dread

I wasn’t ignoring you last week; I was in Hong Kong. HK is a lot like if New York and London used a Chinese surrogate to have a baby. I loved it.

I grew up reading Anne of Green Gables and The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be and The Wind in the Willows and so on. These are some of the best stories anyone can read, not just kids. So it would not be right to say that I don’t enjoy a cheerful story.

But you know what’s even better than a cheerful story? That’s right! A story suffused with dread!

One of my favorite pieces of feedback from Six Mile Store [obligatory pre-order link] was when someone told me they thought something was wrong but they couldn’t put their finger on what it was. That feeling is exactly what I wanted to convey. The stories I find most interesting as a reader always have something unsettling about them: a stultifying atmosphere, characters who probably don’t mean you any harm, a landscape that is completely familiar until it very much isn’t anymore.

The undisputed Queen of Unease has to be Ottessa Moshfegh, who hasn’t yet written a single word that will make you feel better. I got into her work when I went to a bookshop and told them I needed something to fill my Sarah Waters/unreliable narrator hole. They handed me Eileen and that was all I needed. By the time the rest of the world was waking up to My Year of Rest and Relaxation, I had already consumed McGlue [excerpt; your homework is to read it] and Homesick for Another World, so I knew what to expect when Lapvona came out (while so many others didn’t). Moshfegh does not care about making you comfortable.

Ok. You’re convinced. You want to make your writing more dreadful. How do you start?

First, your characters have to be human. They won’t feel dread if they have some special ability to sniff out danger coming from a mile off, and neither will your reader. Most of us can’t see danger even when it’s obvious. When I had a house fire recently, there were five people in my house. All five of us had to overcome a few moments of denial that a fire was actively burning, despite the alarm going off and smoke filling the hallway. There were reasons for this, but were they good reasons? They were human reasons.

This danger-blindness means you can push a monster right into a protagonist’s face, one with all of the characteristics you’d expect from a monster—you can even tell the reader THIS IS A MONSTER—and your protagonist doesn’t necessarily have to clock the monster in front of them. Let the monster drool and smile and play with its prey for a while. (This monster could be another character, a particular situation, a physical location, or even something internal to the protagonist.)

You can also give your protagonist a terrible secret, something they know they’ve done, or that someone else has done, or something horrific that they know is coming. And you then make them wait for a very long time, maybe even forever, for that secret to come out or for that horrible thing to happen. And you write all of the other characters in the book just going through their normal lives while your main character holds the awful knowing. (This feels terrible if your protagonist is likeable, but it’s funny if your protagonist is a dick.)

Introduce confusion. In Weapons, we watch the film unfold through several characters’ eyes, and one wonderful (non-spoilery) bonus of telling the story this way is that small details change depending on whose perspective is at the forefront. For some people, the day is sunny; for others, it’s rainy. Some people think they are calm and helpful on the phone; others think those characters are angry or offish.

You may not be telling your story from multiple perspectives, but that doesn’t mean your small details have to maintain continuity. Why not put things in the wrong place? Why not compress or elongate the timeline? Why not make it really weird?

Take away control. Your protagonist is positive that if she does this, or that, then she’ll succeed. And she does it, and she fails. Start small; this is the kind of thing you can ramp up over a very long time, until your character can’t rely on a single thing anymore. (And you already know readers love this technique, because just look at how many people say A Little Life is like their fave book everrrrr.)

I could go on and on, but you get it. In fact, this list tells you more about me as a person than it does about writing per se. That’s because if you want to suffuse your story with dread that you can personally feel, you first have to identify the things in your own life that make you personally feel hopeless.

So now you know what I worry about. Missing obvious danger signs. Spilling my worst secrets. Losing my mind. Losing control.

So. What do you worry about? How will you bring dread into your writing?