Non-Fiction Gallery

Fear
From Your Character to Your Reader
by J. Daniel Seffens

Happy Halloween! This is a wonderful time to tell you about how to utilize my favorite emotion in your writing, fear.

In order to convey emotion to the reader, you have to follow the Golden Rule of Writing: show, do not tell. If your character encounters a life-threatening situation, do not write, “He was scared.” This will only scare the reader with your mind-numbing prose, causing them to put down your story and experience life on their own. People read so they can experience something different, something great. If you tell them what is happening, they are not experiencing anything but drowsiness. You have to make the reader relate and experience the emotions through your character.

The emotion that anyone can relate to is fear. People are fascinated with being afraid. That is why they go to amusement parks, so they can experience that surge of adrenaline that comes from a brief moment of false danger. If you can do this in writing, the reader will be unable to put your story down.

The question is: how do you make the reader experience fear? Many books out there focus on creating character emotion; but few touch, even briefly, on the emotion of fear. I am going to help you with this. There are many methods and techniques to show fear, so I will only cover a few of them.

Before you can write about fear, you have to understand what fear is and how it affects people. Luckily, fear is one of the easiest emotions to understand for the same reason it is the one people can relate to the most.

H.P. Lovecraft said it best in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” when he said, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Give them something to be terrified about by only telling them what you have to. I will explain this in more detail later.

Lovecraft goes into more detail, “Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalized by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore. This tendency, too, is naturally enhanced by the fact that uncertainty and danger are always closely allied; thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities. When to this sense of fear and evil the inevitable fascination of wonder and curiosity is superadded, there is born a composite body of keen emotion and imaginative provocation whose vitality must of necessity endure as long as the human race itself. Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.”

Lovecraft was a master of writing about fear. He delved deep into the minds of his characters. He showed their fears and played them upon his readers. He understood the effects of fear and how to make people experience it. The most effective is, as he said, fear of the unknown.

To utilize this fear, you need to keep things just out of sight. If something lurks under the stairs, do not have it jump out at your victim. Go ahead and let it grab your character’s foot through the steps, but do not let it step from the shadows. Let the reader use their imagination to picture it. Only let your victim see enough to spark terrifying images. Go into the victim’s mind and describe what is going through it. What effects does the encounter have on the character? Just remember, if your character sees the thing, you need to tell the reader what they see. You cannot cheat your reader by deliberately withholding important information. If the character sees it and it registers in their mind, you need to relay this to the reader. Instead, hide the details from the viewpoint character. Leave it to the reader’s imagination, and they will see something far more terrifying than you can describe in words. If you think you can beat their imagination in detail, you will only suffocate the reader and cause your narrative to come to a grinding halt. That is why it is more effective to have it lurk in the shadows.

If it is out of sight, you may ask, how does the character know it is something evil? This is where another method to amplify fear comes in handy: contrasting the situation. If the character thinks they are in a safe situation–such as a significant-other being playful–the reader will have no idea the character is about to be pulled through the stairs to their death. The sudden jolt from a feeling of safety will make the reader have to take a deep breath in order to calm their pulse.

Another use of contrast is to have something horrible happen in a place of safety, rather than in a dungeon where the reader knows something terrible is about to happen. The dungeon can work, but you need to raise the suspense much more in order to keep your reader from rolling their eyes.

If you can keep the danger unknown and in a seemingly safe place, you will be far more likely to keep your reader amazed at how fast their heart can beat. If their heartbeat is elevated, you have them from cover to cover.