These are the notes I used when I recently gave a workshop on writing horror to a private Discord group. Since I couldn’t invite anyone to attend, I wanted to share my thoughts with my readers. There are spoilers below for Pet Sematary and what some might feel are spoilers for other novels, so read with care. The workshop was designed for a group of new writers of varying skill sets, so I covered a lot of information very quickly and used examples as appropriate.

Anytime I do a workshop like this, I tend to begin with the big picture and narrow the scope as the workshop progresses. I try to keep in mind learning styles as I teach, but that is a little more difficult with online workshops, because I can’t see faces, I can’t tell if I need to expand on a topic or if everyone is getting bored and it’s time to move on to the next thing.

This is a rather lengthy post but it is what is, and as with all writing advice, please take what you need and leave the rest. —T

There are a lot of great resources both online and off on how to write horror, and I’ve listed a few links and a brief bibliography at the end of this post. Rather than give you a list of steps, I want to give you a broader overview of storytelling in general with some advice on how to write horror. We’ll go over story structure, pacing, and how to build tension in a scene, but these are things to do once you’ve completed your Zero Draft. 

What is a Zero Draft? Kate Elliott coined the term for the very first draft of any story. In the Zero Draft, you’re just getting your ideas, or the bones of the story, down. Fleshing out the story later will create the first draft, and this is where you’ll use a lot of the techniques we’re going to talk about in this workshop.  

I also use a lot of examples when teaching. That’s because while it’s highly important to read in your genre, whether it’s horror, romance, or fantasy, it’s equally important to learn how to analyze a story’s structure, not so you can replicate what another author has done, but so you can understand the basics of story structure, which will, in turn, help you develop your own style. 

For the purposes of this workshop, we’re going to pretend you’ve got the Zero Draft of your story written. In the Zero Draft we don’t worry about things like story structure, or finding the right rhythm in your prose, or even worry too much about spelling. What we’re worried about in the Zero Draft is just getting the story down, because all these other things can be fixed in the edits. 

To plot or pants? Each writer has their own style and preference. I like working from a loose synopsis, because doing that allows me to see if the story’s structure is working. Then I let each chapter lead to the next. This is a combination of using an outline (of sorts) and writing by the seat of my pants; however, before I begin any book, I already know who my protagonist and characters are—including their backstories, what they intend to do, and how I intend to get them to the climax. Having these details ironed out in the beginning will allow you to focus more on the story’s structure as you write.

Horror is about building suspense, which is why so many horror authors can easily transition to the mystery/thriller genre. In some cases, the terms horror and thriller are used interchangeably, but I dislike that categorization, because the two are distinct in that at the true heart of every horror story is fear. 

A solid story structure can help build that fear and carry the reader through a story. Although any of the various story structures can work with horror, we’re going to keep things simple and just going to look at two for this workshop: 

3-Act story structure - inciting incident > rising action > climax and denouement (see Caitlin Starling’s The Luminous Dead or Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter for good examples); or 

Freytag’s Pyramid - inciting incident > rising action > climax > return, or fall, where the tension builds and the story moves toward > catastrophe (see Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre or Stephen King’s Pet Sematary for good examples) 

The 3-Act structure is really quite simple, and I highly recommend it for novice authors, because that simplicity allows you to focus on other aspects of the story in your Zero Draft. Freytag’s Pyramid sounds more complicated than it actually is, and I’ll show you how it works with one of my favorite horror stories, Pet Sematary.

If I had to pick a horror novel that fully exemplifies the genre as a whole, Pet Sematary would be that book; however, that’s not why I picked it for this course. I’m using it because it’s an older work, and many people are already familiar with the plot, either through the novel, the films, or memes, so I don’t feel like I’m spoiling a recent novel for you.

Even so, I want to go over a quick synopsis to draw your eye to specific plot points before discussing how these are implemented in the story’s structure.

