The Scary Difficulties of Writing Scary

Or at least "Creepy." A conversation about sound, setting, syntax and other s-words that are important to readers and writers of suspense, horror and any other genre that aims for unease

When Caitlin and I started this newsletter, we envisioned it as a conversation—a nerdy little gathering where those of us who want to better understand suspense (and other compelling fiction) can meet and trade ideas. The more voices we could pull into our corner, the happier we knew we’d be!

So, I was delighted to become acquainted with a newsletter called Subverse by Natalie, aka The Book Creep. Her Oct. 5 post was so good that I asked her permission to share parts—not just link, though you can find her whole piece here. She opens with a fantastic question, which happens to be Halloween-appropriate:

When was the last time you read something that actually made you afraid?

Like true deep-down pit of your stomach nightmare fear that you can’t escape?

I’ve read things that are creepy, horrifying, disturbing, and uncomfortable. I’ve read plenty of thrillers that are exciting and well, thrilling. I know Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark scared me righteous as a child. As a teen, I found some of those Fear Street series books chilling and I will never get over the trauma of Flowers in the Attic (somebody check on V.C. Andrews).

Andromeda: Oh, yes, Flowers in the Attic! I think I was eight or nine and found a copy at the house of my best friend. Her mom didn’t mind me reading her for-adult-eyes paperbacks. Sibling incest! Kids held captive by a cruel grandmother! I can still see that paperback with the cut-out cover.

As it turns out, Flowers was supposedly inspired by a disturbing real story told by a doctor to the 17-year-old Andrews, who was in treatment for a spinal condition that would afflict her for a lifetime, rendering her a shutaway completely dependent on her parents. The tale stayed with her for decades. A virgin, she had to turn to medical texts to write the sex parts with accuracy. This lady didn’t write Gothic, she lived it! (Move over Agatha. I may need to write something disturbing and inspiring about V.C. Andrews.)

Back to Natalie: with the one caveat of a story concept that scared her to the point of being unable to finish the book (Stephen King’s The Stand), Natalie laments that nothing else has truly scared her as an adult reader.

Movies tell stories, movies are scary - what’s missing?

My theory, and well it’s obvious when you say it out loud, is the absentee soundtrack. There are no horror sounds when you read a book, nothing to signal when it’s getting tense or ratchet up that suspense. Visuals are also a crucial component, but you can visualize a book in your head. Jump scares? Also impossible to recreate in book form, but then again, what would those scares even BE like without the soundtrack? My guess is, creepy, weird, but not scary.

Caitlin: I don’t find myself plugging my ears or covering my eyes while I read something that’s scaring me, and I do those things when a movie is really scaring me. (I watched a good chunk of Barbarian through the holes in an afghan.) I do think sound and certain visuals tap into a different kind of terror than most reading does.

Natalie linked a Psychology Today article that posits that horror movies aren’t scary without sound. The article talks about how horror movies tend to use sounds and music that trigger the fear center of the brain, tapping into primal responses to impending threats. Some music mimics an approaching predator, while other scores drone on without end or obvious source, which leads to feelings of unease and anticipation of potential danger.

Back to Natalie:

You need proof though, I see it in your eyes. How about: The comfort of all comfort shows as a horror trailer. Gilmore Girls. Hard concrete undeniable proof that music is the only thing that makes movies scary:

Andromeda: I’m still cracking up about that video.

Caitlin: The first thing I thought of were these videos by this YouTuber whose account is called “Editing Is Everything,” and she’ll take footage and sound from a movie and put it together in a new way. Like she did “Zootopia but it’s 50 Shades of Grey”; then “Zootopia but it’s a horror.” And both trailers are perfect. Her account makes the point: editing is everything!

Andromeda: Love it.

My first reaction to Natalie’s epiphany was that I felt so much better about my inability to make some supernatural moments in a forthcoming novel manuscript truly scary. The best I could achieve was eery. My beta-readers would use words like “dread.” I hadn’t stopped to think, “Maybe dread is enough?”

I’m not a horror writer, after all. I’m not as interested in provoking brief moments of terror as much as sharing longer-term existential anxieties. Basic betrayal, alienation and loneliness stuff.

I appreciate an emotionally resonant premise like the one in Erin Flanagan’s Blackout: a woman who stopped drinking starts having unexplained blackouts, losing chunks of time from her life, and the worst part is she is afraid to tell her husband and daughter because they’ll think she’s drinking again. Now, that’s scary!

