Going to Your Unhappy Place

October! Halloween! What a wonderful time to have a terrible time. If Spring is the season of hope, Autumn is the season of fear. Up here in the northern hemisphere, it gets darker earlier. Leaves turn red and drop. People also drop dead in greater numbers. It’s gloomy, a graveyard time. On Halloween we dress in scary costumes to assert that we’re not afraid.

Truth is, we are. But afraid of what?

I enjoyed Julie Carrick Dalton’s post last week, “Transforming Fear into Fiction”. She’s dead right. I’ve written about fear, too. What you’re most afraid of and avoid is exactly what your fiction needs the most and what you should embrace. Fear is one of the two, diametrically opposed reasons that we are drawn to fiction in the first place. We read stories to experience either hope or fear. (I’ve previously posted about that dichotomy here.)

One thing that chills us are places. My daughter won’t go down into our basement. My son and his (dumbass) teenaged buddies are daring each other to go inside a certain abandoned barn on this coming Halloween night. Hospital operating rooms. Abandoned churches. Junkyards. Unlit country roads.  Anyplace that makes us feel alone and/or that brings us close to the reality of death is a good location for bad things to happen.

Then again, is it the place?  Or, what happens there?  Or, our dread anticipation?  Or, simply how we feel?  The scariest places can be physical locations, yes, and the terrible things that happen there can be sickening, absolutely, but the most terrifying place of all—wouldn’t you agree—is right inside of our own heads.

Let’s take a look at exactly how that works.

The Many Faces of Unhappy Places

Horror master Tananarive Due’s upcoming The Reformatory (2023) is an unflinching depiction of racism set in a Florida juvenile detention facility, the Gracetown Boy’s Reformatory, where a Black boy, Robert Stephens, is sent after kicking a white boy (deemed “assault”) while defending his sister.  It’s a fearsome place ruled by a sadistic Warden and haunted by the ghosts of boys who have died there.  (Disclosure: Due is represented by my agency.)

Most fearsome of all is a shed on the grounds called The Funhouse where troublesome boys are whipped.  Robert is taken there for the offense of wondering whether anyone has ever run away.  In The Funhouse not only is there no escape, but it is drummed into Robert that no one is to blame for his punishment but himself.

Warden Haddock slowly wiped his strap. “You know what you did wrong?”

Robert longed to argue, but he remembered Crutcher’s warning. “Asking stupid questions, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”

…

“Stupid questions?” Warden Haddock said. Exaggerated, the phrase seemed monstrous. “That what you call it?”

Boone made a chuffing sound, glaring at him.  Robert didn’t know what to say, so he dared not speak until he learned his mistake.

“A ‘stupid’ question would be ‘Does the sun rise in the west?’” Warden Haddock said.  “’Do pigs like slop’? Those are stupid questions. Way I hear it, ‘less you’re fixin’ to call Boone a liar, you were asking how to run away.”

In the corner of his eye, Robert noticed the men at the card table flexing their arms, exercising their fingers like Mama had before she taught him scales on the piano at Miss Anne’s house. They had put their cards down. They were preparing to hurt him.

“Not for me to run, sir,” Robert said. “I was just asking if anybody ever did…” Robert’s voice dropped away. Crutcher had told him not to argue. Keep his mouth shut. 

“Why would you want to know if a thing was possible, Robert, ‘less you thought you might want to try it. Explain that to me.”

…

“Like…” Robert imagined the ping from Mama beneath his hand and said the first thing that came to him, as if she were whispering in his ear: “…like how, in picture shows, people fly to outer space and can look down on the whole Earth. Or how Joe Friday chases down crooks on Dragnet. I ain’t never gonna be on no rocket ship, no police detective, but I still want to hear it like a story.”

…

“Stories are dangerous, Stephens,” Warden Haddock said. “They can get you hurt bad. Get you killed. Your friend the storyteller just got thirty lashes. It’s not his first time here, and he should know better. I have to teach you too, and I’m not sure yet how many licks that’ll take. But however the Lord leads me, from now on, if you’re smart—and I think maybe you are—you’re not gonna want to hear no more stories.”