In Pet Sematary, we’re introduced to Louis Creed and his family, which includes his wife, their two young children, and the rather infamous Winston Churchill (aka Church), the family cat. Louis is an alcoholic who is running from his past in Chicago, and let’s just say that it’s established very early that Louis doesn’t always make good choices. 

Louis and his family are encountering a new environment, one that invariably contains a menace, which is a person, who isn’t evil, but who, with the best of intentions, directs Louis to an evil place. In the opening of the novel, Louis meets his new neighbor, Jud, who has lived in the area all his life. 

The supernatural aspects of the pet cemetery aren’t introduced until later in the story when the family cat, Winston Churchill, is hit by a car. When Jud suggests Louis use the pet cemetery to bring Winston Chruchill back from the dead, he gives Louis the backstory of the Mi’kmaq burial ground and tells Louis what to do. It’s been a while since I’ve read the story, but I seem to remember that Jud leads Louis to the cemetery that first time. Regardless, after being left at the pet cemetery overnight, Winston Churchill returns, but he is different. And here is where the story takes a definite turn into the uncanny.

It’s critical you understand that in writing horror, you’re building something weird, what Freud called unheimlich—that which is not familiar (which is an overly simplistic definition of the word)—while exploring a familiar fear. King uses his characters and the supernatural aspects of his story to explore the fear of death, but he takes care to entrench his readers in the real world before drawing them into the supernatural.

The first part of Pet Sematary is almost entirely a mundane story of a damaged man, trying to adjust to a new life. Then the deaths begin and just keep coming, and the story grows weirder and more uncanny with each trip to the burial ground.

So, in writing your own work, you want to keep your reader off-balance by first redirecting their focus from the uncanny to the mundane, and just when they think they know what’s going on, slip them into the unfamiliar in by degrees. Let’s look at how King progresses through the events of his story’s structure. Remember, this is an example of Freytag’s Pyramid: 

The inciting incident: Louis meets Jud, the old-timer who has always lived in the area. These two characters bond. Without Jud, Louis would never know about the Mi’kmaq burial ground. 

The rising action: Louis explores the woods, comes to the deadfall, but doesn’t dare try to go over it, because it’s too dangerous. At Thanksgiving, while his family is visiting relatives, Church is hit by a car. Agonizing about telling his daughter about her cat’s death, Louis talks to Jud, who then offers a solution by leading Louis over the deadfall with the dead cat. Here, Jud introduces Louis to the haunted burial ground on the other side of the deadfall. 

The climax: The young son, Gage, is killed, and Louis digs up his son’s body so he can take it to the burial ground and bring his son back to life. Those chapters are an absolute masterclass in tension and supernatural horror. 

The return, or fall, where the tension builds and the story moves toward: Gage comes back to life, but Gage isn’t Gage, and now he goes on a murder spree that includes Louis’s wife, which leads Louis BACK to the burial ground with his wife’s body. 

Catastrophe: Louis is at the kitchen table with his hair gone white and his wife comes home. 

Once you’ve finished the Zero Draft, we’re in my favorite phase, the edit, where we make sure a reader can follow the story, but where we also check to make sure we’re hitting all the right notes. This is where I want to talk a little about your opening paragraph because it is important. 

Unfortunately, I’ve also seen authors twist themselves in knots over it, and having survived that phase of my writing career, I want to assure you it never gets easier. However, you will survive it. Just remember: 

The opening paragraph doesn’t have to be melodramatic, dark, or evil. The trick is to use clear, concise language. 

Let’s look again to Pet Sematary. King shows you the threat in the first paragraph, but it’s not clearly apparent Jud is a threat. This is the sleight of hand I talked about earlier. King quickly establishes the following things: Louis Creed makes a new friend, Louis has a family, and at the very end, we learn of Winston Churchill, who is a pivotal character: 

Louis Creed, who had lost his father at three and who had never known a grandfather, never expected to find a father as he entered his middle age, but that was exactly what happened... although he called this man a friend, as a grown man must do when he finds the man who should have been his father relatively late in life. He met this man on the evening he and his wife and his two children moved into the big white frame house in Ludlow. Winston Churchill moved in with them. Church was his daughter Eileen’s cat. 

