Lesson 1 of 8 - The Craft of Fear: Writing Horror That Does More Than Just Scare
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Hi everyone!
Welcome to the KKU takeover of the Forever Workshop — I’m your host, Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya (feel free to call me Kayla or KKU!), and we’re going to be talking all things HORROR over the span of this course. A bit about me: I’m the managing editor of the LGBTQ online magazine Autostraddle. I’m a lesbian, a Gemini, a tennis player, and I live in central Florida. Queer theory will often be baked into my lessons, because I’m incapable of not relating things back to queerness, but straight people you are welcome here; I am your #ally.
Now, because of how the Forever Workshop works, I’m sure there are plenty of you who do not write horror, have perhaps never considered horror, and maybe even think there’s no way in hell you would ever write horror or have anything to gain from a horror craft course. Allow me to attempt to persuade you otherwise.
I think all writers can gain insight, skills, and knowledge from studying the craft of horror. Horror is all around us, is it not? We’re living in an ongoing genocide, “crisis” doesn’t even really cover the state of our climate and natural world right now, and capitalism is making it harder and harder for us to simply exist. Writing horror can sometimes be a way for us to explore, interrogate, shed light on, and grapple with the horrors of reality.
Even if your goals are to make work that serves as an escape from the horrors of the world, I still think there’s much to be gained from studying horror craft, which can teach us so much about pacing, tension, emotions and interiority, place-writing, mood-setting, relationships, what have you! If horror craft lessons feel extremely out of your comfort zone, I’d argue that’s exactly the reason to give it a whirl. I strongly believe as writers we should constantly be pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones, and I often discuss the concept of “disrupting” your own creative process.
Don’t worry — when I say “disrupt” I don’t mean it in a tech bro way. And I’m not talking about changing, like, where you sit when you write or anything like that. Disruption is stepping outside of your comfort zone or challenging yourself to write in a way or mode that isn’t your default. That can be as simple as a process switch-up like writing the middle part of a story first and then writing the beginning and end. Or it can be trying your hand at writing horror even though you never have before.
Every lesson will have a mix of readings, explanation of concepts, discussion questions, and prompts often inspired by the readings. It’s best to work through the lessons in chronological order, as they build on each other, but you might also find it useful to return to previous lessons as we progress and apply new tools to past prompts.
HAVE I CONVINCED YOU THAT HORROR IS FOR EVERYONE YET? No, I get it, I totally understand if you are squarely like horror is not for me. But horror can look like a lot of things, which I think you’ll come to realize over the course of this workshop if you give it a shot.
What is horror writing?
Stripped down to its basics, horror is any writing meant to instill sensations of fear, unease, disturbance, disgust. Horror writing is often speculative — but not always! Realist horror exists, too, and a lot of my favorite horror stories tend to straddle the line between what is real and what is not. (The next lesson is all about this concept of ambivalence, so stay tuned!) You can write horror in any genre: poetry, nonfiction, fiction, screenwriting, etc. A lot of the examples we’ll be looking at throughout the course are fiction, and I’ll be focusing mainly on horror fiction, but please feel like you can be genre expansive when it comes to any of the writing exercises, prompts, and discussion in the comments.
In truth, I hate definitions. The second I define a term, especially when it comes to creative work or writing, I have an urge to refute my own definition or to expand on it. In a queer horror workshop I teach called Gays & Ghouls, I open the class by encouraging everyone to write their own definitions of “queer horror,” and then we return to those definitions at the end of the class so they can use what we talked about or what they discovered on the page to rewrite or add to them.
The definition of horror above only scrapes the surface; it hinges on the feelings horror is meant to invoke in the reader, but that doesn’t cover the full expanse of what horror is or what horror does. There are many common devices of the horror genre: ghosts, haunted houses, demons, monsters, body horror, the supernatural, curses. We’ll talk about all of those in future lessons. And hopefully you’ll come out of it with your own expansive, swirly ideas about what horror is and what horror does.
Elements of horror
At the end of the day, the elements of horror are the same as the elements for any fiction: setting, characters, plot, themes, etc. But here are some questions to potentially consider about each of these elements when you’re writing a horror story (or essay! Horror essays can absolutely exist, and we will read some together!):
Setting
How does your setting contribute to feelings of unease in your story?
There are many common settings for horror stories — the woods, a haunted house, remote locations, etc.
If you’re employing one of these common settings, how can you subvert expectations about them or otherwise inject something original?
Is the setting itself a source of horror?
For example, This is always true for haunted house stories as well as climate horror stories.
If the setting itself is a source of horror, why do your characters continue to stay there?
