Let’s Talk About Fear (and erotica)

[ceciliatan]

Thinky Thoughts: Let’s Talk About Fear

Welcome to the spookiest month of the year! I figure this is a great time for some thinky thoughts about fear-specifically how crucial fear is in erotic fiction. For me, at least.

I was a fraidy cat as a child. I was one of those kids who would see Godzilla on television and then not be able to get to sleep

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> What was extra-confusing to my parents is that things other kids were afraid of-like talking to adults, or jumping into the deep end of swimming pool, or snakes-didn’t bother me at all. My mom talked to the school psychologist about it and was told that “gifted” kids with vivid imaginations were prone to such terrors. <<

It is typical that gifted kids have a different pattern of fears, but they also have more categories. So while other kids were having a cluster of "typical" fears, you had two sets -- phantasmagoric ones generated by an active imagination, and realistic ones generated by higher intellectual development. One thing I learned growing up was that my mind could not simultaneously work a worldbuilding problem and generate foreboding scenarios of my own lifetrack. So I got into writing to keep it busy, and that largely works for me. Some other folks will latch onto a science problem or a math one or whatever -- it depends on how their brain works

Re: Thoughts

[ceciliatan]

"You want them in the right balance, because too little fear doesn't add enough oomph whereas too much stops being fun."

Exactly! And for me this applies to the reader as much as to play partners. :-)

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Definitely applies to the reader too. That makes me think of the hurt/comfort ratchet, which I learned from Master Tolkien. If you alternate between the two, you can crank the total tension much higher without wearing out either your characters or your audience. Most horror entertainment seems to turn the intensity up to 11 and leave it there. I get bored.

Honestly, it's like none of them ever played with a multifunction vibrator.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> on the theme of “Freelance Heroes,” complete with a powerpoint slideshow of funny and silly superheroes (and supervillains like “Sticklerman and Stetboy.”) <<

*laugh* Comma Jockey is so you -- he even has a riding crop!

One of my series, Polychrome Heroics, is superhero fantasy, but it focuses on all the other things people could do besides punching each other really hard in the face which is 99% of superhero literature. So I'm always happy to see other folks imagining different kids of superheroes, even silly ones, with some other theme than crimefighting.

>> I learned somewhat the hard way that if book one of a series ends on a cliffhanger and the heroine feels betrayed and abandoned by the hero, the readers will feel betrayed and abandoned, too… by the author. So I’m aiming to avoid that, but as I mentioned last month, exactly where we’ll land, I don’t know yet.... )

Re: Thoughts

[ceciliatan]

I saw pink and lavender when we saw the lights in the spring, in May the month after the eclipse! I hadn't even realize they could be that color, which of course prompted a google session for the explanations of the various colors and why they happen. Fascinating!

A graphic novel about the history of food sounds very much up my alley, yes :-)

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> I saw pink and lavender when we saw the lights in the spring, in May the month after the eclipse! <<

I haven't seen lavender. That sounds cool.

>> I hadn't even realize they could be that color, which of course prompted a google session for the explanations of the various colors and why they happen. Fascinating! ... )

Re: Thoughts

[ceciliatan]

I really enjoyed Alison Bechdel's "The Secrets to Superhuman Strength" too (the third in her autobiographical graphic novels, after Fun Home and Are You My Mother?)