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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Welcome. Welcome back to another horror. Writers fest session. If you can see and hear me drop your location in the chat so we can see where you are joining us from.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Welcome back to another session.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Hello! From Seattle, Canada.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: I'm gonna drop some links in the chat for you.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Uk, more Canada. Welcome everyone we love seeing

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: where everyone is joining us from all parts of the globe we see California, Georgia, Scotland, California, Connecticut, Maryland, the Netherlands. Hi, everyone! It looks like you can see and hear me. Just fine. I'm going to drop some links in the chat for you now.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: and I will drop those intermittently throughout the session as well. But welcome back to another session. I'm Michelle with prowritingaid, and we're so happy to have you. We're going to get started with Samantha scow in just a moment. But 1st I'd like to review a couple quick housekeeping items, so your replays all of yesterday's replays are up on the horror writers fest hub now.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: as well as our 1st 2 replays from today, we will continue adding those so just refresh, and you'll see new things popping up on the hub throughout the day. And those replays are also going to be

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: going to our community page on the event, recording space by the end of this week. So

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: you can just watch those indefinitely there as well as all of our other event recordings. So you can check out a lot of video content there.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Your special offer for attending our event is a special early access to our Black Friday sale, which is coming up soon. This is our biggest sale of the year. You get 50% off yearly and lifetime plans for both premium and premium pro. So you should automatically be added to an email list to receive information about that. If for some reason you don't receive anything by November 16, th please give us a shout, and we will be happy to help.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: If you would like to keep the writing conversation going. We'd love to have you in our private online writers, community, we have a lot of fun conversations happening there in the live event. Chat. You have all of your event recordings. There's a space for feature requests, and we have some fun exciting things coming up soon there, too, so you'd want to be a part of that for sure. It's free to join you. Log in with your prowritingaid account information, and we'd love to see you there

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: if you would be so kind as to provide your feedback. From what you thought of our event. We would be so appreciative if you could fill out our type form.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Tell us what you liked about horror writers, fest what you thought we could do better. What you'd like to see at a future event. All feedback is helpful. It's very important for us as we

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: plan our upcoming event strategy, so that we know that we're planning events that are most valuable to our community.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: And we would love to have you at our brand new writing challenge called 5 K. In 5 days. This is going to be held within our community space.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: and this is where, between November 4, th through the 8, th you will be challenged to write 5,000 or more words. We'll be doing this together. There will be live write-ins, even with members of the Pro writing Aid team who are also taking part in the challenge, and we will have daily discussion, prompts, learnings, and chat forums, and there will be a lot of great stuff. So we hope that you can join us. It's free to join. The link is in the chat as well as on the Hub page

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: reminders for our session today. If you have any questions specifically for our speaker, please use the Q&A box. They do tend to get lost in the chat. But please feel free to use the chat to talk amongst your fellow attendees today. If you want to make sure everybody can see your messages, though, you'll want to select everyone in the drop down, menu beside 2 by default. They do come directly to the host and panelist only. So you'll want to make that slight adjustment, and then you can chat away

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: links that we share today in the chat will also be on the Hub page. So if you miss them in the chat. Don't worry. You can head to the hub and find them there.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: So thank you again for coming. I'm so excited to introduce Samantha. Scow Samantha Scow. She her is an author, accelerator, certified book, coach, and agented author who specializes in coaching mystery thriller and romantic suspense authors from novel planning all the way through agent pitching, and especially loves twist, brainstorming, figuring out pacing issues and the hell that is revision.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: She is the co-executive director of thrillerfest international thriller writers, annual writing conference, and a frequent volunteer mentor for the Women's Fiction Writers Association, an enthusiast of homemade sourdough and cheese of all kinds. She also adores scary stories that keep her up at night, and good red wine.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Welcome back, Sam. It's so nice to have you.

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Samantha Skal: Thank you so much, Michelle. It is such a pleasure to be here. Hi, everybody! I just realized in the chat when I was saying, go pnw, I did it to just Michelle. So Hi! Everybody who is also in the Pacific Northwest. What a day we're having! It's really quite dark and rainy out there. So I am going to get started here and

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Samantha Skal: there we go. So welcome. This is such a fun topic. I'm really excited to talk about this today. It's a brand new one for me in terms of just. I've been thinking about this for a while, and I really am excited to talk about this today. So bear with me if I stumble over my words a little bit, because again, brand new presentation. So today we are going to be talking about the importance of the emotional Aha! Moment in horror. And I'm calling this avoiding

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Samantha Skal: the Meh, because horror can fall flat really easily without this. And so that is what we're going to be diving into. So who you are. If you've seen me talk before, I do tend to talk to everybody, so I have no favoritism when it comes to plotters or planters or discovery writers. Everybody is welcome here. You're going to learn something whether you're in planning or in revision both of those work.

