Literary emotions: FEAR

Literary Emotions: FEAR

For the reader:

            The difference between real emotions and literary emotions is often unclear. “Fear” is an exception. The Fear we experience when reading a good thriller can one of the most intense of all literary experiences. Consider the warning on the back of Lawrence Block’s All the Flowers are Dying: “Extraordinarily suspenseful… Those with weak hearts may want to try some other novel altogether.”

            And yet when we put the thriller down, we are no longer afraid. What we experienced was not real fear but vicarious (substitute) or virtual (pretend) fear. We enter into the fear of the character who is about to be tortured or who is tied to the railroad tracks (empathy), and we pity these characters too (sympathize), though the distinction between empathy and sympathy is often difficult to maintain in practice.

            It’s always possible, of course, that this literary fear may carry over into real life. A reader of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Premature Burial,” for example, might develop a lingering and very real fear of being buried alive. But this is the exception.

For the writer:

            What is the challenge for a writer? Actually, fear is one of the easiest emotions to evoke in your reader. All you have to do is conjure up an empty office building in the middle of the night; have your protagonist pick the lock of an office door and start going through secret files; then add footsteps in the hall and the sound of a key in the door. Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski, who has a set of lock-picking tools given to her by a burglar whom she defended, often finds herself in this position. Or have your rookie protagonist cop mention several times, early on, that she needs new batteries in her cell phone. Remind us that she knows perfectly well that she should call for backup before doing something dangerous; have her lose her flashlight; and then have her poke her nose into the abandoned warehouse in a dangerous part of town where she thinks the bad guys might be hiding out (And you’ve got Linda Wallander in Henning Mankell’s Before the Frost.) It’s hard to go wrong.