In the spirit of spooky season, this blog is going to be about fear. I don’t mean fear of failure, rejection, bad Goodreads reviews, or any of the other fears that haunt our nervous little writerly hearts. Instead, we’re going to talk about incorporating fear into your work—and that doesn’t just mean writing horror or ghost stories. Fear is a powerful tool that you can—and should—apply to any genre.
Fear: Not Just for Horror Writers
In August, I had the pleasure of attending a workshop called Embracing the Monstrous, taught by Emily Lloyd-Jones. (Quick shout-out to the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference for their excellent programming and generous scholarship fund!)
Emily Lloyd-Jones is a YA and MG author who seems to have a penchant for all things creepy—I’m a fan of her novel The Bone Houses, a dark fantasy with a fresh spin on zombies. But as she impressed upon us in this workshop, fear isn’t just for “dark” stories. She likened fear in writing to salt in a recipe—a little of it adds flavor in pretty much any dish.
Childhood vs. Adult Fears
When discussing fear, Emily split it into two main categories: childhood and adult fears. Childhood fears are rooted in the unknown—things like strangers, the dark, monsters under the bed. Adult fears, on the other hand, are rooted in known threats like crime, disease, and climate change.
Fear is a powerful motivator for any character, and your character’s age may help define what they’re afraid of. But you can broaden your audience by layering both childhood and adult fears into your story. Your character may not see both depending on their age, but readers will.
For instance, Emily used an example from The Amulet of Samarkand, the first book in Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus trilogy. The main character, Nathaniel, has a flashback to a scene from his childhood, when he first began his apprenticeship under a powerful magician. In the flashback, the magician locks five-year-old Nathaniel in a room filled with violent imps—which Nathaniel can hear but not see.
Being trapped in a room with unseen dangers is a textbook childhood fear, and it’s pretty freaky in its own right. But older readers will understand that the magician put Nathaniel through this trauma deliberately, and adult fears of abuse and manipulation will spring to mind. Though the character is too young to grasp it, the magician is in fact scarier than the invisible imps.
Universal Fears
Another way to broaden your story’s appeal is to leverage universal fears—things that any reader, from any walk of life, can relate to. Though your character’s situation may be unique to your story, the type of fear they experience can often be tied to something more universal.
For instance, in the Bartimaeus example, Nathaniel is afraid of intelligent magical beings that exist on another plane. This is quite specific, but the fear of monsters—especially ones that we can neither see nor fight back against—is universal.
Fear in Your Novel’s Plot
After discussing the different types of fear and how to bring them out in our stories, Emily gave us a framework for outlining a novel using fear as a starting point. This could be a blog post in itself, so for now I’ll just share the key takeaway that’s stuck with me for the last two months:
The main character’s first big decision in the novel should be rooted in fear, but their final decision should be in defiance of fear.
This shows the main character’s growth over the course of the novel. They start out being governed by fear, their decisions based on instinctive reactions. By the time they reach the story’s climax, the ultimate decision, they’ve learned to overcome this fear. They walked through fire to get here, and their fear has been burned away.
For instance, in Suzanne Collins’s bestseller, Katniss volunteers to take her sister’s place in the Hunger Games out of fear of losing her. At the end, when Katniss and Peeta decide to end the Games with an act of mutual suicide, she is defying her fear of the Capital as well as death itself.
Instilling Fear in Your Readers
As Emily impressed upon us, readers won’t feel afraid unless the characters do. You have to show your characters’ fear through their actions, dialogue, and visceral reactions (like goosebumps, stomach sinking, etc.).
You’ll also need to make readers care by creating stakes. What’s the risk? What does the character stand to lose? Zombies aren’t scary because they look weird and make funny noises; they’re scary because they could kill you. Show why the character is afraid, what he stands to lose.
Even then, readers won’t care about the fear and danger unless they care about the character herself. It’s your job to make the character someone they can root for—to an extent. She doesn’t have to be 100% likeable, but readers must be able to relate to her or sympathize with her in some way.
Humor and Fear
If fear is the salt in your novel’s recipe, humor is pepper. It may seem counterintuitive to make jokes when you’re trying to scare your readers, but if you’ve watched any spooky movies this October, you’ve probably noticed they all have at least a few moments of comic relief.
Humor and fear balance each other. Four hundred pages of nonstop fear would be emotionally exhausting for readers; throwing in a funny scene, moment, or line of dialogue here and there gives them a much-needed break. Think of your story like a roller coaster. You can’t send readers straight down the entire time; they want to go down, then back up, then around some twists and turns—so they can go crashing down again.
Exercise
Fear is a powerful tool that belongs in any writer’s toolbox, no matter what genre or style you prefer. And what better time to make use of it than right now, as Halloween approaches? If, like me, you want to work on developing the fear in your WIP, here’s a quick exercise to get started:
- What does your character fear more than anything else?
- Why? (Hint: it’s often rooted in a traumatic past event)
Happy writing (and scaring)!