How To Convey Fear || Lit Team

Hello everyone!

The Lit Team is back with a new tips post! This week's theme is

How To Convey Fear

So here are the tips!

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Tips made by Ayumi

Hi I'm Ayumi and today I'm going to give you tips. Tips on how to convey fear in stories. Now you could do this by writing the character's deepest fears. For example Eren's fear is the titans. So you can write about how they make Eren feel inside. Titans make Eren feel disgusted, his mind is in a panic thinking about it. Discovering the fears of your characters can really be helpful when writing.

Another way to convey fear when writing is by thinking like a child. You can do this like writing about monsters under the bed or scary people. That is something you can write about. What a child thinks when feeling fear. This can go from imaginative monsters to real life horrors. Like a child being scared of snakes. Or maybe having a nightmare about something that scared you as a child. Now I'll give you an example of how to write fear.

It was late, Reiner was sleeping on the couch. He was up late watching zombie movies again. Reiner was dreaming that he was in class. Giving a speech before a zombie bursts into the room. "Ahh! Zombies!" Reiner screamed as the zombie lunged at him. Snakes came creeping out of the zombie's chest like a volcano. Biting Reiner with venom turning him into a zombie. His body was deformed, rotting and decaying in seconds. "Ah!!" Reiner screamed as he woke up. His heart was beating as fast like a hummingbird. Another nightmare

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Tips made by Eren

How to convey fear within a character you ask?

Well it's in many different ways, for example.

"Eren walked around in a dark empty and abandoned mansion. His eyes glanced around the area. His breathing was intense. As he approached a bloody door his eyes widened at the site of an arm that looked like it's been cut off. The brunette took a deep breath, gripping the handle, opening the door slowly as it made a creeking noise.

When he fully opened it his eyes widened as his ocean eyes dialed. A strange figure appeared as it was fully black, white sharp bloody teeth smiled at the male welcoming him. It laughed disturbingly, making eren shake as his spine shivers feeling a cold sensation. The shadow roared launching towards him with force.

Eren screamed quickly turning around running for his life. The ghost shrieked almost sounding like a little girl screaming into his ears. The male held his ears tightly running towards the door, busting it open. Eren's eyes filled with tears. Finally he made it out alive. He collapsed onto the ground breathing heavily feeling relieved. The ghost stopped seeing the male collapse. It growled slowly, closing the greyish black door as it's blood red eyes glare. The door shut, leaving Eren alone in the dark of the outside world."

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Tips are made by Eren Jaeger

How to portray and convey fear in your character~

Portraying fear or conveying it through your character in something like a Role play can actually be quite difficult. First things first is make sure you think about the type of situation your character is in right then and how someone or specifically they, might feel.

Everyone slightly changes their character in a Role play to fit certain characteristics, so for example, if your character is facing something they deeply fear, you want to show that throughout their actions, body language, noises, and words.

A way you can think about this is what are ways you have seen people or yourself react in fear? Something dangerously scary may results in screams and rigid, fast movement. You can portray your characters fear to great heights especially if you use adjectives describing actions and the people or things around them.

For example~

Pressed against the frigid wall, Eren's lanky body trembled with fear from what lay beyond. It was something out of a horror movie or nightmare, something you only see in your dreams. The brunettes hands shook, clamy and cold as he pushed his sweaty hair out of his eyes that darted around. His thoughts were filled with a fear so indescribable he couldn't even muster a word, let alone scream.

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Tips Made By Mia

•How To Convey Fear•

I, for myself don't know how to convey fear personally. Especially if I don't have someone to help me. But, I'll give out some tips for it maybe just a little.

First, you have to be brave and let that fear don't get to you. Cause if you let it get to you, I don't know what will happen next, but you'll be a chicken in front of everyone else.

Second, you have to be calm about it and let it through and believe you can do it and never let it get to you.

Fears can be conveyed for any second if you try your best (but you don't succeed), scratch that. Ehem, so I was saying. Fears can be conveyed any second if you have someone to help you or if you're just brave enough to do it yourself.

Oh and one last thing, you should be focus on your fear. Focus on it, think of something that can possibly help you convey that fear you have. And that's all!

