Writer's Workshop: Make Your Readers Afraid · 4:38pm Apr 14th, 2018
There's this really interesting concept I learned about during my master's program: affect theory. From what I remember, it asked the question, "What does a certain text make the reader feel?" I'm going to attempt to recreate that theory, as best as I can recall and with my own little flair to it. I'd like to discuss how we can inspire different emotions in our readers; specifically, we're going to start with fear, one of the deepest and most primal emotions we've got. If you're writing mystery, horror, or thriller stories, creating a sense of fear is absolutely necessary; however, fear pops up in just about every story. Let's talk about what I mean.
In order to understand affect theory, we need to go way, way back to when humans first started being a thing. Many of our emotions come from instincts and physiological responses that were developed long before human civilization or modern concepts came around. Fear is just such an emotion. Perhaps the most fundamental desire of all living creatures is the desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain; and if you poll humans, you'll find that the aversion to pain is almost twice as powerful as the pull towards pleasure. Beneath all that, beneath the avoidance of pain and the need to stay alive, there is fear. If I were to summarize it into a single, pithy statement, the kind that would become the thesis for an entire blog post, say, I'd put it as:
Fear stems from the expectation that danger is nearly about to harm us.
So far, so obvious, perhaps. How does this apply to writing? Well, if we want to inspire fear in our readers, we're going to need the following things:
1. First, we need to establish that something is dangerous.
2. Second, we need to express that it is nearby.
3. Third, we need the readers to expect that the characters cannot prevent the harm.
4. Finally, we need to forestall the attack.
Let's go through these point-by-point.
If we want readers to be afraid, there needs to be something dangerous to be afraid of. Pretty straightforward, right? Yet this is exactly what fails with so many jump scares. As a typical example, imagine a scene where a character is brushing their teeth, and they have the medicine cabinet open. They gargle, spit, then close the medicine cabinet, and in the reflection is a bloody, grinning face. SPOOKY! The character reels back, and the reflection is back to normal by the time they look at it again. This scene may be "shocking," but it isn't scary, because the scene hasn't established a dangerous threat. So many horror movies fail at creating effective scares because they rely on the expectation of a scene to carry the scare. A character is walking through a dark hallway at night? That's the perfect moment for a monster to grab them! But if there hasn't been an established danger, there's nothing to be afraid of. And even if a danger has been established, if the reader has no reason to believe the current scene has that danger present, then that scene isn't dangerous. I feel like I'm repeating myself, but again, this is a real problem some writers seem to have.
That leads me to my next point. Once you've created a good danger, fear can be established by suggesting to the reader that the danger is nearby and potentially ready to bring harm to the characters. This is the perfect time for me to bring up Alfred Hitchcock's concept of suspense. If you haven't heard of him, Hitchcock was a master of suspense and tense moments. His secret? Establishing the threat at the start of the scene, and allowing the audience to fear for the characters. Remember, it's the audience we're trying to scare, not necessarily the characters. So as an example, suppose we have some kind of freaky baddie that appears in candlelight. You can have two characters talking, while all around them, the candles quietly light up. We know the bad guy is close at hand, but the characters aren't noticing; that creates fear in the audience. They'll start yelling at the screen, "Notice the candles, you idiots! He's coming! Get out of there!"
As another example, the first time I watched Marble Hornets, I couldn't get past episode 5. In the first few episodes, we get the barest glimpse of the Slenderman, but just that much tells us two things: 1) his appearance causes visual and audio distortion in the camera equipment, and 2) just seeing him causes the main character to run away in stark raving terror. We don't know what exactly ol' Slendy can actually "do," but whatever it is, it's enough to terrify the main character. So that's the first couple episodes. In episode 5, the characters are standing around talking to each other about nothing particularly interesting--mostly just the movie project that acts as the framing device for this horror story. But every so often, the sound on the camera will start to glitch, making it impossible to hear what they're saying. This was so freakin' terrifying that I couldn't keep watching. Because that means that the Slenderman was close by, close enough to cause the sound to warp, and if he was that close, he could strike at the characters any time he wanted. Just that tension, that feeling that the Slenderman could attack at any moment, put me utterly on edge. Spoilers: Slenderman never attacks anybody in that scene, but that doesn't matter because that scene was still freaking terrifying.
