Written by John Everson

Did you ever get this question from a well-meaning but ultimately clueless friend, relative, ignorant passerby: “Why do you wanna write horror? I mean… why not write something good? Maybe a Tom Clancy kinda thing?”

We all have our own personal answers honed for that question, usually elucidated after forcibly restraining ourselves from hauling off and clobbering the narrow-minded nimrod that uttered the uninformed self-absorbed words. Do people ask that of mystery writers? Or sci-fi writers? Do those same nimrods ever ask themselves why they slow down when they see the flashing lights of an ambulance in secret hopes of seeing the body? How can they not understand that horror is not a dirty niche, it’s a universal emotion that we all explore in our own ways? We are all fearful mammals and the literature of horror, regardless of how it’s labeled, helps us deal with our fears. While the “death” of horror has been trumpeted many times, the truth is the literature of horror will never die. Only the labels change.

What the allure of “the dark side” is, I can’t answer for you, you can’t answer for me. And you know what? It doesn’t really matter. There’s a deeper question that you should be asking yourself, today more than ever before.

Why Do You Wanna Write? Period.

Because the game is changing. The e-revolution is upon us and all of the rules are being re-written. As the world of publishing shifts, it’s important for you as a writer to ask yourself, what do you hope to gain by writing?

• Fame? Slavering fans who point you out in the grocery store?
• Riches? You want to actually earn your living writing made-up stories?
• Self fulfillment? You just have to write and don’t care if anyone really reads it?
• Paying it back? You want to give to others all the enjoyment you received from reading?

It’s important to revisit that question with yourself once in awhile, because it should be informing your goals and expectations on the result of your writing. What you hope to gain from writing should be driving your decisions on where to submit and how to publish and what you’re spending your time working on. If you want to write for Penquin, you might not want to be spending a lot of time self-publishing Mutant Redneck Orgy books. Probably not paving the way for a big house career path. On the other hand, if that’s what you really want to write, don’t care if you make a bunch of money from it and don’t care if you have 5 readers or 500…then that’s absolutely what you should do. But you need to go into it with the understanding of the potentials from that path.

Why do you wanna write and what your end goals are should be questions you have answered. We all have different reasons that send us down the path to doing what we do. And sometimes we get caught up in the rush of everything that happens after we start down that path that we forget why we got on it in the first place.

I’m sitting here at the bar at Rock Bottom Brewery in Chicago on a busy Saturday night, and I’m betting the bartender couldn’t tell you why he thought it’d be a good idea to tend here… he’s been making drink after drink after drink for the past half hour and I haven’t seen him slow down long enough for me to ask him if I can get a menu. He might be making good tip money, but his now is probably not what he was envisioning when he applied for the job.

When I started submitting short stories to little magazines almost 20 years ago, my goal wasn’t to be rich and famous. Thank god, because I’m not and if that was the goal, I have more or less wasted the last two decades.

My goal was mostly the paying it back bit. I wanted to give back the same kind of enjoyment from fiction that I’d gotten as a kid. And I’m sure there was a bit of a thirst for minor fame and glory. But I never really expected to pull a lot of money from the deal.

Again… thank god for that cuz it ain’t happened!

But I’ve seen a lot of authors over the years get bitter and angry when, after moving steadily upward from market to market, they didn’t get the riches to follow.

Just a hunch here… but I’m guessing that “riches” wasn’t their original prime motivator when they first sent their naked zombie apocalyptic orgy story to Eat Flesh Magazine back in 1995 and accepted a copy of the side-stapled publication in payment.

They stopped asking Why Do You Wanna? until their internal goals for writing had shifted to become substantially different than what the path they were on could realistically fulfill. And then they found themselves disappointed.

None of this is to say that ultimately expecting to make money in this business is wrong. But there’s a different set of career goals and decisions to make if a full-time job is what you want out of writing than simply a little ego-boost and pocket cash. Goals change over time and that’s again why you need to stop occasionally and say to yourself now:

Why Do You Wanna?