All of this feels perfectly normal, because it is. One isn’t introduced into the uncanny aspects of the story until much later, and when that happens, the reader can go back to this paragraph and see what they initially missed: that Jud and Church are the linchpins that propel the events forward. 

Likewise, Stephen Graham Jones establishes his threat/foreshadowing/hook in the first sentence of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter: 

A dayworker reaches into the wall of the parsonage his crew’s revamping and pulls a piece of history up, the edges of its pages crumbling under the fingers of his glove, and I have to think that, if his supervisor isn’t walking by at just that moment, then this construction grunt stuffs that journal from a century ago into his tool belt to pawn, or trade for beer, and the world never knows about it. 

Neither of these things initially appear to be threats, but each author slowly builds their stories and the growing horror around the relationship between Louis and Jud and the found journal respectively. Both authors have pulled a psychological sleight of hand on the reader by having us focus on one event (Louis Creed and his relationship with Jud / a construction worker finds a journal) before settling us into their uncanny worlds and making the surreal real (that a burial ground can bring back the dead / the supernatural contents of the journal). 

Pacing refers to how quickly or slowly a story moves. You don’t want your reader to feel rushed through the story, but at the same time, you don’t want them to feel like the information you’re giving them is unnecessary. 

I like to think of each chapter as a mini essay, where I’m introducing information, which the the reader needs to understand either characterization or the next plot point. Ideally, each chapter should accomplish understanding in both these areas. 

Each chapter should carry your plot forward and introduce the next plot point by the end of that chapter. You want to leave a hook—an unanswered question or a cliffhanger of some sort—within each chapter if you can. These hooks keep your reader guessing and invested in the story. 

Think of your story as a haunted house or a cornfield maze. You want to lead your reader through without getting them lost, but you also don’t want them bored.  

In a horror novel, the chapters should become more and more threatening or uncanny as the story’s arc is completed. This is where your alpha and beta readers can be an immense help. They can tell you where the story is dragging or where they feel confused. 

HOWEVER, and I always add this as a caveat to any author: Your alpha and beta readers are not always right. Learn to trust yourself. You know what your story is about and how you need it to go. 

Pacing will greatly depend on what kind of horror novel you’re writing. A splatterpunk (slasher fiction) novel will move at a much faster pace than a haunted house novel, where the suspense and backstory unfolds slowly.

I’m going to hammer this point home: always use clear and concise prose. You don’t want your reader guessing what you mean, especially in a horror novel where you’re building suspense and making the surreal believable. 

For example: Take the following sentence: 

Rhi saw something spooky move under the soil. 

There is nothing wrong with the sentence, it’s structurally sound, and it does the trick. You’ve told your reader that your protagonist has seen something weird. But “something” could be anything and really doesn’t seat a clear idea in your reader’s mind. 

If you want to give the sentence a chill, be clear: 

Rhi glimpsed a pale tendril wiggle beneath the soil. 

The second version of that sentence directs your reader to a concrete threat, not some nebulous concept. Even so, notice I don’t go into a deep description of the “pale tendril.”  

Trust your reader to fill in some of these blanks. Rather than indicate a generic movement, I changed the word to “wiggle,” which evokes a specific image. Some will imagine a worm, others a snake, still others Cthulhu, all of it depending on their personal fears. 

The reader still doesn’t know the real extent of the threat, but they have a much clearer mental image, which will stroke their fears. 

I know you’ve all heard the rule of Chekov’s gun, which is “don’t show a gun in chapter X unless it goes off in chapter Y,” but in horror, you show the gun in chapter X so you don’t have to waste time describing the gun in the middle of the action in chapter Y. The difference is that the “gun” is seemingly mundane and introduced in stages. 

