Is Fear Weakening Your Story? 5 Mistakes to Check

Writing about your character’s fear can be tricky because it rarely sits out in the open where everyone can see it. Instead, fear is hidden, rationalized, or the character puts on a mask and pretends it isn’t there at all. Yet when fear is shown well, it becomes an obvious force driving a character’s decisions, behavior, and actions.

Because fear plays such a central role in a character arc, certain mistakes with it can weaken the story. If your character’s inner journey feels a bit confusing, overly complicated, or, on the flip side, too easy, it could be that how fear is being handled is tripping you up. Let’s look at some of the most common pitfalls.

Too Many Fears

Characters, like people, aren’t afraid of just one thing. Very often, their biggest fear spawns new ones, or they develop unrelated fears from other wounding events. Before you know it, you’ve got a Hydra situation, with so many tentacles that it’s hard to identify which fear is the biggest threat.

Take Sabrina, whose fear of flying causes her to turn down opportunities that require long-distance travel. She also has a fear of conditional love, which makes her a people-pleaser who continually seeks to meet the expectations of others. This has contributed to body image issues and a fear of gaining too much weight, which impacts her health.

If we included all these issues in the story, we’d have to address each one with separate turning point scenarios—basically, a separate character arc for each fear. It’s too confusing to write and too convoluted for readers to follow.

Instead, recognize that minor fears (and some phobias) should play a peripheral role. They may present quirks, create inconveniences, or even provide comic relief (looking at you, Indiana Jones), but they shouldn’t be the character’s greatest fear. Whittle down the options to the fear at the character’s core that makes their goal all but unreachable until they subdue it.

Treating Secondary Fears Like Primary Ones

Sometimes the fear you’ve chosen for your character isn’t the primary one causing their problems. Instead, you’ve focused on a secondary fear that sprouted from the first. This is a problem because even if the character addresses it, it won’t remedy the foundational fear that’s causing the issues. To identify the primary one, you’ll have to dig deeper. First, list your character’s fears and strike any that stem from a deeper one. For instance, Sabrina’s fear of weight gain realistically grows out of her fear of conditional love. In this case, we can disregard the former and focus on the deeper fear.

Once you’ve drilled down to what you think is the core fear, make sure it ties into the character’s backstory. Fears are born from certain distressing factors in life: emotional wounds, unmet human needs, negative experiences, and major mistakes or failures. Does the fear tie into any of these for your character? It should. They don’t appear randomly, so if you don’t know what caused a fear to form, you have more backstory research to do.

The Fear Isn’t Connected to the Goal

A character’s greatest fear is part of their inner conflict. They’ve invested a lot of effort learning new ways of thinking and acting that keep fear at bay, but this blocks them from achieving their outer goal, which they desperately need to be whole and fulfilled. In this way, a character’s greatest fear is connected to their story goal. If they’re pursuing an objective that doesn’t somehow touch their fear, there’s a mistake somewhere in their character arc.

To fix the problem, review the main components of their arc (emotional wound, greatest fear, fatal flaw, unmet need, etc.). Spend some time filling in the blanks until the elements connect. When you find which pieces don’t quite fit the rest of the puzzle, adjust as needed.

Overstated Fear

Not every aspect of a character’s fear must be prominently displayed on the page. It’s a lot like backstory. As the author, you should know a lot about your character’s past. But if you write it all into the manuscript, it will become bloated, overloading readers with things they don’t need to know.

The same is true with fears. The story’s turning points can be opportunities for the hero to respond to their fear, but readers don’t need an in-depth narration of their self-awareness and decision-making process every time. Often the most poignant moments are understated. A choice arises, and after a brief internal battle, the character makes a decision. Consequences result. Readers know exactly what transpired, all with a much-appreciated economy of words.

It can be hard to find the balance between sharing too much and not enough. Begin by determining not to spell everything out at every pivotal moment. This is an area where critique partners can earn their dues. Ask them if the fear journey is too spare or heavy at those key points, then flesh out or prune them as needed.

A Herky-Jerky Resolution

We’ve all read stories with meandering, inconsistent subplots, where something’s referenced at the beginning but then peters out, never to be seen again. Or it pops up sporadically, as if the author has just realized it hasn’t made an appearance in a while and needs to be revived.

The same issue can happen when a character’s fear shows up intermittently—often when a crucial conflict appears, because that’s when they’re most likely to be afraid. It’s established in the beginning and overcome at the end, but we don’t see the growth and setbacks along the way. Other times, the journey is too easy, and the character always makes the right choice or overcomes the fear too quickly.

If you struggle to maintain a gradual, realistic progression in your character’s fear journey, use the story’s turning points to map it out (a tool like Story Maps or Beat Sheets can help). This ensures a good number of opportunities for the fear to escalate, ties it into the plotline, and spaces it out in a way that’s satisfying for readers.

Writing fear well means understanding how much it shapes a character’s behavior, choices, and level of growth.

Armed with this knowledge, we can ensure their core fear is connected to the story goal and is playing its role in the character’s transformation.

Looking for more ideas on how fear shapes character behavior and choices (and more help on avoiding story mistakes)? The Fear Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to What Holds Characters Back explores 80+ human fears, from betrayal and heartbreak to powerlessness and death, and shows how each one can create meaningful inner struggles in a story. It releases on April 15th…not long now!

PSST. Our free Fear Factor workshop on How Fear Rewires a Character’s Behavior & Perceptions is on April 11th, at 11 AM EST/9 AM Mountain. Registration is closing soon, so hurry and sign up if you’d like to attend.

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