(Hi Erin, we hope you’re reading this.)

So yes, when I think of fear, I think in terms of story and situation. And yet—and yet! I would like to have more control over small-scale terror/tension as well.

Caitlin: If we’re defining fear or terror as that heart-pounding fight or flight response to what you’re reading, I definitely don’t think I’m aiming for that reaction in the majority of my scenes. That kind of feeling is exhausting to have for too long as the reader or viewer. I remember finishing The Revenant and being like “I am never going to make myself live through that again.” And that was just a few hours—it takes much longer to read a book. It’s too much to keep up!

Andromeda (nodding): Ah yes, the durational aspect of art. I always love comparing the viewing of a painting, to listening to a song, to reading a short story, to watching a movie, to reading a novel. Time matters! People are willing to be confused/disoriented/emotionally overstimulated for brief periods of time but not long ones. The tradeoff is that the longer we spend with a piece of art due to its temporal requirements, the more we really attach to those characters. (A smart Hollywood writer told me that people watch movies for lots of reasons but they turn to ongoing TV series as substitute family. Jiminy, I think she was right.)

Caitlin: That said, for one of my novels in progress, I do aspire to be truly scary, in the sense of tapping into a very primal reaction, at a handful of points. And I think Natalie is right that it’s much harder to do with words alone!

Andromeda: This topic stayed with me, and I started thinking about what tools novelists do use to create fear or its quieter cousins: alarm, anxiety, unease. The first and most global that came to mind was setting. Just as in a soundtrack, you hear certain melodies, as rendered in prose, repeating. We become alert to those little repeating motifs that tell us something bad is going to happen, heightening anticipation.

By chance, Caitlin, you recently wrote about Tana French’s The Witch Elm, which uses setting beautifully.

Caitlin: I did, but here’s another one that works, too: the deep, lush, dark woods in Kate Alice Marshall’s What Lies in the Woods. Ten authors would describe the same woods ten different ways; in Marshall’s book, the potential for long-buried secrets and magic were important, and so she repeated imagery of how the forest was layered, “soft rain patter[ing] the branches above” or the girls making magic “[b]eneath a canopy of moss-wreathed branches.” An abandoned shopping cart anchored to the ground by roots was “proof that a dryad walked these woods.” But also that the woods are wild, lawless, and dangerous. Darkness, shadows, rot, blood, and bone are frequent descriptors. These words built on each other to create a moody, dread-inducing setting.

Andromeda: Another example! Stacy Willingham’s novels, A Flicker in the Dark and All the Dangerous Things take place in Louisiana. In the latter book, those sensory elements of the bayou create tension: the smell of mud, the buzz of mosquitoes, the unrelenting heat that prompts characters to wander outside at night, when they probably shouldn’t! Even when we aren’t in a scene involving a murky pond or in a hot bedroom looking at mysterious wet footprints, those images linger and do a lot of work.

Let’s talk about something else that can act as a moody score for an entire book: the feeling of being inside the mind of a character who isn’t thinking properly. So we can tag this tool as “character,” “POV" (including unreliable POV),” or both. Toby, in The Witch Elm, has suffered a head injury during a violent robbery and his head feels consistently messed up, unable to sort out his memories; he is also reliant on reality-skewing drugs. Just thinking about Toby, I have a headache.

The main character of Willingham’s A Flicker in the Dark hasn’t slept properly for “364 days” since her baby was kidnapped. There is nothing more relatable, I think, than the dull pain and muddled thinking of sleep deprivation.

If we had to imagine songs to be used in these scores, they would definitely be in a minor key, and they’d be moody or jangly. I am imagining long sections of sustained sound, dissonance, a droning quality. Like this song here, or any song from the Arrival soundtrack.

Caitlin: Yes! Whereas in What Lies in the Woods, the main character’s current perceptions of reality are totally reliable; droning noise or dissonance wouldn’t make sense. There, present-day Cassie returns home after a local serial killer dies in prison—Cassie is the one whose testimony put him away. She faces new threats as she unravels old memories of that summer, when she and her friends played the Goddess Games out in the woods. Those flashbacks would get creepy violins or something that’s almost pretty but skews unsettling.

Andromeda: Now that we’ve covered strategies that work throughout a book I want to talk about the scale of sentence and word—those tools that might be more like a specific sound effect, rather than a score. Can we use words and sentences to act like the iconic screeching violins in Psycho? (I’d remembered the violins. The cellos that follow are even better. Classic!)

