Procrastination and Fear by Nancy L. Eady

I have mentioned this before, but on my list of necessary evils, housework falls somewhere between doing my tax returns and getting a tetanus shot. There is only one time that changes. If I am up against a writing deadline, or need to study for a test of some kind, or prepare for a hearing, housework shoots right up to the top of my list of priorities. Housecleaning is the perfect procrastination tool. Physical work, little thought, and the righteous satisfaction of seeing the dust and grime yield before me will squash any lingering concerns about the looming deadline. Until I stop cleaning house and the worry floods right back into me. The only drawback to housekeeping-as-procrastination is that no matter how hard I clean, the deadline remains, looming closer. 

Are there good ways to deal with procrastination? I haven’t found many that work for me beyond the drop-dead deadline. (Not the fake deadline you set up to try to get something done early, but the drop-dead/your-case-will-be-thrown-out-of-court deadline.) The best thing about a deadline is that you reach a point, whether you want to be there or not, where you just have to start writing or working on whatever it is you have been avoiding. When the deadline involves a writing project, I may be thinking the entire time, “This is the worst paragraph/story/essay/brief/scene I’ve ever written,” but at least I am putting words on paper. (I am, of course, speaking metaphorically since most of my writing now is done on a laptop or desktop computer with a keyboard, but the principle is the same.) 

I have been to a couple of seminars on the issue, and they have dangled the tantalizing possibility that procrastination has psychological roots. That has two advantages. First, if it is a psychological problem, then I can believe that it’s not really my fault that I like to procrastinate. Second, it gives me even more rabbit holes to go down while I’m trying to procrastinate by looking up stuff on the internet. (Once, during an extended three-week writer’s block session, I googled such interesting topics as who was Elizabeth II of England’s sister’s husband, whether “redeemability” is a word and if so, the definition thereof, the list of daily specials at the local cafe, and the cost of the law office for sale one block from my house. I also confirmed that neither I nor my husband had uveal melanoma, congenital heart disease, eosinophilic asthma, defective automatic levelers in our camper, or unexplained hair loss.) 

I do find that procrastination can be based in part on fear—fear that my work won’t be any good, fear that I am not capable of doing the task I have been set, and the fear of failing are just a few I can come up with. In my life, I have discovered only two ways to deal with fear. The first is to go through it. I could look it squarely in the face, take a deep breath, and walk through it with my head held high. That sounds quite noble, doesn’t it? I’d be impressed with myself if I had ever managed to do that more than a smattering of times when it really mattered. Most of the time, if I am in the “go through it to the other side” mode, I do it with my eyes closed, shuffling my feet slowly forward inch by inch, grabbing every handhold I can find. It’s not nearly as noble, but it still gets me where I need to go. 

The other technique is to avoid the thing that causes the fear. Avoidance works really well with things like spiders and cockroaches. I was 40 before I ever killed a spider, and that was only because Mark was at work, it was just me and a five-year-old Kayla in the house, and she was more terrified than I was. And before you laugh and try to point out to me that said insects are much smaller than me, so it shouldn’t be a problem, you obviously don’t know your natural history very well. It is a proven fact that any insect you try to kill has the ability, should it wish, to morph into a creature six feet tall with slathering fangs and the ability to smash you into smithereens and then boil you for lunch. Avoidance doesn’t work nearly as well when the thing that causes fear is a task that has to be accomplished, like doing your taxes. Trust me, the IRS doesn’t care how scared you are; it wants your return filed correctly and by the appointed date and time. 

So I’m curious, fellow writers and gentle readers, what techniques have you found to help you deal with procrastination, especially the fear-based variety? Does procrastination or fear affect your writing? Any advice would be welcome. 

Remembering Pearl Harbor

War is caused either by an imperialistic stance by an aggressor, a failure of nations to successfully negotiate their differences, or a combination of the two, which is how the United States ended up in World War Two.

When Japan invaded Manchuria (imperialism), the United States reacted by refusing to sell Japan oil. This was no small matter for Japan, who bought 80% of its oil from U.S. companies. When the terms the U.S. required to begin shipping oil to Japan were too high for the Japanese government to accept and still maintain face—a commodity more important to politicians than to the millions of regular people who suffer when nations resort to war—Japan attacked the U.S. at Pearl Harbor on a date that FDR decried would live in infamy.

In two hours, Japan sank most of our battleships, numerous other vessels, and killed 2,400 people. As battles go, the material losses were major (although temporary, as most of the battleships were raised to fight again). In comparison to other battles, the human loss was small. On a single day at the battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg, MD) nearly 23,000 soldiers died. The atomic bomb dropped at Hiroshima killed over 40,000 people that day and 50,000 -100,000 more in the next four months.

