What Scares You Most? That’s Exactly What You Should Write

Writing my way into topics that scare the shit out of me

Apr 03, 2025

Welcome. We saved you a seat under the Palm Tree. This week, under the Palm Tree, we’re discussing the immense strength that’s found when creating art around topics that terrify us.

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Kieren Westwood

whom I have come to highly respect as a writer and developmental editor, encouraged me to write about the things that terrify me.

What terrifies me? Death and dying.

I wrote a story about it. It’s a story about the exacting price it takes on the deceased and the people who love them.

It examines the idea of death as an inglorious Groundhog Day. Each death is a reason to say everything to the woman you’ve shared your life with. Each return gives you more reason to be vulnerable, to remember their scent, their weight on your skin. Each renewed moment is a reason to revel in the particularities of their graze along your collarbone.

What surprised me about this piece, is the way it came together. Each paragraph appeared on the page as compact couplets of meaning.

It felt inauthentic to the piece to type the longer paragraphs I tend to lean on in my other pieces. For example, the paragraphs in FALLING (Free Spirit, April 2025) are much longer by comparison.

Even now, as I think about it. I can not put my finger on why the paragraphs needed to be short and the language more direct. I may have been trying to create a contrast between the surrealism of the setting and the protagonist’s desperation for concrete reality.

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Read full story

This excerpt from the short fiction piece THE WEIGHT, illustrates this strange contrast.

She sighed. It came out as near-subzero air. It rippled over my chest, over my neck before coating my nostrils. It deadened all it touched. How could such cold live in a person?
“Babe. Something is up. Your breath. It’s so cold.”
“Can I finish telling my story? I just got to the good part.”
The smell was stronger now, that acid smell.
“Right. I am up there on the auditorium stage and the first word. The very first one is ‘dinosaur’. I will never forget that word.”
“Don’t tell me.”
“Yeah.”
“Damn.”
“Are you judging me?”
“I mean…” We both laughed.
“Ok, yeah, I fucking misspelled the word. I got super nervous. A classroom full of eyes is nowhere close to the whole school and a very cute Devin watching your every move. My mind went blank. When I came to. I had spelled ‘dinosaur’ D-I-N-A-S-A-U-R.”
“Oof, that one letter did you dirty.”
“Right? That's what I’m saying.”
She put her head back down on me.
“You feel it, don’t you?” She said.
“Feel what?” I said.
“It’s ok. I can tell. We don’t have to pretend.”
“You don’t feel anything?” I said.
“No, I just feel a draining. Like a lot of liquid is coursing through me and pooling at my feet.”
Her calves were to either side of me. Just her upper body and thighs were pressed into me.
“The fucker is petty. I don’t have time to tell you the most embarrassing story, not this time around.”
I sat up and propped myself on the wrought iron headboard. It was exquisitely ornate but hollow inside. “No. You can’t leave. You’ve only been here for–” I looked at the clock, but my vision was swimming some.
I blinked a few times to see where the clock hands were pointing. “You’ve been here for less than an hour,” I said.
She followed me up to my seating position before nestling back into me.
Her eyes were red, not a magenta red, a faded red, and there was a flatness to them, that hadn’t been there before.
They were like the eyes I’d seen at Madam Tussand’s wax museum with her off of Regents Street.
We both watched the rain. We saw how it blurred the street, how it created unreliable smears of the red terrace houses.
After a long stretch, this woman, I had gained and lost, and gained and lost again, said, “You could come with me?”
Her words rang like a silver bell in my brain. I could go with her.
“Bite me again,” I said.
“What?”
“Bite me again,” I repeated. “Harder this time. Sink your teeth into me.”
“What are you talking about? Did you hear me?” She said. “I’m serious. You could come with me, and we could come back together.”
“Please,” I said, looking at her. I kissed her. I remembered her lips as satin soft. Those same lips felt impossibly cold. “I need to know if I am actually awake. Bite me.”
She propped herself on her elbow, leaned in, and bit my jaw, hard.
It hurt, but not as much as it should have. There was no searing, mind-clearing agony shooting through me.

What scares you? Would you ever write about it?

Share your fears below. We can never outgrow that which we will not face. Writing within the chasm that terrifies us raises our upper limits as writers, as creatives.