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Samantha Skal: You're absolutely going to learn something from that. And then mostly you are here because I'm assuming you're fascinated by what makes horror resonate with readers.

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Samantha Skal: So who I am? I forgot to give my updated bio to Michelle. I apologize. So one of the bigger things is that I am now the executive director of Tillerfest, and I am also the co-founder, along with Carrie Savage, who gave her presentation yesterday. If you didn't check it out. It was amazing of a retreat writing retreat called shadows and secrets, which is based on and focused on thriller mystery and horror writers. So if that's of interest.

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Samantha Skal: come, check us out. As Michelle said, I'm also an author, accelerator, certified book coach, a big fan of everything author, accelerator does. And I focus on mystery, seller, suspense and horror, novel planning all the way through agent pitching. And as she said, my superpower is twist brainstorming. It's what I love to do, and I am lucky enough to get to spend every day all day doing it. And I'll add that my weird

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Samantha Skal: fact for today is that I love canned corn. I think it's delicious. I know I'm kind of alone in that. So if this resonates with you, please let me know in the chat. And Hi, new friend.

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Samantha Skal: all right. So in the next 40 min I'm going to go over some definition of terms and horror, genre expectations. What an emotional Aha is! And isn't! Why readers crave it, and why? Without it horror can fall flat. Michelle. Actually, I am realizing I put up the wrong presentation. So I'm going to stop sharing for just a second. I'm so sorry everybody. Give me

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Samantha Skal: 20 seconds, and I will figure this out. This was one from a few days ago.

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Samantha Skal: and here is the one that I meant to be sharing with you. Okay, so we're gonna go back to where I was

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Samantha Skal: And

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Samantha Skal: here

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Samantha Skal: we

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Samantha Skal: go.

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Samantha Skal: So sorry about that.

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Samantha Skal: All right.

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Samantha Skal: here's the real one. Okay? So why, readers crave emotional arcs in horror. And why, without it horror can fall flat. I already talked about the other things, and I am going to get into this to keep us going. So why do readers crave emotional arcs in horror, and how do we avoid making it flat? So the 1st thing I want to talk about here is that what horror is, and kind of what it isn't. So some of the main genre

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Samantha Skal: here are that when we pick up a book, a novel that's labeled horror, we know something bad is going to happen, but we don't know how it's going to end so similar to well, dissimilar, actually to mystery, solar and suspense. We know that chaos is going to be brought to order in those genres in horror. It's chaos to chaos right? It can get worse. Our goal is to invoke suspense and fear, even if nothing

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Samantha Skal: scary happens until the very end. And the caveat there is just to make sure you deliver right. If you're going to label something horror. You need to make sure that you are actually horrifying the reader. And one of the other interesting things I think about horror is that there's lots of room for themes. It's not always about the thing in the horror. Right? There's lots of you know. You can have symbolism you can have. You can be talking about an actual thing that's happening in

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Samantha Skal: real world and put it in the box of like, here's this monster in the woods. So it's not always about the thing. And I think that that leaves a lot of really fun room for playing with

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Samantha Skal: with all kinds of stuff. And one of the things that we can do to make it actually shine is to put this emotional arc in there and make sure that our characters are really resonating with the reader, which I will obviously get into quite a bit today. So, as I said, the genre goal of horror is to horrify, frighten, and terrify, and our biggest goal is to break the reader's viewpoint on life, and what they didn't even think of to be scared of.

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Samantha Skal: So if you think about the last like truly horrifying book that you read, or short story. Often horror can lend itself very well to short stories. It'll leave you with an unsettled feeling. Right like you. You end the book, and you're like, Oh, my God! Like I didn't even think that this could be a thing that I should be frightened of. I didn't even think about this aspect of this. That's what we're going for. And so this this

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Samantha Skal: I

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Samantha Skal: concept of like just playing with the reader. I want you all to really think about that when you, when you sit down to write a true horror novel because there are some things like twists, which I will cover in a little bit. But mostly it's about we can't predict what's coming right. It's not twisty for the sake of being twisty like it sort of is in thrillers and mysteries like we need 3 twists and thrillers and mysteries because the reader expects it, and I think that those can lend themselves well to horror as well. But mostly we can't predict what's going to happen, and

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Samantha Skal: the fear that we have about how bad it's going to get.

