Writing this in May (I can't connect to the Internet today so I might as well write some planned posts in advance), I wonder how many people will post anything at all in response to the Long & Short Reviews prompt, "Things That Scare Me."
In between infancy, when we don't know enough to be scared of anything but loud noises or sudden drops, and middle age, when it's to be hoped we know enough to cope with most situations in a practical rather than emotional way, it's human to fear The Unknown. And when we're young, that category of "The Unknown" includes a lot.
When I was little, the fashionable idea was to rear children in a sweet, happy, safe fantasy of a "nursery world" where we wouldn't develop any phobias because we could feel secure that Mother and Daddy would keep us safe.
It didn't always work as planned. Parents also wanted to believe that that nursery world fantasy would keep us feeling secure when we were dragged from place to place, when we were threatened by things beyond Mother's and Daddy's control, when relatives died. And they also wanted to believe that they weren't supposed to take any real notice of how children felt about things that had moved from "The Unknown" to "The Loathed"--medications and even operations (sometimes unnecessary), nasty situations at school, Mother's difficult pregnancy, Daddy's disabling injury, Grandpa's dying...
For me and for the children I used to baby-sit, that was when the really ridiculous phobias started. Around the time my grandfather died, I developed a fear of public toilets. After a long-distance move, a child I knew thought a chip in the paint on the kitchen stove looked like a wolf's head, and avoided the kitchen. After her grandparents' house burned down, a child I baby-sat developed a fear of the sound of water gurgling in a culvert below a road she'd been walking all her life. While her mother was ill, another child I baby-sat described "bad dreams" about "horrible slippers, with eyes and a mouth that talks and whispers horrible things."
Yes, bunny slippers can look pretty horrible when your life in a whole world of The Unknown gets especially stressful. So did that silly blue Knickerbocker Toy (before the Beanie Babies there were Knickerbocker Toys, very similar) that was meant to be some sort of cartoon image of a paddling duck, that seemed to zoom around the room in a fever dream I had just before vomiting. I wasn't afraid of the duck when I was awake, before or after that dream, but I never have liked badly drawn, cartoonish toy animals.
During Grandmother's last illness I remember silently praying that I wouldn't dream about an image that nobody had thought would upset me--a drawing in a comic book of humans walking away from a dead horse on the trail. It didn't take Freud to guess that, although nobody talked to me about Grandmother's condition and I didn't say or do anything that showed fear, some part of my mind saw the image of a blob of brown ink representing a dead horse as also representing all the real unhappiness I and everyone else was feeling about losing Grandmother. When she died there was actually some sense of relief...the drawing of the dead horse didn't scare me any more.
Adults usually look back on these things and either laugh, or empathize with the ridiculous phobias of the children we now know. I think of them as evidence that adults don't need to bother trying to keep children away from stories and images adults think might be too frightening. If a child really is happy in the nursery-world fantasy, Disney's wicked fairy turning into a dragon won't cause nightmares; if not, bunny slippers and chips in paint will figure in nightmares anyway. Don't blame the books, parents. Blame yourselves. Specifically blame the decisions you make to change the children's routine, uncovering that hole in the nursery world through which children fall down to The Unknown. If you don't want to deal with childhood phobias and nightmares, don't even think about changes of address, let alone divorce, and keep all the children's elders healthy until the children are at least thirteen.
By that age most of our fears are reasonable. Well...sort of.
Most spiders can bite, some inject enough venom to make the bitten place hurt, and most humans don't like the sensation of spiders walking across our skin in any case. Since spiders do not particularly want to be picked up and snuggled by humans either, it's reasonable that most of us don't want to touch a spider. I don't scream or faint if a spider runs across my hand (and I live in a place where a lot of spiders hunt down smaller insects by running madly about, trying to surprise them). I don't reach into a box where spider nests are, either.
