Tag: Writing Advice

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...

If after the first kill in Jaws, the mayor agreed that there was clearly a shark problem and acted fast to get rid of...

If you take any Writing 101 course then you will be familiar with the importance of character arcs to fiction. Prose fiction has always...

This Scream Writing Questions post should have been up two years ago but somehow it managed to slip through the cracks of email, a...

One of the best features of Scriptophobic is how it has allowed me to talk to such wonderfully intelligent creative minds, such as Graham...

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...

Most writing advice would suggest you follow a certain formula, as if the best stories are something you create in the lab. And look,...

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...

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 his book On Writing, Stephen King discusses his method for discovering the story as he writes it and why he is not a...

You can learn a lot writing a book. Learn something about yourself, your understanding of genre, and maybe hopefully how to be a better...

I grew up on the tale end of the arcade boom, only encountering them in my travels a few times as a youth (aboard...

I spoke before about how writing fiction can be a lonely task – how sometimes it is necessarily lonely in order to protect the...

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...

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...

Gathering around the campfire and telling ghost stories is such a powerful image of how we share our mythologies that John Carpenter used it...

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...

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...

The most deluded thing a writer can tell a prospective publisher about their recently finished manuscript is that “it gets better as it goes.”...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...