What's Your Spy Afraid Of?

I'm gearing up for a real road trip. My friend and I are driving from Florida to Charleston, South Carolina to give a workshop at the RWA chapter there. It's the Low Country RWA chapter...with that name, how could I say no to their invitation to give a talk about "Facing The Inner Cave of Fear"?

When I first saw the topic they gave me, I went "Wow! They want to me to talk about what???!" I guess it made sense, since my second book, Facing Fear, was about...umm...facing fear. LOL. But now I have to deconstruct my writing and explain how I do it. Deconstruction of self is not my favorite thing, let me tell ya. I would rather cook, which if you ask the men in my life, is a chore I excel at but do not like to do.

How does a writer write about fear? Or anything? When we write about love, we have an overall goal, a romance/relationship between two people that reaches that point when they realize they're in love. But fear? Fear is a lonely feeling. Fear is all about the self.

And how does a writer put that in paper in a story and not go into chapters of morbid soliloquy? It's a romance that she's writing, after all. I believe that fear is one of the hardest things to write about because a writer has to really dig deep inside her for some element of personal pain, then project it somehow into her scene, which might have nothing to do with that personal experience.

It's not easy writing about rape or violence in a romance. It's not easy writing about anything that's distasteful. Some books just give a detailed description of the scenes and they leave me cold as a reader. And then, there are the gems that I reread over and over again, no matter how crappy or sentimental or unbelievable the story.

Here are some great examples:

The heroine's fear of water and her final overcoming of it in Elizabeth Lowell's Chained Lightning. This is a very poignant story, albeit with some dated dialogue, but the scene in which the hero is watching as the heroine sits in shallow water trying, over and over again, to inch her way into deeper water. That is one of the most memorable scenes that dealt with fear. The reader is pulled in along with the hero's growing pain as he stops himself from interrupting. Simply fabulous!

Debra Dixon's Playing With Fire, a masterful story of a heroine trying to keep a secret and her fear of discovery. It's a different kind of fear, with a more urgent sense of secrecy to it, but Dixon's handling of the subject is subtle and suspenseful. I love this book.

These are the two off the top of my head for now. Do you have an example of a book that explores fear as a theme? It'll help me with more examples for my workshop, heh heh. A spy's gotta have ulterior motives all the time, girlfriends!

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