Yet everyone seems to know a sensible, reasonable person who really can't stand spiders, who may look greenish if people even talk about spiders. I think Spider-Man cartoons may have helped some people cope with the fact that spiders share our planet. Still, many spider-phobics aren't triggered by Spider-Man, because he obviously has nothing to do with real spiders, and are triggered by harmless little animals who actually protect them from insect bites. Why do spiders invade people's beds? Because they like to eat gnats, flies, and mosquitoes, of course. Spiders will then bite us if we happen to crush them, and can they be blamed....but they're there to eat mosquitoes that intend to bite us.
Again, everyone who speaks or sings or performs for audiences in any other way feels some performance anxiety. Most of us don't talk about that adrenalin high having an addictive quality, but it does. But while most of us learn to deal with the feeling that we've not practiced enough (it's not possible to have practiced enough), even learn to improvise something the audience may think was part of the act if we forget the words, some people build up real performance phobias.
Usually people call attention to their phobias and try to elicit sympathy in their teens and twenties. In our thirties we usually realize that there are better ways to get attention, and work through our phobias. College students used to be shown an educational film in which a man who'd formed a phobia of rabbits modified his behavior to the point where he could enjoy the company of Playboy Bunnies. We all broke through our fears that people who were different from us wouldn't liiiike us, that we'd break the new office machine if we used it, that we'd literally die if anything happened to our beloved elders, and many more, too.
So at sixty I don't feel the emotion of fear very often any more. Fire? Deep water? Violent attacks? I've faced the danger, assessed it, and acted on a rational assessment of the situation. A fire is to fight. When throwing buckets of water on it is likely to help, I know I'll run toward the fire with buckets. When it's time to step aside and see whether a fire hose can do what buckets are failing to do, I know I'll do that. I know from experience. For a younger person these situations may still be part of The Unknown.
I've built up a history of bravery. This is a good thing. If some reader is thinking "I have a history of cowardice," ask yourself whether that thought is useful to you. Does someone special hold your hand in a nice way when you scream at the sight of a beetle? If not, it may be time to lose the beetle phobia. Meanwhile, I'd suggest, instead of identifying with a history of cowardice, thinking that you've not built up much of a history of bravery because you are young. The times to (take a swimming course and then) dive into deep water, (hire a local guide and then) walk into the rough neighborhood, (practice climbing and then) climb as high as the tree will hold your weight, are still ahead of you. All of The Nephews come from long lines of brave people and will probably do very well.
However, even if wailing to your friends and relatives about your phobia of birds is working nicely to get sympathy, reduce the phobia people feel because you are bigger than they are, etc., I don't recommend wailing about present-time phobias on the Internet. Well, especially not if you feel, as I do, that you don't want any evildoers attacking your loved ones as a way to hurt you.
Everybody has to have watched at least one movie scene...
"Tell us your secret (or agree to stop whistleblowing, or cooperate with our regime) or we'll shoot you."
"I certainly won't be in a position to do that if you do shoot me. Fire away!"
"We have your daughter. If you do as we tell you, we'll let her go. If not, we'll kill her. Bwahahaha."
"Eeek! Daddy! Daddy!"
In movies this is usually where Superman or Robin Hood or some character played by John Wayne comes in, kills the evildoer, and reunites the threatened family. Though, depending on the age and shape of the actress the producers could afford, the audience may have to watch her squirm and squeal for--several minutes, if she's about twenty years old and has a bosom that heaves well. If she really is one of the grown-up actors' daughter or niece, age six, one quick shot of her squealing "Daddy!" will do.
In real life I don't have any superheroes to count on. I do have anonymity. Because the web sites I use don't know where to find the writer known as Priscilla King, evildoers who track me through cyberspace don't know where to find The Nephews, either. Hello, did anyone really think I'm this much of a privacy fanatic merely because I don't like being interrupted by phone calls? Well, I don't like being interrupted by phone calls. It's not exactly a lie. And all anyone in cyberspace needs to know about The Nephews is that the group includes both sexes and several colors. If you feel that everyone on Earth deserves to see how adorable your grandchildren are, you might want to reconsider this...not that they're adorable, of course, but that everyone deserves to know it.
