Horror Writing Advice from Erinn L. Kemper

It’s officially horror-writing season!

We love reading horror stories any time of year, but around Halloween, we start to see more and more folks testing out their fright-writing skills.

If you’re looking to join the bloody fun, we’ve got some advice for you from writer Erinn L. Kemper, who’s been featured in multiple horror anthologies and is currently hard at work on her fourth novel.

You can watch the entire interview with Kemper here, or read the transcript below.

What drew you to horror?

Kemper: It was funny, because I always wanted to be a writer. When I was a kid and a teenager, I wrote a lot of poems and songs and a couple of short stories. But I had this idea that a writer wrote literature. So when I was in my 20s, I decided I was going to sit down and start writing, and I started writing literature. And I didn’t enjoy it.

I had this short story called “Uncle Jesus and the Yard Sale,” I think it was called. It was literary, and very pretty, and I found it really dead and lifeless and boring. And I was like, ooh, what if I just kill everybody?

My primary reading was horror, so I don’t know why I had this notion that I had to write literary fiction. So I just was like, okay, I’m going to write what I read and have fun with it. And yeah, I found it a lot more fun.

What makes reading horror so enjoyable?

Liam: You were a horror reader. I am, too. I love horror. What do you think is so enjoyable about reading horror compared to other genres?

Kemper: I mean, there’s a scientific reason. We get the adrenaline, and then the catharsis. I think that’s part of it. It’s a very human thing. We’re curious about what’s in the closet, and we’re kind of scared of it, but we want to see it.

I like knowing about the dark places, and following some protagonist as they slowly unravel. I think everyone kind of enjoys that. Seeing what’s in the dark, in a safe way, because reading is a safe way to do that. And I think we’re drawn to monsters. A good monster story is always, as for kids, the best story.

Liam: I love that idea that it’s a safe way to read this stuff. You can be reading the most horrific thing, and then put down the book and go swim at the beach or something. You can quickly clear that emotion away after you put the book down, but still experience it so vividly in the moment.

Kemper: Yeah. Like that book, Blindness.

Liam: The José Saramago book?

Kemper: Yes. I read that book, and I enjoyed it. Watched the movie, hated it. I’m sure it was a good movie, but I turned it off because I couldn’t handle watching some of those scenes. Whereas reading them felt safer.

Liam: It is a great movie. Julianne Moore is always amazing. But you’re right. That’s a book that makes you feel blind as you’re reading it. The way he doesn’t use names, and hardly any punctuation, is its own type of horror as you’re stumbling through the book yourself.

Kemper: Yeah, exactly. I like finding the beautiful in the grotesque. As a writer, that’s really what I’m drawn to with writing horror. And pushing a main character as far as you can, and then seeing if you can get them out of it. Sometimes you can, and sometimes you can’t. It’s a good challenge. It’s fun.

Is it hard when a character doesn’t make it out?

Liam: Is that hard for you, when you realize that they’re not going to make it out?

Kemper: Yeah. I have cried when I’ve lost a character. It can be really, really challenging, for sure. I’m even tearing up thinking of one of the characters I was unable to save. I’m like, “Oh, she was so sweet.”

Liam: Well, it’s good if it affects you that way. Ideally, that will make its way onto the page, too. I’ve certainly read horror books where I’ve shed a tear. You don’t really think about that, but horror books can make you cry if your favorite character doesn’t make it out.

Kemper: The best horror books make you cry, I think. Every time. My favorites always make me cry.

How do you come up with horror ideas?

Liam: Let’s talk more about the process of writing horror, because I think some of the people watching this interview will be folks who have dabbled in horror, or are curious about dabbling in horror. Do you have a process for writing horror or generating ideas? What does it look like from the inside?

Kemper: Ooh. Ideas are literally everywhere. Everywhere, everywhere. Sometimes I start with the monster, the bad guy. An idea comes to me of, ooh, what if there’s this…

One time I was walking through the streets of my hometown, and within the course of an hour, I think I saw five pregnant women. And I thought that was crazy. That’s a lot of pregnant women to see in such a short period of time. So I thought, “Oh my God. What if there’s a town where all the women get pregnant at the same time?”

That could be comedy, but if you run with it in a different direction, it can be very scary. So just those kinds of scenarios. It could be a feeling that we all have, like fear of death, or fear of losing your mind to Alzheimer’s or to insanity. Fear of turning into your parents. Even if you love your parents, you can be afraid of that and run with that.

