This four-week workshop will teach you how to write horror that goes beyond the scares and beyond the gross-out, to compel, challenge, and move the reader.
Your Instructor: Dale Bailey, Nathan Ballingrud, Gemma Files, and Helen Marshall
Where: Online — Available everywhere!
When: This class is not currently enrolling. To be notified when it is offered again, Click Here
Enrollment: 15 students
Price: $375
Class Description
There’s more to horror fiction than shock and revulsion.
In fact, horror can address a wide range of concerns and subjects, just as well as any other form of fiction. That's what this class is all about.
Over the space of four weeks, a quartet of today’s leading horror writers will take you through the elements that go into constructing a better horror story. Central to the class is the idea that a good horror story needs good characters—vividly-drawn individuals in whose fates the reader can invest.
Building on that foundation, the class will consider the narrative conventions available to the horror writer, as well as the uses of horror traditions, the potential for narrative experimentation, and drawing on the resources of place and history.
And by the end, you’ll have a better appreciation of the tremendous possibilities horror fiction continues to offer the ambitious writer.
Over the course of your four weeks in this class, you will get:
- Original lectures written by each instructor specifically for this course
- The opportunity to study with four of today’s leading horror writers
- Instructor and peer critique within a supportive environment
- Reading assignments designed to expose you to a broad range of innovative and exciting fiction
- Writing assignments designed to help you to develop your ability to create evocative characters and to place them in dramatic, compelling narratives
- Insightful commentary from all four instructors to help you to develop your writing more fully
What This Class Covers
Week 1: Unsettling with Setting: A Sense of Place & the Past
with Dale Bailey
Week 2: Shivers Down the Spine: Emotional Resonance in Horror Writing
with Helen Marshall
Week 3: Deconstructing Tradition: Rifling the Tropes, Frankensteining Your Own
with Gemma Files
Week 4: On the Butcher's Table: Breaking Down What Makes a Compelling Character
with Nathan Ballingrud
Goals Of This Class
- Write vivid characters who engage the reader
- Create dynamic narratives that engage the conventions and history of horror fiction, so you can chart new directions in the field
- Experiment with narrative form—and learn the benefits of that experimentation
- Draw on your particular place and its history in order to add depth and resonance to your fiction