…

“Gimmie your shirt,” Crutcher said. Robert hesitated just long enough for him to add, “You don’t want to wear it. Fabric gets in the skin.”

The Funhouse is a place of horrors and the greatest horror of all is psychological torment.  In Robert’s case, it is not only his entrapment that terrifies us, the beating to come, it’s that he is told that he alone is responsible for it. The twisted wrongness of that is sickening.

Another way to evoke fear is by playing against it. In Chris Pavone’s thriller Two Nights in Lisbon (2022), American bookshop owner Ariel Pryce accompanies her new husband on a business trip to Portugal. When she wakes one morning, he is gone. Ariel doesn’t know a whole lot about her husband. She doesn’t even know what business he’s on, or whom he is in Lisbon to meet. She fights her panic.

She’ll shower, that’s what she’ll do. She’ll shower and she’ll dress herself in today’s outfit, which she chose a week ago, deliberating through her closet with a little chart of what clothes she’d need, for what purposes, on what days of this short trip. Today it will be a mid-length skirt and a peasant blouse, simple, unfussy, yet sexy. Ariel’s normal outfit is jeans and a T-shirt, and no makeup whatsoever. But this Lisbon trip is not normal, so she’ll put on makeup, and a low-handing pendant necklace, accentuating parts of her body that she usually doesn’t.

Then she’ll open the door and find the American newspaper on the doormat, with the stories about the memorial service for the vice president, and about the man who had been nominated to succeed him, news that’s been dominating the American media for months.

Ariel will scoop up the newspaper, and walk carefully down the hotel’s wide staircase, taking her time on the slick marble, her hand trailing the wooden banister that has been buffed smooth and shiny from two centuries of friction, the long-term degradations at the hand of man. She’ll stride into the large sunny breakfast room that’s perched above the bustling square ringed by elegant buildings and those lethal old trams clanging and screeching on their tracks, disgorging early-bird tourists and bleary-eyed commuters munching on their breakfast pastéis, their eyes drawn up to the hotel’s elegant façade, where curtains are billowing through the first floor’s middle set of French doors just in front of the low table where Ariel and John have eaten their breakfast two days in a row already, it’s their table, and that’s where her new husband will be, sitting there with his coffee and newspapers, waiting for her, looking up with that grin—

He isn’t.

Alone in a foreign country, your husband missing, not knowing how or why or even knowing enough about your husband to begin looking for him…the dread feeling here is one of isolation. The situation itself might be enough to invoke that feeling in us, but Pavone knows not to play the obvious notes. Instead, he goes the opposite way: He uses Ariel’s attempt to remain calm. That calm is undercut by Pavone’s imagery…

A little chart of the clothes she’ll need…this Lisbon trip is not normal…memorial service for the vice president…slick marble…two centuries of friction…degradations at the hand of man…lethal old trams…screeching on their tracks…

Get the idea? Ariel is trying to take it easy, but the language of the passage is anything but that.  There’s tension in the contrast between her hope and the unsettling details of her reality.  Ariel doesn’t know very much about her husband and—no big spoiler, I imagine—the reader also doesn’t know everything about Ariel and that is the point.

We’re frightened of what we don’t know, what might be out there, what our own ignorance will do to us. We try to stay calm, assure ourselves that everything will be all right, but you and I know damn well that it won’t. Not always. Sooner or later, the worst happens to us all and what makes it even more horrible is our naïve wishing that it won’t happen to us.

Let’s talk about writers’ fears. What’s yours? One common fear is not getting published. Effort wasted. Words ignored. It’s an awful prospect, but there’s one that worse. What if you were published but your work was universally judged to be worthless?

In Olen Steinhauer’s The Confession (2004), that happens to Comrade Inspector Ferenc Kolyeszar, in a country in eastern Europe in 1956.  In addition to being a state militia homicide detective, he is a proletariat writer. One morning, a colleague is looking through Kolyeszar’s desk and appraising the writing he finds there:

He nodded at the papers. “How do you do this? I mean, all I write are reports. They’re so dry. But you, Ferenc, you’ve got a way with words. How do you do that?”

“I work at it. Now please put them back where you found them.”