Lots of people make a good full-time living at writing. I should know — I started my adult career as a journalist. The key in the “I live by my writing” career choice is a) you’re a hired gun that writes whatever will pay the bills and b) a corollary – you write on whatever topic you can.

As horror writers, we write on the topic we love. News for you: you can’t always make a living at doing what you love. Of course – we all define “make a living” differently too. I know full-time writers who make a good living at writing horror-oriented things and I know full-time writers who say they make a living at writing – but it’s not a level of economic success that I would personally call “success” – or a living. Yeah, some people break their backs at it and manage to feed themselves… at least for a few years. But it’s often not sustainable, in large part because of too narrow of a focus. Open yourself to writing in multiple genres, including non-fiction, and you’re probably going to succeed a lot better as a professional writer. That’s far more likely than succeeding as a full-time professional horror writer. Just know this — as a “pro writer”, you won’t always write what you love to write. There’s a different mindset involved there. Ask me about covering school boards for the suburban newspaper some time.

I decided a long time ago that my goal in fiction was to write the kind of creepy stories I loved and that I wanted to read. I wanted to entertain, regardless of pay or market. And then I published books. I got excited to reach a larger audience with my stories. And I wanted to reach an even larger one. For awhile… the path “upward” seemed certain.

And then last week, the bottom fell out. When my publisher Leisure Books announced that they were dropping their mass market horror publishing and would be focusing more and more on e-books and less and less in print, I found myself faced with a critical question: do I personally want to be an author of e-books?

My instinctive answer was a spittle-heavy cough of “Not on your dead, mutilated, demon-infested corpse.”

Yes, I know, Leisure will be producing a line of trade paperbacks to hopefully regain some bookstore shelf space and my books should appear in that format, but the writing is on the wall. More and more publishers will be moving out of traditional print in favor of e-books. There’s no overhead there (or very little) and a lot of potential profit. I personally don’t mind e-books as an ancillary method of fiction delivery, but I don’t see myself ever buying one. In my heart and mind, they are not “books”. They’re unproduced manuscripts floating around on the Internet without the engaging smell of ink and the tactile sense of paper. Without the yellowing factor of time and without the sense of space and permanency. E-books are the digital idea of a book that has yet to be printed.

Won’t do it, I said.

Might have to just quit writing entirely.

No.

And then I asked myself again. “Why Do You Wanna Write Horror? Why Do You Wanna Write Anything?”

“To entertain an audience,” I answered quickly. “To give people the same enjoyment I got from reading fiction when I was a kid and…”

Gotcha.

Who’s full of shit now? If today’s readers are getting the enjoyment out of and being entertained by e-books than why do I care if they’re e- instead of p-?

Because I like seeing my name on a spine. Because I like having my work physically on a shelf. That’s probably the deepest held motivation of a lot of writers, no matter what motivation they suggest publicly. So yeah. I hadn’t asked myself and explored “Why Do You Wanna?” for real in awhile.

Because I want to produce books that people enjoy that sit on a shelf and are permanent.

That’s a little different answer stemming from a little different place than “I just want to entertain.”

Yeah. So maybe my goals weren’t quite as pure as I thought. If I was in this simply to get paid, I wouldn’t care about the format of my resulting work, just the cash. If I was in this simply to entertain, I wouldn’t care about the format, just the reviews and reader comments.

Why Do You Wanna Write Horror?

If it’s to make a living, you’d better consider topic diversification if you hope to pay for health insurance.

If it’s to make a movie, perhaps consider a career in effects and makeup — it’s a lot easier to backdoor your way into a script from there than it is to sell one to Hollywood from writer-land cold. Hollywood sees horror films as effects gardens, not great scripts that should be made.

If it’s to see your name on a book spine that more than a couple hundred people buy, well, all I can say is go look at the horror section in Barnes & Noble’s. What? There isn’t one? There you go.