I know all those statistics, but what resonated most with me as I toured Pearl Harbor, part of the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument (including the USS Arizona memorial), is the virulent hate so many immediately felt toward those of Japanese heritage living in the United States. In Executive Order 9066, FDR set in motion what would become the mass internment of Americans with Japanese ancestry. In the mainland U.S., over 100,000 were interned. In Hawaii, with a population of over 150,000 individuals with Japanese ancestry, fewer than 2,000 were interned!

Did you know the disparity of treatment of between locations? I did not. This was racism, pure and simple.

Fear allows presidents to take actions that would otherwise be unconstitutional. FDR subjected citizens of Japanese ancestry to the loss of property, freedom, all citizen rights, simply because of fear that they might conspire against their country.

President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus soon after the start of the hostilities now referred to as the Civil War, the War Between the States, or the War of Northern Aggression. The Judiciary determined that the right to suspend habeas corpus resided in Congress, not the President. Lincoln ignored the court order.

Lincoln was wrong to ignore the courts. FDR was wrong to tar all those with Japanese heritage with a single brush. Yet, in surveys, Lincoln and Roosevelt are considered two of our greatest presidents. For example, in the Siena College Research Institute, Presidential Expert Poll of 2010, Lincoln was rated #3, FDR was #1[1].

During the McCarthy era, political persuasion (and sometimes only presumed political persuasion) was cause for citizens to lose their jobs, to be blacklisted by industries regardless of whether they had ever committed any act against the interests of the United States.

This is our past. We should not run away from it. We must remember it to avoid repeating it.

We feared Native Americans and tried to exterminate them, or at least confine them to reservations. We feared Southern sympathizers and allowed presidential power to trump the checks and balances of our three branches of government. We feared the Japanese and illegally interred 100,000 fellow Americans.

Our current president uses fear of race, religion, and national origin to pit U.S. citizen against U.S. citizen. In our society, I am lucky to be privileged: an Anglo-Saxon male with sufficient financial means that I don’t need to rely upon charity to live. From the perspective of those in power, I should be concerned about losing all that I value because of the growing influence of those who are “not our kind.”

They are correct that I am concerned about losing what I most value. However, we have very different concepts about what has greatest value.

If I do not stand with Muslims and Jews and Blacks and Mexicans, if I do not stand with the poor regardless of race or religion; if I don’t object when others’ rights are diminished in response to fear promulgated for political gain; if I allow anyone to trample the inherent worth and dignity of another, I have lost my own soul.

~ Jim

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_presidents_of_the_United_States#Siena_College_Research_Institute.2C_Presidential_Expert_Poll_of_2010

After the crime: Fear and resilience

by Julie Tollefson

In reading and writing, I am drawn to the dark side. Murder. Suspense. I get a thrill from peeking over the edge at the worst of human nature, knowing that at the end of the ride the payoff will be the triumph of good over evil. Nice and tidy and controlled.

Last spring, our community (population 5,000) experienced two incidents that caused me to reflect on the connections between the fiction I love and the reality I find reprehensible.

In the first, as winter gave way to spring, someone scrawled a note on the bathroom wall at my son’s school, threatening violence against the student body the next day. In light of school shootings in recent years, and the mass shooting at a business less than 200 miles away a few days earlier, the threat was seriously scary. 

Increased anxiety accompanied the increased police presence in all of our small district’s schools. Two hours after the district notified parents of the threat, I sat at my desk going through the motions of work, cleaning out drawers and organizing files and attempting other tasks that didn’t require my full attention. My thoughts were 20 miles away, with my son and my husband, a teacher in the same school. 

The next day, when I sent my child to school and my husband to work in a place that potentially could be the site of the next headline news, was even worse. My husband could have called in “sick.” We could have kept our son home. Many, many parents did. Only two students showed up for my husband’s first class of the day. His largest class size was six. District-wide, more than half of students stayed away. 

But as a family, after a lot of conversation, we agreed that we did not want to be held hostage to fear instilled by other people. It’s the kind of decision you never want to get wrong, but we thought it was important to show that we weren’t helpless.

A couple of months later, a local man allegedly shot a police detective in a nearby town, then fled through a series of carjackings. My husband and his students stayed at school under lockdown while tactical units surrounded a house a block or so away. 

Both of these incidents caused me to think about the implications for my writing. I enjoy reading a sweeping Jason Bourne-like tale of multinational intrigue, but big drama also happens on a smaller scale, locally, at the family or individual level. That’s the sort of fiction I gravitate toward in my writing, where I can explore the consequences for an individual or a community when someone breaks the social contract and commits a heinous act. 