Likewise, you don’t want to plant all your “guns” in one chapter. Sprinkle these various items throughout the chapters, so you don’t fall into info dumping on your reader. 

Ways to increase that dynamic tension: 

Use shorter sentences when you’re trying to ramp up the tension in a scene. 

The environment can be utilized to increase tension (a storm that increases in intensity as the events unfold, a house that is slowly falling apart as the story progresses, glimpses in a mirror or window that startle the character). 

Sounds, scents, lighting ... these are all good ways to help describe the rising tension. It’s not necessary to use them all at once but think of them as herbs in a recipe: a little enhances flavor while too much can overpower the dish. 

Since these things can be kind of spoiler-rific, I’ll give you a scene from one of my novels, which is dark fantasy. Here are the “guns” that were planted in the previous eleven chapters: 

Diago and Lorelei are supernatural creatures—Diago is a nephil and Lorlei is a Rhinemaiden; 

Music plays a large part of this story, and the violin haunting Diago is his lost Stradivarius; 

The nephilim experience chromesthesia, sound-to-color synesthesia, which is a type of synesthesia whereby sound involuntarily evokes an experience of color, shape, and movement. The nephilim use the vibrations of sound to form sigils, which is how they work their magic; 

The final line of this scene was established at the beginning of the book through Diago’s recurring nightmare of WWI; 

They are sneaking into Germany under cover of the night, and the year is 1932. 

Here is the section, and watch for when the sentences begin to pull up sharp to increase the tension: 

Diago and Lorelei had the cover of a moonless night, but she showed no inclination to begin their journey until midnight, when she gestured for him to follow her. Silently, they uncovered her boat. Diago helped her push it into the water. 

Lorelei rowed with long easy strokes, knowing when to pull hard and when to drift; she guided the boat as if she swam beneath. They were over halfway across when he heard the first siren’s song: a deep haunting sound, like the wind in pain, crying, crying . . . 

Lorelei hissed through her teeth. 

Another voice joined the first Rhinemaiden and they harmonized: “Come down, come down, come down into the river, into my arms so sweet . . .” 

He felt their song touch his will, but the effort was as tentative as a tug from Rafael on his sleeve. They think I am a mortal. They’re not trying very hard. 

Before the sirens could strengthen their song, Diago felt another assault on the back of his mind. The violin screeched in raw discordant notes. 

Someone dropped it. His heart stuttered at the thought. Fine. Drop it, destroy it. He didn’t care as long as the hateful thing finally ceased its hold on his mind. 

In the ensuing silence, something bumped against the side of the boat. He tried to convince himself it was flotsam. Then the sirens’ song came again, louder, more intense. He recalled the angel Candela and the golden snake she’d used to enchant him. I will give you a song . . . 

He resisted the urge to lash out at either the Rhinemaidens or the ghost-music from the violin. Even a sigil of protection could work against him by alerting the Rhinemaidens to his supernatural nature. On land, he might fight them and win. On the river, he would be helpless as water filled his lungs. 

Under normal circumstances, his voice was his life, but silence was his best weapon now. Lorelei was his protection. He had to trust in her. 

“Almost there,” Lorelei’s mutter caused him to open eyes he hadn’t realized he’d closed. 

No lights burned on the opposite shore. They might as well be floating into an abyss. 

He needed something to occupy his mind, something to drive the Rhinemaidens’ insistent song from his thoughts. Shutting his eyes again, he counted backward: five hundred, four hundred and ninety-nine, four hundred and ninety-eight . . . 

The first Rhinemaiden whispered, “Come into my arms and I will sing you a song.” 

. . . four hundred and ninety-seven, four hundred and ninety-six, . . . 

The squawk of the violin struck his consciousness. Diago envisioned a hand grasping the neck. Long tapered fingers—lovely hands—took their position on the strings—white so white could a mortal be so white? 

