It has not been a good weekend. My husband, who a few months
ago fell into a pit of anxiety and depression caused by work stress, has been
making a slow recovery, but has had a rough couple of days. My teenage son has
a chest infection and coughed most of last night, so no one has had much sleep.
I sympathise with both of them, but at times my nerves are stretched to
breaking point, and I have been known to rant and rave at the poor man from my
own fear and frustration, then hate myself for making him feel even worse. On a lighter note, when
I drove my son to the out of hours doctor to get antibiotics, he decided to
follow her advice and wait a few days before resorting to using them. It was on
the tip of my tongue to say, ‘Take them now! We need the coughing to stop tonight!’
Thriller writers have an interesting relationship with
anxiety. In one sense, it is what we do;
we create anxiety in the reader – but the enjoyable, fictional type that gives
a frisson of excitement, not the debilitating type that ruins lives. If you are
someone who enjoys reading, watching or writing thrillers, the chances are that
you are not someone who experiences serious stress yourself. When a friend of
mine who suffers from anxiety read through an earlier version of my novel, Unspeakable Things, she asked
incredulously, ‘What made you want to write it?’ which perhaps wasn’t the
reaction I had hoped for. Soon though, I remembered that she tries to avoid any
kind of entertainment that might be disturbing, looking instead for the type
that is comforting, uplifting or funny.
People who like thrillers are like those who seek out
dangerous sports: their adrenaline levels are less likely to rise than other
people’s. This leads them to go looking for experiences that cause the exhilarating
feeling of an adrenaline rush – the thrill of free-fall, the novelistic tension
ratcheted up to breaking point, the moment in the movie when everyone jumps.
That’s me. My default setting, I have realised lately, is not worried. As my
sons have grown older and sought out various dangerous adventures, my
assumption has remained that they are all right, unless I am given serious
cause to doubt it. When one went on a
school trip to Tanzania, some of the other parents wanted a phone call to
reassure them that the flight had landed safely. I told my son that I would
assume they had landed safely unless I heard otherwise on the News.
Nevertheless, in order to write characters who are going
through terrifying times, you do need to empathise with those who suffer. You
need to describe the feelings of being nervous, tense, shocked or terrified in
ways that resonate with readers and provoke a reaction in them. And of course,
I am not immune to feeling anxious. Lately my resilience has been under serious
strain, though of course this is nothing to what my husband is going through.
They do say that if
you are a writer, nothing that happens to you is wasted, and I have found that
my experience of watching a loved one going through a difficult time has come
through in my writing. In Unspeakable
Things, Jim is bewildered by Sarah’s mood when she finds out shocking
things about her mother’s past.
‘He began to steer her away from the whole Mary subject and tried to
get her to focus on more positive things, and for a while he hoped that she was
beginning to calm down. But in the evenings, he would speak to her, or glance
at her as he laughed at something on the TV, and he would see her brooding,
intense, hardly aware of him. In the mornings he woke up to find her sleepless,
staring ahead. He found himself missing her as though she had gone.’
I hope I have not sounded callous, examining the subject of
anxiety from such a writerly perspective - but this isn’t the place for an in-depth
unburdening about what the past few months have been like. I just hope that
soon the brooding fear and the nail-biting tension will be back on the pages of
my novel and that my husband and I, who once jumped out of a plane together,
will be happily thrill-seeking again.
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