Writing Horror

A recent question on the BL forums got me thinking. How does one write horror?

As the Paranoia RPG so eloquently put it: Fear and Ignorance, Ignorance and Fear.

Shock, horror and fear are three different emotions and are dealt with differently. Shock is the heart-pounding response to a sudden event. Horror is the distaste that arises from something gruesome. Fear is an underlying doubt, a gnawing feeling that heightens suspense.

All three of these can be conveyed in two ways by a writer; through the characters or direct to the reader.

Shock

Shock can be hard to convey directly to a reader. The written word lacks the immediate visual impact of film or sound, so it only really works if the reader has been totally immersed with the story. The words need to be sudden, jarring. If the ’shocking’ event is overly described, the verbiage of the words lessens the reaction.

In a shower of blood and brains, Damien’s head exploded.

is not as good as

Damien’s head exploded.

Readers can probably (somewhat disturbingly) picture what an exploding head looks like, you don’t need to spell it out for them. Not only the words but the presentation can be toyed with. Just as the characters who are shocked shouldn’t be immediately aware of what’s happening, so too the reader. Allow their imaginations to run riot for a short while before settling their nerves.

Just as important is immediate reaction. The characters need to feel the same shock as the reader. Thundering heartbeats, screams, shouts, bowel-loosening terror! Your characters are the vehicle through which your reader shares the horror with you. If you’ve done your job they care for the characters and when the characters are scared, the reader is also scared on their behalf.

“You’re getting the ice cream,” said Mackenzie.

“Only if you promise to bring a spoon,” joked Damien as he stepped out into the rubble-strewn street.

“Yeah, but -”

Mackenzie’s head exploded.

Damien hurled himself towards the wall of the closest building. Grunting over and over, he curled up where pavement met brick, cradling his rifle across his chest.

Horror

Horror is the loathing and revulsion experienced when something unpleasant happens. All sorts of things can induce horror in the reader; your warped imagination is the only limit! Just as with shock, it’s important that your characters also react with the horror of the reader.

Even if the character doesn’t actually feel shock or horror (a hardened Space Marine for example) it’s important to point out that the horrifying event is having no effect. In this case the reaction is no reaction at all, which in itself says something about the character.

“You’re getting the ice cream,” said Mackenzie.

“Only if you promise to bring a spoon,” joked Damien as he stepped out into the rubble-strewn street.

“Yeah, but -”

Mackenzie’s head exploded.

Damien hurled himself towards the wall of the closest building. Grunting over and over, he curled up where pavement met brick, cradling his rifle across his chest. There were flecks of blood on his shaking hands.

The retort of a rifle shot still echoed along the deserted street.

Panting, Damien shot a glance towards the camouflaged bundle lying in the road. Blood pooled from Mackenzie’s decapitated corpse. The ragged remnants of his face were turned towards Damien, one eye staring at him from a mask of blood. Gritting his teeth, Damien forced back the shout that rose in his throat.

Fear

This is the real goodie. Unlike horror and shock (or panic) fear is not a reaction. It is an anticipation, even expectation, of something bad happening. Fear is founded on tension, the interplay between what might happen and what does happen. Fear is the build-up that makes the shock and the horror more potent. The shock and horror are the release of tension.

Again, the characters’ fear can be transmitted to the reader, but depending on the style of writing and perspective there are other ways to ratchet up the tension. A common trick in films is to have the character(s) being observed by an as-yet unidentified person or thing. It stalks them in full view of the watcher, who wants to warn the characters of the danger. The same can be done in writing. You can make your reader aware of a threat that is unknown to the character. The tension comes about because the reader is unsure whether the character will become aware of the danger before it strikes. Also, you can have one character aware of the danger and other characters not. Don’t underestimate the ‘It’s behind you’ drive.

Entire plots can be driven by fear: A character learns that an assassin is out to hunt him. A plague is sweeping the city, unseen but deadly. There’s nuke in a suitcase somewhere. A piece of shrapnel is close to the character’s heart and could kill him at any moment.  Fear is the Expectation of the Bad Thing Happening.

