Genre Writing: Horror – Do’s and Don’ts

That task of writing is never easy. Enjoyable but not easy. Sure one can have a great session and put down five thousand amazing words with little effort. Others have written novels like this (looking at you Anne Rice/Chuck Wending/Stephen King/R.L. Stine). However, the rest of us struggle through each word and sentence and paragraph to get that completed novel. When writing, there are some general do’s and don’ts we must consider regardless of genre, to help us through the task of writing. I tackle some of these below:

First Things First

I am not Stephen King or Clive Barker or any of the amazing horror writers out there. I am me. I have a completely different persona, history, life and ability as myself. So the first thing that I never do is compare myself to the greats. I refer to them and reference them, nothing wrong with that, but when I write I do not write to become King, Lovecraft or Straub. So don’t do it either!

Don’t think cliches are overrated:

This is where people immediately falter when it comes to writing a genre. They hear other writers, published and unpublished, tell them not to write cliches. I personally think they are wrong on a fundamental level. The genre’s work because of these cliches. Look at the Orphan/Chosen One cliche in Percy Jackson, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars, King Arthur, Wheel of Time, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The Giver and so on and so on. Imagine they told these authors “Chosen one’s are so overrated. Don’t do it.”  and how many of these great books (and movies) we would have lost.

Do it different:

Yes there are a lot of them, but there are many ways that you can write the cliche to make it different. Unique. Start with the cliche (if that’s what you have) and build on it until it’s yours.

“The merit of originality is not novelty, it is sincerity.”

~ Thomas Carlyle

Don’t assume “It’s been done before.”:

Very similar to the cliche but different on one aspect: it may not be a cliche. Think of the Marvel/DC comic book universe and the idea of mutants or humans with super powers. Now think of I am Number Four by Pittacus Lore, Jumper by Steven Gould, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs and many others (My Hero Academia!?). Each of them talk about super-powered humans but each of them tackle the story in a unique way.

Do it unique:

Very much the same advice as cliches. Find a new way to write the idea but in a unique way. Use the same perspective or character types but different from the norm. Now I’m not saying steal ideas and just re-write the characters or story, that’s a no-no. Nonetheless you can take elements you enjoyed in those and craft your own story.

Everything has already been done. Eevery story has been told, every scene has been shot. It’s our job to do it one better.

~ Stanley Kubrick

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