Or something physical, like fear of heights or fear of tight spaces. I don’t know if you know Whale Fall by Daniel Kraus.

Liam: No, I haven’t read that.

Kemper: Guy gets swallowed by a whale. And it is so freaking claustrophobic that it’s terrifying. Even if you’re not afraid of tight spaces, you are when you’re reading it. So those kinds of weird situations that pop up in your life, or fears that you have. The more visceral, the better.

For me, writing in the jungle is kind of interesting, because I can use the environment, too. Like right now I’m kind of hot, so extreme heat and humidity, and how that can be added to anything.

Liam: I was thinking that when you were talking about using your environment. You can find horror anywhere. You could be in a city, you could be on a mountain. But the jungle has its unique horrors. Talk about claustrophobia. Have you read The Ruins?

Kemper: Yes, by Scott Smith?

Liam: Yeah, I think so. Very gruesome. But it really captures that jungle paranoia that can happen. And the screaming monkeys. Something’s got to be done there, for sure.

Kemper: Yeah, exactly. How can I not write horror when I’ve got howler monkeys overhead and weird bugs everywhere?

For short stories, I have kind of a running list of little seeds of ideas. It’ll say something like termites that eat people, or that eat illness in people. There are just lots of little seeds. I write them down and keep them going.

I also often find inspiration from open calls, if you’re following the different genre publishers, anthologists and magazines, and what they’re looking for. For example, I said I was never going to write a zombie story. I was like, “Nah, zombies, no.” But then I saw an open call for Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages, and I thought, “Oh, historical zombies. That’s interesting.” So I wrote a story about the hopping zombies in China during the construction of the Great Wall. You can find inspiration anywhere.

Liam: That’s a great idea. We share open calls a lot on our Instagram. Chill Subs is a great site for people to follow, too. They’re constantly posting open calls. So yeah, use the prompt.

I also think so many good horror books or stories start with a “what if.” A lot of books in general start with “what if this scenario were to happen.” But with horror, it’s often what if the worst possible thing happened, or the scariest possible thing happened. So with that idea of the pregnant women, it could be any number of genres. But how do you look at it through a horror lens?

Kemper: Exactly.

Liam: That’s maybe what Stephen King did with clowns. He looked at a clown and thought, “What if that clown was horrible?” And that’s how we got It.

How do you make your writing scary?

Liam: This is such a big question, but how do you make your writing scary?

Kemper: That is a big question. It does tap into the “what if,” and going to the darkest place possible, and then going even darker. But that’s kind of the end. That’s where you get to when you get to the end.

I think about a really good slow-burn horror, where the book starts with little bits of eerie but nice word choices, and a restlessness you can generate. There are clichés, like the leaves blowing across the street, and mist, and things like that. But you can really generate a lot of mood and atmosphere with your language, and then make it creepier and creepier and creepier as the story goes.

Like, in chapter one, the branches are stroking the side of the house, which is kind of a sensual image. But by the end of the book, the trees are sharpening their branches against the side of the house. You can intensify your language.

I just finished reading Chuck Palahniuk’s book on writing [Consider This], and he had one suggestion, which was: at the beginning of the book, assure the reader that it’s not going to happen. So for example, the Titanic. “This ship is unsinkable.” And then it sinks. So doing the opposite of what you say you’re going to do is a good way to create suspense, because you say that, and it’s in the reader’s mind, and that creates some tension.

As far as the mechanics of your writing, move from long sentences that lull the reader into a feeling of safety, and then short, short, short, short, short, to create moments of adrenaline and fear.

Another tip Chuck had was to create a repeated scene. Maybe repeat it three times throughout the book, but each time, twist it. Make it darker, make it weirder. Portray your character in a different state, physically or mentally, a deteriorating state, so that it creates this dread of, “What’s next? How bad is this going to get?”

Liam: Great advice. Because then the reader will start to notice those scenes coming up. Say every four chapters, your character is washing dishes, but each time something worse happens to her when she’s washing dishes. Then all you need to do is mention that she’s going to wash dishes in order to scare your reader. You know something’s going to come.

Kemper: Yeah. Or a character who loves coffee, and you take that away from them. So now the coffee has ashy notes of fresh cremains or something like that. Then you can see the deterioration of the character’s world. Everything’s decaying, everything’s sour, everything’s wilting around them as the story progresses.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

Kemper: The most useful bit of writing advice I ever got, and this is just general writing advice, was write the ending. Think about what you want your reader to feel at the end of your book, and write the ending that makes them feel that way.

