"We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones." Stephen King
October is the month of shadows, a time when light wanes, leaves fall and the local Wal-Mart is filled with images of witches, skeletons, ghosts and all manner of things that go bump in the night. It is the one month of the year when giving public expression to our fears, especially those of growing old and dying, is permissible. Even deliberately provoking and celebrating fear is encouraged.
For most writers fear is a constant companion, and it is what stops us from putting pen to paper. We’re afraid we’ll fail to capture our vision. Worry about how other people (especially editors) will judge our writing strikes cold terror in our hearts. We’re scared that maybe we don’t have it in us to write after all and frightened that if we do succeed, we won’t be able to handle it.
Many writing-advice mongers encourage us to ignore our fears and to write despite them. Others urge us to engage those fears in fierce battle and ultimately defeat them. Still others invite us to focus on positive thoughts in order rise above what scares us and to move to a higher, more evolved level where no fear exists.
Stuffing fear, doing battle with it and forcing ourselves to think only positive thoughts are temporary measures at best. Like all primal emotions, fear is energy. Avoiding it, struggling to conquer it and working to convince ourselves that it doesn’t exist, all take even more energy, energy that we could be spending writing.
Many years ago, Psychologist Carl Jung called the parts of ourselves that scare us so much that we hide them from our own awareness the shadow. Consigned to the darkness the parts of ourselves that we fear gain in intensity until they control our actions. We become paralyzed. We stop pursuing the things we believe we want to do, such as write.
As the pressure of their presence builds, we begin to project these fearsome negative qualities outward onto others like the Biblical parable of the man with a log in his own eye pointing out the speck in the eye of another. Believing my editor thinks my writing is no good is much easier than admitting to myself that I’m afraid that my writing isn’t as good as it could be and am afraid of doing something about it.
When the contents of the shadow become too strong to be contained, they break free and wreak havoc in our lives. If we’re asked to rewrite an article, we tell the editor exactly where to stuff his or her suggestions. Or, in a sudden and unexpected fit of self-loathing, we delete all of our writing files and rip up our rough drafts.
Fear scares us because to admit to it causes us to face our own vulnerability and the fact that we cannot control every single thing that happens to us. (The Old Norse root of scare is timid. In other words, things outside of us don’t scare us so much as our own timidity causes us problems.)
The original Old English meaning for the word fear was both danger and awe, or reverence. Those scary parts of ourselves that we’re so intent on hiding from are neither good nor bad; they simply are, according to Jung. Each has the potential to be a helper or destroyer. Like electricity and other powerful forms of energy that have the potential to harm us, the things that we fear and our fears, themselves, can also heal us. They can heal others as well.
The writers whose work touches the human heart and raises the human spirit did not allow fear to scare them. They knew that it is a universal human emotion and used it as creative raw material. Like alchemists, they mixed the whole range of emotions to concoct stories that work on a deep level to transform readers with the potent kick of a magical potion.
This month, consider what would happen if you worked with the shadowy fears that stop you from writing by harnessing their raw energy within your writing.
According to Jung, in order to know the characteristics that we fearfully deny and that lurk in the darkness of our own shadows, we have only to look at the qualities we most vehemently despise in others.
Make a list of personal qualities you can’t stand in other people. Don’t hold back. Come up with the most evil, ugly, slimy, rotten, and despicable ones you can think of.
Now make up a likeable main character, an average Joe or Jane who just happens to have one of those qualities. Write a story about that person.
If you are a journal writer or an essay writer, this month make a list of the parts of yourself that you fear and gifts those shadow pieces might have for you if you acknowledged them and chose to express their energy in a positive way