What scares us?

As a horror writer, this is a question my mind embraces every day. But the notion is elusive because the scope is so vast: the more you try to pin down what exactly terrifies someone, the less accurate you become. One person could be afraid of zombies, while another could fear snakes or spiders, yet another could lay awake at night ruminating about an invasion by hostile aliens bent on destroying the earth. See where I'm going with this? No one thing universally frightens everybody. And to write a story that hopes to scare as many people as possible, you have to approach things differently.

Personally, I focus on three writing techniques.

First , I keep all external/supernatural threats off stage as much as possible. Be it a vampire or zombie or some creature I created, I offer only hints and glimpses, enough to whet the razor's edge of my reader's imagination. And then I let them fill in the details. A reader's own imagination is far more effective at creating what frightens him than anything I or any other writer could hope to do.

Next, when the threat is on stage, I try to write the experience as tightly as possible, almost claustrophobically; I want my reader right in the face of the terror. That, coupled with the time they had to imagine how the monster (or whatever) truly frightens them, work quite effectively together.

The final trick is to emphasize the tragedy of the human condition: the pain of a broken marriage, the loneliness of a bullied child, the fear and rage a parent feels when her child is threatened, the terror of mangled expectations, social or personal (think of the Shining, where Danny Torrence, a boy who loves his father, must watch as the man goes homicidally insane, and what that does to the young boy emotions). Wise writers will focus more on the human relationships than the monster or alien or whatnot, because we all have a frame of reference for the former, while no one has really encountered the latter.

So, monsters can and do frighten us, but we all react more strongly to what our own imaginations feed us in the dark of night. And all stories, no matter the genre, are about people. Period.
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Published on March 09, 2013 05:40 Tags: horror, writing
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