History That Never Was

Image by Enrique Meseguer from Pixabay

Now that the 2024 WriteHive Online Conference panels are available on their YouTube channel, I’m catching up on the ones I missed during the conference itself and sharing some of the things I gleaned from them here!

I’ve caught up on a number of genre-specific panels, including Fear Factor: A Horror Genre Master Class. Horror is one of the genres that I’ve studied quite a bit, because I’d really like to write more of it, but I’m never certain I’m doing it “right.”

The panelists talked about essential elements of horror stories, writing techniques for horror, creating stakes, dealing with tropes (both good and bad, and how to avoid the bad ones), and gore (and how it’s not needed to make something horror). They also talked about protecting your mental health when you write disturbing things and gave advice for authors looking to get started in the genre.

My big take away from this panel was the suggestion that in creating stakes in a horror story, you need to push past your own fears and lean into them, because if you’re not scared by the story, your audience won’t be either. So I feel like those stories that I’ve written that still put a chill down my spine are probably getting close to “right”!

This video is about 35 minutes long, so not a terribly long watch, and they recommend some panels from previous years of the WriteHive Online Conference if you want to learn more about writing horror!

Tags: advice, conference, genre, horror, online, panel, writehive

This entry was posted by dawn.vogel on Monday, September 2nd, 2024 at 6:00 am and is filed under Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.