Hide and Seek by William Meritt Chase, 1888
When you write something creepy or eerie, I think it often helps to tap into your deepest childhood fears. I recently wrote about how Skinamarink does this with fears of the dark, monsters under the bed, creepy cartoons, toys seeming sentient.
Since then, I've been considering some of my own wide-ranging childhood fears. I have always been a person of many phobias, and while this has been inconvenient for me at times, it's also made life more exciting. Instead of being bored as a kid, I found everything full of astounding peril. And I wasn't just worried about monsters. I often felt a strange sense that very old ghouls and evils were all around me, invisibly stalking me. Now, yes, the Southern church of my youth helped stoke these particular fears. But isn't there some pleasure in it, too?
For me, the most fascinating fears were: the woods (especially at twilight or under gray skies...it was unthinkable to be there at night); rundown houses far away from the road in the overgrown country; suburban neighborhoods that seemed utterly empty in the middle of the day; empty fields in the winter; dreams; the mysterious secrets of adults; the concrete blocks at my elementary school; endless peeking stars; the concept of infinity (which I was taught about alongside the ever-present God); sinister motives; the devil lurking everywhere; the rapture; the antichrist; the cavernous uncertainty of the afterlife; dogs; falling; blood. To name a few! I love writing about these things now, maybe because I feel a sense of power over the past. But I’m also trying to work something out.
Many writers (even the ones we read in school) seem to write the same story or poem over and over. We keep encountering fears about masculinity in Hemingway's stories, fears of exclusion in Fitzgerald's, fears of meaninglessness in Joyce's, fears of poverty in Dickens', fears of misunderstandings in Austen's, and so on. You might have different ideas about the fears you see constantly reappearing, and I’m interested to hear them. Most writers probably have many. With horror, you might find that Hitchcock is afraid of madness and blond women, and King is afraid of addiction and the past.
There's no shame in writing the same story again and again. We do this all our lives until we write our way out. We entertain the ghosts of childhood and old (even ancient) worries each day. We think about death, however much we try to distract ourselves.
If you write stories that explore your anxieties, what is a list of your oldest fears? Please share, if you don't mind! Or keep it to yourself. Either way, you'll probably be writing about these things for the rest of your life, so you might as well know the territory.
Even escapist stories have some nightmare elements. Whenever you willingly hear another person's story, you know you might be haunted by it for the rest of your life. But we keep returning to the same stories, sometimes to battle monsters, and sometimes to see if they're really as awful as our own imaginations.
I completely agree with this—my fears usually stem from loss/abandonment, grief, and the unknown, and they do almost always show up in my work (in one form or another!)