If it’s really to entertain readers, regardless of format, you’ve got some good years ahead of you. The whole game is changing, and that means there are going to be a lot of new avenues that we can’t even predict right now. I hope you’re as selfless about your desire to “entertain” as you think you are. And that you like e-books and intend to spend countless hours promoting them so that people can find your work amid the sea of other e-releases. It is possible to succeed in that market – look at the Amazon ebook bestseller list and you’ll see some relative unknowns from indie houses or simply self-published work sprinkled amid the predictable big names.

The e-book discussion is a book of columns by itself, but it’s a reality to factor into Why Do You Wanna. The problem I see with e-books in the long-term, aside from their lack of physicality (which I’ve learned IS a factor in my personal reasons for Why Do You Wanna), is that they completely level the playing field of publishing. Some might see that as a good thing, but I don’t think so. As the floodgates open and anybody can upload anything to the “store” and slap a price tag on it, the editorial review process that has heretofore culled and chosen books to publish and promote and bring exposure to from amid a muddy sea of half-baked slush piles will be washed away. It will become harder and harder for new authors to make a ripple and be seen amid the ocean of uploaded narratives.

With the digital age, we gain increased freedom of publication, but it also waters down the marketplace such that it will become harder and harder to prove your abilities and actually make a living at writing because the choices for readers of what to buy and read become exponentially vast. Instead of 1,000 people buying Book X, maybe only 100 will, because the other 900 potential buyers were presented with so many choices, they didn’t see or decided not to spend the time on Book X. Instead of having editors read the slush piles and decide upon a slate of books that will be promoted for potential purchase (still a vast slate, but finite and with some quality control), the entire world will become a digital slush pile. Perhaps major publishers will continue to be looked to and trusted for their lines of books but in reality, they become less relevant in the marketplace. Does the average reader now really pick up a book and decide whether to buy it based on the logo on the spine? I don’t think so. The reader chooses based on the cover and the interesting back cover description. But their choice in finding a good story was made a little easier by having a publishing system in place, because only a small percentage of the manuscripts churned out by hopeful authors that year ever got a chance to be seen by a reader browsing in a bookstore.

I’ve always been a believer in the editorial process, even when it didn’t go my way. I’ve always been a believer in having my own personal library of books in a room that I can go into and sit and enjoy being surrounded by the tomes of my past, sitting in shelves on the walls. An e-reader doesn’t quite give you that same feeling.

Why Do You Wanna?

Think for a minute before you answer.

I’m still thinking this week myself.

Credits

You can check out John’s work at: John Everson

Ty is an author in the horror genre. To learn more about his work, you can visit his website at: Ty Schwamberger

Anyone can tell a story. Heck, every conversation you’ve ever had in your life probably contained a story on some level. So why is it so hard to write one? For one, most of those conversations wouldn’t make very good stories, at least not the ones I’ve had. And two, writing a story requires structure, and it’s your job as a writer to understand that structure so intimately that it becomes as natural as, well, a conversation.

The Five Narrative Modes

Every novel or story consists of five parts, narrative modes if you prefer the term. They are dialogue, thought, action, description and exposition. I like to think of these parts as storage bins, with dialogue, thought and action being the largest bins, and description and exposition being the smallest. Every tool you use to write – all that figurative stuff, all those thematic elements – goes into these bins, and the stronger your bins are, that is, the better you understand them, the more weight they can hold.

Dialogue and Thought

Dialogue and thought serve three purposes: first, they reveal something about the character. Second, they build tension. Third, they help advance the story. The difference between the two is that dialogue is spoken aloud, while thought is internal monologue. Often, the two can play off each other to create interesting effects.

For instance, in a conversation between John and girlfriend Marie, John might say—

“I can’t wait to see you at dinner.”

So I can rip the tongue out of that pretty little mouth of yours, he thought.

Action

Action is that big-block V8 engine under the hood of your story. This is not to say that every scene need be explosive, but action is the driving force of your narrative, used not only to advance the story, but also to reveal information about your characters.

For example, John reached underneath his car seat and felt around for the butcher knife. It was still there, ready and waiting.

