How To Haunt the Page in Revision | Perfect Your Pacing
Lesson 8 of Writing Horror That Does More Than Just Scare
Welcome to our final lesson in The Craft of Fear! I miss you already!!! Also, HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Unsurprisingly, this is my favorite holiday of the year.
On this special haunted day, we’ve saved the best for last: Revision! Perhaps you love revision, perhaps you hate it, perhaps you feel a little bit ambivalent. In any case, we’re gonna talk about it!
First, I want to share my personal beliefs about and framing of revision. Take all this with a grain of salt. In fact, take everything from every one of these lessons with a grain of salt. My role as your Literary Elvira here has not been to prescribe what to do but rather to jumpstart your horror gears, to give you some tools, but then it’s up to you to decide how you’d like to wield them. I believe in an expansive and liquid approach to craft. There are so many ways to go about writing horror, and nothing I say is the be all, end all.
Now, revision. I think a lot of people like to think of revision as a process of tightening or polishing, but I prefer to think of revision as a transformative process. You’re not polishing the work; you’re transforming it. That doesn’t necessarily mean an overhaul; it just means approaching revision with the same capacity for imagination and exploration as you do with initial drafting. Make cuts; make additions. Do what you need to transform the work into its next stage. With that in mind, let’s talk about some strategies for transforming your horror drafts!
Hopefully you’ve generated a decent chunk of new work throughout this course, and hopefully it’s wonderfully messy work! If it’s perfectly pristine, then good for you! But if you were really focused on disrupting your process and challenging yourself, then my guess is the work is in need of some transformation, and that’s not only a good thing — it’s a great thing. It’s time to look into all the nooks and crannies of the work you’ve generated and figure out what to tug at a bit more or perhaps release into the void. For this lesson, look at the work you’ve generated along the way and apply some of the revision techniques to them as you see fit!
How to improve pacing while revising
Pacing is one of the hardest things about writing horror, but pacing can make or break a horror story. I personally find it restrictive to try to focus too much on pacing when I’m drafting, so it’s something I return to in revision.
It sounds simple, but I find that turning an eye toward line breaks, white space, and punctuation can do so much for pacing in horror. Poets are particularly adept to using these elements to their advantage, and if you’re strictly a prose writer, you should still be thinking about line breaks and white space in your work. When I’m writing horror, I will often use white space to create pockets of “silence” on the page that function in a similar way to the quiet moments of horror films leading to the jumpscares. Sometimes that means going back to a story during revision and breaking an entire paragraph of a story up into multiple paragraphs or even line breaking after every sentence for a particularly short and punchy passage.
It definitely takes some experimenting and time to figure out where the story would benefit most from a bunch of line breaks or white space. You shouldn’t do it just for the sake of doing it; it should somehow transform the work in a way that serves its overall intent and themes. But I want you to go back to some of your previously generated work and consider shape, consider white space. Where could it unlock something new about the work?
Consider this flash story: Exotics by Dantiel Moniz. See how there are three paragraphs that are relatively the same size (in print, this is even more evident), then interrupted by a one sentence paragraph, which is followed by three paragraphs of approximately the same size and shape as the three that open the story. How does the shape of this story reflect, heighten, or interplay with its narrative?
Sentence variation and attention to punctuation are other things we can consider when revising horror (or revising anything, of course!). I find there are moments in horror that are best communicated in short bursts, almost mimicking a beating heart. Other times, a run-on sentence gets the job done, especially if a character is panicking or feeling overwhelmed.
Let’s look at Edgar Allan Poe’s Berenice, one of his more underrated stories in my personal opinion. An upsetting story, to be sure, and one that really knows how to use sentence structure and punctuation to its advantage. Consider the long, winding sentences in the paragraph that begins “Among the numerous train of maladies.” The paragraph describes the narrator’s monomania — an obsession on single objects. The long sentences feel themselves like an obsession, a descent. Consider also the final sentence of the story, full of commas, never-ending, its horrors unspooled like a nasty ball of yarn that would be impossible to roll back again. Again, it’s fitting for the horror at hand.
So here we have two horror stories — one a work of modern literature and commentary on absurd wealth, another a classic work of Gothic literature steeped in the themes Poe loved best (death, beautiful women, illness, etc.)
Revision exercise
Return to a piece of work you’ve generated during this course and play around with line breaks and punctuation.
Return to a piece of work you’ve generated during this course and pay attention to sentence structure and length. Does a pattern emerge? Could one? Is there a part of the piece that would benefit from shorter, punchier sentences? One that could benefit from run-ons?
I’ve so enjoyed our time together, and I hope you have, too! You can find me writing about queer horror and so many other things on Autostraddle as well as on social media (I’m @KaylaKumari everywhere). And of course: HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Hey Kayla, thanks for this fabulous class. I took your "Gays and Ghouls" queer horror class last year and really enjoyed it (highly recommend!); your class for The Forever Workshop is a great companion to that. I don't consider myself a horror writer, but I'm fascinated by it as well as queer horror short story anthologies and books like It Came from the Closet. Do you have any favorite books on the craft of writing horror? I'd love to keep building on what I've learned from you in the two classes. Thank you!