Talk:The Truth of Fear/@comment-247250-20150401223029/@comment-247250-20150408144929

I'm aware that creepypasta is not based in reality. I just take writing seriously. You want to write something scary or interesting or funny, it better be those things or I'll have a problem with it. In this case, your story didn't make sense, not just as jiving with reality but because of the issues I mentioned.

That said, maybe I was being too mean. Re-evaluating it, and breaking up my score slightly, I'd give it a 6/10 for the idea and a 3/10 for the style and execution. Overall, 4.5/10.

I still stand by my criticism that fear doesn't "take over your body" and I definitely stand by the fact that the common experience you cite is far too specific.

Your opening sentences seem to imply that most people would simply assume not just that something is amiss when they hear a creak at night, but that they are literally going to die ("...and stayed still out of fear, not wanting to be killed? Of course you have."). This I think is a rash assumption to make, and I definitely think it's out of the ordinary. We don't suddenly get overwhelmed by the sense that we're about to die, we momentarily pause to listen (or look) for danger. Adrenaline begins to flow and out muscles prime for a fight or flight response, but that's vastly different than simply being paralyzed by fear that we're about to be killed. It's a very different sort of psychological and physiological response. Perhaps I'm reading you wrong, but the way it's currently written seems to me to be saying something that is a massive exaggeration of what really happens.

"You are saddened with your life, depressed at what has happened..." I take issue with this as well. Not only is this not the case for plenty of people, but the second part is so exceptionally vague that it should probably just be removed.

"...but yet you fear the things that go bump in the night." Just because we react to something doesn't mean we're afraid. We pause, we listen, we do a double take, but to my thinking there's a big gap between that and actually fearing it.

"How can someone with no fear of death fear these creatures?" And what if the reader fears death, as many do? In my experience there aren't that many people who are honestly unafraid of death. (You've also implicitly done away with the idea that those that go bump in the night might not be creatures but given the nature of the work, that's fine.)

"Have you ever seen one of these creatures kill someone?" To a paranoid mind, I can see how a bump in the night can be immediately turned into a creature lurking in the darkness, waiting to pounce. And the sentence I've quoted here is the beginning of the inversion of that assumption, as I take your story's point to be. But before we get to the inversion, you as a writer need to bring us, your non-paranoid readers to the point where we're willing to accept that the bump in the night is in fact a creature, and not just a bump.

"But in those stories, you never hear what happens to the character after his disappearance, do you?" Obviously when a creature supposedly takes someone and they disappear mysteriously, the implication is that they don't come back. As the writer trying to invert the expectations, you should be trying to give us reasons to think that maybe the disappearance isn't because of a bad thing. Your last sentence ("...how can these creatures make your life better if you keep hiding from them?") stumbles into the finish line without giving us any lead up to that point.

Were I doing a rewrite, I would do the following:

1) Make the focus of the first paragraph less extreme. We aren't afraid of what goes bump in the night because we're afraid of getting murdered, we're physiologically reacting with a fight or flight reflex. You started to get into that but backed off too quickly. Get more into the physiology of why we react the way we do.

2) Give us reasons to think that maybe what happens isn't so bad. What would you do if you were taken from your relatively drab life and taken to paradise? Would you return home? If you were taken without warning, would you leave to go home, knowing you might not be able to come back? And if you would stay, how would anyone else know where you went, or why? These kinds of questions might be a better way to transition the reader to thinking about the conclusions you want them to draw.