How to Write a Horror Story 7 Tips for Writing Horror

How to Write a Horror Story 7 Tips for Writing Horror How to Write a Horror Story: 7 Tips for Writing Horror In our era of highly commercialized crime and thriller novels, it may seem like zeitgeist-defining horror books are a thing of the past. Indeed, Stephen King was once the perennial bestselling author in the world, and children in the 90s devoured Goosebumps books like The Blob devoured, well, everything.But let’s not forget there’s a huge base of horror fans today, desperate for their next fix. So if you’re hoping to become the next Crown Prince of Dread, your dream can still come true! And the first step is learning how to write a horror story. 7 key tips to writing a blood-chilling horror story 😠± 1. Tap into common fearsThe most important part of any horror story is naturally going to be its fear factor. People don’t read horror for easy entertainment; they read it to be titillated and terrorized. That said, here are a few elements you can use to seriously scare the pants off your reader.Instinctive fearsFears that have some sort of logical or biological foundation are often the most potent in horror. Darkness, heights, snakes, and spiders - all these are extremely common phobias rooted in instinct. As a result, they tend to be very effective at frightening readers.This is especially true when terror befalls innocent characters apropos of nothing: a killer traps them in their house for no apparent reason, or they’re suddenly mugged by a stranger with a revolver. As horror writer Karen Woodward says, â€Å"The beating undead heart of horror is the knowledge that bad things happen to good people.†Monsters and supernatural entitiesThese stretch beyond the r ealm of logic and into the realm of the â€Å"uncanny,† as Freud called it. We all know that vampires, werewolves, and ghosts aren’t real, but that doesn’t mean they can’t shake us to our core. In fact, it’s the very uncertainty they arouse that makes them so sinister: what if monsters are really out there, we’ve just never seen them? This fear is one of the most prevalent in horror, but if you decide to write in this vein, your story has to be pretty convincing.Societal tensionsAnother great means of scaring people is to tap into societal tensions and concerns - a tactic especially prevalent in horror movies. Just in recent memory, Get Out tackles the idea of underlying racism in modern America, The Babadook examines mental health, and It Follows is about the stigma of casual sex. However, societal tensions can also easily be embodied in the pages of a horror story, as in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. Have you ever tried writing horror? Did you manage to scare yourself? Tell us in the comments!