How can you best describe fear?

Fear is enormously complex and has many different faces. There are many different aspects that all fall under ‘anxiety’, but they differ. In my eyes, you’d have to differentiate a bit, because there’s no general fear. At least not when you write.

Fear of being confronted by a clause or from being confronted with the swarm (i.e., in the sense of a mild nervousness) is completely different from, for example, pure terror or the panic with which one runs away from the chain saw murderer who follows one through the forest.

Sure, it’s kind of similar… but in my eyes, you’d have to focus differently on the situation where the person is.

Let’s take the exam:

“Well, Judy, are you ready?” Judy didn’t answer. Instead, she clinged to the chair’s armrests, forced the fingernails not to dim deep into the antique wood. That’s it. The moment of truth. The most important exam of her life.
Eva’s reassuring words barely penetrated her, instead she took the noise of the blood that chased her wild heart through her veins.
“You can do that! You can do this,” she tried to talk to herself. But her sweaty hands and the sum of bees in her ears punished her lies.

And now we’re delimiting it to the forest example where we’re more likely to have the ‘green panic’.

The branches hit her face, but the pain stopped. Instead, she stumbled further over the uneven forest floor, fell into the foliage, jumped up again and ran further. She did not pay attention to the sting in her side, the aching of her muscles, ready to give in under the unfamiliar effort, her wild-beating heart. Only on the tubes of the chain saw behind her, which slowly came closer.

“What did I do to you to run away, Clara?”

Tears rose into their eyes, but they continued to to torment. She was not allowed to stop! Don’t stop, don’t slow down! He was approaching. Too close.

So you notice… while Judy was still really able to ‘clean’ her fear, has tried to do something about it and calm down (and I have also brought some individual, for example, because she hears bees individually when she is afraid), Clara does not have this opportunity.

She uses this fear for her headless escape. I try to keep the sentences and parts of the sentence short, especially when it comes to their thoughts and commands. Because she has no time to think (and not really the dynamics of the scene). She must run away now, because if she doesn’t, she’ll be minced soon.

Now that’s the horror you wanted… I would not go exclusively about the fear of the figure, but would really also shape the scene accordingly.

Impenetrable darkness around me. From time to time, I hear how branches strike against the walls of the old wooden hut, but the rushing of the storm is lost. All I can hear is a rustling like leaves in the wind. Carefully I stretched my hand into the darkness, button on the wall after a light switch, a candle, matches. Something that devastates the darkness and this jamming feeling that has been on me since I knocked the door behind me.

Whatever I do, I can’t sell it. A trembling goes through my whole body, although I snuck my jacket tightly around me and it wasn’t cold outside. I push myself so tightly I can go against the wall and feel that someone is behind me. I’m staring. An icy hand stretches out after me, ready to attack. To pack me and move with him, into the depths of hell he comes from.

“Bella.” I’m dressing up, we’re going around, but too late. The hand is faster, pushes over my mouth before I can scream.
I desperately try to fight, but my whole body is paralyzed. But the shape is stronger. Strong enough to surround my wrists with their iron handle and press them firmly against my back. Too hard to fight him.

All I can do is stand. With tears in the eyes, wild trembling hearts and trembling limbs while he leans over my shoulder. The odor of moist earth, of lazy teeth and standing smoke rises into my nose. My stomach crawls together as fat hair my cheek stripes and hot breath meets my cheek.

“Welcome, my darling, stay a little. I get so rare visit.”

As always… it’s just written down… but I hope you realize that it’s more of a thing to build the scene. Try to let the reader feel the jamming here and signal over your main character that it feels similar. Maybe you noticed it with my examples… Fear can be described relatively well about concrete things or the dynamics… you don’t necessarily have to work with the concrete terms (where it’s perfectly okay at the beginning to briefly state that someone is afraid).

So, as I said, all GANZ is a lot of scene building, if you give the reader a real feeling for the situation, then it’s usually half the rent, just if you manage to do it over the protagonist and how he perceives his environment.

I wish you a lot of success and a lot of fun writing 🙂

Merci :

I am happy (as always :)) we already know a bit here on the page 🙂