in which the stakes are high for the character. When we stop and listen to those stories, we get to recognise them as the original fiction they are. It’s not only a way of recognising the difference between our anxiety and our reality; it’s tapping into our most reliable muse.
The five exercises I’m sharing come from my workshop at
