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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

TELL ME MORE

How do you write about the feeling of terror?

2/2/2014

7 Comments

 
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How does one write about terror?  I don’t mean the delicious spine tingling sensation evoked by the thriller or horror story, the literary equivalent of Halloween or the latest upside-down turbocharged fairground ride. I’m thinking that raw state of mind when logic goes out the window and with it any trace of pride or self-consciousness, when body and brain conspire towards a sole objective: survival. Even Verdi’s glorious Dies Irae doesn’t do justice to the torment.

Any strong emotion is difficult to portray; there's always the risk of overdoing it and ending up telling the reader what to feel. Like hallucinatory states, it’s an extra challenge to translate the reality of terror into language. True terror is a psychotic state where words have little currency. How do we begin to describe the all-engulfing fear, the belief – rational or otherwise – that our life is about to end?

Even if we can find words adequate to the task, the writer may not be. Do I really want to plunge down into the darkest of my dark places to deliver an honest representation of the emotion? Can I guarantee I’ll ever surface again?

Suppose a writer brave, or masochistic, enough does manage to find the right words, readers may not be so eager to devour them. Despite the horrors on the nightly news, we like to delude ourselves our own world is secure. Yes, life has its ups and downs, its joys and griefs, but, particularly for those of us cocooned in the West, we assume that, once we’re grown, nothing could be so bad as to make us shit our pants and start howling for our mothers.
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Yet many writers manage to overcome the limitations of language, safeguard their own sanity and avoid jeopardising readers’ expectations to explore the limits of human endurance. In The Banner of the Passing Clouds, we are not shown the worst atrocities directly. It is the narrator’s younger brother who is conscripted to fight in Afghanistan and returns home too traumatised to speak. The reader is thereby put in a similar position to the young man’s family, observing the damage while unable to offer any help:

it was the very fact of his inability to witness and perhaps control events that drives Iosif to such extreme psychological distress. I hoped to convey this distress to the reader and allow them to fill in off stage action with their own imaginings
Anthea Nicholson
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Adam Johnson categorised his Pulitzer prize-winning novel, The Orphan Master’s Son, as a trauma narrative. In this not-so-fictionalised North Korea, the citizens exist in a state of constant terror where survival depends on renouncing their own initiative, curiosity and joie de vivre. I wish I could pin down what makes this bleakness so readable: perhaps it’s the sense of an insight into the machinations of a closed-off country, or that we’re rooting for a hero who, if only momentarily, beats the system.

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Or, as with The Banner of the Passing Clouds, it might be the love element that lends the novel enough hope to keep us reading. In In the Orchard, the Swallows, a man is sustained through fifteen years of imprisonment and torture through the memory of his first young love. The cover suggests a much lighter story than the author delivers: this is a novel that doesn’t shy away from the stripping away of the self that terror brings.

Every instinct of the body is to recoil from pain, but they allowed us no escape. An awful sense of powerlessness grew steadily, as though I were inhaling a great breath of air and was unable to stop. The horror became overwhelming, and from some hidden place in my mind I felt a darkness, something huge and unnameable, begin to form  ...  I would wonder how many days I had been tormented, only to find, on being returned to the cell, that I had been gone no more than an hour or two.
Peter Hobbs
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There is no redeeming love for Dr Yelland’s patients in Pat Barker’s First World War novel, Regeneration. Already traumatised by their experiences at the front, they are subjected to cruel and painful “treatment” from which there is no escape. Although we don’t witness this through the patient’s eyes, it comes across as an unflinching and honest betrayal of terror. Day of wrath, indeed: if there’s a God in this scenario, He isn’t here to offer salvation.

As a writer, I’m interested in extreme situations, but I don’t want to give myself nightmares. You can check out my attempts to write about terror in a couple of my short stories. Habeas Corpus, recently published by Baltimore Review, is about a photojournalist taken hostage; look away now if you don’t want to know about the worst moment of his life:

all the love and buzz and satisfactions of his life could not compensate for how it was to end.  Dragged behind that car at forty miles an hour, skin flayed and bones splintered.  Thirty-seven years of connections and commitments whittled down to a trail of scrappy body parts on a dirt road in a land deprived of care. He had no thoughts.  No memories.  No pictures of better times to steer him through his final moments.
In a domestic setting closer to home, the young narrator of my flash fiction piece All Night, the Babby experiences his baby sister’s unsoothed crying as if listening to someone being tortured:
the noise of them others being tortured gans straight to your gut. So it might as well be you who’s having your head pushed into a bucket of shit, or the soles of your feet burnt wi’ cigarettes. It might as well be happening to you when the screaming gans inside you.
Terror doesn’t necessarily end when its source is removed and I’ll be exploring how writers have addressed the aftermath of terror in a later post. But I reckon we could do with something a bit jollier before that, so perhaps, with Spring just around the corner, it's time for my piece on allotment gardening.

