Dear reader,
Fear is an emotion hard to capture. It has been twisted and shaped and reused in many ways, making it predictable and exaggerated. And for the fellow man, some seek to find new ways to bring fear back in modern day. They mold it into new shapes and put it in different situations or even the same ones but with new-fangled results. They create a new era in fear. Classical myths and creatures have an untold story from a different point of view. New things rise up to the glory of being pronounced scary.
Man witnesses fear in many ways, but only some things capture an entire audience. There are few spots in the golden zone of fear. Things that one cannot say are not horrifying. From movies to the modern video games, there is fear at its peak when everyone screams and jumps back in their seats, startled, and a witness to the ultimate scare tactic.
But it is hard to create fear in words. You can’t jump in front of them or make them hear the same terrifying noise you hear in your own head. Everyone doesn’t have your same imagination. Descriptive words have to be used to the extreme to even give your reader the picture perfect image. You have to draw events out so they anxiously a wait the outcome. Everything has to be crisp, clean, and cut with all writing can give you. It might seem easy with all the short horror stories you might skim over or Steven King novels you read, but everyone is uniquely their own and because of it, fear novelist have to give that extra effort to keep you hooked. Fast readers need everything to be long and wordy, while slow readers need some special event or happening every other page to keep them going. Or it will dropped and called not good enough.
I repeat, fear is hard to capture in words. Some will say it hasn’t really been grasped all the way. Sure you might get their hearts racing and their palms sweaty, but deep inside you want something else. You want them to be afraid. Truly scared. You want to make them shake and bite their nails as they read it alone in their bedrooms at night. You want them to pretend they’re hearing things and that the fiction could possibly be truth. But, no, you want even more! You want them to feel crazy, misguided perhaps, that they thought that something so small as words on paper could frighten them in to such a deranged state of mind that even sleeping at night is a crime against the brain. They have to keep their eyes peeled for the monsters under that foggy bridge or the axe welding manic slowly opening that squeaky door. They can’t trust opening closed doors or being in the silent darkness for to long. Being alone is worse then being around a stranger who might, in fact, be that insane murderer escapee hiding under the high school girl’s bed.
Yes, visual effects are stronger then words but the pen is mightier then the sword. I tell you now, my dear readers, fear is hard thing to spin a web with. Even as I begin to thread a story of gruesome fear, not even I myself might be able to scare you. I only wish to write my story so that you might be informed of how hard fear is to create in the language of silly lines and symbols. And to my dear writers, I give you my best of wishes to your direction in the mind of writing fear. I understand the difficulties in trying to really make the reader hate you for keeping them up on the weekdays.
With love,
Grim
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