Show Your Fear!

This is a guest post from John Peace, author of The Calling.

I opened my eyes with a sharp report reverberating through my dreams. My eyes were open in an almost total absence of light, with only the faintest outline of walls around me. Whatever that noise had been, my gut told me it meant me no good.

Another gunshot echoed through the darkness, closer this time, as I lay half-asleep with my wife in a hike tent in the middle of the night. Thus began a half-hour of the most powerful fear that I have ever experienced.

We had pitched the tent in a green mountaintop pasture at about 10,000 feet above sea level, in remote, mountainous country on the Arabian peninsular. This was a perfect campsite for us, and a valuable grazing area for the nearest village, half a mile around the side of the mountain, but the children who herded the goats, sheep and smug cows around had always tried to warn me about ‘wild animals’ as they hurried back to their homes at dusk. I’d chuckled at their imaginations.

It had been my favourite area for hiking getaways when I had worked as an English teacher in the city, in my batchelor days, but now we were plunged into nightmare. Let me stress that this was the only time this happened to me in all my years living in the Middle East.

The three or four gunmen stood at a distance from our tent and their leader began making demands: He wanted all of our dollars, quickly! He wanted gold, now! And he wanted me to throw my weapon out of the tent and follow with my hands up.

The trouble was, I had no weapon to throw, not even a can opener; but he didn’t believe me. And the only gold we had was in our wedding rings. Dollars? What use were they while hiking in the mountains?

As we shouted back and forth, the gunman laughed at me: he could tell from my voice that I was terrified. I was indignant with my traitorous body: no matter that my limbs were trembling as if I were shivering from intense cold, I was not afraid of this man! At least I told myself that, and I clung to a certain defiance. I repeatedly refused to come out of the tent and put myself at their mercy. Why didn’t one of them drag us out of the tent? They must have been unable to comprehend how anyone would camp there without a firearm for self-protection.

Looking back, it’s fascinating how a life-or-death situation like that can have such a profound effect on the body. My mind was functioning, although thinking was like wading through a peat bog, and I felt more intensely annoyed at myself for bringing my three-months-pregnant wife into such a fix, and outraged at being treated this way. But my body had other ideas. I was losing control of myself, shaking, and it was obvious in my voice. The nearest I’d come to this before was in fist fights, years before at school.

A confrontation with one’s own possible death produces a great sharpening of perspective, a sudden re-balancing of values to bring to mind what really matters after all, and sometimes to reveal some of those petty self-deceptions that we each harbour. I had thought that I was not afraid of death and was quite sure of where I was going after crossing that icy river, but I discovered that I was not at all willing to go there yet, or even to get my feet wet! I had the nerves of a first-time flyer refusing to board the plane. This is the story-arc equivalent of an epiphany, the teetering peak of the monster roller-coaster plot, when you have such a good view but no tranquility in which to appreciate it at length. You have to learn from it in retrospect, if at all. But everything can change at that moment; we are at our most vulnerable and flexible, lunging out for the nearest safe handhold, desperate to swim to a shore, any shore.

In the end, we flung out most of the contents of our backpacks and the few notes of local currency that we carried. I even pleaded with the men to leave us the cash to pay for our fare back to the city, and they did so! They must have finally realised that we were not loaded with jewellery and banknotes, as they’d expected. I believe they took pity on us, in a small way, before they vanished into the night with threats of what would happen if we alerted the police. Who knows? Perhaps they came to their own minor epiphany, and have walked the mountains more gently ever since. I’d like to think so.

We had our ‘reversal’ (that’s number seven in the eight-point story arc – from Nigel Watts’ Writing a Novel). I never went back there, and the country and countryside I’d loved turned sour on me for quite a time. I realised how wild those mountains could be, guessing that the village children had known more than I about the wild creatures at large in their land.

One day last year this all came back to me when, safe and sound back in Canada, I clicked on a web ad for some sort of self-defence training. In the long and very convincing sales pitch the writer stressed that martial arts training is all very well, but in a fight-or-flight situation, terror will most likely take over your body and, unless you are prepared, several things will probably happen:

1) The body relieves itself of excess matter as quickly as possible

2) You lose fine motor control

3) You lose the ability to think clearly and rationally.

What a relief, I thought, that my wife and I skipped straight to point two when those shots rang out. But it rang true to me that even the best skill training becomes useless when faced with overwhelming threats. It’s not just something that happens in stories; it’s simply that most of us, most of the time, lead reasonably safe lives.

 

As writers, we attempt to portray life as it really is. The ‘human condition’ is such a many and varied mystery that there’s no end to the books that can be written about people. In the action scenes I found myself writing in The Calling, a science fiction adventure for 8 to 12 year-olds, a choice presented itself to me, perhaps one common to all writers who include any adventure. The choice was how much realism to include in the characters’ reactions to danger. Should Valin (the main character, a nomad youth attempting to steal the space raiders’ ship) go through what I went through? Do I have to show how his limbs were trembling in every action scene? How many synonyms are there for ‘tremble’? Would he in fact get over this reaction before reaching the final chapter? And how many different ways are there to show him struggling with fear?

Actually, the struggle to control his thoughts played a very large part in the story. I wanted to show an ordinary person gradually overcoming his fears, self-doubts and the invisible, accumulated bitterness of the past. Instead of portraying pints of blood being spilled, I aimed to paint fear by the threat of violence and the building up of menacing characters (and machines) which had become so used to acts of brutality that they no longer had any inhibitions to restrain them. Goodness knows, there seems to be a glut of such people in our world. Just scan the headlines.

Rather than exploring and celebrating death and pain in all its guises (and this thought occurs to me as I pass down our much-decorated street this October), I would like my writing to inspire readers to look for a better way. And I’m sure I’m not alone.

 

The Calling is available in print at CreateSpace and as an ebook at Amazon Kindle. See a short promotional video here.

John Peace drip-feeds a blog about writing.