Fear - Can You Be Afraid of a Character in Your Writing?

Calvary Gates - Fresno, CA
copyright 2008 - Louise Ann Stowell

Can you be afraid of a topic...more importantly a character in a story you are writing? 

I had checked out a fantastic book from the library last week called The Winter Ghosts by Kate Mosse.  I love her other books...Labyrinth and Sepulcher.  The weather is changing from snow to rain and I was feeling the need for a little moody reading.  

There was a paragraph in her book that described almost exactly and incident that happened to me many years ago when I was living in Fresno at the Calvary Cemetery.  It was, I guess, a ghost story.  I am not completely sure what "it" was nor why the incident happened.  The only thing that comes to mind is that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Other than that I have no idea why the incident occurred.  

However, upon reading Kate Mosse's description of "silence," I thought, "Wow!  I need to write that story down. Fictionalize it.  This would be a great story!"  

And so I began to do so.  I soon found that I was having difficulty in getting the beginning down.  As I progressed, I realized that I was writing like it was one of the old reports I used to generate at the engineering firm.  It had descriptions and details, but not nearly enough emotion.  I was writing it clinically.  That bothered me.  Bothered me enough to roll around in my brain while I slept and awaken me at 3 in the morning last Wednesday.  Waking Terry on my getting up, I wound up discussing it with him.

What he said was interesting.  He suggested that it could be that I was afraid.  Silly, right?  Not really.  As we talked more about it, he said that perhaps there was a part of me that was more frightened than I consciously admit.   That maybe I was afraid I would conjure this thing up...get it's attention just from the telling of it.  Enlightenment!  (He is so good for me!  How he pus up with me, I don't know!)

So today I am about to sit down and re-write the story.  I am going to allow myself to let my imagination go and get it out on paper.  My thinking is that I need to exorcise it.  This may be achieved by writing about it.  Let's see what happens!