Tonight is a very short entry. This is from some notes I took at a presentation by author, Dan Wells, during a previous year of my favorite symposium, Life the Universe and Everything. Since much of the presentation was displaying movie clips the text is not as many notes as I have taken at other panels I attended but there is still useful advice. Dan’s panels are always an entertainment. He has excellent humor and good counsel.

– Breaking the normal and make it unexpected. First you must establish what is normal than move out of normal. You need to establish what is common between the characters and then it breaks out of normal when something unexpected happens. Guy talking on phone to woman until he reveals he is watching her.
– Making it unnormal like appliances that act on their own as in the movie ET.
– Waiting for the other shoe to drop. This phrase came from a story of a guy always hearing two shoes drop each night from the apartment above him, night after night. He learns to expect it each night. Then one night only one shoe drops. Audience always knows there has been a shark attack so the main character is waiting for it to happen again and audience is delayed in seeing the shark attack and thus builds the tension. You can build tension by false starts. Tension builds in jaws because protagonist can see shark in water because people are in the way.
– Pushing the fear buttons by having audience experience common fears. I think the movie was minority report (haven’t seen it) people experienced freezing, suffocation, invasion of privacy, things poking into your eyes etc.
Please feel free to give additional suggestions you have on this topic in the comment section of the blog/site.