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Chapter 14: Using Description to Create Atmosphere and . . . and . . . Suspense!
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Try out a ghost in your own story – you don’t have to keep it if it doesn’t fit –
or you can make it happen when your character is under the influence of
medication, drink or drugs! Write a scene in which a character sees a ghost.
How does he react? What does it change about his attitude to life or to other
characters in the story?
Creating suspense in your sleep:
Dreams and premonitions
Dreams are a powerful device used in fiction to create atmosphere, to reveal
characters’ hopes and fears, and to foreshadow the future. Because we all
have dreams every night – even though we may not remember them – we are
all familiar with this strange alternate state where the rules of the everyday
world do not apply.
Dreams and visions
Writers often use dreams in fiction to foreshadow events. In biblical and
ancient times, the interpretation of dreams was considered an important art,
because people thought that dreams could predict the future. This belief has
persisted into modern times, and people still feel that their dreams can sometimes
predict future events.
You can also undercut the expected associations, however, by depicting your
character having dreams that show the opposite of what will happen; for
example, a character dreaming of failing an exam and then finding that he has
in fact passed. The stress and anxiety that a character feels causes him to
dream about what he fears happening rather than what really will happen.
You encounter many examples of dreams foreshadowing events in Shakespeare,
such as Calpurnia’s dream in Julius Caesar, which goes:
. . . she saw my statue,
Which, like a fountain with an hundred spouts,
Did run pure blood.
—William Shakespeare (Julius Caesar, Wordsworth Classics 1992,
first performed 1599
In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877), Anna’s fate is foreshadowed not only by
the event at the train station (see the earlier section ‘Owning omens’), but
also by a series of dreams in which she sees the sinister figure of a railway
worker tapping the joints between the carriages. These dreams reinforce the