Looking at the Fear Reaction
A while ago, I talked about attempting to evoke fear in the audience. But it didn’t really touch much on the other side of the equation, how to write a character experiencing fear. I started thinking...
View ArticleClassifying Fears
Fear reactions don’t just vary by character—they can also vary within a character’s emotional range by what exactly the fear stimulus is. How long-lasting is this threat? How intense? What sort of...
View ArticleOn Fear: Social and Long-Term Threats
For a lot of people, it’s easy(ish) to imagine fear reactions when dealing with immediate threats to life and limb. Big guys with bigger weapons and apparent invincibility? Earthquakes that create...
View ArticleWriting a Character Fear Profile
Sometimes, it’s easier to approach something when you can fill in the blanks; characters’ fear reactions are no exception. The following is the skeleton of a possible way of recording a character’s...
View ArticleImpractical Applications (Tuyet’s Fear Profile)
Not long ago, I discussed creating fear profiles for characters. This is an example using my old favorite PC, Tuyet. Name: Tuyet Default instinctive fear reaction: Fight Standard reasoned fear reaction...
View ArticleFear: Responses vs. Coping Mechanisms
I find that people’s ways of reacting to fear stimuli fall into two general categories. On the one hand, you have direct responses to the fear itself: attempting to in some way eliminate the immediate...
View ArticleCharacterization Exercise: What is Fear to You?
You’ve probably noticed one of the more odd blanks I put on my fear profile template: the role of fear in the character’s life. After all, not all characters deal with fear in quite the same way;...
View ArticleWriting the Fear Reaction
Over the past week and a half, I’ve been writing about factors that are going to influence how characters react to something that scares them. Now let’s put it all together and look at a step-by-step...
View ArticleWednesday Night Writing Exercise: Fear, to Ruby
I got this one from one of my 2011 exercises, which in itself was an extension of my template for writing a character’s fear profile. The idea is to figure out what role fear plays in a character’s...
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