Liam: Oh, that’s so interesting. Sort of reverse engineer it. And it doesn’t have to be happily ever after, right?

Kemper: No, no.

Liam: “I want them to walk away with a worse sense of dread than they had when they started” is a totally viable endpoint. But then you have to think, “How do I go back and build up the dread?” Clever.

Kemper: Exactly. I had one novel where I applied that. Joe Nassise was the one who gave me this advice. I was struggling with the end, and he told me that. So I said, “Okay, I want the reader to feel this sense of horrified awe at the end of my book.” And I was like, “Okay, how am I going to get the reader to feel horrified awe?”

Liam: Right. That’s a puzzle.

Kemper: And when it came to me, I started shaking and crying. I was like, “Oh, that’s how to do it.” And then I could write the rest of the book. I was like, “Okay, now I have a target.”

Liam: That’s amazing. I often think of writing like going on a hike. You might know what the ending looks like. It’s a mountain in the distance. But you do not know where the path along the way is going to lead you. So starting with that endpoint is very, very clever.

What makes a good horror protagonist?

Liam: What do you think makes a good horror protagonist?

Kemper: In horror, you can’t just have the premise of bad things happening to good people. That’s boring. Weirdly, the protagonist has to kind of earn what happens to them, and then through their actions earn a positive result, a happy ending. It can’t just be a good person in a bad situation.

The protagonist can’t just be good, and the antagonist can’t just be evil. They have to have some flaw in their character for the writer to exploit, and that’s the reason this is happening to them.

To go to comedy, as just such an easy example, take Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. There is a reason that happens to him. You could easily take Groundhog Day and turn it into a horror story. Or Jim Carrey’s Liar Liar. He’s a person who lies, so all of a sudden he has to tell the truth, on the worst possible day, when he has a big case or something.

I can’t remember the exact premise, but that’s very similar to The Dead Zone by Stephen King, where the protagonist touches people and sees the truth of what’s going to happen to them, and that becomes a horrible situation for him.

Liam: Right, because so much of it is about putting this character in some sort of restraint or some sort of bad situation in order for it to be horror. And it’s really boring to see a perfect person go through that. First of all, it’s unrealistic, and it’s not interesting. So I guess more than any other genre, a fatal flaw is needed for these characters. Some personality trait.

That’s a good exercise for people, too. Go read a horror story, or a few horror stories, or a book, and ask yourself, “What is this character’s flaw, and why are they having to go through this experience?” If it’s a good story, you’ll be able to find the reason why.

Kemper: Yeah, exactly. And it’s either a flaw in them or it’s something they did. Not something that happened to them, but something they did that caused this to start to happen.

What are your favorite and least favorite horror tropes?

Liam: Let’s talk about tropes a little bit, because I think more than any other genre, horror gets tropes. I’ll start by saying I don’t necessarily think tropes are always a bad thing. Tropes exist because they’re interesting and they work. However, in my opinion, it still needs to be unique and original. So with that being said, what are your thoughts on some of your favorite horror tropes and some of your least favorite?

Kemper: Ooh. Least favorite is easy. I’m not a huge fan of revenge stories, but again, there are some that are amazing. I’m not a big fan of torture or sexual assault as either a motivator for the protagonist or an end result that makes it horrible. But again, I’ve read some that are very, very good.

And like I said already, bad things happening to good people just doesn’t fly for me. It’s such a lazy way to tell a story.

If you’re going to include violence against animals in your story, you’re going to have a hard time selling it. People don’t want to read that. Suicide is also a difficult one to sell, but it can be sold.

I’m also not a fan of cannibalistic hillbilly or hill folk stories. That being said, I said I’d never write a zombie thing. You never know. I might put some cannibalistic hillbilly-type characters in space someday. Do something different.

For favorites, I really like literary horror, quiet horror. It’s not a trope, it’s a subgenre. But I do like that, and my favorite…

What is literary horror?

Liam: Well, let me ask you, actually. Can you pause there and tell us a little more about literary horror? What does that mean to you, and how does it differentiate itself?

Kemper: Literary horror and quiet horror, rather than a lot of jump scares and really gory, visceral, high-intensity horror, it still has high stakes, but it wouldn’t have the chase scenes and things like that. It will have more atmosphere, more mood, more beautiful language.