He forgot to count. Lethargy suffused his limbs. It would be easy to slide beneath the waves and sleep . . . 

“In my arms,” sang the second maiden. Cold fingers caressed the back of his hand. 

Then came the attack and punch against the strings—three quick jabs of the bow: strike, strike, strike—and then a pull, slurring to become the malignant leitmotif Diago now called his own. The violence of the music wrenched him from the somnolence induced by the Rhinemaidens’ song. Arpeggios reverberated blue and deep like the waves sloshing against the side of the boat. 

The tempo picked up speed, the beats coming harder, faster like the slap of fins (oars) on the water. The wind touched his face, and the promise of a melody was whispered to his mind. 

Return to me, and I will give you a song, wept the violin with long, sweeping strokes that floated over the night deeply, sadly, moving into a dirge. The notes faded, softer and softer, shifting into a tremolo so that the bow quivered over the strings until the water drowned the last of the chords, and five heartbeats passed with nothing but the splash of oars to fill the quiet . . . 

Then the bow resumed its attack and punch against the strings (strike, strike, strike) and the boat hit the opposite shore, and the night came down, and the world went black, and silence descended quick and hard, like the stillness that follows the falling of a bomb. 

Everything in this scene has already been established in the readers’ minds long before I hit the action. That way I can just refer to the violin, the Rhinemaidens, and the nightmare without having to stop and tell the reader what is going on. 

The tension is ramped up by shortening the sentences about midway through, but also through the rhythm of the various songs assaulting Digao’s mind. The story is about the power of music, so I tried to use rhythm in my prose. One of the best ways to see if a scene like this is working is to read it out loud, and then when you’re happy with it, turn it over to your trusty alpha/beta readers. 

Show don’t tell: Show don’t tell, except when you need to tell ... wait! What? 

Show don’t tell is some of the worst writing advice authors can get. Note that in the opening paragraphs of the bestselling novels above, the authors tell you what’s going on. There aren’t waves and waves of descriptive prose, because it’s not needed. The authors seat the reader firmly in the stories from the get-go by ... wait for it ... telling. And it’s quite effective. 

But even as King initially tells you about Louis’s eventual love for Jud as a father-figure, he goes on to show the reader how that relationship develops through the story, and when everything eventually turns dark, the reader is swept away in the narrative. Even as Jones tells the reader about the found journal, he goes on to show why it’s important to the narrator, and then he revels the journal’s contents over the course of the novel.  

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use descriptive prose. What it means is that you, the author, need to find the right combination of show and tell that effectively conveys your story to your reader. This isn’t something you can do by following strict “writing rules,” which I tend to avoid. This is simply something you learn by doing, by writing, by making mistakes, and by learning from those mistakes to become a more effective writer. 

Less is more: Unless you’re writing body horror or splatterpunk (slasher fiction), in which case more is definitely called for. It all depends on the type of horror that you want to write, so read books that tell the same kind of story you want to tell. Folk horror is often tied to the land, haunted buildings and body horror tend to build suspense slowly. Haunted houses are more mind-games and body horror tends to be more graphic. This is the time to meet reader expectations.

Damaged People: Most characters in horror novels are damaged people. THEY think they’re fine, but the reader can clearly see trouble coming. One of the most poignant I can recall recently reading is Starve Acre. It’s about a family with a child they simply don’t understand, and that child is possessed by something horrible, and then the child dies, and here, two grieving people are each trying to cope in their own way while something evil slips into their lives. It was a hard story to read and one that is a perfect example of how the surreal can leech into the characters’ lives. 

Supernatural Rules: Just as fantasy has rules for its magic, supernatural horror has rules, and while these rules are sometimes defined by myths or established tropes, you need to establish your version of these rules in your readers’ minds. When does the horror begin in your story? When the rules get broken, or when the rules don’t?

There’s a saying that there aren’t any original stories, but don’t let that frighten you. (See what I did there?) 

