Make a spectacle of you.

There’s a particular kind of cowardice that only writers know. It doesn’t announce itself as such. It shows up instead as taste.“I just don’t really do horror,” we say, as if genres were food allergies and not choices. “I’m more of a character-driven person.” “I prefer realism.” “My work is quieter.” These are all respectable statements, and like most respectable statements, they are often lies. What they usually mean is- "I am afraid of looking foolish in that direction. I am afraid of failing there."I know this because for years I insisted that thrillers were beneath me. Gothic horror in particular felt like a costume party I hadn’t been invited to: all that fog and candlelight and melodrama. I admired Nosferatu and Dracula as artifacts and studied them the way one studies stained glass in a church that no longer inspires belief. And yet, when I was honest, the stories that clung to me most stubbornly were not the careful meditations I claimed to love, but the ones that frightened me. The ones that stayed in the room after I turned off the light. The sewer scenes in Stephen King’s It. The glimpse of a shadow on a wall where no one should be standing.

So, reluctantly and a little theatrically, I decided to do the thing I tell other writers to do: I started writing short thriller pieces precisely because they were what I felt least qualified to write.

If you’ve ever taught a a workshop—or simply sat through one—you know how quickly people sort themselves into camps. The “plot” people. The “voice” people. The autofiction loyalists. The world-builders. The poets who are “just trying prose this once.”

Ask a roomful of writers what they’re working on, and you’ll hear the same invisible borders being drawn:

• “I can’t do dialogue.”

• “I don’t understand how plot works.”

• “Anything speculative just seems silly to me.”

• “I’m bad at describing action.”

These sound like neutral self-assessments. They’re treated as immovable facts: like saying, “I’m five foot four” or “I don’t like olives.” But writing is not height. It’s closer to handwriting: messy, adaptable, responsive to attention. When someone tells you what they “can’t” write, what they’re really telling you is where the fear lives.

Fear is rarely described as a craft tool, but it is one of the most precise diagnostic instruments we have. It points directly at what we believe we are not allowed to be: sentimental, melodramatic, silly, overwrought, confusing, boring, obvious. When I say “I don’t write thrillers,” I am not making a statement about thrillers. I am confessing that I am afraid of being ridiculous. I am afraid that if I try to scare you, you will laugh.

Instead of treating that fear as a closed door, I’ve started treating it as a neon sign: Write here.

Of course, most of the fear that governs a writing life isn’t cinematic. It doesn’t wear a cape. It shows up in the middle of the afternoon, disguised as a perfectly normal email.

Take, for instance, the quiet horror of a first independent research project. In my case, a Fulbright. There is nothing overtly gothic about a grant. There are no dungeons in the application portal, no blood-red signatures. And yet the year before departure was one of the most haunted of my life.

I was thrilled, of course—that public, polished emotion we know how to perform. But under the congratulations and the careful LinkedIn posts, another narrative ran on loop:

What if the project is useless?What if I go abroad and produce nothing of value?What if my “independent” research simply proves that I should never again be left unsupervised with a question and a budget?

This is not the fear of a fanged monster. This is the fear of being revealed as ordinary. Of having a prestigious structure wrapped around you like a costume, only to discover there is nothing impressive underneath.

The Fulbright project, unlike a short story, cannot be abandoned halfway through with the excuse that “it just wasn’t working.” There is money attached, expectations attached, people whose signatures sit at the bottom of your award letter. The horror, in this case, is administrative: spreadsheets, timelines, committee reports. The monster under the bed is not a demon but the possibility of a final report that reads, in effect, I didn’t quite manage to do what I said I would do.

The same fear slips, almost unchanged, into my attempts to write technically. Drafting a technical piece—something precise, rigorous, up to “standard”—terrifies me more than any invented ghost. The requirements seem so clean on the surface: clarity, structure, evidence, a sensible progression of thought. Underneath them, I hear a different question:

Are you actually smart enough to say this out loud?

I worry that my technical writing will reveal all the gaps I’ve been smoothing over with tone. That the moment I step into a more formal, exacting register, it will become obvious that I am better at atmosphere than at understanding. My sentences, so confident in the elastic world of fiction, suddenly feel like a child dressed in their parent’s lab coat.

The fear of writing a thriller and the fear of producing a “useful” research project or a respectable technical paper turn out to be the same fear in different costumes: the fear that, once the lights go up, there will be nothing solid behind the performance.

When I finally turned toward gothic horror—toward those sepia-toned worlds of Nosferatu and Dracula, and the sticky, suburban dread of It—I thought I was stepping away from these everyday anxieties and into something safely theatrical. I imagined capes and candelabras, graveyards and thunderclaps.

What I found instead was a mirror.

Gothic horror, for all its exaggerated shadows, is obsessed with very ordinary fears: contamination, invasion, shame, desire, decay. Vampires are just metaphors with better cheekbones. The haunted house is simply the family home with the lights turned low enough that you can finally see what’s been leaking through the walls for years. Stephen King’s sewer clown is childhood terror with better marketing.

The more I wrote in that mode, the more I realized that my “everyday” fears were already gothic. The Fulbright year has all the ingredients of a haunted-house plot: you, alone, in a foreign structure full of inherited expectations and invisible rules, hearing faint sounds at night and wondering whether they are in the building or in your head. Technical writing has all the tension of a thriller: a ticking clock, high standards, a narrow margin of error, the constant dread of being found out as an impostor.

Horror simply insists that we admit what we are already afraid of, and then gives it a body.

This is one of the reasons I urge other writers, whether they consider themselves “serious” or “just doing this for fun”, to work in short stories. The short story is merciful. It is a controlled experiment. A small room where you can safely summon the thing that scares you and see what it actually looks like.