The interplay between fear, shock and horror are the foundation of ‘Horror’ fiction. The best exponents are able to increase the tension of the reader, heightening their fear, before lowering it again. The tension then rises even higher before subsiding slightly. As a writer you need to toy with expectation, otherwise the situations become predictable and lose their impact. If every fear-inducing scene results in a shock or horror, and the characters deal with it, then the concern for the characters is lessened in subsequent episodes. That’s why shlock-horror slasher movies usually aren’t that scary. They concentrate on shock and horror rather than fear. Body count does not equal fear in itself. When done well the reader almost wants the bad thing to happen just so that it’s out in the open and can be dealt with. Don’t give them that release until it’ll have maximum impact.

 ”You’re getting the ice cream,” said Mackenzie.

“Only if you promise to bring a spoon,” joked Damien as he stepped out into the rubble-strewn street.

“Yeah, but -”

Mackenzie’s head exploded.

Damien hurled himself towards the wall of the closest building. Grunting over and over, he curled up where pavement met brick, cradling his rifle across his chest. There were flecks of blood on his shaking hands.

The retort of a rifle shot still echoed along the deserted street.

Panting, Damien shot a glance towards the camouflaged bundle lying in the road. Blood pooled from Mackenzie’s decapitated corpse. The ragged remnants of his face were turned towards Damien, one eye staring at him from a mask of blood. Gritting his teeth, Damien forced back the shout that rose in his throat.

Damien’s eyes darted across the dark empty windows of the buildings, looking for the sniper. He could have been anywhere amongst the tangle of half-ruined apartment blocks. Was he lining up his next shot at that moment? Was Damien’s head now looming large in a magnified scope?

The urge to run gripped Damien, and immediately met an overwhelming desire to stay still. Flight met fight and Damien was caught inbetween, rocking back and forth. He couldn’t think. His eyes kept drawing back to Mackenzie’s headless body. Damien couldn’t even swear, the words balling up in his larynx, choking him.

Another sound snapped him out of his gibbering: the rattle of falling debris. Damien raised his head with tectonic slowness, fearing to hear the retort of a gun at any moment. Snail-like, he inched forwards until he came to the corner of the building. With a gasp, he realised he had been holding his breath and let it out. Every nerve jangled as he poked his head forward. His eyes were scrunched half-closed and he forced himself to open them fully.

He saw more soldiers at the end of the road, turning from the main square. Like Mackenzie, they seemed oblivious to any danger, strolling along with their rifles slung over their shoulders.

Damien wanted to shout out to them. They needed warning. He swallowed hard and licked his lips, imagining the words coming from his mouth. It was no good, he couldn’t say anything. The fear of revealing his position overwhelmed his concern for the other soldiers.

They made their way past the smoking remnants of an armoured car, chatting away. One of them was handing out cigarettes to the others. Somewhere out there, a bullet was being slid into place, a scope adjusted.

Damien wanted to scream. He wanted them to take cover. ‘Get down!’ he begged mentally, but all the while the fear that writhed in his gut robbed him of speech.

He risked another glance. The squad was about a hundred metres away, sauntering along without a care in the world.

Damien sat back slowly, gnawing his lower lip, dreading the sound of another round being fired. He tasted blood and realised he had bitten through his lip. The metallic taste focused him.

Taking three deep breaths, Damien bellowed.

“Sniper!”

The soldiers scattered, diving for cover. Damien collapsed to the pavement, sobbing. His relief was short-lived as realisation dawned.

Somewhere amongst the war-torn remnants of London, hidden in the maze of collapsed buildings and dark alleys, the sniper was still out there.

Getting Out and About

As well as beavering away on the manuscript for Alith Anar I’ve been busy with arrangements for promotional events to celebrate the release of Malekith. Dates and times are yet to be confirmed but currently planned is an appearance at Warhammer World in mid-December for a launch party, plus signings at GW Derby and Plaza, as well as a visit to Forbidden Planet in London. I’ve also recently finished an interview for Falcata Times magazine, which will be appearing in the Christmas special, and the latest White Dwarf also contains an interview regarding the writing of Malekith and the Time of Legends series in general. We’ll have to wait and see if there’s any overseas events in the pipeline.

If you can get along to one of these, please come and say hello. Saying the secret passphrase “Dennis is da Best” will garner my undivided attention.

 

Addition: Facebookers can find details of the Forbidden Planet signing.

Additional Addition: More details can be found on the Black Library news forum.

