by R. M. Ziegler

Created on: October 22, 2008   Last Updated: December 26, 2010

Fear is the main element of successful horror fiction. Fear is what makes Stephen King's books fly off the shelves. Fear is also what motivates writers such as King to pen these stories. King has admitted to being afraid of the dark and of the bats that inhabit his attic. He uses his own fears in his work.

Shirley Jackson ("The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House) wrote once, " . . . I have always loved to use fear, to take it and comprehend it and make it work and consolidate a situation where I was afraid and take it whole and work from there . . . I delight in what I fear."

Maybe you don't delight in your fears. Likely, you push them far away so you don't have to think about them. Or you worry, worry, worry. But in addition to inspiring story ideas, writing about fear is therapeutic. It helps you to take control of them. In gaining control of them, you can take your fiction to those dark places you didn't want to go.

What are your recurring fears or haunting images?

Write about them. Close your eyes, take some deep breaths, and free-write about them for ten minutes. Go deep. If it's difficult for you, return to it again later. Keep trying.

Just like in any fiction story, the successful horror story must have a beginning, middle, and an ending and must have well developed characters. Your hero's conflict must be believable (in this case, the dark threat), and he/she must react consistently and believably.

That's not to say a normally timid person isn't capable of murder or violence. When placed under an inordinate amount of stress, people may react in ways that are out of character for them. A person might behave differently from his usual moral values to fill desperate needs. As in all fiction, your hero must grow or change by the end of the story. The change may be positive or negative.

As you create your hero, decide what dark threat he is going to face. The threat need not be totally original. You may recycle and borrow threatening characters from classic and contemporary fiction such as: witches, vampires, ghosts, werewolves, and zombies. Your threat may be a symbol of death: Satan, temptation, or whatever else you think of.

In Stephen King's, IT, the dark threat became each character's darkest fears mummy, werewolf, clown. In other stories, he used evil dogs and possessed cars. Joyce Carol Oates uses a stranger to personify temptation in her story, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"

You can take something ordinary and turn it into a dark

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