Setting and Horror Certain things are true for all settings. If you want a sense of claustrophobic threat then small enclosed dark spaces ar...

I’ve been thinking about horror stories, about what elements are common to the genre. I had intended to do this all in one post, but it has ...

I’ve been on a journey of sorts over the past decade. I wanted to understand--intellectually, but also on a blood and bone level--the elemen...

This post is part of a series on Lester Dent’s method for writing a short story . You might think: Why should I care? Well, all the short st...

In previous posts  I’ve written about Lester Dent’s short story formula . Lester Dent was perhaps the best of the pulp-fiction writers of th...

This post continues my mini-series about how to introduce a character. I’ve already written about Exaggeration, Unusual Position and introdu...

I’ve already gone over Swain’s idea of a character’s dominant impression , now let’s talk about their dominant attitude. A character’s attit...

Characters--Homo Fictus--are the raw material from which stories are created, but who are these entities who populate our stories and how do...

This post is a continuation of yesterday's post BUT in what follows I don't talk about horror stories. Alas. Horror stories are ver...

( FYI, this post is part of my How to Write a Genre Story series. By rights I should have titled it How to Write a Genre Story: Setting and ...

There are many stories that don't fit the hero’s journey. For example, the movies Psycho and The Princess Bride. And that's great! ...