I Must Be A Writer…

I’ve been a regular user of Yahoo!’s various services for 10+ years now, and I’ve referred to their Answers website numerous times since they started it up (I even wrote about it at one time). I’ve never been particularly active on it, though. The points system is kind of a pain; you can’t vote on a question’s usefulness until you’re a level two, and it’s tough to rack up points unless you ask a lot of redundant questions which have already been asked by someone else about a million times. The point system, for this reason, is woefully inadequate. It rewards people for mindless chatter and rarely gives much credit for deliberate, well-thought-out ideas.

But I happened by the Writing portion of the site the other day and found a question that I thought I could answer myself: How to write a horror story like 28 weeks later or dawn of the dead?

So I checked and, yes, a level one person can actually answer a question, so I jotted a few things down. Here’s what I came up with as an answer to this question:

First: you need to create a catastrophe that causes the dead to rise.
Second: you need to create a character (or characters) to be the focal point of the story.
Third: focus more on tension than on gore. It’s always better to terrify than to horrify. In the end, though, if you can’t do either one, take the tip from Stephen King and just “gross ‘em out.” But for starters, try to keep the tension high.
Fourth: The character must interact, in a realistic way, with his/her environment. The character must have to face dilemmas, be challenged by them, and either overcome them or fail, it’s your choice, your story.

If you do all of that, and make it interesting, then you will have written a horror story like the ones you mentioned.

Pretty simple answer, huh? Well, in the end it was voted best answer (where’s my blue ribbon?), so I’ve now got a best answer rating of 100%, which means every question I’ve answered (all one of them) has been chosen as the best. Of course, the answer I gave was just about as basic as you can get, and you could get pretty much the same advice at any writer’s conference (or from any writer) anywhere. But it makes me feel good, just the same. It makes me feel like, at times, I might actually know what I’m talking about when it comes to writing. Or–the other answers were stupid, and mine was the only one that was making an honest effort and not just out to score points. Personally, I liked this answer (to the same question, submitted by a different user):

Step One Go see Dawn of the Dead

Step Two: Read Day of the Triffids By the Great Sci-fi novelist John Wyndham.

Step Three: Have your one original idea “Hey, what if I just made a movie that was Day of the triffids, but with zombies?”

Step Four: Chuckle and do coke off a Thai hooker’s rump

Step Five : rinse and repeat