For a great article on the power of the short story, read Carmen DeSousa’s blog.
“Short stories are a great way to meet an author without a long commitment or a nice release when you need just a little escape before going to bed, since there’s no risk of staying up too late to finish the story, as most short stories take less than an hour to read.”
— Carmen DeSousa
Learn to master suspense, and you’ll have your readers literally squirming to turn the page. This is particularly true with fight scenes. The build up is the perfect place to lay down what is truly at stake for your characters, to make clear the price of failure.
Don’t underestimate the value of this phase. A good build up will often last longer than the fight itself, and rightly so. Take Gandalf’s confrontation with the Balrog in the mines of Moria, for example. The actual fight didn’t last long. It was the build up to that moment which made it great – the lore, the menace and the darkness, the chase through the mines, all of it culminating with the breaking of the bridge.
Sometimes there’s not even any action in this phase, because you don’t need it; everything is implied. That nasty, serrated hatchet the goblin is shaking at your character speaks for itself. You can just imagine the damage its rusty edge would do to unprotected flesh, and oh no, your heroine isn’t wearing any armor either. Small details can help differentiate the impending conflict from a run-of-the-mill battle by increasing tension and upping the stakes. It can also be a great opportunity for horror.”
[found on writersdigest.com]
“The three types of terror:
- The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it’s when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm.
- The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it’s when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one:
- Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there …”
— Stephen King
“The horror genre is something that I’ve always been fascinated with. Luckily, I don’t think I’m the only one. People like to be frightened. If they didn’t, Stephen King wouldn’t have a thousand novels and you wouldn’t find every horror film ever made running on AMC at this time, every year. Seriously. Click over to AMC, I can almost guarantee Halloween, or one of its sequels, is on right now.
And horror has adapted. Yes, you can still find the slasher movies and those “gross-out” moments that King references. But it’s mental now. “Found footage” movies can be terrifying because it seems so normal, so everyday. The more real, the better. And the scarier. It’s the dark basement where the only thing you can hear is the beating of your own heart. That’s real horror. The kind of stuff that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, as if someone was standing inches behind you.
But writing horror isn’t so easy. With any type of fiction, it’s difficult to think of something that hasn’t already been done. With horror fiction, it’s especially true. Creepy basements, loud noises from the attic, hidden rooms, Indian burial grounds, old hotels, multiple personality disorder, etc.—it’s all been done before, and it’s all out there. These clichés shouldn’t restrain you, however. They’ve simply defined the space you’re working in. You know what’s there, now create your own story.”
For more tips from Writer’s Digest on writing thrillers, click here.
If you choose to set your story at a point in history, then your book won’t age for obvious reasons. But, most thriller readers like their stories to be contemporary which on the one hand is great for writers because it doesn’t mean we have to do painful extra research on e.g. what clothes a man would have worn in 1934.
On the other hand, there are pitfalls. Your book can take over a year to be written and edited, many years to get an agent and a publishing deal, and another year or two to become a finished published novel. Want to write a spy novel featuring the rogue state of Iran? If so, you need to be confident that Iran is still a rogue state in at least 5 years’ time.
The Western world applauded the collapse of communism but I guarantee you there were a large number of spy writers who tore up their draft manuscripts in disgust when the USSR fragmented, because their stories were supposed to be contemporary yet featured the Cold War and the Soviet Union.”
For more tips on writing from Matthew Dunn, click here.
Glimpse inside the mind of a contemporary philosopher...
Refuge From the Storms
reciprocity
The Life of a Teenage-Traveler
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose / The more things change, the more they stay the same
writer & mother, feeding my dream and my family
Fantasy Fiction writer and Amateur hobby artist
AWAKENING THE SLEEPING READERS
A blog full of humorous and poignant observations.
The only thing worse than being 'blind' is having a Sight but no Vision
A contrast between elegance and grunge.
The strings of my life’s soulfulness in the beauty of eternity.
Author. Speaker. Librarian.
Your Source For The Coolest Science Stories
A topnotch WordPress.com site
Think upon your thoughts and it will take you higher
Editing Addict, LLC 