In Honor of Halloween: How to Write Horror

Halloween approacheth, people, and you know what that means. Bad horror movies on TV, cheerful be-costumed kids warbling "trick-or-treat" at the door -- and a chance to write some good old fashioned horror stories. As it so happens I'm currently studying a few stories from Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in an English class and I thought I'd write down a few thoughts about writing like the pros. At least, this is what I've observed in good gothic fiction. So, continuing the how-to's:

How to Write Horror or Gothic Fiction

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Step One: Read
As always with writing, it's immensely important to read, read, read, and learn from what you read. Before you leap up to write a horror story, try reading some first. Poe redefined how we use the word grotesque in his fiction, so he's a great place to start. He uses the supernatural and grotesque, but to a skillful restrained effect, leaving much of the horror in the mind of the protagonist and the reader. It's a wonderful technique to leave the paranormal as ambiguous in your story, so you're never quite sure if it's all in your head or not. After the jump: steps two through six.

Step Two: Start with the Normal
The paranormal won't seem frightening and surreal if you haven't established a mundane, perfectly real context to throw it into. Your characters must be terrified by what they see (or think they see), so to do that, you have to place them in a non-frightening setting first. Have them go to school or their jobs, or put up with an annoying relative's visit. Anything that's perfectly mundane. Fixing a leak in the toilet. Doing homework. It's all good stuff.

Step Three: Set Your Scene
Horror writing is all about two big things: mood and atmosphere. Once the normal scene-setting is over with, you need a setting that is very evocative of loneliness, isolation, mystery, and fear. A lonely moor. A dark old house. Back alleys in a rough part of the city. Old settings are particularly good; if you make your setting too modern and trendy, you'll risk sounding like a parody. If you really want to scare the pants off your readers, use old-fashioned settings that have had centuries to build up dust, mold, and rot. Graveyards are always lovely; old churches or ancient forests are great too. Your description should be lush and vivid; it's all about setting the tone for scariness. Without this crucial setting of the atmosphere, you'll never get your readers scared later on.

Step Four: Follow the Rules
I'm all for flouting authority and defying convention, but some storytelling rules in the gothic world exist for a reason: it's because there are specific ways to scare us as readers, and specific ways that are guaranteed to fail. Here are a few rules to live by. As Chekhov said, a gun that is introduced in the first act must go off in the third act. What he meant by this is that readers have certain expectations about what will happen, especially when you important significant props or techniques in the story such as guns. If you mention that a ghost haunts some house early on in the story, you can't never have that ghost show up; it will only be anticlimactic and disappointing to readers. Other rules about keeping a story scary without losing the tension: don't have too many false alarms (this is cheaply manipulating the reader, and the reader will resent it), and obey the rule of three. We have the rule of three very strongly imprinted on us from a culture of folk-lore and myth. Three days of spinning straw into gold, three quests, three witches, etc. Two is too few and four is too many! Trust me, we all feel it instinctively when the rule of three is violated.

Step Five: Be Original
Or what I really mean by this is, avoid cliches! Following the rules doesn't mean turning out something that is formulaic; there is plenty of breathing room within those rules to create something truly new. Avoid cliched phrases (he jumped for joy -- she was pale with fright -- she screamed like a banshee, etc) and think of original ways to describe that ancient human emotion of fear. It's probably the oldest human emotion, come to think of it, but there's always a new way to describe it.

Step Six: "Don't just say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream." - Mark Twain
I've mentioned this before on Creative Writing Corner, but it's particularly relevant to horror writing. The only way a reader will get goosebumps is if you the writer fully inhabit a scene and make it come alive. We respond when things seem to be happening right that very moment, right in front of us. See my post on capturing the moment.

Good luck fledgling horror writers! Here's hoping you send a chill down a reader's spine.

Comments

[M. Edward Arthur]

Horror Short Shorts under Ed's Board. Out there, bizarre.

[zoe]

these were good tips