How to Write Short Horror #1: Character Description
When writing a short story, detailed character description is only really necessary when you need to emphasize a character’s looks. Most of the time, you can give a short description of a character that infers a look in the mind’s eye of the reader…In other words, let their imagination fill in the rest…
How to Write Short Horror #2: Tailoring Your Prose
Your prose (your writing ability, your eloquence in the written word, or in a much broader sense, your writing style) can be tailored to fit your characters rather than simply “sounding” like you always do when you write. Try reading some of your stories out loud, and you’ll hear what they “sound” like. This is your prose in the most basic sense of the word…
How to Write Short Horror #3: Understanding Your Complaints
Understanding why you don’t like a certain story, plot, movie, etc. is fundamental to understanding your own writing. If you don’t understand this, you can’t construct more than one plot. Your stories will all sound the same. Watching or reading horror you don’t like will actually improve your writing, because then you can improve on the elements you do like and avoid the ones you don’t…
How to Write Short Horror #4: Choosing Your Ending
So, what kind of ending do you want your short horror story to have? In this post, we’ll discuss the main types of endings you want, or in other words, the Disturbing Ending, the Unsettling Ending, or the Resolved Ending. Finally, we’ll go over the subtypes of endings you want, otherwise known as the Twist Ending, the Orthodox Ending, or the Unorthodox Ending…
How to Write Short Horror #5: The Four Pillars of Horror
There are four pillars (or four categories, however you wish to see it) to writing within the field that is horror, and those pillars should not be misconstrued as just subgenres of horror. There are countless subgenres of horror, too many for me to list off the top of my head, mainly because horror goes well with every other genre in existence…
How to Write Short Horror #6: The Descent into Hell
In this entry, #6, we’re going to go over what happens when someone dies and goes to Hell, like the literal Hell, like the place of fire, brimstone, and devils with pitchforks. I am sticking this entry in here as “inspiration” for anyone who would like to write horror fiction about it (yes, there is horror nonfiction, if you were wondering, but that’s not the point of this entry). I put “inspiration” in quotations, because not only does this make good writing material, but if Hell does exist, this should serve as a warning to never, ever, ever go there…