John is doing something, however minor, and we learn a little about his motives while moving the story forward.

Description

Description is all those deep sensory images you want your reader to experience. At its best, it should invoke an emotional response by setting the mood of your story. One of the cardinal rules when working with description is not to over describe. Easier said then done, I know, but always remember that your story comes first, and if your description is not serving the story, then it’s got to go.

Let’s check back with our pal Johnny, who has his heart set on murdering Marie after dinner. To create the proper mood you might describe the scene at the restaurant something like:

He was assaulted by the smells of burnt onions and body odor as he entered. The place was bursting with people wanting to “feel like family,” as the slogan on TV suggests, and the floor was sticky with spilled drinks from the children scurrying around like an infestation, waiting to be pressed into the ground by a careless foot.

Not something I would open my wallet for, but you can see the description is brief and there is a definite mood created here, one that is obviously not happy.

Exposition

Exposition is the most dangerous of the narrative modes. It refers to the details the narrator gives about a character. This can be sometimes a flashback or flashforward, or just a piece of background information or commentary. The problem with exposition is that readers like to draw their own conclusions about the characters, and exposition, because of its very nature, forces you to tell instead of show. A good rule is to limit exposition to incidental information, like a character’s age, or the fact that the character prefers apples to oranges, or, in good ol’ Johnny’s case …

To dash out this bitch’s brains while the family next to him stuffed yet another bowl of the free salad and bread into their faces. Now that would make him smile.

So now that you have your storage bins ready, go forth and fill them up with whatever you want. Me? Looks like I’ll be busy filling mine up with poor Marie’s body parts.

The Scariest Thing Imaginable: Rejection
by Jeff Strand

To many authors, the idea of getting a rejection letter is even more frightening than being haunted by a ghost or attacked by a chainsaw-wielding psychopath. It’s freakin’ terrifying! After putting all of that time, blood, sweat, and passion into your creation, you’re about to send it to an editor who may respond to all of your hard work with a form letter saying “Nah.”

Or, worse, he or she may tell you that it’s terrible, that it can’t be salvaged, and that it never should have been written in the first place if any decency still exists in the world. The editor might laugh at your submission and pass it around the office, and hurriedly warn other editors not to publish your writing because you suck. Your photograph will be stuck on the corners of monitors of editors everywhere, with a big red X over it. Career = over.

Okay, most writers aren’t that paranoid, but in speaking to a lot of aspiring authors, I’ve been surprised at how many of them don’t submit their work simply because they don’t want to face possible rejection. If they don’t send it, nobody can tell them no. No sting of the form letter. No humiliation from the checked boxes indicating that your story Lacks Strong Character Development and Does Not Resolve In A Satisfactory Manner. No handwritten snarky comments at the bottom. Not sending out your work keeps you nice and safe.

Authors should not fear rejection.

Which is not to say that you should take the opposite approach, which is to e-mail your work to every editor you can find, regardless of whether the story has any possible connection to what the publisher needs. (In my single, ill-fated attempt to edit an anthology, within minutes my in-box was flooded with completely inappropriate submissions from authors who were clearly ready to fire off those trunk stories at any market that popped up.) This type of carpet bombing approach is known by industry insiders by the technical term “lazy and stupid.” So don’t do that.

Obviously, if it’s a bad story, and you know it’s a bad story, don’t send it out. The fear of rejection usually comes at the point where you think you’re writing publishable work (maybe you are and maybe you aren’t), but you’re not sure that anybody beyond your family, friends, and the too-nice people in your critique group will agree. Maybe you’ve dreamed of seeing your name in the pages of Cemetery Dance magazine, and you truly believe that this story just may be good enough, it’s the best thing you’ve ever written… but what if they say no?

What if you get rejected hundreds of times before somebody accepts your work? What if you run out of room in your house to use them as wallpaper? How could you possibly work up the energy to write another story if so many people have told you “NO!” on your others? How can you live through the shame?