He lifted the top sheet and read aloud: “’She moved through the world as if nothing was worth her effort, but she nonetheless influenced the outcome of situations. The proper word, or a subtle gesture, and someone was filling her empty glass with wine.’ You see what I mean? I feel like I’ve known this woman before. You’ve nailed it just right. I’m impressed.” He tapped the pages again. “Impressed and a little disappointed.”

“Disappointed?”

“I’m not an artist, not like you. But like anyone, I enjoy a good read. I know what I like. It’s a shame to see great talent wasted like this.”

I waited.

“This,” he said, laying his hand on my words, “It’s so…so unreliable. All this—how should I put it?—this me me me. You understand?”

“I don’t think I do.”

He crossed a leg over his knee. “Who do you think would be interested in this, Ferenc?”

I shrugged.

“There’s my point! No one, except for yourself…This is about you, and only you. And this relationship—this marriage—what depressing people! The story about the dam, that’s what people want to read. I ask you again, who would want to read your story?”

I wanted to reply, but there was no satisfactory answer.

Ouch. Isn’t that every writer’s fear? Yours? Mine? Our writing is pointless, of interest to few, lacking impact and self-indulgent? Has anyone ever told you that to your face? Even if you believe in yourself and your writing, what if someone else—even one person—doesn’t? And what if they’re right?

What greater fear can there be than being worthless? A waste of air? Despised by others? Less than dirt? That condition is not a surprise in the existentially empty world of eastern Europe in the 1950’s, which Steinhauer has evoked so well in his novels, but it’s also an emptiness many of us sometimes fear, mask and unhelpfully deny.

Trust it, if you write then there is someone who despises you. Worse than hating you, that someone simply doesn’t care. For someone you’re not just a failure, you’re useless, worthless, less than dirt. A writer? Pfft.

Feels good, doesn’t it? Congratulations. Welcome to your pointless existence.

Unhappy Places on the Page

Now that we’re all feeling good and encouraged, let’s look at a couple of ways to go dark on the page.  The feelings we want to provoke in readers are aloneness, helplessness, despair, shame, guilt, anxiety, loss, bitterness, numbness, paranoia, inadequacy, failure, rejection, humiliation, worthlessness and/or the nearness of death.

Fun! Feel free to add!

• What is your protagonist’s lowest moment? List what is gone forever and what will now never arrive. All that’s left is—what?  Weave into a paragraph.
• When is your protagonist most isolated, alone, helpless and at the mercy of others? Who can rub your protagonist’s face in that hopelessness? Do so.
• In what situation does your protagonist become trapped? Close off all avenues of escape and relief. Time is up. Pick one gruesome type of suffering that is just about to happen. What is one detail of that torture, one piece of evidence or residue that will be left when it is over? Use it.
• For what is your protagonist to blame? What’s the worst way to stick in that knife and twist it hard? Go ahead.
• What’s the Bad Place in your story? Build it up…then go there. How is it worse than feared? Or even worse than that?
• Give your Villain control of someone your protagonist loves. What evil can the Villain do? Get it ready.
• Of the things that your protagonist hopes for, what can you take away permanently? What would hurt? Be ruthless.
• Of what is your protagonist proud? What is the foundation of your protagonist’s identity and security? Undermine it.
• What’s the most humiliating failure that could happen? How can your protagonist screw up in a way that results in tragedy? What’s stopping you?
• After failure, what is the most bitter aftertaste? When it was all for nothing, is there anything left? Take that away too.
• Play against looming despair. What can your protagonist do to pretend that the worst isn’t happening. Write that, then drop a bomb. Nice try, Protagonist, too bad but you’re fu-ked.
• When does your protagonist know that death is real and near? Pause there. Let Death breathe in your protagonist’s face, Death’s clammy grip fasten on your protagonist’s arm, pulling, pulling, pulling…

Happy Unhappy Day, My Friends, It’s Been a Pleasure!

The roller-coaster effect is one that novelists value, but too often fail to deliver.  A coaster must climb, but also plunge.  When it hits the nadir, stomachs sink.  That’s important because the high of the ending of many manuscripts could be more satisfying.  They will be when protagonists been through the worst, faced death and have nevertheless somehow come through.

What’s your protagonist’s unhappy place? What’s yours? How are you going there in your WIP?