David Tocher Tells Us How to Scare Your Reader
Please welcome David Tocher to Immortyl Revolution! As a devotee of the dark, I was happy to invite David here to share his insight in the psychology of horror. Leave a comment for David, and I will draw two names to recieve an Immortyl Revolution fridge magnet.
How To Scare Your Reader
By David Tocher
Understanding The Psychology of Fear
To scare your reader, first you must understand how the mind works. Most people don't enjoy facing what they're afraid of. By that, I don't just mean just rats, spiders, or blood. I mean the real, everyday things we're afraid of – loneliness; being taken advantage of; someone finding out about our guilty past; the addictions we can't control. The list goes on. So, what most of us do with these fears is externalize them. That is, project them onto some object outside of ourselves so we don't have to take responsibility for it.
Do you ever wonder what scared the Nazis so much that they projected that fear onto the Jewish people? Do you ever wonder what scares racists so much that they project that fear onto a black person? Or how about you? What is it that you're really afraid of so much that you project it onto a spider, or a person of a certain social status, or a woman or a man? The truth is, good people and bad people all have fears, and they all deal with them by projecting them onto something outside of themselves.
Now that we've established this, let's look at how we can use this knowledge to write a horror story.
Using Your Plot and Subplot To Exploit The Psychology of Fear
When explaining plot and subplot, I like to use the movie Spiderman as an example. The plot is the main conflict of the story. In this case, the battle between Spiderman and the Green Goblin. But then, you have your subplots in the movie, which are the stories underneath the story. A subplot's purpose is to add dimension to your story, to give your readers a reason to care about your hero and his main conflict. Let's look at the subplots in Spiderman – Peter Parker battles his feelings for Mary Jane, Peter Parker battles with poverty, Peter Parker battles with low self-esteem. All these things make Peter Parker someone we can identify with and root for.
When you write a horror story, you must have your hero battle a horrifying antagonist – it could be anything, like a serial killer, a ghost, a werewolf, a vampire, or a legion of zombies, or whatever you wish. But in your subplot, where you add dimension to your story and give us a reason to identify with your hero, you must give your hero a real, everyday battle that his main villain is a symbol for. That is how you make a connection with your readers' collective consciousness and evoke their universal fears, the same way someone drilling into the earth strikes oil and brings it bubbling up to the surface.
An Example From Horror Fiction
Stephen King's The Shining is a great example of this technique in action. The main plot of the story is Jack Torrence battling the ghosts at the Overlook Hotel, which is isolated in the wintry mountains of Colorado. In the subplot, our hero battles with a troubled past of alcoholism and guilt over hurting his son. He also struggles with a short temper.
The Overlook Hotel's unsavory history and the ghosts that haunt its corridors are metaphors for Torrence's life – how his troubled past haunts his present. There is also a boiler in the Hotel's basement that he has to release pressure from each day. That's a metaphor for his short temper that he's always trying to keep in check.
See now? Stephen King made a connection between a fictional terror and a realistic terror that any of us could go through. The ghosts at the hotel are what our everyday fears were projected onto. That's how he wrote one of the most frightening stories in literary history!
Now, It's Your Turn!
A great tool for developing your plots and subplots is a dream dictionary. This is not a blanket endorsement of psychology – I'm merely saying that authors of dream dictionaries have found common themes in people's nocturnal visions. It's just the way our minds work. You can go anywhere in the world and to any culture and say, "The wolf waits at your door" and they'll get the idea of what you mean – danger is imminent! But if you tell someone that "the gopher sits on your shoe," you'll leave them perplexed for sure. Our minds share universal symbolism.
If I were going to write a story about giant spiders attacking a city, I'd study up on what spiders symbolize when people dream about them. Here's an interesting interpretation of spider dreams from Tony Crisp's Dream Dictionary at Dreamhawk.com:
Any emotion or desire that devours the strength or purpose of your life. The spider is also used as a symbol of sexual orgasm, but only if we are terrified, disgusted or guilty about such feelings. Sometimes symbolises a mother's power, as in the way we are caught in the web of her desires and emotions. Inability to become independent of the mother.
The spider can also depict any emotions you don't want to 'handle', such as those surrounding a spouse leaving; wanting to ensnare, or feeling trapped by someone; the basic survival instincts in us such as a spider might have – can I eat, or will I be eaten in this meeting/relationship? This level of our sensory and feeling perception is important. Like a spider it keeps one of your feet/fingers on the web or influences that connect you with other people and the world. Like the spider, if you are wise, you thereby know something of what is coming your way – do you advance or run?
Here, we have a lot of material for our hero's subplot conflicts:
• Is he struggling with guilt over his sexuality?
• Does he feel trapped (as in a web) in a relationship to a manipulative partner?
• Does he seek liberation from a controlling parent?
These are all real-life struggles that we can each relate to. Now that I've determined what my story's hero will be like as a person, I'll send a monster after him the represents his real life fears.
Conclusion
Writing horror stories can be more than just a superficial carnival scare. It can be a means by which we can explore our natures and ask honest questions about ourselves. This can be said for classic tales like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and even Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde. The monsters in these stories were symbols of the real battles that we face in life.
What do your monsters represent?
-December 13, 2010
About The Author:
David Tocher grew up in British Columbia, Canada. He currently lives in Quebec, where he is at work on a novel. His latest story, Letters from a Dead World, is available in Dreamspell Nightmares, an anthology published by L&L Dreamspell. To order the anthology, visit http://www.lldreamspell.com/DreamspellNightmares.htm.
