Writing Through Fear
I’ve just written a scene I’ve been avoiding for a while. I wasn’t consciously avoiding it, but after falling out of writing for a few years, it gave me some perspective on my current work in progress and I realized that the outline was missing a key scene— without it there would be a massive hole in the narrative. Not that you’d consciously notice it on a casual read-through, but you’d sense it. Something missing. And the fact was, I had consciously not included it in the first draft of my outline.
To understand what the scene was, and why I was avoiding it, I need to give you some backstory of my WIP. My protagonist is Jack Paris, psychic PI, Iraq war veteran, and most important to this scene, has family roots in Louisiana Voodoo. In book one we deal with John Dee and western esoterism, so it didn’t come up much except to establish his place as an outsider.
Book two, which I’m working on now, I have Vodou as a major plot element with both good guys and bad guys practicing. I’ve done a lot of work to treat the tradition respectfully as a religion. (As I’ve said before, I do like writing about religion) The bad guy isn’t bad for using Vodou, he’s bad for corrupting it for personal ends. Jack is non-practicing and a bit of a novice, so he needs to go to a mambo for assistance.
What I was avoiding was a full blown Vodou ritual. Given the subject matter, there needs to be one for a number of reasons. One’s thematic, showing Jack deepening his roots as the story progresses. There’s a plot reason, as the mambo is trying to ritually protect Jack from an evil bokor’s workings. But the biggest reason is that Vodou is part of the book and dealing with it respectfully means I need to include a ceremony. (Can you think of the Exorcist without any Catholic rituals?)
I think I was avoiding it because I was worried about doing it justice without being exploitative. The whole purpose of the Jack Paris stories is to show these different belief systems in a grounded realistic fashion, and I didn’t want to fall into Hollywood territory.
But I finally did the work, did the research, and wrote the scene. The story is stronger for it. If people give me grief for it, at least I know I did a respectful portrayal, and worked through my own fears.
