Prior to writing INVISIBLE FIENDS I didn’t really have all that much experience of horror. I’d seen a few horror films in my time, but I’d never really read any scary books, so I came to the genre with fresh eyes, and have hopefully managed to bring some of that to the series.
Since IF was picked up I’ve been dipping in and out of a few horror books for both adults and children. Sometimes I enjoy them. Other times I don’t. But I think I’m learning a little bit from each one.
For those of you considering writing horror, here are three little nuggets of wisdom I’ve picked up over the past few months.
1) Normal is scary.
Too often in many of the books I’ve looked at does the author hurl us almost immediately into the supernatural. Virtually from page one we’re assaulted by vampires or demons or some other ugodly abomination designed to scare the bejesus out of us.
Hurling a reader headlong into the bizarre does your book a big injustice, though. We need some time to understand the characters and their everyday lives. We need to see them at work, or at school, or interacting with their family – anything, as long as it’s what they would normally do were they not characters in a horror book.
None of us can identify with fighting a horde of vampires, but we can identify with doing the shopping, or eating dinner, or watching TV. By hinting at some darkness underlying your characters’ everyday lives, it gives the reader cause to think about their own life, and what dangers might lurk within it.
As the veil of this ‘normal’ reality is slowly pulled aside, the reader becomes increasingly uneasy. And from there it’s but a small step to ‘terrified’.
2. People, not corpses
This one may have been Star Trek’s fault. In the original series of the show, Kirk, Spock and the other lead characters were usually accompanied into danger by at least one unnamed crewman in a red jumper. The second you saw that brightly coloured sweater you knew the crewman was as good as dead. They may as well have painted a target on their chests and held up a sign saying ’shoot here’.
In countless books and movies since then, writers have developed a bad habit of creating characters whose sole purpose is to die horribly. They don’t wear red jumpers any more, but you can still identify them just as easily. They are usually two-dimensional and have almost no bearing whatsoever on the plot of the story. They appear in the story, they bumble about a bit, and then they die. It’s a device used to highlight how terrible the villain of the story is.
And it’s rubbish. Who cares if some cardboard cut-out is swallowed by a monster? Who gives a damn if someone of absolutely no significance to the story has his head torn off by a particularly unpleasant gerbil? No-one. If we don’t care about a character, we don’t mind if they live or die, and no matter how gory or absurd the death, it won’t leave any emotional impact on us.
Even if you know a character is doomed from the start, treat them with the same respect you would any other character in your story. Breathe life into them, make us care about them, and I guarantee their death will not be in vain.
3. Too much excitement is dull
This applies to any type of story, but I’ve noticed horror writers (me included sometimes) are quite bad at trying to cram too much terror into their books.
In an early draft of INVISIBLE FIENDS: MR MUMBLES pretty much my entire story was just a series of increasingly horrifying events happening one after another. I thought just piling on the jeopardy would be a sure-fire way of keeping the reader hooked.
I was wrong. The events of your story should be like a series of waves. Each wave rises (building to the dramatic event), peaks (the dramatic event itself) then fades (a little breathing space for your characters – and readers).
If you just have the first two parts of the wave without the third, we never get to see your characters’ reactions to the story events. Remember tip one? We can’t identify with vampires or monsters, but we can identify with human reactions and emotions. Give your character a little time to recover from each major story event, and let the reader see how the event has affected each character. It’ll help us identify with them more, which will make us care about them more, which in turn will make us keep turning the pages to find out what happens to them.
4. Free, bonus tip!
This really just expands on the last part of what I just said above. Try to keep in mind when you’re writing – regardless of the genre – that people don’t really care about events in a story, they care about the people those events affect. It’s not what happens that makes a story interesting, it’s who it happens to and how they respond to it. That’s why it’s so important to make your characters as lifelike as possible. The more real they seem, the easier it will be for us to identify with them. The more we identify with them, the more it feels like we ourselves are in there living the events of the story with them.
And what’s going to illicit more of an emotional response – a monster lurking under a bed you’ve never seen before, or a monster lurking under your bed, waiting to devour you as you sleep? I know which one would get my attention more.
Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but the creature on the left there has the body, bill and feet of a duck. And yet it has the markings of a seagull. And it was hanging around with seagulls outside Tesco.
and was written by Pat O’Shea.