How To Scare Your Reader
By David Tocher
Understanding The Psychology of Fear
To scare your reader, first you must understand how the mind works. Most people don't enjoy facing what they're afraid of. By that, I don't just mean just rats, spiders, or blood. I mean the real, everyday things we're afraid of – loneliness; being taken advantage of; someone finding out about our guilty past; the addictions we can't control. The list goes on. So, what most of us do with these fears is externalize them. That is, project them onto some object outside of ourselves so we don't have to take responsibility for it.
Do you ever wonder what scared the Nazis so much that they projected that fear onto the Jewish people? Do you ever wonder what scares racists so much that they project that fear onto a black person? Or how about you? What is it that you're really afraid of so much that you project it onto a spider, or a person of a certain social status, or a woman or a man? The truth is, good people and bad people all have fears, and they all deal with them by projecting them onto something outside of themselves.
Now that we've established this, let's look at how we can use this knowledge to write a horror story.
Using Your Plot and Subplot To Exploit The Psychology of Fear
When explaining plot and subplot, I like to use the movie Spiderman as an example. The plot is the main conflict of the story. In this case, the battle between Spiderman and the Green Goblin. But then, you have your subplots in the movie, which are the stories underneath the story. A subplot's purpose is to add dimension to your story, to give your readers a reason to care about your hero and his main conflict. Let's look at the subplots in Spiderman – Peter Parker battles his feelings for Mary Jane, Peter Parker battles with poverty, Peter Parker battles with low self-esteem. All these things make Peter Parker someone we can identify with and root for.
When you write a horror story, you must have your hero battle a horrifying antagonist – it could be anything, like a serial killer, a ghost, a werewolf, a vampire, or a legion of zombies, or whatever you wish. But in your subplot, where you add dimension to your story and give us a reason to identify with your hero, you must give your hero a real, everyday battle that his main villain is a symbol for. That is how you make a connection with your readers' collective consciousness and evoke their universal fears, the same way someone drilling into the earth strikes oil and brings it bubbling up to the surface.
An Example From Horror Fiction
Stephen King's The Shining is a great example of this technique in action. The main plot of the story is Jack Torrence battling the ghosts at the Overlook Hotel, which is isolated in the wintry mountains of Colorado. In the subplot, our hero battles with a troubled past of alcoholism and guilt over hurting his son. He also struggles with a short temper.
The Overlook Hotel's unsavory history and the ghosts that haunt its corridors are metaphors for Torrence's life – how his troubled past haunts his present. There is also a boiler in the Hotel's basement that he has to release pressure from each day. That's a metaphor for his short temper that he's always trying to keep in check.
See now? Stephen King made a connection between a fictional terror and a realistic terror that any of us could go through. The ghosts at the hotel are what our everyday fears were projected onto. That's how he wrote one of the most frightening stories in literary history!
Now, It's Your Turn!
A great tool for developing your plots and subplots is a dream dictionary. This is not a blanket endorsement of psychology – I'm merely saying that authors of dream dictionaries have found common themes in people's nocturnal visions. It's just the way our minds work. You can go anywhere in the world and to any culture and say, "The wolf waits at your door" and they'll get the idea of what you mean – danger is imminent! But if you tell someone that "the gopher sits on your shoe," you'll leave them perplexed for sure. Our minds share universal symbolism.
If I were going to write a story about giant spiders attacking a city, I'd study up on what spiders symbolize when people dream about them. Here's an interesting interpretation of spider dreams from Tony Crisp's Dream Dictionary at Dreamhawk.com:
Any emotion or desire that devours the strength or purpose of your life. The spider is also used as a symbol of sexual orgasm, but only if we are terrified, disgusted or guilty about such feelings. Sometimes symbolises a mother's power, as in the way we are caught in the web of her desires and emotions. Inability to become independent of the mother.
The spider can also depict any emotions you don't want to 'handle', such as those surrounding a spouse leaving; wanting to ensnare, or feeling trapped by someone; the basic survival instincts in us such as a spider might have – can I eat, or will I be eaten in this meeting/relationship? This level of our sensory and feeling perception is important. Like a spider it keeps one of your feet/fingers on the web or influences that connect you with other people and the world. Like the spider, if you are wise, you thereby know something of what is coming your way – do you advance or run?
Here, we have a lot of material for our hero's subplot conflicts:
• Is he struggling with guilt over his sexuality?
• Does he feel trapped (as in a web) in a relationship to a manipulative partner?
• Does he seek liberation from a controlling parent?
These are all real-life struggles that we can each relate to. Now that I've determined what my story's hero will be like as a person, I'll send a monster after him the represents his real life fears.
Conclusion
Writing horror stories can be more than just a superficial carnival scare. It can be a means by which we can explore our natures and ask honest questions about ourselves. This can be said for classic tales like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and even Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde. The monsters in these stories were symbols of the real battles that we face in life.
What do your monsters represent?
-December 13, 2010
About The Author:
David Tocher grew up in British Columbia, Canada. He currently lives in Quebec, where he is at work on a novel. His latest story, Letters from a Dead World, is available in Dreamspell Nightmares, an anthology published by L&L Dreamspell. To order the anthology, visit http://www.lldreamspell.com/DreamspellNightmares.htm.
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