When I started writing this post, I thought the message would be “In fiction, unlike in real life, you get to control the outcome. You get to celebrate when the good guys win.” But the real-life incidents I described above were scary, and the consequences rippled throughout the community, even when the outcomes were the best possible under the circumstances (no one attacked the school and police caught the suspect in the shooting of the detective without further harm to innocents). And that is a lesson I want to explore more deeply in my fiction. Crime at all levels leaves scars, and how people—real or fictional—heal and cope in the aftermath determines whether they and their communities let fear win or find the fortitude to be stronger and more resilient despite threats and violence.

How do real-life events influence your thinking about the fiction you read or write? 

The Fear Factor in Mysteries

There are lots of reasons why people read mysteries. Some like to solve the problem of who done it. Some are interested in the characters and how they handle difficult situations, and some like the formulaic writing that in the end will be satisfying as the evil doer gets his/her just reward.

I went to www.librarything.com/topic/75724 and read the comments on the topic “Why do you read crime novels?” I’m not going to list all of them here, but she_climber wrote “Nothing is as exciting in my life as in the books I read.” I think we can all agree with that unless we lead exciting lives. AHS-Wolfy wrote “I want to pick up tips in formulating the perfect murder.” I certainly hope he/she was joking.

In July 20ll, The Bookseller listed that ten of the twenty-five bestselling books were thrillers. Philip Hensher in this edition states that he thinks the reason thrillers are so popular is because “we turn away from the unspeakable horrors of the newspaper events with no resolution to where a single running policeman can put everything right.”

Although thrillers are at the top of the list of mysteries with frightening events, all mystery writers need to put in some form of the fear factor to create suspense. Some people think the cozy book is the most comforting read, and they may be right to some extent, but the fear factor there is when the safety of a rural or small town is disrupted by murder. If one can’t feel safe in the country or a small town, where can one be safe?

As for the shudder effect in mysteries, I wonder if mystery writers aren’t putting their characters in situations that reflect their own fears or phobias; i.e. psychotic stalkers, facing a killer with a knife or gun, being gagged and bound, a house burning down around them or locked in a small claustrophobic place. All horrible things, I agree.

 

This past week I just finished Sandra Parshall’s book Bleeding Through – an excellent book, by the way – and one of the fear factors she used was a four-foot rattlesnake in her main character’s office. Since snakes seem to be a huge fear factor for many people, I wondered why more people don’t use them in the mysteries they write. Yes, I’ve read about them in other mysteries, too, but not as many as one would think considering the shudder effect snakes produce in most people. I have to admit, I’m not afraid of snakes. In fact, when I was a little girl I used to chase the boys with snakes. I’ve never been afraid to catch snakes, but then there were never any poisonous snakes in my area, and because my mother and grandmother weren’t afraid of them, I wasn’t either.

 

I saw my first rattlesnakes when backpacking about ten years ago. It was a huge one with an enlarged midsection from something it had recently ate, I assume. It was calmly going across a forest road in Pennsylvania. My sister and I thought it was a branch until we got close enough to see it. We were fascinated. Eventually when it decided we weren’t a threat, it slithered off into the ferns lining the road.

The next one was along the Appalachian Trail in Shenandoah Valley National Park.  It was an extremely hot day and I was lagging behind when I reached my sister sitting on a boulder waiting for me. She told me we couldn’t go on because there was a rattlesnake on the trail. Now I was hot, thirsty and needed water which was somewhere ahead, and I wasn’t going to let that snake stop me. 

When I got within eight to ten feet from it, I started stomping my feet and pounding my walking sticks on the ground. Snakes can’t hear, but they do feel vibrations. The trail was on the side of a mountain; one side went up rather steeply and the other side went down. I wasn’t going to go up or down and the rattler didn’t want to, either, so we faced off; me stomping, it rattling.  I won. It slithered a short way down the hill and my sister and I went on as it continued rattling its tail.

I’m sure everyone heard about the preacher who handled rattlesnakes and was bitten and died last month. Would I want to handle rattlesnakes? No! Would I want to find one in my house? Another no because I may not have any snake phobias, but I’m not stupid, either. I wouldn’t want any poisonous snake in my house or a constrictor, either. Will I include snakes in my books as a fear factor? Probably not since there aren’t poisonous snakes living in my area.

Another reason for reading mysteries was stated by AFHeart on the topic about why we read crime novels. “One of the great aspects of mystery stories, I suspect is flirting with the danger – safely. It’s a vicarious thrill. The reader is behind locked doors snuggled up with a cat, sipping tea while following a murder.” I can agree with that.

If you’re a writer, what fear factors do you include in your stories or books?

Is it something you fear?

If you’re a reader, what kind of fear factors frightens you the most?