Here’s the key:

Once you get that acceptance, none of your rejections count anymore! Seriously! When you’re doing an interview and you’re talking about your deal with Random House, nobody is going to say “Yeah, well, I heard that your manuscript didn’t meet Bantam’s present needs!” Think about which of the following people you have less desire to punch in the face:

Author #1. “I racked up hundreds of rejections over years of hard work, but I refused to give up, and then one day I finally got that acceptance letter and my scream of joy was so loud that the neighbors called the police.”

Author #2. “I finished my first novel, and it was accepted by the very first agent who read the query, and within two days we had a book deal.”

For successful authors, their previous rejections are practically a badge of honor. J.K Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected by a dozen publishers, and you don’t hear her shouting “Don’t tell anybody about that! I’ll be shamed!”

If you believe in your work, send it out. It will get rejected. That’s fine. Cry a bit, kick an non-valuable inanimate object, consider the feedback if any was provided, give it another read, and send it out again. Because trust me, when you get that “Yes! We want it!” e-mail, the pain of all of those other rejections vanishes.

Save your fear for other things, like the looming zombie apocalypse.

You can check out Jeff’s work on his Gleefully Macabre website: Jeff Strand

Ty is an author in the horror genre. To learn more about his work, visit: Ty Schwamberger

Chances are your first experience with pacing was in the form of a rejection slip: Pacing didn’t work for me; or in a seminar or writing group: I liked the story, but the pacing felt, I don’t know, off a little. Either way, when someone mentions a pacing problem, which is often vague at best, the tendency is to make drastic changes to your story in order to speed up your narrative to the point of nausea. Yes, pacing has to do with the speed at which your story unfolds, but it’s important to understand that you don’t correct the problem by moving at a breakneck speed.

But before I get too far ahead of myself, let’s work through a definition of pacing. Pacing, as it relates to fiction, is time manipulation. Because every story – at least every story worth reading – has a forward momentum, pacing allows the author to control the speed at which that momentum moves. Think scene versus summary.

Some Things To Consider

You’ve probably heard that pacing is similar to skateboarding, with each thrust being revelation and action, and each glide being digression, contemplation and description. Perhaps your readers have been given some vital information they’ve been salivating for, or your monster appears for the first time and kills off a character you were just starting to cozy up to. What happens next is the glide. Here you can throw in some necessary back story, some key description you couldn’t find a place for or some piece of research that adds verisimilitude to your story. The important thing to remember is that how long you glide depends on how big the thrust.

In medias res, which is Latin for “in the middle of things,” refers to a story starting in the middle of the plot. Often writers turn to this technique so the story can hit the ground running, immediately drawing the reader in. The problem with in medias res is it necessitates flashbacks. Not that flashback is necessarily a bad thing, but it is best used to bring about a fuller understanding of character, not as a means of telling a story. If you find that your writing page after page of flashback, then you may want to consider starting your story somewhere else.

Many pacing problems occur either because a story is overloaded with conflicts in order to keep a dying momentum going, or because writers aren’t sure what to do with certain scenes, so they fan out in different directions before finding the right path. The best time to find these issues is while reading the first draft. If you can, try reading the draft without stopping, and note where the story seems to slow down or speed up for no reason.

Pacing can be subjective. It is why when someone says that the pacing felt off, it drives writers batty, because next to my personal favorite, the story didn’t work for me, it is the weakest advice a writer can receive. To be fair, most readers don’t know why there is a problem, and it is up to you, the keeper of all the story’s secrets, to uncover that mystery. My suggestion here is to get as many beta readers as possible to review your story. If one reader says, the pacing at the end didn’t work for me, that’s a perspective. If several readers say the same thing, then it’s a problem, and you can begin to focus on the specific problem without revising scenes that may have been perfectly fine.

Move too slow, and you’re readers are going to start skimming to get to the good stuff; move too fast and your readers won’t be able to keep up. Finding that balance is what makes pacing so difficult to master, and – because I doubt you’ve come across this advice before – the only way to really learn pacing is to read the authors that make it seem effortless.