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Samantha Skal: That's why we're reading these novels, and fear, as you might imagine, is heavily informed by the emotion of the character and the misbelief that they're carrying with them.

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Samantha Skal: So

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Samantha Skal: the reason that emotional resonance and this emotional arc is so important in horror is because plot without this is just like this happened. And then this happened, and like I went into the woods, and then there was a monster, and then it tried to eat me, and then I didn't get away, and then I did get away like you can see how that, you know, is scary, but it's not going to be as scary, as if you heard about how scared I was the whole time, or what I was scared of actually happening. Or maybe there's this other thing over here.

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Samantha Skal: It's about what's going on in here, and we want the reader to like feel as if they are in the book, and the way we do that is with emotional translation. So

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Samantha Skal: when you are writing and you have your protagonist and they're moving through the story, we want to know why what's happening in the plot matters to that person. We want them to translate what they should be scared of, and tell the reader us why we should care like, why we should be rooting for them. So you know a lot of horror novels like it. Can. It can run the gamut right? You have, like Slasher fiction over here. You have.

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Samantha Skal: like psychological horror. You have. You know, monster horror. And like all the B-movie stuff you have like true horror. That's

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Samantha Skal: you know just about like, how bad can it truly get? You have haunted house. You have all this stuff, but without the translation from the protagonist about what we should be scared of, or what this means, you know. Like, if someone enters into a

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Samantha Skal: a story like September House is a great example of this. That book opens in a haunted house like we know there's ghosts, and we know that she's not particularly scared of them.

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Samantha Skal: It's amazing, right like what a new fresh take on the genre that we what we don't really know what's going to happen. We just know it's going to get worse, and it starts off in such a bad place. We're like, Oh, my God! Where is this going to go? That's why that was so resonant with so many people is because we started off, and we knew what was going on, and we knew we were trusting the author to take us to a much scarier place. But all of that is through translation on the page.

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Samantha Skal: So translation, when I say that I mean it's what to be scared of and what Stokes that reader fear. So, for example.

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Samantha Skal: caves fascinate me. I find them to be very scary, but also really really interesting, and I like being in them. But I'm also scared of them, because it's like, how deep do they go? And what's down there? So for me, a cave in and of itself is not particularly scary for somebody else, it might be. And so if my protagonist is going into a cave, I want them to translate. How bad is this going to get like, what have I heard about what's

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Samantha Skal: in this cave? What have I not heard? And we, as the reader, if the protagonist is fearing what's in the cave. We wonder immediately how bad it's going to get like September house. Right? We're like, Okay, we're in a haunted house. How bad is this going to go like what's actually going to happen to her. And then, if this person is not fearing anything, sometimes we think the protagonist is naive, and we just can't wait to see what happens. Sometimes we're going with it. And we're like, Okay, I don't really need to be scared.

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Samantha Skal: But I know this is a horror novel. So it's going to get really bad. So I'm already scared because of the suspense of what's going to happen.

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Samantha Skal: So play with that when when you're sitting down to write your book, or as you're in revision, or you know, wherever you are in the process. Think about the concept of your reader and what they're going to be feeling, and the fact that as soon as they pick up your novel, which is labeled Horror, they know that it's going to get really bad, and so wait, you know. Draw it out. Keep that suspense going for the entire time, because they are trusting you

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Samantha Skal: to bring it to the end, where it's going to be absolutely terrifying and break their brain for a little bit, which is what we want.

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Samantha Skal: So when fear isn't translated, the reader doesn't know what to be scared of, and that can lead to boredom. So, as I was saying about caves, readers all have their own filters like, you know.

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Samantha Skal: I don't know. Snakes don't particularly scare me. I don't want to get bit by one, but like I'm not going to like run screaming away spiders. On the other hand, like, you know, if they're in the room with me, it's maybe okay. If they drop down in front of me like you know great prejudice will not abide, can't do it. But you know, over there it's probably fine. Some other people are very different. Sometimes spiders are fascinating. Sometimes they're run away and hide forever.

