Tag: Writing Advice
Choosing a Victim: Houses, Feasts, Blobs and Dead Kids
One topic that doesn’t come up often in discussions on writing horror is the importance of the victims themselves. There is plenty of writing...
Motivation and Stakes in Jaws, Death Spa, and Blue Monkey
If after the first kill in Jaws, the mayor agreed that there was clearly a shark problem and acted fast to get rid of...
Character Arcs: Are They Necessary?
If you take any Writing 101 course then you will be familiar with the importance of character arcs to fiction. Prose fiction has always...
Scream Writing Questions with David J. Stieve
This Scream Writing Questions post should have been up two years ago but somehow it managed to slip through the cracks of email, a...
An Interview with Writer/Actor/Podcaster Michael Swaim
One of the best features of Scriptophobic is how it has allowed me to talk to such wonderfully intelligent creative minds, such as Graham...
Looking for Silver: Keep Digging, Keep Writing
When we begin writing a story, we’re in love with an idea. The idea may be bold, maybe it’s weird, could be it’s a...
A Tale of Two Halves
Most writing advice would suggest you follow a certain formula, as if the best stories are something you create in the lab. And look,...
In Defence of Fanfiction
Fanfiction gets a bad wrap. And I get it. It’s full of weird sex, poor spelling, and a fervent love for a fictional universe...
Using Decay to Develop Your Characters and Worlds
A bullet might be the fastest way to develop character (or end it). Similarly, dropping a bomb on a city is the most surefire...
In Defence of Outlines
In his book On Writing, Stephen King discusses his method for discovering the story as he writes it and why he is not a...
6 Things I Learned Writing In the Shadow of Extinction
You can learn a lot writing a book. Learn something about yourself, your understanding of genre, and maybe hopefully how to be a better...
An Interview With Sequence Break’s Writer/Director Graham Skipper
I grew up on the tale end of the arcade boom, only encountering them in my travels a few times as a youth (aboard...
5 Dos and Don’ts You Want From a Writing Support Group
I spoke before about how writing fiction can be a lonely task – how sometimes it is necessarily lonely in order to protect the...
Protecting the “Magic”: The Sanctity of the Idea
Writing is a private ordeal. We sit at the computer and will a world into existence with words. It’s a Herculean task. The loneliness...
Scream Writing Questions with Pat Higgins
Pat Higgins reached out to me on Twitter while we were looking for new people to talk to. Can't say how glad I am...
An Interview with Video Palace’s Ben Rock and Bob DeRosa
Gathering around the campfire and telling ghost stories is such a powerful image of how we share our mythologies that John Carpenter used it...
Scream Writing Questions with Suri Parmar
This week Scriptophobic was lucky enough to talk to Scum of the Earth Films's Suri Parmar. Apart from tons of hands on and theoretical...
The Horror of Connotation
While I make it my domain to help screenwriters professionally, both through script consultations and one-on-one mentoring, it is my goal to provide my...
Seven Ways to Make a Great First Impression
The most deluded thing a writer can tell a prospective publisher about their recently finished manuscript is that “it gets better as it goes.”...
I Am Legend from Richard Matheson, to Vincent Price, Charlton Heston, and Will Smith
Richard Matheson is one of the all-time great writers of horror. From Duel to Stir of Echoes, his stories have repeatedly made the trip...
The Dog Kennel from The Thing (1982)
OBEDIENCE TRAINING GONE WRONG
It was the summer of 2004. As burgeoning horror fans, my brother and I used our freedom from school and responsibility...
The Female Gothic: Three Steps To Creating Authentic Women in Horror Literature by Meg...
There is a notion of the kick ass woman. She is strong, perhaps even muscular. She is a natural leader, tough, and quick-thinking. We’ve...
Jaws and the Rare Case Where the Film is Better
The common thinking is that the book is always better than its film adaptation. That’s just…not so. It’s easy to understand why we often...
David’s Transformation in An American Werewolf in London (1981)
A HOWLING GOOD TIME
When I was in college, rather than saving my money for practical things like groceries or bills, what little I was...
Tina’s Death in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
ANALOG NIGHTMARES
The first time I watched Wes Craven’s seminal masterpiece, I was huddled around a 22’’ tube TV sitting on the shaggy carpeted floor...