This next one is pretty important, too. If you've got a big ol' monster ready to attack your heroes, but your heroes are ready and capable of destroying it, there's no reason to be afraid. Fear depends on the relatively high probability of loss, which means, in general, the characters need to feel overwhelmed and outgunned by the danger stalking them. Even if they are equipped and prepared, there still needs to be the potentiality that the danger will strike first before they can use their defenses. So if your characters are vampire hunters, armed to the teeth with stakes, garlic, and holy water, the only way to keep the readers afraid is to show how fast and cunning the vampire is. If the vampire can slip through shadow, they can pick off the heroes one by one, and suddenly this is no longer a turkey shoot. Make it even odds that one overcomes the other, and you've got something more along the lines of an action setpiece; put the heroes at vastly poorer odds, and now the readers will fear for your characters' safety.
Finally, delay the attack as long as you feasibly can. Once you've hooked the readers in with fear, you can lure them along for quite a long time. So long as the threat is still present, the audience will remain afraid. However, you can't do it for too long, for a couple of reasons. For one, the audience will start to get fatigued from all the fear, and it won't affect them as strongly anymore. (As I'm sure we'll discuss in future posts, mixing in different emotions is a critical part of good storytelling.) For two, if the attack doesn't come after a long time, the audience may begin to suspect that the danger isn't really present, or that it really isn't as dangerous as it seems. I was reading a book the other day that had this exact problem. The main character was endlessly repeating the same four days, living out four different lifetimes. Every so often, a shadowy figure would appear, pointing or beckoning. Another character who was appearing in the loops would hew and cry about how the shadowy figures killed her family and kidnapped her and they were too dangerous to let live, but I noticed that it never actually did anything, for all her talk. Turns out, they were actually the good guys, trying to get the main character out of the loops. Not much of a surprise to me, because I'd run out of fear a long time ago once I realized the shadowy figure wasn't attacking him.
For most of these examples, I've used standard horror baddies trying to kill or otherwise harm the main characters. But that absolutely doesn't have to be the case. "Psychological" horror revolves around the horror not threatening one's physical body, but their psyche. Examples: Azathoth or The King in Yellow, who're not really going to kill you so much as break your sanity in two. But let's step away from horror and thriller for a second. If we want to use fear in more mundane situations--your dramas, your romances, your slices-of-life--you can threaten something valuable to the characters, like their property or their relationships. The main character in our romance finds out that their SO has given up on romance and is going to drive back to their parents' house across the country. Those tense final moments as the MC rushes back home, hoping against hope that they can catch the SO before they leave forever... those will stoke the fear in your readers' hearts.
There's one last thing I'd like to discuss regarding horror: information. There's a very delicate balance you have to keep when revealing or hiding information from the reader. You've got to give the audience enough to know the threat is dangerous--a total blank of a threat will just confuse your readers. On the other hand, over-revealing your threat can make it feel too familiar, or make it feel like the characters are sufficiently prepared to defend themselves. Take a creature like the shapeshifting horror from The Thing. We never learn where it's from or what it wants, but we do learn how it operates and how to keep it at bay. Despite that, the horror of the scene actually increases, I'd argue, once we know a little more. If it can impersonate anyone, then anyone is a potential Thing, even our main character! And once the characters know that the Thing can be destroyed by fire, the tension doesn't really let up. Now the audience is bound by a lurking idea: if we screw up, it means setting an innocent human on fire. And those moments in the blood-testing scene, where each character walks up and puts a drop of blood on the slide to be tested... skin-crawling!
The natural flow of a mystery/horror story is from less information->more information, but whenever you introduce new information, you run the risk of turning the story from terrifying to a solved puzzle. The goal must always be, whenever giving the audience new information regarding the danger, that this new revelation makes the danger more threatening, not less. As an example, suppose the characters learn that the monster's weakness is a fountain of blood, and that collapsing the rocks above the fountain will stem the flow and end the monster for good. That lessens the fear, because you've given the characters a fighting hope. How do you counteract that? Show that the monster knows they know, and in so knowing, ramps up its attacks. All that knowledge ain't gonna do the characters much good if they die before they reach the fountain. Not to mention, this also helps build the final tension in the conflict in reaching the climax of the story. Ideally, your danger will be at its most terrifying, its most threatening, moments before it's finally defeated!
So, yeah. That's my first foray into affect theory, and a brief little primer on horror and fear. Done right, fear will get your readers on the edge of their seats, ready to turn to the next page to find out whether their beloved characters are spared or speared. It's that figment of worry when the future is uncertain, that hanging potentiality that all is not as it seems. It's the constant threat of destruction hanging over the characters' heads, like the Sword of Damocles. It is perhaps the basest of all human desires, the sense of imminent danger all around you. It is fear, and it's a powerful feeling.
I think I'd add on another step at the beginning, and that we have to relate to the character experiencing the fear in some way.
Doesn't matter if it's a villain, hero, or nobody that's just there to die, I need to feel "that could happen to me" or I won't feel fear if they kick the bucket.