The Easy Way to Write Horror That Sells

The Easy Way to Write Horror That Sells

Rob Parnell

Language: English

Pages: 97

ISBN: B00GX2B29M

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Whatever your area of preference: short stories, novels, film and/or TV, there is an ever hungry need for thrillers and dramas using supernatural themes and settings. In short, horror fiction.

All you have to do is to understand the conventions associated with this most prestigious of genres.

Now, don't go thinking in cliches. Horror is not just Stephen King and Slasher movies!

Horror and Dark Fantasy fiction also encompasses the likes of Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, the Matrix series, and TV shows like Buffy, Charmed, Fringe, Bates Motel and The Walking Dead.

Of course there are the classics to aspire to: Edgar Allen Poe, Lovecraft, MR James, and more modern writers like Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Graham Masterton, James Herbert. Stephen King describes Thomas Harris (Silence of the Lambs), James Patterson and Patricia Cornwell as closet horror writers too!

All of the above writers know - and have profited - from the notion that scaring the pants off your reader not only makes you successful, it keeps readers coming back for more!

Good horror is sophisticated. More and more writers, like Joe Hill and Jack Ketchum, are winding up in the literary section of your local bookshop or library. No longer is horror marginalized. It's increasingly seen as respectable and justifiably good writing.

So, believe me, it's more than possible to make a very good living from writing horror and dark fantasy!

Do you want success as a horror writer? And get to grips with a genre that will benefit all of your writing.

Here’s what the book covers:

* How to build suspense

* How to create believable characters

* How to come up with original and compelling ideas

* How to create convincing monsters and psychological enemies

* How to sustain a series of stories / books / movies

* And much more!

Part One: A thorough analysis of the horror genre from its origins to its place in the modern world. We will examine the various forms of storytelling in the past and in the present, identifying the roots of the genre and how certain functional characteristics have been carried over into the modern diversity of horror / suspense / mystery / thriller and crime genres.

Part Two: Creating our own stories. We establish the parameters and the requirements of character, the horror conventions and ways to stretch the envelope. The emphasis is on creating strong durable protagonists with believable agendas at credible odds with the antagonist / monster / psychological threat.

Part Three: The importance of setting, environment and the psychological landscape. We discuss the various ways in which authors use setting as 'the third character' - and how to create our own living, breathing locations. We also examine mood, tone and factors like theme, purpose and the overall feel of your supernatural stories in this context.

Part Four: Plotting. How to take a rough story idea from inspiration to a full blown template for a novel. The importance of planning and organization. How to easily construct plots using the various forms of writing software available and other tried and true methods - card file systems, cut and paste etc. We also study pace, building suspense, tension and examine the fear factor.

Part Five: The writing. How to sustain motivation and enthusiasm for your writing project and ensure it is written until it's finished. Procrastination, time and self-doubt are the writer's natural enemies. We deal with these issues head on - and head them off! We study time management and self-support systems in detail to help us get past any slumps, writers blocks or personal health issues. This lesson will help turn you into a writing machine!

Part Six: What to do with your novel / short story / screenplay after the writing. I'll show you how to construct a career path and a strategy for success.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

guilty conscience. No, in Walpole's story, they appeared to be real. This is curious because apparently Walpole had a fervent hatred of superstition! Nevertheless, Otranto is important for its setting - a Gothic castle that houses a largely dysfunctional family. If we substitute 'castle' for 'haunted house' and 'dysfunctional family' for 'partying teenagers', we can see immediate parallels with the modern horror story - and the two-hundred-and-sixty-odd years since it was first published then

made changes to my original WORD document to reflect the new sequence of events and made notes in the template about those extra plot developments, foreshadowing issues that became important later and making sure the resolutions were all dealt with. This took about another hour. So a total of one four-hour session gave me the entire template for a 120,000 word horror thriller. In case you're interested, the first draft of the novel then took about two months to write, after which I spent

is total hogwash. We live in a material world. Like it or not, the most talented people often become the most successful. Therefore the most successful are the most talented - by definition. No amount of whining or condescension about someone getting famous despite having 'no talent' makes the slightest difference to reality. When an author sells a lot of books; that means they are talented. Money defines talent. If you don't like an author's writing, it doesn't matter a toss. It's still a

Because, in order to sell books to people, you have to write the kind of books that people want to read. Too often new writers write in a self-serving vacuum where their only potential readers are themselves. It's all very well writing and hoping that one day some anonymous agent or publisher will recognize your genius and somehow turn you into a bestselling author. But this is not how the real world works. It only appears this way when we look at the business of writing from the wrong

horror written since the 1960s. Of course it was the publication of Bloch's Psycho in 1959 that began fiction's fascination with the psychopath and to some extent blurred the lines between the thriller and the horror novel. Writers like James Patterson, Patricia Cornwell, Kathy Reichs and Thomas Harris use hyper-reality to contrast the dark, almost supernatural evil of killers to great effect in their novels. Harris's Hannibal Lecter is the most obvious example of a horror archetype thinly

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