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Samantha Skal: I have a friend who's really kind of weird about trees in general. I have another friend who's weird about birds like everybody has their own filters, and so, if we don't know why a character is taking an action, so if somebody sees a spider and runs, if I'm not scared of spiders. I'm going to be like, what's going on is that like a particularly dangerous one? Is it going to chase you, you know, whatever. And so we want the character to translate that so that we don't disengage from what they're doing.

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Samantha Skal: So hopefully. That makes sense. If you have questions, I'm happy to kind of go into this more at the end.

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Samantha Skal: So when we know why the character is doing something, we connect with them, we especially connect when the character has the same thoughts and feelings. And so, as your character is moving through the story, if they're looking at something, and there's some like logical way out, like, you know. Just walk out of the cave when the bats start flying at you. We need a good reason for understanding why they can't do that, and you can do that through inner thought.

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Samantha Skal: So all of this translation happens through inner thought. It's like I'm looking over here at this empty office next to me and thinking like, Okay, well, there's no one in there, and so I don't need to be scared. And then a head pops up right? That's scary. It's not happening just. I'm fine. But you know, when we, when we see a character, move through the story, and they think the exact same thing that the reader is thinking about. Well, why don't they just leave?

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Samantha Skal: And the character thinks like, Oh, I can't leave because I wish I could. But I can't. Because of this, all of a sudden we're connecting with this story. We're being sucked deeper and deeper into the story.

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Samantha Skal: And all of this can really help with reader clarity, which is connection, and it also removes those like what is going on, moments which we've all felt in books, you know, like authors are people, too. We make mistakes, and we bring our own filters into everything. But the goal is that you don't have any of those moments, and your reader is sitting there, and like, completely connected to the character in such a way

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Samantha Skal: that as the character moves through everything, they know exactly what's going on. They know why they're doing what they're doing, and they understand why the action is being taken instead of being confused about why someone would do that

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Samantha Skal: hopefully. That makes sense. Okay.

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Samantha Skal: ideally, your character pictures themselves, or I'm sorry your reader pictures themselves as the character in the character. There's 0 filter. Right? So, especially in horror, we want to remove those filters as much as we possibly can, and just suck our reader in to the point where they just they completely remove everything around them. And they are just feeling what's happening in your book. That is what creates those physical goosebumps. And

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Samantha Skal: the, you know, like the rapid heartbeat, and like the turning of the pages like this, that's what we're going for. So what your character feels. Your protagonist or your reader is going to feel, because you have translated what's going on. The character is telling the reader what they're scared of, and all of this filtering informs the translation of what's going on on the page. So think about

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Samantha Skal: when I say filter, I mean, like your protagonist has a deep fear of spiders. If we know that going in, then we know that every time there's spiders it's going to be really bad, even if we're not personally very scared of spiders like

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Samantha Skal: that will inform how much fear the reader is going to be feeling through the protagonist. I'll stop talking about spiders, because I remember there was a presentation last year, I think, where somebody was like, please stop. So I'll make it like.

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Samantha Skal: I don't know birds. Those are a little less scary to me. Okay, so your goal is that the reader is the character, and the reader feels no filter, and in doing so the reader is going to feel all the fear. All right. I have gone into this quite a bit. So hopefully. This all makes sense. So what is an emotional arc and emotional. Aha!

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Samantha Skal: And what it isn't. So again, horror is all about fear overcoming. Fear is a core emotional arc for horror. We've all seen that, like, you know we enter the story being scared right up until the point where somebody is not scared because they've just had enough, or they've reached their point of like this is my breaking point, and they let go of their fear, and they face it, and then they triumph or not, you know. Sometimes horror ends badly.

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Samantha Skal: That attitude of that change matters very much, and I personally think that horror is very much about

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Samantha Skal: in the same way that mystery, thriller and suspense is, but it's about like distilling who a person is right down to their core and figuring that out right? Because you're dealing with like life and death, and often something kind of worse than death like it can be. You know, psychological horror. It can be the fact that there are demons. It can be that haunted houses are going to.

