When he wrote "In the Dark," Geoffrey Alexander didn't have any outline or structure in mind. He simply wanted to convey the experience of fear. "In a typical day I spent up to six hours in an area ranging from 12 to 36 inches in height. An area so small that I often couldn't get up on my hands and knees." He faced fear every day and was struck by the daily toll it took on his psyche when he went to work. "You have no choice but to deal with it. You have to work."

He knew that the claustrophobic moment, the panic attack, had to come at the center of the piece. It was a powerful experience for him that still makes him nervous. The rest of the essay revolved around that moment.

He wrote this essay quickly. "It took an hour or two to write the first draft." He then set it aside for while and when he went back to it he edited it sentence by sentence, conscious of how he could pull readers in.

"My litmus test to whether something is worth writing about is if I can't stop thinking about it. If I can't shake it after a week or two then I'll write about it. People have a lot of bad ideas, and I have a lot of bad ideas, and a lot of ideas that aren't worth writing about, and you have to allow yourself to forget it." This is the only time he has ever written about fear as a subject, though he sees it as inevitable if you are going to write about people.

His advice to writers is to try to capture the physical. "If you are writing nonfiction you are dealing with people and places and events that exist." He recommends focusing on communicating the feeling of a place, because there is no liberty to make things up: "the physicality of a place or a person, or the sensory detail like pain or fear or beauty that brings people in. Find the details that make the telling of that story special or effective."

The best self-education as a writer is to "read everything you can get your hands on so you can chart your own course later." He finds it ironic that the more you write the less you read. Simultaneously, he advises not to read the genre you are writing in at the moment. "Writers are sponges; they tend to take on without knowing it the voices of others." Don't read short fiction while writing a short story. Your voice has to be so strong that those other things can't intrude," so read history or nonfiction if you are writing fiction.

Alexander also believes that writing conferences are powerful venues for a writer. Conferences allow people who value what others are doing to have some very powerful moments together. "Writers are generally not valued. It's like you're cheating. Nobody believes that staying home all day or writing a story is working.  It's important to share your work with people you trust."

Technique depends on a writer's intent. Different forms of writing require different approaches. At the end of "In the Dark," he finally copes, or at least succumbs to his fear and relaxes into the moment, having found the one cool spot in the cramped ceiling. He falls asleep on the job, and the message is clear: he has let go of his fear. Sometimes a writer's technique is simply dictated by what happens.



 Corinne Platt