If I were to ask, “What are you afraid of?” I’d probably get plenty of similar responses. For some, it’s serial killers, ax murderers, and bad people in general. For others, it’s disease, illness, or the loss of a loved one. Then there’s phobias like spiders, snakes, clowns, and heights, which are all responsible for their own share of sweating palms and racing heartbeats.
But fear isn’t just for horror novels. The feeling can be used to increase tension, suspense, character development, and even setting, in every genre.
And you don’t have to be obvious about what you’re doing, or even how you’re doing it. It can actually be more impactful if you aren’t. Learning the art of how to subtly leverage your characters’—and your readers’—fears can help you create a fictional world that keeps eyes glued to the pages of your book.
One way to do this is by not focusing on a specific fear. Sure, making your character afraid of heights, and then forcing them to conquer a fifty-foot climb in order to save the day has its place, but it’s okay to not name what it is that has your character on edge.
It’s perfectly acceptable to simply invoke the feeling, because sometimes people—and characters—don’t know exactly what it is that they’re afraid of. A general uneasiness of unknown cause can be crafted into scenes that create just as much tension as a character locked in a haunted house with Hannibal Lecter and a dozen sadistic, serial killing clowns, because fear takes many forms, has many faces, and is felt in varying degrees.
At its most general, fear is anxiety, and anxiety isn’t always an enemy. Anxiety can keep you safe. It can sharpen your senses. It can make you take action. It can also make you worry, and worrying can make you more careful, enhance your motivation, and help you solve problems.
If I were to ask, “What makes you anxious?” would I get the same answer as when I asked what you were afraid of? Now what if I asked, “What makes you worry?”
Three different questions, all with different answers.
This is how to subtly leverage fear in your writing. Pick a different emotion or feeling and develop it. Make it grow into something more. Something worse. Something, dare we say, sinister.
How do you feel about being alone? What if you were somewhere unfamiliar, like on a road trip? Consider having your car break down on a remote stretch of highway where you were unable to get a cell signal. It’s an unsettling situation, to be sure.
Would you feel less nervous in this scenario if you were by yourself, or with others? What if those others were unable to contribute positively to the situation? What if they were arguing? Or had bad ideas about how to respond to the circumstance you’ve found yourselves in?
Now, what if we changed the location? Your car and your phone still don’t work, but instead of being stranded in the middle of nowhere, you’re at a resort on a tropical island. It’s a popular trope, but a good example in that it’s a situation that can also be enjoyable. On an island with friends and no cell service, nothing to do but relax and unwind? Sounds like torture, right?
But what if your bitter ex was there? Or you made a horrible mistake that turned the others against you? What if a storm was coming? Or a body was discovered?
That’s the fun thing about fictional fear—taking paradise and making it purgatory. Twisting the situation, emotions, the little, niggling voice we all have at the back of our minds to ramp up the tension.
For me, it’s not the bam-bam-bam of action that keeps me reading late into the night. It’s the tension of needing to find out what happens next. The slow burn as the flame travels up the wick, getting closer to the stick of dynamite, that keeps me in suspense. Every book can benefit from that steady draw, so find your character’s weakness, sharpen your claws, and prey upon it.
The Girl who Lied by Shannon Hollinger (Bookouture) Out Now
Rain hammers the earth and a vicious wind rattles the trees. Then lightning strikes, the flash illuminating a young girl staggering out of the woods, her brown eyes wide with fright, a silent scream on her lips…There’s a storm approaching the tiny Maine town of Coyote Cove when Chief Maggie Riley comes across the body of a man, blood seeping from stab wounds into the damp forest floor. As she desperately struggles to secure the evidence before the rain hits, Heather, a local teenage girl, emerges from the woods, shivering and unable to talk. Maggie, once a high flying big-city detective, lost everything when her four-year-old brother went missing five years ago. Heart-broken, she’s never stopped searching for him: but now she is plunged back into the world she left behind. The victim, Maggie discovers, knew secrets about everyone in isolated Coyote Cove. It seems there are more local suspects in this case than people she can rule out. And with Heather still traumatised, Maggie struggles to unravel her strange appearance at the crime scene. Until, following a faint, bloody trail deep into the forest, she’s horrified to unearth what the terrified girl’s been hiding… But when Heather is kidnapped, the battle to identify the killer becomes a race to save an innocent girl’s life. And with the whole town terrified, Maggie is shocked to uncover that this twisted killer is much closer to home than she’d ever imagined. Battling her own demons and memories of her missing brother, how far will Maggie have to go to save Heather? Or will another innocent young life be lost forever...?
Their Angel's Cry by Shannon Hollinger (Bookouture) Out Now
The little dog trembles and whimpers, but refuses to move. Maggie reaches further into the undergrowth, trying to tempt it out. But as she moves closer, she sees something that stops her heart—a tiny, shivering baby, wrapped in a thin, pink blanket, saved only by its loyal protector. There’s a ferocious storm heading toward the isolated town of Coyote Cove when Chief Maggie Riley gets the call every cop dreads. Three bodies have been found on Rattlesnake Mountain, half a day’s hike from civilization. And when Maggie finally reaches the site, exhausted and freezing, she discovers something even more terrifying—a tiny baby girl, kept alive only by the warmth of a small dog who refuses to leave her side. As Maggie races the baby to safety, she wonders, why on earth the family risked hiking the mountain in this weather? Who were they and who could possibly have killed them? A former detective, Maggie may be an experienced investigator, but she’s still an unwelcome newcomer. Battling town prejudice, her fears for the orphaned baby, and the increasingly dangerous weather, Maggie soon discovers the case is far more complicated than she could have imagined. The family is not who they seemed. The mother has never had a baby, there’s no link between them at all. So whose baby is it, and where are they now? With Coyote Cove cut off by the storm, Maggie knows that wherever the killer is, they won’t be able to leave. Stuck in town with a murderer on the loose, Maggie must race to find them before anyone else gets hurt. But she hasn’t counted on the killer taking matters into their own hands, and going after Maggie first…
More information about Shannon Hollinger can be found on her website. You can also find her on Facebook And on X @ThisWriterSays.
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