So go forth and write, but remember to pace yourself.

1. Read, write, repeat -
Enough said.

2. Don’t get lost in woods -
Some writers prefer to plot their story before word one goes down, while others simply let the characters and situation drive the story. Whatever your preference, you need to have at least a vague idea of where you want your story to go, or else you’ll have characters running around chapter after chapter like chickens without heads. At best, you’ll waste unnecessary time during the rewrite; at worst, well, there’s always that other story you were thinking of starting.

3. The better the hook, the tastier the meat -
Your hook is the Big Concept you’re trying to sell; that razor-sharp, serrated edge that cleaves its way through everything else in the story. The hook is easy enough to create. Say the words what if … and then fill in the blank. What if … an impenetrable dome came down over a small town (Under the Dome by Stephen King)? What if … a family of inbred maniacs terrorized a group of tourists in the woods (Off Season by Jack Ketchum)?

4. Put flesh onto your characters before you rip it off -
Readers want characters they can relate to, characters they don’t mind spending a few hundred pages with. But most of all, characters that your reader will care about, because no matter how good the story, if your readers don’t care about the characters, they won’t care about the story that surrounds your characters.

5. This evening’s tour guide through Hell is …
Think back to those great stories that inspired you to become a writer. Sure, there were memorable characters, some moments of pure terror, joy, love, hate … but there was also that setting, so perfectly realized that you were there. If you can’t take your readers there, then how can you possibly expect them to get lost in your story?

6. You’re not gonna believe what happened next -
You may have the best murder scene on page 157, but unless your readers are interested in pages 1-156, they’ll never see it. You need to constantly keep that carrot called “What Happens Next” dangling in front of your readers’ faces. If you get stuck, remember this simple formula: Problem = Solution + Bigger Problem. In other words, keep raising the stakes.

7. It hurts to be dead -
We live in a highly sensory world, and there are plenty of other stimulants competing against your story. So the more your readers can feel your story the better. One thing to keep in mind is you should always go for the specific image over the vague one. Ambiguity and abstraction are the surest ways to a flaming death.

8. Study your enemy -
No fiction writer is an expert in everything that goes into his or her story. Unfortunately, this is compounded a hundred times over for horror writers. Unless, that is, you’re a zombie, serial killer, vampire, or … I think you’re getting my point. It’s those little details research provides that separates a horrific scene from a laughable one.

9. Don’t rush, even if it’s right behind you -
You’ve spent all this time building characters, developing intricate plot points, and creating this fully realized world for your characters to move around in. Often the tendency is to rush to the end once you’ve developed everything else. Don’t.

10. Kill your darlings –
One of the greatest joys in writing is coming up with the perfect passage. You know the one, where you stand up from your desk, throw open your window and yell to the world that you have arrived. Often enough, though, these precious darlings offer nothing substantial to your story. If you find any (they’re there, trust me), you should ask yourself–does this work in the story, or is it only self-gratifying? If it’s the later, save it for Twitter.

11. It Lives Part 2 –
Write each book as if it is the only book you’re ever going to write. Don’t save good ideas for another book. This is especially true for books in a series. Yes, if you’re writing a series you’ll want to spread the major storyline over a number of books, but each book must stand alone as a great story.

12. No admittance after dusk -
Just because you finished your story doesn’t mean it’s ready for primetime. You’d be insulted if you just shelled out nine bucks to see a movie that still had actors fumbling for words and some blue screen showing, wouldn’t you? Well, if your story isn’t polished, an agent or editor will be just as insulted. We make mistakes; it’s human. But that doesn’t give you permission to be lazy.

13. The evil twin -
There’s one Peter Straub, one Anne Rice, and one Neil Gaiman (though he seems to be everywhere at once, so I suspect he keeps several clones locked away in his closet.) Just because these and other popular authors sell huge numbers of books doesn’t mean taking their ideas is going to translate into dollar signs for you. Write your own story, in your own words.