First, let me share a pet peeve. I bristle at prescriptive writing advice, especially when it’s just plain wrong or not informed by deep reading. I recently got my hackles up about an email from a book coach who was critiquing a friend’s pages and this coach told my friend that her sentences were too long. To write a thriller, you must use short sentences, the coach said. Or maybe she said: To write. A thriller. You must use! Short sentences. (Kidding.)

I’m ready to accept that action thrillers, the ultra-commercial kind featuring men running around shooting and jumping out of planes, probably do have short sentences on average. And I think we can agree that in active, high-conflict scenes of most novels, regardless of genre, the sentences get even shorter, simulating the way we feel at stressful moments. Fragments can mimic breathlessness and confusion. Repetition can also be effective.

Here’s a Stephen King scene from The Shining. First, all seems comforting and familiar. Jack and Wendy are listening as their son Danny gets ready for bed. Wendy even reflects in a positive way about how mature their little boy has become. But…he’s been in the bathroom a little too long. There may be nothing wrong at all. (Of course, this is Stephen King. So you know that there probably is something wrong.) The scene is as tense as if the little boy were being held at gunpoint rather than brushing his teeth.

She knocked lightly on the closed bathroom door. “You okay, doc? You awake?”

No answer.

“Danny?”

No answer. She tried the door. It was locked.

“Danny?” She was worried now. The lack of any sound beneath the steadily running water made her uneasy. “Danny? Open the door, honey.”

No answer.

Danny!

This goes on for two more pages —”No answer,” “Only running water,” “No answer,” “Nothing,” “Danny!”—before Jack and Wendy manage to break down the door.

Note to self: aside from the “worried” in the passage above, there are very few words describing the emotions of the parents or their physical reactions. No beating/hammering hearts or constricted chests. (Guilty!) We don’t need to be told how they feel. The language itself conveys the feeling.

So yes, short sentences can work. But who wants to read an entire book of short sentences? We don’t want those violins screeching all the time or they’ll have no effect! Maybe dynamism is the answer—some short sentences for the tension-creating parts, and long sentences for the moments of relief or reflection.

And then again, not always. TA-DUM!

There is no “must” when it comes to using sentence length or syntax to create tension. I discovered this by looking for more examples like the one from The Shining and what I found more often was just the opposite: long sentences as a tool for building tension and unease.

Here’s only part of the first long paragraph from Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods, a book I loved reading two decades ago, well before I thought of myself as a suspense reader. I simply categorized this 1980s classic as “literary.”

Re-reading it now, it strikes me as a delightful precursor to Gone Girl. We will soon find out that someone did something, a woman is missing, and we sure don’t know whom to trust, but the narrator seems to have a screw loose.

But before we can fully understand all that, we need to be grounded in place. Am I talking about setting again? Not quite (though the setting is doing work). It’s the sentences themselves I want to draw your attention to, their rhythm and punctuation or lack of punctuation. You might read this aloud to yourself to feel the full effect.

Chapter 1

How Unhappy They Were

In September, after the primary, they rented an old yellow cottage in the timber at the edge of Lake of the Woods. There were many trees, mostly pine and birch, and there was the dock and the boathouse and the narrow dirt road that came through the forest and ended in polished gray rocks at the shore below the cottage. Then there were no roads at all. There were no towns and no people. Beyond the dock the big lake opened northward into Canada, where the water was everything, vast and very cold, and there were secret channels and portages and bays and tangled forest and islands without names. ….

What do those sentences and words do for you?

For me, they act as a form of mesmerization. The words are simple, often monosyllabic, and the images are presented one at a time, allowing us to see each object as it appears. The old yellow cottage. Trees. Which are mostly pine and birch. The dock. The boathouse. The narrow dirt road. The meaning accumulates in an orderly way—no waiting for the end¹ of a sentence in order to “see” and understand what’s being described.

The use of “and” to connect some items in the list, instead of commas, “sounds” to me like a droning sound, slow and hypnotic, pulling us in while filling us with a subtle sense of dread. The title definitely helps, “How Unhappy They Were!” (Suspense relies on a question, and O’Brien is quick to provide a good one: Why are they so unhappy? Ticking time-bomb. Now O’Brien can delay answering that question. Suspense.)

Some other writerly choices help the effect build. Just when we’re getting dreamily immersed, O’Brien provides some interesting repetition. Then there were no roads at all. There were no towns and no people.

