How to Write Scary Scenes – Part 1
It’s an age old question. How do you scare your reader out of their wits? Whether you are writing a horror story or a ghost/supernatural story or indeed any story that you want to illicit plenty of emotions – especially the scary ones – the ability to scare the reader or invoke fear, helps to makes the story all the more realistic. But scaring people isn’t easy. The art of scaring your reader is all about what you DON’T reveal, as opposed to what you do reveal. And that’s because fear – psychologically speaking – is a primitive emotion that manifests when we don’t understand what we are confronted with. It’s easy to fear something we don’t know about, and that’s because we feel like we have no control over the situation. Not being in control scares many people. In fiction, it’s about creating that sense of no control, not knowing, not seeing the whole thing, of being helpless. It’s about creating a heightened sense of tension and atmosphere. It’s about manipulating how...