But there are milder levels of fear that are perfectly appropriate for book reviewers to tell the world about. "I fear it's not a good day for a picnic." "I'm afraid those things are more fun to look at than they are to own." Most relevant of all, there's the set of things that might make us say "I fear this book's not going to be much fun to read."
1. Very bad "mechanical" writing skills--spelling, grammar, punctuation. An occasional "they done" for "they'd done" or "Criminals Trump and Obama" for "Criminals, Trump, and Obama" can happen to anyone, but sometimes self-published books are hard to read.
2. A "correct" but vague and nondescript tone of writing "voice," suggesting that the book was written by plagiarism-ware. Those things are not "intelligence." Nor are they friends to writers. By all means run a manuscript through a spelling and grammar checking program--after you have written it--but don't let your computer try to do more than that.
3. Things that feed into hateful old stereotypes, especially about women. Women who venture out of "The Home" alone may be harassed in some way but the tone of your writing should leave no room for the suggestion that that's normal or acceptable. Women who may be twenty-five, but whose behavior would be noticed as unusually immature at fifteen, may deserve a romance but should get several chapters, or better yet volumes, to grow up before they marry anybody. We really did elect a President who imagined there could be peace while the Hamas goons who participated in the terrorist attack to years ago were alive, but we've lived and learned and will probably remember not to elect another one: No man should ever trust a man who abuses women, any more than women would do.
4. Painful p.c.-ism. In a story set in the 1980s it's authenticity, not hate, to mention the employers who are more concerned with a character's stockings or hairstyle than with whether the person can type. In a story set in the 1850s your characters don't need to be slaves or slavemasters--in fact the lives of free Black Americans at this period is one of the fresh, little explored chapters in US history, and my personal feeling is that most members of "Peace Churches" North or South, at this period, were more interesting than most slaves or slavemasters--but they will most definitely be aware that slavery still exists. In a story set in the 1650s your characters may not believe that God really cares which set of church-related words people use, but they have surely been notified, probably by physical abuse, that other English-speaking people care very much about this. (One can hope Addison was exaggerating when he described how the little boy found St Anne's Lane, but would he have claimed the story was true if it hadn't happened to someone?) If you let a character in the past spout ideas that belong to the present, you need historical evidence that the person or someone like the person really said whatever you want your foresighted character to say.
5. Self-contradiction happens in fiction. The storytelling mind says or writes that something happened in the springtime and then notices that it would work better in the story if it happened in the winter. The character's name changes in mid-conversation. I once wrote about a scene that actually happened in a Camaro, which has a vestigial back seat, and, while routinely blurring all details, changed the car and had a character in the back seat of a Corvette, which has no back seat. But writers are supposed to read their work and fix these things before they allow other people to see their stories.
6. Product placement. Until you've actually signed a contract that specifies that a character drives a Corvette, it's probably better to keep your options open, anyway. He drives a sports car.
7. Annoying word usage quirks. You want things to
affect or
impress people, not "impact" them. A computer is
running or it's not, but it's not capable of "responding" and never will be. Characters sharing the stage might be
speaking with each other, but characters talking privately are
talking to, or
with, each other. Though of course a character might misuse these words to show that the character is the sort of person who misuses them in real life.
8. Buying into the misbeliefs of a pressure group. If you're fantasizing about some future technology, show its bad and good points without partiality. If your characters are religious people, try to avoid having everything go splendidly for them and horribly for unbelievers.
9. Redundancy. If you have not thought of an equally witty variation on "a face so face-like in its expression as to be absolutely facial," try to avoid using "face," "face-like,' and "facial' in the same paragraph.
10. Romanticizing what is "different" or, conversely, familiar. Real people who have been in two very different places usually have lists of things they liked and disliked about each place. Even the Prisoner of Chillon regained his freedom with a sigh, because he'd formed emotional attachments to some things in the dungeon. You might have a character who believes that some sort of "social change" will make everything better for everyone but you, yourself, should not make such a mistake.
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