Hello, readers and writers! I hope you like hearing from me on a Tuesday, because our PPC schedule is changing. From now on, you will receive Practice, Process, Craft every Tuesday—alternating between a creative writing prompt and the long-form essays and guides. Prompts every Friday and essays every other Monday was complex 😂 Welcome to the new schedule—it’s Tuesdays! Bring your coat.
What’s coming up? Next Tuesday you will receive my follow-up to “Learning to read,” where we looked at some of the many meanings “reading” carries, and proposed a definition we might adopt. In the follow-up, I’ve got advice on how to fall back in love with reading, enrich your reading experiences, and how you can start to think about reading as part of your writing practice. Then, I’ll get even more specific about how to read as an editor—one of the three meta editorial skills (reading, asking, and listening) I introduced in “What makes an editor?” This series has been really fun to work on, and I hope you’ve been enjoying and learning with me!
Today, I have a Halloween prompt for you, a simple question we should all think about more—What are you afraid of?
But first! A story.
One spring day in middle school I was hanging out in the hallway after classes talking to my friends about our fears—fears like falling, heights, spiders, etc. Physical fears. A floppy-haired kid walks up, and I won’t use his real name because it is very specific, but this pseudonym basically captures it—Tommy Idaho—and we said, “Tommy! What’s your biggest fear?” Without missing a beat young Tommy merely blinked and calmly answered, “Heartbreak.”
HEARTBREAK?? We could not stop laughing. We were twelve, thirteen. “No, no, your biggest physical fear, like Lily is afraid of waterbugs.” There was no beat Tommy Idaho could miss. Blinking once more he calmly stated, “Giants.” WHAT??? GIANTS??? “Like Jack and the Beanstalk?” We were aghast, he was unabashed. Tommy shrugged. “Yeah, fairy-tale giants.” He coolly flopped his hair back and wandered off. I still think of you, man. I hope you’re just the same.
So, what about you? What are your fears? If your mind goes, like Tommy Idaho’s, to heartbreak-level fears first, be there with that! If it goes to fairy-tale giants, ‘tis the season. And because the fairy-tale giants rarely get discussed, that’s what I want you to come up with. Some fear that’s been with you maybe a long time, or that you didn’t know about until you happened to encounter it at 45? For some inspiration and fun around this, two of my favorite podcasters just released two episodes discussing their fears together, one on You’re Wrong About and the other on American Hysteria—I recommend these! These fears range from people on stilts to being secretly watched. Another angle in on this was surfaced a few weeks ago in my writer’s group: “What horror movie set-up would you least want to find yourself in?” The answers and discussion made up one of my favorite afternoons of the year.
To know your friend is afraid of fairy-tale giants might sound surface-level and we should really be diving in to his fear of abandonment, but what’s more interesting than comparing these “surface” fears, part of our experience of being in bodies, somehow conscious, here on earth? I think about things other people are afraid of that I am not—Bigfoot, outer space. And things I’m terrified of that other people are not—car accidents, the ocean. Some people’s greatest physical fears would not even register as experiences in another person’s day. How do we understand creepiness, eeriness, and fright? How is this not interesting?
Some fears are mysterious secrets of fascinating origin, others are evolutionary sensitivities, many are inherited from caregivers either biologically or through explicit and implicit messaging—“spiders are scary.” Some fears have no connection to the rest of our lives, or our spiritual or existential challenges, or to our priorities or values, or to our politics. Sometimes they are relevant to all of these. I used to have a recurring dream as a child about being trapped behind a wall, and the mere thought of being trapped in open water, like in the movie Open Water, makes me want to curl up under a bunch of blankets and stay in the desert forever. Being sucked into something is the horror-movie set-up that scares me the most, trapped in a TV or a teacup or the body of a fly. In this case, my physical fear is obviously and directly related to my values, priorities, existential concerns, and even my politics! My fear of a bug getting into my ear is just having a body, and probably seeing that happen to someone on Nick at Nite.
Maybe your fear has a big backstory, and maybe not! Either way it’s fun to talk about, and to hear what your friends and family say—you may have never discussed this with them, and it’s fascinating. I was delighted to find out a few years ago that my mom is afraid to leave an ankle hanging over the bed in case someone grabs it from underneath, like a little kid, and that my dad is afraid of heights, like his dad. I feel closer to my friends after uncovering this dimension of our lives.
So, this isn’t really a writing prompt this week. Tricked you! If you want to write about your fears, do it! But remember that relating is a big big big part of writing, and we need to talk to each other more. So for your writing prompt this week, I encourage you to talk about your fears—silly and serious, and maybe it’s both—with your fellow future zombies out there in Frightsville.
Have fun and stay safe!