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182 Part III: Painting the Picture with Description
When you write fiction, you’re often allowing subconscious aspects of
yourself to find expression, and as a result you may find uncanny events or
objects creeping into your work. Real people and fictional characters often
project onto external objects emotions they’re feeling. How often have you
cursed a ‘beastly’ table that you stubbed your toe on, or a ‘stupid’ lid that
won’t unscrew properly? In children’s stories, and in horror fiction, objects
frequently come to life.
Children also have feelings of being more powerful than they are, and that
their hostile thoughts can injure someone. You can use this persistent feeling
in your writing. Even as an adult, you may still find that if in a fit of temper you
wish someone would die, you start worrying that he will, or that if you hear
of a person sticking pins in an effigy of a person, something bad will happen.
If something bad does happen to the target of your malevolent thoughts, you
can feel responsible even though you know at one level that this is completely
irrational. Perhaps it’s a form of guilt for having bad thoughts.
In reverse, people often attribute to others feelings that they possess but
don’t want to admit to. According to Sigmund Freud, dread of the ‘evil eye’ –
a malevolent look that many cultures believe able to cause injury or misfortune
to the recipient – arises because people project onto others the envy
they’d have felt in their place. So, someone who achieves success may feel
that other people want to attack and bring him down. A sense of paranoia is
very common in horror fiction.
The uncanny can also come out of things that aren’t seen or understood
properly – things glimpsed through a half-open door, shapes in the dark.
The whole essence of the uncanny is that it’s ambiguous. Look at a masterpiece
such as Henry James’s 1898 The Turn of the Screw. Possibly the apparent
ghosts are real, but equally the stressed governess may be imagining
everything.
It can be hard to create a feeling of the uncanny – the secret is usually to keep
the reader thinking that there is a rational explanation up to the very last
moment. Write a scene in which you create a feeling of the uncanny. Go slowly,
stretch things out and keep them real until you reach a point where the character
realises that he’s seeing something impossible. Then let readers see how
the character reacts.
Seeing ghosts
Even if you’re not writing fiction in a specific horror or ghost story genre, you can
still introduce an element of the uncanny to create tension. For example, a character
may see a person in a crowd who looks like someone who died recently. In
reality, this happens quite commonly, although the person concerned may feel as
though he’s going mad, or has seen a ghost, or even that the person is still alive.