Okay, so weird stuff is happening in this place. How do you justify continuing to keep your characters there? Does an outside force keep them trapped? Are they choosing to stay for a psychological reason? Which brings us to…
Characters
How much do/does your character(s) know or not know about what’s happening around them?
You can play with the dynamics of this as you go, too. Maybe they begin very unaware and then become more aware. Maybe they’re always a bit confused or uncertain. The next lesson in this course will be all about ambivalence, so stay tuned!
How much interiority are you providing?
How much access do we have to the character’s thoughts and feelings as they’re experiencing horror? What parts are you withholding and why?
What do your characters fear?
A fun and often effective approach to writing horror is to consider an abstract, deeply human fear and then literalize it in the form of a horror situation. So, say a character is afraid of being abandoned by the people they love and then the people they love start mysteriously disappearing.
How do your characters experience and process fear?
What does it feel like in their bodies? What goes through their minds as they’re afraid?
How does the source of horror interplay with your character’s motivations and desires?
Or, in other words, what does your character want and how does the source of horror play into that? Does the source of horror provide an obstacle? Heighten the desire? Undermine it? Function as a metaphor for it?
What’s the point of view and tense and how much distance does your main character have from the events of the story?
Tense has a lot to do with plot + pacing, which we’ll get into next, but it’s also connected to character in terms of narrative distance. Do you have a narrator recounting what happened to them with some distance (a lot of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories follow this structure, for example), or is the horror happening in present tense and therefore we’re experiencing it in tandem with the character? Is the story told in first? In second, third limited, omniscient? And how does your choice of tense inform the way the horror functions?
Plot + Pacing
Where does your story begin? And how does it end?
You don’t have to know for sure if you’re starting in the right place or how the story will end before you start drafting — it’s very possible you’ll figure these things out as you go. But what do you want the shape of your story to resemble?
Are there twists?
If so, what are they, and how do they unfold. Are they just twists for the sake of twists? Then maybe reconsider and try to develop twists that do more than just “trick” the reader.
What is the narrative tension?
How much does the reader know or not know about what’s happening? This goes hand-in-hand with the question of how much your character(s) know. Dramatic irony can be a way to build narrative tension.
Does the writing feel dynamic and have a rhythm to it?
Horror shouldn’t scream all the time. In fact, it’s usually in moments of silence and restraint that we can scare the reader best. The loud sound in a horror movie might be the thing that makes you jump/scream, but that wouldn’t happen if not for the silence and build up that precedes it.
Themes
Does the source of horror represent something?
Is it a metaphor with a real-world analog?
Are there human emotions/experiences you hope to explore through the lens of horror?
Common themes to explore in horror are grief, death, familial dysfunction, fractured relationships, societal injustice.
Is there a specifical mythology you’re working with?
There doesn’t have to be! Your horror can stem from a clear mythology or explanation or it doesn’t have to and can be more abstract or even — gasp! — unexplained
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These questions are merely meant to jumpstart the horror brainstorming process. They’re not exhaustive or requisite. They’re just meant to get you thinking about how to craft effective horror within the general elements of fiction.
Expectations for the rest of the course
Even though we aren’t physically in the same space together or doing the readings and exercises at the same pace, I do want you to treat this newsletter course as a generative and interactive experience. I can’t wait to talk to you in the comments about the readings, concepts, and writing exercises from the course. When doing the writing prompts, I encourage you to be playful, expansive, and messy. Draft wildly rather than flawlessly. Don’t get too caught up on whether something is “working” or not. Just descend.
Given the fact this is a horror course, many of the readings will contain disturbing imagery or descriptions, and since we’re such a sprawling group, there’s no easy way for me to flag all possible content warnings to suit everyone’s needs, but I will include a one-sentence description of each story that will hopefully give a broad sense of its particular horrors. If you need to skip a particular reading, feel free to do so, or you can ask me any questions about the readings (all of which are short) before you delve in.
Links to the readings will be followed with jumping off points for discussion, but you aren’t required to answer/respond to those suggested discussion topics. They’re just there to get the ball rolling.
Have fun! Take risks! Be like a horror movie character and go into the creepy basement even if your gut is telling you not to! Write the things that scare you!
In our next lesson on Thursday October 10th, we’ll pull inspiration from real-life strangeness, master restraint and ambiguity, and create curses! If you’d like to receive this …
hi all! thanks for joining! happy to answer any questions or even just chat. i know there isn't a formal writing prompt for this lesson, but if you're wanting to do some writing, I'd love you to consider the question of why you write horror or, if you're new to it, why you want to write horror. no need to share your answers, but you can if you like!
After reading this intro lesson, I realize a story in need of revision has wanted to be horror all along. I’ve never tried horror. Can’t wait to get started. Thank you!