Tag Archives: fear

Works

Façade of Fear

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It’s the Halloween Scarefest! Post a scene, 400 words of less, of a character who’s afraid (and see the blogfest post) to join in!

This scene is from Façade (you can read the award-winning first chapter here), about two-thirds of the way through the novel.

Setting the scene: Katya Mikhailova is the Soviet cultural attaché in Paris. After she was injured in a bombing, she briefly worked with the police and an American liaison for her own reasons—but she gave them a false name so they wouldn’t know about her position at the embassy. Now she’s tricked them into returning her to the embassy before they could find out her identity.

But the American isn’t letting her get away that easily.

Please note this is basically an unedited rough draft!

As soon as the door latched behind me, a deep sense of unease sent my stomach plummeting. The hair at the nape of my neck stood at attention. Something wasn’t right here. Everything looked the same as when I left, but there was something I couldn’t put my finger on that put me on my guard, a sharp edge to the air.

And then the hand clamped over my mouth.

My heart froze. I could almost see myself ready to lash out with elbows and hands and feet—but I forced myself to breathe through the panic. Thinking clearly was the only thing that could get me away from this attacker, not blind luck.

“I don’t want to hurt you.” His voice was a shade above a whisper. Frank.

My heartbeat redoubled, but still I fought off the urge to fight back. He hadn’t hurt me yet, and he’d just said he wasn’t planning to. No reason to change that by trying to use force.

I shook my head to free my mouth, and Frank moved his hand a centimeter. I stared straight ahead, unwilling to turn and look at him. I spiked my tone with sarcasm. “What took you so long?”

“You’re going to have to explain yourself,” he said.

“Explain what? That I couldn’t trust you to keep me safe anymore?”

“No, not that, Miss Mikhailova.”

The chill of danger in the air finally leached into my veins. I looked to the mirror above the vanity. My lips were still stained red from the beet borshch, but the rest of my face was as pallid as death.

He’d found out the truth and he’d come here to kill me.

Read the rest of the Halloween Scarefest Entries!

Picture by Valentin Serov

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Technique

Running out of ideas

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Are you ever afraid you’ll run out of ideas? I am. Writing fiction takes up a lot of ideas.

Mostly, I’m not afraid of running out of the high-level, story-starting ideas. Those ideas come from everywhere—watching television, reading the newspaper, reading other novels, brainstorming on other projects, etc. Generally, it takes me two of those big ideas combined to get really excited about a story. And once I’m really excited, I can’t wait to start writing.

But I’m afraid of running out of the little ideas. Things that solve problems on a scene level: tricks to get characters out of (or into!) scrapes, gadgets and technology, historical and cultural facts, and so forth. Sometimes I feel like I’ve been incredibly lucky to come up with the number of ideas (and solutions rooted in my research) that I’ve had in the first place—what if I run out?

Sometimes, I want to save these ideas. “Yeah, I could use this here,” I tell myself. “It might help this scene, but what if I need that exact kind of plot device/gadget/tidbit more in a year or two or five? I mean, I guess I could use it then, too, but won’t that make my writing . . . redundant?”

I’m trying to learn to trust myself—if I have an idea that works for this story that punches it up, I probably shouldn’t wait to see if maybe this story will work okay without it and I can use it later. It’s not “wasting” an idea if you actually put it to use—and who knows if you’ll ever have occasion to use something like that again. And even if you do, chances are that you’ll have to customize it to your characters and their story, so it would probably look very different.

What do you think? Where do you get your “little” ideas and solutions? Do you think something like that might be recognizable? Do you know of any writers who repeat the same plot devices too much?

Photo by Steve Koukoulas

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