Do you see why I hate writing “rules?” Have you been told not to use the passive voice and to-be verbs? Can we not imagine several intriguing reasons why the passive construction works so well here?

Also, can you imagine how annoying it would be if a clumsy editor wanted to combine those two sentences into this nothing-special rewrite? Then there were no roads, towns, or people.

STET!²

Individual words, like a low pulsing sound effect, augment O’Brien’s tension.Vast and very cold. … Secret channels.

Oh dear. I’m already thinking there’s a body in that cold water. In one of those secret channels or bays, and then again there’s the tangled forest somewhere. Maybe the body is there. Help! Mommy!

I’m not truly scared, of course, just…worried. Pleasurably worried. And definitely curious enough to keep reading.

Caitlin: this partial paragraph is beautiful. I’ve just sat here reading it multiple times. It sounds great out loud, too. Like poetry, thanks to the use of so many ands instead of commas, and excellent word choice. I need to read this book!

Andromeda: If we had space for more examples, we could say more about both sentence structure and word choice—like the fact that unease and even terror can rely on strange, unexpected word choices. As Lincoln Michel recently asserted, the mix of unexpected and expected word choices or phrases can produce the feeling of uncanniness which is essential to horror.

I feel the need to offer a caveat to all of these concepts. As I writer, I don’t actually think about things like syntax and word choice during a first draft. I just write, trying my hardest to focus on character and story. My analytical side comes into play during revision, mostly when I think about what’s still missing, and especially when I compare one scene that seems effective to another of mine that is flat.

Caitlin: Agreed. Sometimes there are perfect moments in that first draft, but it takes many revisions to have a book that feels like it has a score, like you were talking about earlier. Enough repetition of descriptors or themes that the whole piece hums with recognizable sound.

Andromeda: Ooooh. I want the next book I’m writing to hum.

Caitlin: It’s a clever idea to think about sound when we’re writing scary. Clever enough that even those storytellers with true access to sound—filmmakers—have underestimated its value. According to this NPR piece Andromeda shared with me, Hitchcock initially thought the shower scene in Psycho would be more powerful without music; luckily, Bernard Herrmann, who wrote the movie’s score, composed something anyway. When Hitchcock later expressed disappointment with the scene, Herrmann played the shrieking violins for him, and that was it.

Andromeda: So maybe the good writer does the same thing. Operate intuitively at first, but be ready to figure out what’s missing, later. Which also means: listen to your editor/beta readers/creative team members because sometimes they are right!

Caitlin: Yes! In that NPR piece, Herrmann’s biographer says that the real difference between the scene with the music and the scene without is viewpoint. Without the music, it’s “disturbing” and the viewer is “watching a terrible thing happen.” But with the music, the viewer becomes Janet Leigh, feeling her “panic” and “terror.” Herrmann believed, perhaps like Natalie, that "film music … [was] the ‘communicating link’ between filmmaker and viewer.”

Andromeda: And I personally think this takes us back to something we say often here at Present Tense about the importance of caring about a character (which isn’t the same as liking her, necessarily) and being able to experience events through her, which requires some good deep POV access.

To sum up: utilizing POV, setting, character work, syntax and diction we can unsettle readers and sometimes spook them. But I still wish our books came with a soundtrack.

With luck, Natalie will chime in and tell us what she makes of our theories. And you, too, readers and writers! Do you aim to write scary? Do you look for scary in the novels you read? Can you explain what makes it work?

If you like this conversational format for the occasional craft and readings piece, let us know. We can call the series “Suspense shit we are trying to figure out.”

The end.

1. I am not a syntax expert by any means, but let me try to sift through some desiccated brain cells and dig up what I used to know. I believe this is what we call a cumulative or loose sentence: the first independent clause can be understood on its own, not requiring other phrases that follow for understanding. A periodic sentence does the opposite, requiring the reader to get to the end (to where the independent clause is hiding) before being able to make full sense of the whole thought. Now here’s the funny thing. Periodic sentences are supposed to create suspense, according to many grammar sites. They’re forcing the reader to wait, right? But I think O’Brien’s cumulative sentences create more tension! I opine that this is the old Hitchcock rule in action, once again. If we don’t have enough info, we can be surprised (boom!) but not really held in suspense (tick-tick-tick, there’s a bomb under the table and I see it and I’m waiting and oh gosh here it comes…).

2. From the Latin for “let it stand.” What we writers type into our proofs when we don’t want to accept an editor’s change.