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Tips made by Mikasa

So, you might be wondering how to effectively convey fear in your writings or roleplays. This, of course, is a very valid question to ask yourself when you’re writing horror! Especially if it’s your first time writing a horror piece or participating in a horror roleplay.

No one is entirely fearless, everyone’s afraid of something, be it a mental fear or a fear of a physical being (real or fictitious). Take two polar opposites in this: Armin and Mikasa. Armin is usually known as someone who’s genuinely afraid of a lot of things while Mikasa is practically fearless (save for when Eren or Armin are in danger). You’d roleplay as Mikasa the opposite of how you’d roleplay Armin in a normally scary environment. And try to use fear-related words in your writing. Here’s a little example of the differences.

Mikasa would be something like this:

“The haunted house they had chosen for this day was, unsurprisingly, barely scary. It relied more on jump scares and low-budget props than anything. Even the Halloween makeup was subpar. If it weren’t for Eren and Armin, Mikasa would’ve left a long time ago and taken her chances trick or treating even though she was fifteen or ‘too old’ as Eren put it.”

While Armin would be like this (this does include a slight over exaggeration on my part, so don’t feel forced to roleplay as Armin exactly like this):

“A vampire jumped out of the closet, provoking a high-pitched scream out of the blonde. Eren and Mikasa covered their ears in agony, the screams clearly the scariest thing in the night for them, while the blue eyed teenage boy cowered in fear. “When can we leave. I’ve been spooked enough for the remainder of the year,” Armin cried, a low chuckle coming out of Eren’s mouth before another fictional creature jumped out of the shadows.”

In the end, every single character has a different response to something scary. Always make sure that the character you’re using is either a ‘scaredy-cat’, average when it comes to something scary, or someone that barely gets scared at all before ing anything that involves scaring people or writing about a character(s) in a haunted house (or anything similar). Hopefully these tips have helped you in some way or another, bye bye!

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Tips made by Kuchel

To convey fear, One must put the emotions of the OC or canon character into play. But, there are guidelines to that. You must pertain to their personality as well.

For example, Levi Ackerman shoes little fear physically due to his emotional drainage caused by the losses of those he deeply cared about.

Levi Ackerman, 'The emotionless man' of the Scouting legion, Showed fear upon realizing who gunned down Nifa and attempted on his very own life. His own uncle, And former caretaker, Kenny ackerman. He sneered in disgust as he growled, The male ridiculing him for his height. But, Then fear struck him greatly. He shuddered as his icy blue eyes widened. He shook his head and backed up, And fired off his anchors and launched forward into a cloud of Omni-directional gas.

There you go AOT Amino! I know, My tips aren't that good, I've never truly conveyed fear in roleplay before.

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Tips made by Aria

Tips on how to convey fear

If you want to convey fear, you'll want to either start with the character that creates it, which is most times the cold hearted, anti-social, or antagonist character(s) of the story; or with the setting atmosphere.

To start, the character, which might seem the easiest to some people. If you want to convey fear with the character(s), you'll want to give them frightening features or traits that you think will even bring shivers down the spines of people that read your story. For example, you can use Levi, a common character used for this horror, the genre that brings fear.

As the raven haired man sat upon his throne, not even giving others a glance, to which they were grateful for and were mentally letting out sighs of relief, he kept staring directly to the female with amber eyes. He seemed to be straightly looking into her soul, causing her to slightly shake. Looking away to try and ignore his stare. But.... a few minutes later, she then felt something, or someone feel her (somehow) up and down, so she looked back to see the same  man lifting his eyes to smirk at her innocently, which is supposed to impossible, since he's the demon king.

Enjoy that? Well, let's now move on to the atmosphere. There are times when readers want to know about to the atmosphere the setting gives, because saying "He was about to shit his pants 'cause the place was scary as hell!", won't be enough. You'll leave them confused and some won't even bother reading your story further. So in order to explain, why did you character(s) were scared the hell out their minds. You have to explain the details, like what about the lightning, is it dim, bright, turning on and off? What about the temperature? The change in a character through the scene?