Could Digital Publishing Restart Pulp Fiction?

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t really ‘get’ e-books. I understand the principles, but I’m just old fashioned that way. That’s as much about the collector in me as it is the physical qualities of the reading format. I think there’s an ephemeral nature to digital content at odds with the permanency offered by books. I like looking at a shelf full of books more than a list of files on a computer screen. Then again, I thought the same about my CD collection but now my iTunes library is far larger than anything I would have bought physically, and when the day comes that I can have a TV or digital box-thingy that can store movies I suspect my DVD collection will go the same way (I have a stupidly big LCD TV, why would I watch movies on my PC monitor?). Then again, CDs and DVDs are just a storage medium, there’s nothing physical about their qualities that differentiates them from any other. Books are special…

In one area in particular, though, I can see huge potential for digital publishing. Most of the modern fiction genres we all know and love really came into their own through the medium of short stories. Short horror pieces, detective stories, penny dreadfuls, dime novels and pulp magazines were like the movie matinees that created the modern film industry – giving readers a little and often. These days it is the accepted wisdom of publishers that short fiction is generally nowhere near as popular as novels, which is a crying shame. Part of the problem is the expense versus income of putting together an anthology or running a fiction magazine, and even the most popular short fiction magazines have circulation woeful in comparison to their heyday.

Digital publishing changes that. The idea of the monthly serial can return through the computer screen. Already some writers publish their works chapter-by-chapter in this way but that just seems to be a means to an end rather than an end in its own right. I would like to see (and write) short digital fiction for its own sake, with low commitment costs for publishers and consequently low investment cost for the reader. The ability to choose and download single short stories – either to investigate a new author or keep up with an already favoured one – is a logical step that removes some of the hit-and-miss people associate with short fiction collections.

The strength of ‘pulp’ fiction is in its ideas and its availability, unfettered by the narrative constraints of a novel, giving authors and readers freedom to explore and innovate in many directions. By removing the costs of physical publishing, e-fiction can let loose the shackles of commercial pressures and allow that exploration to enter a new phase. What would genre fiction have been without the windows of opportunity available to the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber and many others? Many of them would never have seen the light of day, their works deemed unsuitable for the modern publishing industry – nobody reads short stories, after all…

Doing the Maths

So, the editors at Black Library have approved the synopsis for Alith Anar, the second installment of the Sundering for the Time of Legends series. I know what needs to be written so now I have to go away and write it.

When writing commissioned work it is important to have a schedule – and keep to it! The most obvious milestone is the deadline for the completed manuscript. Usually advances are broken down into further sub-payments – on commission, at some pre-arranged halfway point and on final delivery (or sometimes paid on publication by try to avoid those as the delays can be terribly long between doing the work and getting the cash). ‘Halfway’ may be calendar-based, word-based or some other measure. Different authors break down this work in ways that best suits their working style. Some treat the halfway stage as half the words written and re-written to the ‘final’ standard. In the past I have completed the first draft at halfway and then spent the remaining time rewriting the complete manuscript. That’s the approach I’ll be taking on Alith Anar. That means ‘halfway’ won’t be halfway at all, but more likely two-third to three-quarters of the project timeline.

So, that’s 100,000 words to write. Looking at the calendar, there are 33 working days until Christmas, which give me roughly 3,000 words per day to write if I want to be done before the holidays, which seems a grand aspiration at this stage. That’s eminently achievable – few hours work each day. If push comes to shove, it is possible to write a lot more in a day and also to work weekends, but now that I’m writing full-time that’s something I want to avoid if possible. I find that 2,000-3,000 words a day is a steady pace that allows me to maintain my flow and concentration. When I push my writing beyond this it leaves me tired – in fact on past books I have pulled week-long intensive stints that have left me feeling utterly shattered.

However, you don’t want your writing to descend into a simple number-crunching, quantity-surveying exercise. You have to learn to go with what feels right. That means on some days the part of the book I’m working on will be trickier and maybe I’ll only get a couple of thousand words written. That’s fine, because I also know there will be days when the writing just comes naturally and quickly and I’ll have banged out 5,000 or more in the afternoon, or will feel able to work into the evening. This means that the schedule is not a micro-management of every hour of every day, but rather a means to ensure that overall you are keeping on track. In this case, that means making sure I’ve written about 15,000 words per week.