There are horror tropes, and just like a romance novel where two people meet and after a series of unfortunate events they fall in love with a happily ever after, so too does horror have its tropes—they're just not as pleasant. 

Let’s look at a couple: 

Summoning evil: This a great one and it’s used a LOT. You know the drill: teenagers get together and summon evil, usually accidentally, and then they can’t put the Ouija back in the board. One of the most effective uses of this trope is actually a movie (Talk to Me), which is about a group of teenagers who grip a severed, embalmed hand so they can become possessed by a dead spirit. It’s a party game that goes bad. 

Usually in these situations, it’s a Ouija board or someone finds an old book and summons a demonic being, but in Talk to Me, the writers flip the trope to become a severed embalmed hand. And it’s all fun and giggles until the wrong person gets possessed and someone else holds the hand too long ... 

What’s the rule and does it get broken? To prevent spirits from binding themselves to the hand holder, someone else must end the possession before 90 seconds by pulling away the embalmed hand and blowing out a candle, but when that rule gets broken, one teenager jeopardizes her own life to fix the error. The harder she tries to undo the damage, the more horrific the results, leading to the climax.  

Found Footage: Stephen Graham Jones spins his historical horror with a found journal in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. It’s an easy trope, so an author needs to invent some way to tell the story coherently and a way to put the trope on its head. Jones does both by having the journal found by a woman trying for tenure, she reads the journal, which is written by a distant relative, who is writing the journal about how a Native American told HIS story to the journalist. Talk about your Russian nesting dolls ... and it works because Jones takes his time to build the story without sacrificing his pacing. 

What’s the rule and does it get broken? What the vampire eats, the vampire becomes and no, the rule remains consistent throughout the novel. Therein lies the horror. 

The point here is simply this: take a trope and have fun with it. Use your imagination. Read old myths and fairy tales, find a trope that works for you, bend the rules, and run with it. 

New authors tend to get bogged down in writing advice, and writing advice is like any advice, it usually works best when it’s not followed rigidly (see Show Don’t Tell). That’s why I tend to focus on story and structure. Tell a good story. Once you’ve got the story down, then you can tweak it however necessary to fit into a genre. 

Before beginning a story, write a sloppy synopsis just for you. You don’t have to follow it precisely, but writing a synopsis gives me a good idea of what works and what doesn’t before I get hip-deep into the story and then must backtrack to rewrite portions of it. 

Agents, authors, and publishers will put a lot of emphasis on a story’s opening, and I’ve seen a lot of novice writers really freak out about it. I understand the desire to grab a reader’s eye from the first sentence but take a deep breath and just tell your story. 

When writing the opening (of any story for that matter), keep the language sharp and simple. I’ve seen some novice writers trying too hard to be something they’re not with over-the-top flowery prose, or trying too hard to be dark, dark, dark, or cramming way too much action into a single sentence. Take your time. 

Read and study successful novels to analyze the story structure. You'll learn more through that exercise than any other “how-to.” 

And finally, and most importantly, have fun. Write what you love, because you will be reading it again and again and again and again ... 

How to Write Horror - With Cynthia Pelayo Cynthia outlines eight steps for writing horror.

Popular Horror Tropes at Writer’s Digest is a great list of tropes used in horror. 

The Reedsy blog has a great list of story structures with examples. (Disclaimer: I know nothing about Reedsy or the blog other than they have some nice charts which makes the various structures easy to understand.) 

Stick the Landing: How to End a Horror Story by Peter Derk. Peter gives some great ways to make sure your story ends in such a way as to impact your readers. 

The “Uncanny” by Sigmund Freud. 

Horror Trope Thesaurus by Jennifer Hilt (ISBN: 9798352214596)  

On Writing Horror: A Handbook by the Horror Writers Association (ISBN: 9781582974200)  \

Save the Cat! Writes Horror: The Ultimate Guide to Creating Monster in the House Stories by Jamie Nash (ISBN: 9780984157655)