It Was a Dreary Night of November: The Importance of Setting in Horror Fiction
If you’ve read Dracula or Frankenstein, you’re probably already aware of how important setting is to the Gothic novel. If Dracula had lived in a cottage by the sea, it would have been a much different story. Unlike other stories at the time, Gothic literature was a place where setting played just as much importance as character and usually involved desolate landscapes in wild and mountainous locations, rambling castles, foggy moors, and decaying ruins.
In contemporary horror fiction—the successor of Gothic literature—setting plays an equal role. But where the Gothic’s settings reflect the fear of giving in to social vices and desires, the horror of the modern reader is focused on realities that are closer to home.
BREATHE: Overcoming Writer’s Block
I once had a job attempting to novelize a video game that (somehow) had no script, and every time I told the project manager, “I’m stuck,” they would tell me, “It’s okay, you just need to wait for the muse to inspire you!”
Needless to say, that book never got written, because—more’s the pity—working writers don’t have the luxury of waiting for inspiration to strike. When a deadline’s looming, and the writer’s block is pressing down, you often don’t have any other option but to keep going, even when that feels like beating your head against a brick wall.
Thankfully, there are some things you can do to help break through the (hopefully metaphorical) wall.
Going ‘Whole Whale’ into Children’s Literature: An Interview with Karen Yin
I’m happy to say that my little boy is very interested in books, so I’ve spent a lot of the last few months cuddled up on the couch reading board books and other children’s literature.
Lucky for me, I was able to chat over email about this exact subject with Karen Yin, well-known in editing circles as the force behind the Conscious Style Guide, and familiar to Guild members as the wonderful keynote speaker at our 2017 Red Pencil conference! She has recently made the dive into children’s literature with an upcoming picture book geared toward three-to-six-year-olds entitled Whole Whale, due out from Barefoot Books in May 2021 (preorder here).
Getting the Words Out
A few years into editing full-time, I came to realize that the publication process bewildered most of my writers. Not only did they not know what hoops to jump through, they very often didn’t know that editors could help them in the leaping.
Cooking with Adverbs
Many writing experts agree that adverbs can weaken rather than strengthen the point being made. “The adverb is not your friend,” states Steven King, one of the leaders of the movement to avoid adverbs. Some go so far as to say it is the mark of the novice writer to use adverbs when they are not necessary and even redundant: to have someone “shout loudly” or “stomp heavily.” A few advise avoiding adverbs in dialogue altogether to avoid such errors.
Overuse of adverbs can also make a writer lazy. It’s easier to throw in an adverb instead of providing enough description that the reader can imagine how someone is behaving.
But there is a middle ground between overuse and avoiding all adverbs that most writing mavens fail to address!
What’s the Big Idea? Four Words that Can Define a Work in Progress
A couple of years ago, I got the urge to write a book. I’d recently returned from a sabbatical in Europe, where my husband, Eric, and I walked a thousand miles on the Camino de Santiago, a network of pilgrimage trails that date back to the Roman Empire. I hadn’t intended to write about the trip when I left, but when I got back I couldn’t shake the suspicion that there was something book-worthy in the experience.
I’d worked in book publishing for almost two decades by that point, including the past seven years as a developmental editor and collaborative writer. I’d seen hundreds of manuscripts, both fiction and nonfiction. And while there was a lot about becoming an author I didn’t know yet, I did know that the first step wasn’t just to start typing away at Chapter 1.