79. What Are You Afraid Of? More Gearing Up for Script Frenzy.

One of the often-repeated pieces of advice for writers is to incorporate your greatest fear into your writing. Make your main character suffer and face the demons that scare you the most.

Like this bit from Simon Wood at Murderati :

Fear makes for great storytelling. It’s a fossil fuel with an
inexhaustible supply. It drives stories. It forces the reader, the
writer and the characters to face what frightens them full on. Stories
thrive on conflict and facing your fears is the greatest conflict. No one
is fearless, so everyone can relate.The best scary writing explores our
archetypal “core” fears.

So this is a great place to start plumbing for script ideas. If you need help figuring out your fears, there's a great list of possibilities here or here .


Go check them out. It's amazing just how long the list is.

While fears help create tension, drama and conflict, there are some that might be better used for humor (not that fears are a laughing matter, but, hey-they could be!)

Anablephobia-the fear of looking up (MUST keep eyes averted at all times-uh, huh!)
Anthrophobia-the fear of flowers (What a good excuse to skip sending that Mother's Day bouquet!)


and that triumverate of evil:
Leukophobia, melanophobia and porphyrophobia--fear of colors white, black and purple respectively (you can keep looking and find fear of yellow, too)

One must not get confused by the various spellings-or you might find genophobia (fear of sex) when you REALLY wanted geniophobia (fear of chins-hahahah!)

Some of the lesser known are totally familiar in content, if not verbiage-like nostophobia. That's the fear of returning home. I think that must be a specialty for teens who are out past curfew, or the student with an F on a test, or perhaps the spouse who's had a tad too much to drink or forgot some important event, or just any of us feeling a bit guilty about something...

But my TOTALLY MOST FAVORITE of all is consecotaleophobia--just try to say that. It rolls around the mouth and sounds most foreign of all. I'm sure that knowing it will come in handy, too. It's the fear of chopsticks. :-)