JasonTolkien

I'm a terror/horror and fantasy writer. I love writing and reading, because they offer the unlimited power of our imagination. We can put the camera of our mind wherever we want, close-ups, wide angle shots, viewing things from above. We can replay the same scene over and over in our thoughts, putting the camera in different places each time, feeling a variety of experience. Is my writing scary? Only if you do the work of using your imagination to make it so. Otherwise, you can sleep through my "terror" stories. I used to do that, and complain about how boring "horror" was to read. Then I learned that like an actor, readers must become the character, feel what the person in the story feels. I used to think the writer was supposed to do the work of scaring me, now I know that is my work to do. Writers can only offer the possibility of fear through their story. If you do the work of living in the world you imagine, making what you picture in your mind so real you honestly feel you are there, you will be scared by my stories. And everyone else's.

Master of horror H. P. Lovecraft said, "The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside,..." 

Bernard Perron said in Silent Hill: The Terror Engine, "...the expression commonly used to describe the pleasure of immersion in an imaginative world, Coleridge's 'willing suspension of disbelief,' constitutes to passive a formulation. The question is more about an 'active creation of belief,' since we use our intelligence to strengthen the reality of the experience...if you don't 'manufacture particular kinds of belief' and if you remain distant or turn your back on the imaginary dangerous world, the game is over even before it has started."