: Re: Can non-interactive stories make an audience feel guilt, and if so, how? Interactive stories can do this quite easily- give the audience a choice, reveal choice to be a bad one, everyone is

@Berryessa137

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I will not have anything to offer that is as technical and full of advice as the other responses here, but I can tell you this:

Hideaway by Dean Koontz

A story about two people becoming psychically linked, at first they do not know that what is happening is real or that it is happening to the other person as well. Enter protagonist, a normal older gentleman sweet as pie suddenly has a vision of killing someone. It is real. It is visceral. He is seeing this from the first person view, lifting hands and seeing them bloody, feeling the pulse of the person being strangled throbbing beneath his fingertips, the anxiety of doing this actually doing this deed and the unraveling of a perfectly sane man virtually living out these experiences. It was terrifying but here is where your answer comes in. I had to stop a couple of times just to catch my breath and walk it off.

At some point I found myself thinking, "yeah, the way that he arranged that body doesn't fit with the rest, what is missing is that he needs this over here and incorporate something with it like..." and it hit me. The thought of arranging a dead body in a certain way made total sense. Me. In my bedroom, before bed. Me, identifying with the insane logic of an insane person doing an insane act... and I am not insane. He did such a good job of pulling you into the though process of the killer that you begin to think like a killer, you understand his twisted idea of logic and then... with hope.. you are horrified that you were just in that place, in that space with him.

Yes, a writer can make the reader feel guilt, actual guilt for the actions within a book or story. He brought me closer than I ever want to be to the act of killing someone.

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