When I write a short thriller, I’m not just practicing jump scares. I’m learning how to live with fear in a form I can manage. The story has a beginning, a middle, an end. The monster appears, does its work, and is contained—defeated, or at least understood. I may fail embarrassingly, but the failure is bounded by a word count.

That practice bleeds back into the rest of my life. Sitting in an archive in a foreign city, staring at notes for a Fulbright project that feel thin and directionless, I find myself thinking in thriller terms: What, exactly, is the threat?

The threat is that the work will not matter.The threat is that I will not prove worthy of the chance I’ve been given.The threat is that the gap between what I proposed on the application and what I can actually do will be too wide to politely ignore.

Once the fear has a shape, I can write toward it. I can outline my research questions the way I outline a plot: identify the stakes, track the reversals, find the scene where something finally happens. The same goes for technical writing. I can treat it as the narrative of an idea, not a test I am doomed to fail.

Short stories make it possible to rehearse courage in miniature. They allow you to face a monster under the bed that is made of paragraphs and pacing instead of real-life consequences—and yet the emotional muscle you’re using is the same.

For all our talk of “vulnerability,” fear remains strangely taboo. We can say we’re overwhelmed, overworked, “struggling with impostor syndrome.” These phrases have been smoothed by repetition; they no longer cut. But to say, plainly, I am afraid I will not be able to do this still feels indecent.

Fear is too raw, too unflattering. To admit it is to admit that you are not fully in control. And control is the last illusion we’re still clinging to—especially in ambitious, achievement-scented spaces like fellowships and academia.

So instead we develop elaborate cover stories. We say, “I’m still refining my project,” when what we mean is, “I am terrified that my project is hollow.” We say, “I’m not really a genre person,” when we mean, “I’m afraid that if I try that, it will reveal what I can’t do.”

This taboo seeps quietly into our writing. We are willing to write about sadness. We are learning, haltingly, to write about anger. But fear—real fear, the kind that wakes you up at three in the morning with your heart running ahead of you—remains underrepresented on the page, except in genres we dismiss as “unserious.”

Which is why I have come to believe that horror and thriller writing are, in a way, forms of honesty. They refuse to let fear remain tasteful and abstract. They drag it into the light, give it teeth, and let it speak.

There is a quiet superstition in creative life: the belief that fear is a verdict on talent. If something terrifies you to attempt, it must mean you’re not naturally good at it. Better to stay where the compliments already live.

But the longer I write—and the more I stumble through research projects and formal prose—the more convinced I am that fear is not a verdict. It’s a compass. It points to the parts of your creative self that have not yet calcified into habit.

When I sit down to draft a piece and feel nothing but competence—a low, pleasant hum of “Ah yes, this again”—that’s comforting but suspicious. It means I’m walking a path I’ve already mapped. There is value in that, of course. Not everything has to be an ordeal. But if I go too long without feeling that sharp intake of breath, that “I might be out of my depth,” the work begins to flatten into performance.

Choosing to write in my weakest genre—thrillers, horror, anything with a pulse over 80—has given me a simple rule: if I feel scared to start, I’m probably exactly where I need to be. The same applies when I open a blank document labeled “Research Proposal Draft” or “Methodology Section.” The urge to flee is not a sign that I should abandon ship; it’s a sign I’m approaching something that matters.

Because the uncomfortable truth is this: there is no clever side door, no shortcut around the thing you’re afraid of. There is only through. The only way to learn to write horror is to write the scene you’re sure you’ll ruin. The only way to produce a meaningful research project is to risk producing one that fails. The only way to write technically to a high standard is to write technically to your current standard and then submit yourself to the slow humiliation of revision.

The monster under the bed will not move out because you’ve described it beautifully in your journal. At some point, you have to look directly at it.

So this is my invitation, and my dare, to you—whether you are a seasoned novelist, a fellowship-laden researcher, or someone who scribbles between emails: write a short story in the genre or mode you distrust most.

If you’re a realist, write something supernatural.If you live in lyricism, write something ruthlessly plotted.If you write only soft, tender things, write a story where someone does something unforgivable.If you’re secretly convinced you’re not “smart enough,” write the technical explanation anyway.If you are me, perhaps, you write a thriller that makes you leave the hallway light on.

You don’t have to show anyone. You don’t have to declare that you are now “a horror writer” or “a scholar of X.” The point is not conversion. The point is cartography: to map where your fear lives in your practice, and to walk toward it far enough to see what it’s guarding.

The first attempts may be awkward. Your haunted house may be ridiculous. Your research design may feel flimsy, your technical language wooden. That’s fine. Embarrassment is just fear wearing bright colors. What matters is that you looked under the bed instead of pretending there was nothing there.

Because in the end, the writing life is not so different from a long, slow horror film with surprisingly good lighting. There are corridors you don’t want to walk down, rooms you avoid, projects you postpone indefinitely because you already know, without ever trying, that you can’t possibly do them well enough.

And yet, the only way out is through. Through the draft you don’t yet know how to write. Through the project you’re not sure you can complete. Through the genre that makes you feel clumsy and fraudulent.

When I think back to the works that first unnerved me—Nosferatu with its long, inhuman shadows, Dracula with its Victorian panic about desire and contagion, It with its insistence that childhood terror never fully leaves—I no longer see them as distant extremes of imagination. I see them as records of people walking straight toward whatever they feared most and refusing to look away.

That, in the end, is what I am trying to practice, and what I am encouraging you to practice: not fearlessness, which is boring and probably fake, but a kind of deliberate, structured bravery. Sit at your desk. Pick the thing you’re most afraid to attempt. And then, gently but firmly, lift the edge of the bedspread.

Something will be waiting there. That is, after all, the point.

-From Le grand nomade to you, because we all have Trying Times

P.S. Be sure to keep an eye out for the short stories, too.