I spent three days at Killer Nashville this year, moving between three different rooms, on three different panels, talking about three seemingly unrelated things: what scares readers, how to write characters whose experience differs from your own, and why medical scenes in fiction so often get the body wrong. By the time I got home, I realized the three rooms were asking the same question in different clothes. What does it actually take to get close to the truth of something?
Room one: what actually scares people
On the “Writing Stories That Actually Terrify” panel, we polled the room on what genuinely frightens them, not jump scares in a movie trailer, but the fear that follows them after they closed the book. Heights won by a wide margin. Jump scares and being alone with your own thoughts tied for second. Spiders came in third.
I found that ranking more interesting than I expected. Heights and being alone with your thoughts don’t share an obvious surface connection, but they share a structure. Both are about losing control of your own mind in a moment when no one else is there to catch you. A jump scare is something done to you. Heights and unwanted silence are things that happen inside you, and there’s no one to blame but your own nervous system. That’s the kind of fear I try to write. Not the monster in the room, but the moment a character realizes they can’t fully trust their own perception of what’s happening.
Room two: writing what you haven’t lived
The “Writing Diverse Characters” panel invited me because of Dave Everest, a supporting character in Campus of Shadows who has dyscalculia. Several audience members mentioned afterward that this was the most in-depth diversity panel they’d attended in years of going to writing conferences, which genuinely surprised and moved me. I hadn’t set out to write an issue. I’d set out to write a person, and the disability came along as part of who he already was.
What I keep coming back to from that conversation is something I’ve believed for a while but heard articulated more sharply on that stage: people navigating an invisible difficulty are often more careful than everyone around them, because they’ve had to build checking systems into their daily life that most of us never think about. That carefulness is nearly impossible to dramatize well, because on the page, carefulness looks like nothing happening. The character double-checks something. They pause a half second longer than expected. It’s a hard thing to write and an easy thing to miss, in fiction and in real people.
Room three: what medicine actually looks like
The “Writing Medical Scenes in Fiction” panel drew on my background in nursing, and some of the conversation ended up being a gentle argument against television. TV has trained readers to expect things that simply don’t happen. A flatline on a cardiac monitor, for instance, is not something you shock a patient back from. That’s not how a flatline works, and any nurse in the audience will tell a writer exactly that if you get it wrong.
We also talked about language. Real medical professionals under pressure don’t speak in long, explanatory sentences. They use compressed lingo, shorthand built for speed, the same way any high-stakes profession develops its own internal language. Getting that rhythm right does more for a scene’s credibility than any amount of anatomical detail.
The thread underneath
Fear, difference, and the body. Three panels, three rooms, and underneath them all the same question I keep returning to in my fiction: what’s the gap between what we perceive and what’s actually true? A fear that comes from inside rather than outside. A carefulness that looks like nothing. A body that TV has taught us to misread. Perception and hidden truth again, in three different rooms, on three different days.
One more thing before I go
While I was at the conference, I got word that Shadows on the Edge will be released on September 29th, in ebook on Amazon, with the audiobook to follow as soon as Amazon has it loaded. I’m hopeful the audio will be ready right at launch, but these things aren’t always in an author’s hands.
I was fortunate enough to get an early read from Ellen Butler, the #1 bestselling author of The Brass Compass, who called it “a chilling supernatural thriller that blurs the boundary between death, devotion, and possession.” I couldn’t have asked for a better description of what I was trying to do with that book.
For now, I’m grateful for three rooms, three panels, and a conference that reminded me why I keep asking the same question in different forms.