For classics, examples of writers in that genre are Robert Aickman. He writes really good short stories that are very quiet horror, very moody. Ramsey Campbell writes that beautifully. I’d say Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier. Gothic horror dovetails really nicely with quiet horror.

Liam: I was just in Bennington, Vermont, which is where Shirley Jackson wrote “The Lottery.” I was actually at a writing center there, just two houses down. And it’s a great example of what you were talking about, because the town itself is so sweet and idyllic and cute. It’s this classic New England town.

She was walking around that town, went to the adorable little town center, and thought, “What if they had a sacrificial ritual right here in this adorable little town?” And she ended up writing one of the best horror short stories of all time, just by being inspired by her walk to the grocery store.

Those are great recommendations, and I’d love to see more literary horror. So I hope people take your advice and go down that path.

Kemper: There is a lot happening right now. John Langan’s The Fisherman is very, very literary horror.

What trends are you seeing in horror right now?

Liam: Are there other trends happening in horror that you’re aware of right now? Are we more paranormal, less paranormal these days? What kind of trends are happening?

Kemper: Wow. Trends. There are a couple of books called Trad Wife that came out recently, and books about online and AI, those kinds of things. The trad wife books are both about online influencers. I love Trad Wife by Sarah Langan. It’s excellent. She’s a wonderful writer. And Alma Katsu wrote Incarnate, which is about AI and that kind of influencing as well.

Liam: Right, and there’s that other one, Yesteryear, that’s being made into a movie.

Kemper: Yeah, with [Anne Hathaway]. And I’d actually say that’s horror in many ways as well.

And The Hunger by Alma Katsu. You were asking about trends. I don’t know if historical horror is trending, but it seems like many of my favorite writers, like Alma Katsu and Victor LaValle, have been writing historical horror. She took the Donner Party and what-if-ed it, because nobody really knows what happened there.

Liam: Right. Talk about cannibalism.

Kemper: Yeah, yeah.

Liam: It’s so interesting how genre trends reflect real life. That’s always been the case. If you look back at movies like Night of the Living Dead, a lot of that is about racial panic and the fear of what was happening during the civil rights movement. So maybe one thing people can do if they’re looking for ideas is go read the news. If you want to see some horror, there’s plenty of it to be found in the headlines.

Kemper: For sure. And I think, too, really just look for the things that worry you, on a personal level and on a social level. Because then that’s something you’re invested in writing about. Horror is the perfect vehicle for social commentary. Don’t get preachy about it, but use it as a way to talk about the things you’re actually afraid of or concerned about.

Can writing about your own fears be therapeutic?

Liam: Do you think it can be therapeutic in that way, to write about your own fears?

Kemper: Absolutely. You can see it in the fiction when you’re reading it. People are afraid that they’re not going to be able to protect their children, and then they write a story about that. And it’s so effective because you can tell that’s a real, legitimate fear that person has.

Liam: I think that’s how we got Pet Sematary, basically. Stephen King being afraid of losing his own child.

Kemper: Exactly.

Liam: It takes courage to lean into your own things, because you’re probably going to scare yourself. Do you ever give yourself nightmares, or do you have to stop writing because you’re getting freaked out?

Kemper: I have actually scared myself, definitely. And that’s a good thing, though. It’s like, “Okay, I’m doing it right.”

One of the writers I know, Josh Malerman, is very active on Facebook and writes about his process a lot. He freaks himself out all the time. He turns on all the lights and is so scared to walk down the stairs. He’s doing a good job when he gets scared.

Liam: If the author is scared, people will probably be scared reading it, too.

What books on writing do you recommend?

Liam: You’ve already given us a lot of tips and a lot of people to look up, and I’m going to make sure at the bottom of this article there’s a list of everyone you’ve mentioned. But are there any other books you would recommend people read right now? This Chuck Palahniuk book, is this a book on form in writing that he’s put out?

Kemper: Yeah. There are a couple of horror writers and speculative fiction writers who have done really good books on writing. I really like the ones that blend autobiography with some writing tips, and he does that really well.

Stephen King’s On Writing is a classic. David Morrell has one. Gary Braunbeck, who’s probably one of the best short fiction writers of horror there is. Kaaron Warren has one as well.

And both Braunbeck and David Morrell have written my favorite… I wrote that down because I thought, “Oh, that’s funny.” My favorite novel by Braunbeck is called Keepers, and my favorite horror novel by David Morrell is called Creepers.

Liam: Keepers, Creepers. Where’d you get those peepers? 

What horror books should everyone read?