It’s always a good idea to get ahead of schedule. Unforeseen events – a bout of a winter cold as I’ve just had, for instance – can easily take a writer out of action for two or three days. As with other project management you need to be able to create flexibility ahead of such inevitable delays and also have a contingency if you fall behind. The most important thing is not to panic. Sometimes writers get blocks simply because of the pressure they have heaped on themselves. This often becomes a vicious circle, with the writer putting in more and more hours without making significant progress.

I can’t remember on which novel this happened to me, but it did. After returning from a convention visit to San Francisco, I was tired and jet-lagged but was up against the deadline for the book. A combination of being awake at 2am and having a novel to write were a deadly combination, considering I was also going in to do my games developer job during the day… The novel did get finished just after deadline, but I was a wreck, having not allowed myself to readjust after the jet-lag and frequently surviving on three hours of sleep a night. The impact lasted for several months and I was forced to take a break from the freelance writing while I got myself back on track.

If you feel that the deadline is looming and that you are behind schedule there’s some simple things you can do:

1. Talk to your editor. I can’t stress this enough. Editors don’t like writers who deliver late, but they like it even less if the writer doesn’t warn them. Discuss point 2 with them.

2. Come up with a new plan. Work out how short you are on your deadline and revise the delivery with your editor if possible. This may be as simple as going back to the original plan of X,000 words a day for longer rather than trying to add an extra 1,000 or 2,000 words into the schedule.

3. Take a break. This can be the most difficult thing to do, because it feels that every moment needs to be spent writing. Believe me, even if you just take one day off to go shopping, visit a relative or even just sit around in your pants to play computer games, it can recharge the brain and make you ready for the final push. Even better, plan another day off in the next week or fortnight to ensure you don’t get sucked into the misery of endless writing under pressure. On this day off, enjoy yourself. Know that you have a plan in place and you’re allowed to spend the day doing something else. Make it fun, don’t use the day off to catch up on the housework or do something else worthwhile. The same is true if you are feeling under the weather. Sometimes you can take a couple of paracetamol and get on with it, at other times it really is a good idea to get some bed or sofa rest. Better to be out of action 100% of one day than be at 50% for ten days…

4. Feel the love. Let your friends and family know that you have to concentrate on your writing and may be neglecting them for a short while. They’ll understand if you are honest about the situation, while relationships can become frayed when you send yet another ‘Sorry, not tonight’ text message without explanation. If you’re having difficulties, talk them over with your best pal and often you’ll be able to realise the solution to the problems you are facing. Too often a writer will turn in on himself or herself, feeling like they aren’t a ‘proper’ writer because they are struggling and imagining how easily and naturally it comes to all of those writers on their bookshelf. Truth is, most of those writers struggled too at one time or another and had friends, agents, editors and others to help them through. Why do you think so many folks get name-dropped in ‘Thanks to’ and dedications?

Big Picture

As well as the project management aspects of each novel, I am also now hurtling towards sorting out a much broader schedule. It’s important as a commissioned writer to get a steady flow of work. This means having several irons in the fire at any given stage. Some novels are ideas, others are at synopsis while one will be being written. Where possible you want to be able to move from one project to the next with the minumum of delay. Sure, plan in some celebratory time off when the mss is delivered, but make sure that the next project is ready to be commissioned and start rolling as soon as possible.

This means that I’m going to sit down and look at overall work load. How many novels a year am I going to write? Who for? How do the needs of the different editors/ publishers tessellate into a schedule that I can keep and is useful for them? How am I going to continue to produce work year-on-year? That means not only a conveyor belt of projects but also time for preparatory work, brainstorming, navel-gazing and walks in the park with the iPod to get the juices flowing. The cutting edge of being a writer is sat at a keyboard, pounding out the words. The joy of being a writer is the flights of fancy, the dreaming of characters, stories and situations. If you are going to be a career writer (and are realistic enough to admit that it is going to take many novels to earn a decent income) that means sustainability. Year after year that means generating ideas for novels and writing them.

Sometimes that seems daunting – how many years, how many novels do I have in me? Other times one can sit back and take the longer view and I think ‘Wow, how many cool things am I going to get to write in my lifetime?’