To Be Scared

Is it wrong to be drawn to something that scares you?

I’m not talking about genuinely scary things like big hairy spiders with far too many eyes and huge monster teeth, or scratching noises in the walls that could be big hairy spiders…  Okay that's enough of that visual image for a while.

I’m talking about the unknown.

As a writer I cannot help but be drawn into the realm of the unknown, whatever it is I happen to be writing.

I can prepare all I want to and have my characters waiting patiently, or sometimes not so patiently, to be called into action, but when it starts to happen I have little idea what will happen.

Indeed, my characters seem to take a perverse pleasure in doing the opposite of what I think they will do, or what I plan for them to do, that I am fortunate if the scene ends up in the place it should be, and if even half of the plot points have been covered.

As such it is a place of the unknown.

This is not entirely new to me.

Every book I have ever written has never ended up where I thought it would.  There are things that were supposed to happen which didn’t, characters died who were not supposed to, and others lived when I had planned their gruesome deaths in intricate detail.

Every time I enter a scene with my characters, it’s a toss-up whether the scene will turn out as planned, but I’ve discovered that if I get to know them well enough, I can plan a little better than when I set things up and let them go.

Like wind-up toys with no direction and little more than surface entertainment value.

If I get to know them too well, though, doesn’t it remove the possibility that something unexpected could happen?

Removing the unknown?

As a fan of the suspense genre, it is those forays into the unknown that cause such nerve-tingling fear (see above re: big hairy spiders in the walls) in us mere readers, ensuring that we have to sleep with the light on and can only drop off once the daylight has appeared from the wrong side of the night.

And yet we keep reading them.

It’s fun to be scared sometimes, to enter a world not under our control and see what happens when we become a willing part of it.  Until things go wrong and then it becomes a choice between the written down fears within the pages, or the ones created inside the mind once the pages are closed.

I thought that once I started writing, I would finally be the one in control of that world, of its' characters and events.

I know, naïve right?

The only thing certain is that I am entering the realm of the unknown whenever I construct a new scene, and it is with a sense of trepidation that I go into that world to see what will happen, what will befall those I have put there, including myself.

I don’t know what will happen, I don’t know who I will encounter there, or what the end result will be.

But that’s part of the fun.

If I knew exactly what was going to happen all the time, what would be the point?  Why would I enter a world where everything was planned out in detail, where I would feel no sense of excitement about going back there?

It’s what keeps me writing.

Once everyone is in the right place at roughly the right time and events are set into motion, it is the desire to find out what will happen next that keeps me wanting to take it further.

I go back to see who will live, who will die, and how they will get themselves out of the trouble I throw at them.  And trust me, there is never any shortage of that.

They never fail to surprise me.

It is the surprise, the excitement, that fuels a desire to return to the land of the unknown and see what lies there, beyond the next door.

It’s why I go back there, as a writer, and as a reader, to face what is unknown and therefore scary.

But is it wrong to be drawn to it?

Not from where I’m sitting.

It’s fun to be scared.