Best Writing Advice for Horror Fiction Authors

Want to try your hand at writing horror fiction but don’t know where to start?

Have you started writing your own horror stories, but don’t know if what you’ve written is hitting the mark?

Or maybe you don’t know where to start?

Much of the advice about writing horror fiction you can find on the internet is generic and vague.

Below is some of the more useful horror story writing advice that I’ve found. I’ll add more links to this page as I discover good writing advice, but for now these are the most useful places I’ve found that help me with my fiction writing.

Story Grid

The Story Grid is one of the most useful guides to writing any type of fiction.

The Story Grid is the brainchild of long-time book editor Shawn Coyne. The original book The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know, has spawned a community full of advice, tools, and methodologies that help writers and editors produce the best story they can.

Underlying the whole system is the Story Grid Five Leaf Genre Clover.

“A Genre is a label that tells the reader/audience what to expect. Genres simply manage audience expectations.”
Shawn Coyne, The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know

The Story Grid believes that all stories fit into one or more of twelve content types, one of which is Horror. All content types have obligatory scenes and conventions that readers expect to be in there.

This doesn’t mean that all Horror stories need to be predictable by including similar scenes and conventions. It means that readers expect an underlying similarity between books. It’s all in the way you write it.

The Story Grid breaks down the Horror genre into three basic sub-genres:

Uncanny – explainable evil, where there’s a scientific or rational explanation for it. For example: Alien, Frankenstein, The Passage.
Supernatural – unexplainable evil from the spirit world. For example: The Conjuring, Amityville Horror, Black House.
Ambiguous – where the reader never really knows if the evil is real or not. For example, A Head Full of Ghosts, Final Destination.

If you’re a budding horror author, take a look at these Story Grid articles and consider buying the book:

Writing in the Dark

Tim Waggoner is an award-winning, prolific writer of horror fiction. The Writing in the Dark book comes from the blog of the same name that he started in 2011 and still writes today.

Published in 2020, Writing in the Dark is particularly good for beginner horror writers and covers things like how to construct monsters and how to generate original horror ideas and storylines. It also includes general writing advice, such as character arcs, clichés, how to use suspense, and how to market your work.

Waggoner has also published two further books in the series (Writing in the Dark Workbook and Let Me Tell You a Story) and also has a YouTube channel full of writing tips and advice.

Fiction University

Fiction University is the personal blog of Janice Hardy, a writer and writing teacher.

Fiction University doesn’t have specific advice for writers of horror, but her general writing advice is on point.

Her website has around 3000 extremely useful articles on writing, from where to get ideas, to character building, world building, point of view, common writing problems, pacing, and so much more.

A sample of articles that I’ve found useful, particularly word usage:

Mythcreants

Mythcreants is the place to go if you’re a speculative fiction writer.

Be warned, though. Once you start reading articles on the Mythcreants website, you’ll be dragged down that rabbit hole, clicking through from article to article until you lose all sense of time.

Mythcreants has a podcast as well as written articles that are easy to read and understand and make so much sense you’ll wonder why you never saw it. They look at and talk about real world examples of good and bad writing and also offer an editing service.

Whether they’re talking about horror or fantasy or science fiction, you can learn a lot from their writing advice. Their analyses of bad writing are particularly fantastic and include not just what not to do but how to fix it if you’ve done it.

A sample of articles about writing horror:

A sample of more general writing articles:

Seth M Sherwood's Scary Movie School

Seth Sherwood’s Scary Movie School Substack newsletter is a wealth of information about screenwriting for horror authors.

Seth is a working screenwriter, director, designer, and producer who, in his own words, writes “horror stuff for big screens (Hellfest, Leatherface) smaller screens (Light as a Feather), video games (The Devil In Me), pages, e-pages, and at least one wall in a parking garage in Portland Oregon in 1997“.

He also has a book, The Scary Movie Writer’s Guide, which is available in paperback or in Kindle format. Worksheets for the book are available for free from his website.

First published: 26 July 2022 | Updated: 26 January 2024

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