: Re: How do I create tension around a threat which isn't immediately, personally harmful? I'm at the end of chapter 1 of my book, where the protagonist (a cyberterrorist) commits his first terror

@Goswami879

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these kind of attacks aren't as exciting as direct terror attacks

Au contraire, they are as exciting as you write them to be. Your job, as the author, is to convey the emotion you want your reader to feel. Whether excitement, fear, abandonment, ecstasy; no matter.

My simplest advice to you is that if you can't make it exciting, then you're not excited by it. And if you're not, there's no way your reader will be. Writers vend an intriguing form of Meisnering, in that it's third-party, nontemporal, but it's still conveying emotion to a reader nonetheless.

So when you're writing that scene, feel it. Put yourself in your characters' shoes, and run through the scenario in first person. What is at stake? What would you be worried about? What would you try to do? Are you calm, are you nervous, are you intrigued by the idea that somebody managed to get past your Triple-blind Encrypted Reverse Proxy TBERPâ„¢ software that six years of Ivy League mathematics helped you build?

Think of all the movies you've seen that this has happened in...

"Something's weird..."

"Define weird."

"I don't know, it's... like something keeps pinging against the CORS."

"Pinging the CORS? Like a DOS attack?"

"I don't think so. It's just a 2-bit packet, it's not-- oh my god, CORS just went down!"

"WHAT?"

"Not just CORS, all three blades just went! What the f--" His sentence is finished by the team mascot, a smartass parrot that keeps repeating WTF, WTF, throughout the remainder of the scene.

Alarms start ringing, "Processor cycles are going nuts... 81% usage, 96... 105!"

WTF!

"How is that possible? 112%, 116%... PC thermal readings rising!"

"121! The server board is going to melt!"

WTF! ASCii art of Donald Trump starts popping up on all the screens in the room

"Firewall is down! TBERP is totally compromised!"

WTF, WTF!!

"Somebody strangle that damn parrot!"

Explosions are physical: action drama. Head games, tension, stress: that's the stuff of psycho drama.

My example is lame. Write something better. You're a writer.

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