In a post on CrimeReads, Taylor Adams says incorporating your real-life fears into your fiction to create greater tension and stakes.
As an example, Adams notes the fears that pet owners have about the life and health of their animals. “Most people (luckily) haven’t been stalked by a crazed killer with a knife, but parents and pet owners alike can relate to the stress of being responsible for the safety of something that sometimes, inexplicably, tries really, really hard to kill itself,” he says. “I find the idea of someone attempting to poison my dog deeply skin-crawling. Who wouldn’t?”
With that in mind, Taylor used his own family dog as the basis for an animal companion at risk in his latest novel. “Maybe it’s a weird choice – especially given how fictional Laika is in extreme danger for most of the story – but I found it to be a helpful personal link to the protagonist and a reminder of what’s truly at stake,” he writes.
Taylor suggests that fear in fiction is most effective when it reflects the real world. “The worst day of your life will often start like any other, and that’s how it blindsides you,” he says. “The mundane gives us a relatable entry point into the nightmare, and troubles us by illustrating just how easily a normal day can veer disastrously south.”
Counterintuitively, humor is another way to make fear seem more real. “Real life is messy, random, and full of chaos – and as a writer, a similar unpredictability in tone is a powerful tool to harness,” Taylor writes. “A well-timed joke can momentarily puncture a scene’s building tension, inviting the reader to lower their guard while the real shock secretly waits just around the corner.”
Conversely, Taylor believes that graphic descriptions of violence can throw a reader out of the story, because most of us can’t relate. “Fear is all about dreading the unknown, and being certain that Very Bad Things lurk just out of view, even if they can’t be seen,” he says. “A gruesome death can certainly amp up the adrenaline – in the short term – but in the longer term, you’ve shown the worst thing that can happen. Afterward, the horror becomes more difficult to maintain because the reader has already witnessed the ‘worst case scenario.'”
