Today, let me introduce you to H.P. Lovecraft. We'll continue to examine his work into next week as well. Here's a start.
He wrote: "The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint...of that most terrible conception of the human brain–a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space."
In other words, horror writing is not just writing about blood and guts or by revealing the monster. It's all about tone/mood--the atmosphere of dread. Your protagonist is up against something that is utterly unknown or foreign--something unbelievable, or something odd or out of place in our normal, everyday lives.
To this end, the monster in horror stories is often a metaphor made real. A person suffering from cancer might be a protagonist who is being hunted by an amorphous, malignant mass--or a teenager who is tempted to take drugs, might be accosted later by a roomful of zombies. Cancer = monster, the drugs = zombies. Many horror stories work on this level of metaphor.
So--if you want to write a horror story, you're going to need to write with an effective tone and use diction (specific word choice) to create a specific mood for the reader.
H.P. Lovecraft describes his writing process: "As to how I write a story—there is no one way. Each one of my tales has a different history. Once or twice I have literally written out a dream, but usually, I start with a mood or idea or image which I wish to express, and revolve it in my mind until I can think of a good way of embodying it in some chain of dramatic occurrences capable of being recorded in concrete terms. I tend to run through a mental list of the basic conditions or situations best adapted to such a mood or idea or image, and then begin to speculate on logical and naturally motivated explanations of the given mood or idea or image in terms of the basic condition or situation chosen."
Let's take a look. "The Color Out of Space" by HP Lovecraft & "The Ropy Thing" by Al Sarrantonio.
HOMEWORK: Please read or finish the packet of short stories. Finish reading Stephen King's On Writing. Complete any blog posts you did not complete over our Spring Break. Catch up. Read.
"My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature." -- H.P. LovecraftThe great American horror writer, H.P. Lovecraft wrote a little book called Supernatural Horror in Literature in 1927 and an essay entitled: "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction". He also continued to train other horror writers of the time, as well as influence new horror writers of today.
He wrote: "The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint...of that most terrible conception of the human brain–a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space."
In other words, horror writing is not just writing about blood and guts or by revealing the monster. It's all about tone/mood--the atmosphere of dread. Your protagonist is up against something that is utterly unknown or foreign--something unbelievable, or something odd or out of place in our normal, everyday lives.
To this end, the monster in horror stories is often a metaphor made real. A person suffering from cancer might be a protagonist who is being hunted by an amorphous, malignant mass--or a teenager who is tempted to take drugs, might be accosted later by a roomful of zombies. Cancer = monster, the drugs = zombies. Many horror stories work on this level of metaphor.
So--if you want to write a horror story, you're going to need to write with an effective tone and use diction (specific word choice) to create a specific mood for the reader.
H.P. Lovecraft describes his writing process: "As to how I write a story—there is no one way. Each one of my tales has a different history. Once or twice I have literally written out a dream, but usually, I start with a mood or idea or image which I wish to express, and revolve it in my mind until I can think of a good way of embodying it in some chain of dramatic occurrences capable of being recorded in concrete terms. I tend to run through a mental list of the basic conditions or situations best adapted to such a mood or idea or image, and then begin to speculate on logical and naturally motivated explanations of the given mood or idea or image in terms of the basic condition or situation chosen."
Let's take a look. "The Color Out of Space" by HP Lovecraft & "The Ropy Thing" by Al Sarrantonio.
HOMEWORK: Please read or finish the packet of short stories. Finish reading Stephen King's On Writing. Complete any blog posts you did not complete over our Spring Break. Catch up. Read.
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