In the meantime, what’s your take on this?

Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
7 Comments
randy kraft link
5/2/2014 06:21:30 am

Great blog, great examples. I find the subtler the language, and the greater the focus on the scene, the more intense the feeling evoked. The reader should feel terror with the character. After are, terror is in the eyes of the beholder.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
5/2/2014 05:44:25 pm

This article gave me much to think about, Anne. I choose to not read or watch horror. I have lasting memories from the few that I have read and watched that I wish I could erase from my memory; along with a few nightmares and personal experiences. However I appreciate the the skill that must go into creating the horror in words, more so than visually in film. There is more to the craft of writing than most readers give the writer credit for.

Reply
Annecdotist
6/2/2014 09:01:57 am

Thanks so much for your comments. I'm with you Norah in avoiding torture and violence on the screen (which means I'll probably miss Twelve Years a Slave, admirable as I think the concept is) but feel a little bit safer with it in print, although it can still be harrowing. Like you, Randy, I think it needs to be subtle and relevant. I suppose I'm working through my own terrors by reading and writing about it (but not too much).

Reply
Safia link
8/2/2014 10:50:27 pm

At this juncture, I can't envisage writing about the details of horrific events, but in my second novel, will have to filter the terror through the MC (still figuring him out). As a reader, I find I can take graphic details up to and including a certain level (the examples from your own work I can handle - very effective). I enjoyed 'In the Orchard the Swallows' enormously for the sheer beauty of the language and I suppose this is the crux - can terror be described 'beautifully'? I can only remember a few occasions when I have skipped sections of books - one of these was the prolonged description of the mother and baby being locked in a room without food or water in Khaled Hosseini's 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' - gut-wrenching and unbearable for me. I haven't read 'The Kiterunner' (put off by reviews) and although I've downloaded 'And the Mountains Echoed', for some reason, I haven't 'picked it up' yet. So ... I guess certain techniques can be too traumatic for the reader, producing an aversion to the author (or am I just an over-sensitive soul)?

Reply
Annecdotist
9/2/2014 07:40:25 am

Thanks for your comment, Safia. No, I don’t think you’re oversensitive, perhaps especially empathic? But I don’t think we need all the gory details to represent an emotion, although I was particularly interested in Anthea Nicholson’s decision to depict the war in Afghanistan off stage, leaving it for our imaginations to fill in the detail. Maybe that would work for your novel?
Interesting, I was quite disturbed by In the Orchard The Swallows, despite the beautiful language, but did appreciate the chance to read it. Yet ashamed to say I can’t remember the scene in A Thousand Splendid Suns – maybe I was being very defensive, and did appreciate The Kite Runner, although I might have been happier without the scene that you might be referring to from the reviews.
Seems there are subtle differences between what we each can and/or want to stomach.

Reply
Rebecca link
10/2/2014 03:39:46 pm

Hi Anne--thank you for your kind works about my stor!. I really enjoyed yours as well, especially how you managed to bring lyricism to the terror you mention above.

I will say, I had an interesting time recording the reading...definitely my first time doing that! I'm glad you enjoyed it; it's the part that made me most nervous.

I'm intrigued my many points you raised in this post...I find that I will stick with any description of horror or terror as long as I feel there's a reason for it. It's easier to put my faith in authors I already know; I'll stick with a Cormac McCarthy novel no matter how disturbing (like Child of God, for example), because I trust him to see me safely to the other side, and to have traumatized me for a reason..but if the horror is gratuitous and serves no purpose, I tend to feel betrayed as a reader. Does that sound strange?

Reply
Annecdotist
11/2/2014 04:33:40 am

Thanks, Rebecca, and welcome to my blog. Not strange at all, in my opinion, I think you put it really well – there's a willingness to be disturbed but, without necessarily asking for a happy ever after, we need to trust we won't be left in a nightmare when the novel comes to an end.

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