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Samantha Skal: you know. Take you to a dark place that you didn't even know existed, or whatever right like you're going to be exploring all of these very, very scary things. And so

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Samantha Skal: if you think about somebody being put in the worst possible position, and how do they act? That's the core of who they are. And I think that that sort of that moment, like that breaking of that person, and how they act in that moment. That's what makes horror so interesting. It's not really about the scary thing. It's not really about like how you know what what the scary thing is doing. It's about how

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Samantha Skal: your protagonist is moving through this story, and who how they realize, like who they really are. So again, this more scared they are, the more you can ramp up that tension to the point where they are truly just like at their most intense moment, and then they decide to face it that's going to be much more emotionally resonant and much more engaging to the reader than if they're like entering with a lot of swagger, and then don't actually change throughout. They just like bust all the ghosts, or whatever

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Samantha Skal: So think about what that change can look like, and then think about what could cause this realization. So emotional arcs are not external or about someone else. They're not realizations or explanations about like, oh, this is how this went down. This is how the villain, or the monster, or the ghost, or

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Samantha Skal: whatever got away with it. They're not classic twists, so it's not like a reveal of the villain's truth, which I'll go into in just a second. If you've not seen me talk about that yet, although they may lead to one right like you can have something be revealed, and then the emotional Aha may lead may come out of that.

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Samantha Skal: They are an internal change. So if you think about, you know, taking somebody down to their very core, like their most scared thing that they've ever been, their most intense, like life and death and fate worse than death moment.

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Samantha Skal: this is where we learn who somebody is. As I said, so emotional arcs are based on an incorrect assumption about themselves and misbelief. I'm sure you've heard that a million times. I'm a nineties, kid. Major. Malfunction is one of those other things that comes up. It's like this thing that just.

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Samantha Skal: It's a thing that we believe about ourselves. Our characters believe about themselves, and it's often going to be pretty universal. So it's like imposter syndrome. I, you know, had some trauma when I was little, or the character had some trauma when they were little, and so they're unworthy. They feel they're unworthy of love or not strong enough or not capable or something along those lines. Right? So

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Samantha Skal: it's going to feel universal. And it's going to feel a little bit tropish because it is. But it works really really well, particularly in horror. Because again, we're breaking people down the character down to the very core of who they are. And at our core, you know, humans are all like pretty similar. There's some differences, and how we choose to live our lives and everything. But like how somebody acts at that worst moment. That's what we're going after. And so this is why we need to know

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Samantha Skal: what broke somebody when they were little, or when they were 10, or 15, or 20, or whatever like. Where did this misbelief come from?

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Samantha Skal: So the misbelief is a lens or filter through which our protagonist or character views the entire world, and makes all their assumptions through this. So it informs all of their actions. Let's go with like I don't know, not capable, because they grew up in an environment where they were told that they were weak or.

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Samantha Skal: you know, not strong enough, because they had 3 big brothers, and they got pounded on all the time, or whatever like. You know that sort of emotional misbelief. You know. You can imagine that somebody that a character might be like. Well, I'm not going to let that take me down. I'm gonna work out all the time, and you know, fight back. And I'm going to have this thing that like to always prove that I can do this. But that core little like tiny voice inside. That's the misbelief for this, and so it can think like, Oh, my God, I can't do it!

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Samantha Skal: And that's what's going to come up and keep getting like louder and louder up until they have this emotional Aha! Moment.

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Samantha Skal: and the misbelief doesn't waver for that time. Right? Because again we're taking them into the deep, dark place, and this is why I love horror so much. So when your when your person enters the story, they're coming into a cave. I don't know. I have the descent in my head because I watched it recently. Great movie, if you've not seen it.

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Samantha Skal: And it's 4 women they enter a cave. Bad stuff happens. And you know bad stuff happens. So but there's nothing really good that happens in that movie, right? Like, it just keeps getting progressively worse. And so you can think about progressively worse and inner voice, inner, imposter, syndrome little tiny.

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Samantha Skal: dark voice inside, getting louder and louder right up until that climactic moment, and then it sort of gets a little bit better the dark night of the soul very important in horror. This is when that's like this, all is lost like I have hit

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Samantha Skal: the the very most terrible moment of you know fate worse than death, like, what am I going to do? I can't get out of this. How am I going to act?

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Samantha Skal: That's when the Aha moment comes out

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Samantha Skal: again. It can be traced back to an external origin. This is not something that typically comes about just because someone decided to think this when they were 5. So it's either someone did or didn't do something. Someone said or didn't say something. Somebody assumed a motivation for why something happened that affected them.

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Samantha Skal: So, you know, to get like, I don't know a little dark like. Let's say you're 5, and you know you're one of your parents leaves, and you assume it's because they don't love you enough. And it's actually because they were going to save the world or something. It's actually not that dark that's kind of nice. But anyway, the 5 year old might assume they're unworthy of love and carry that little voice with them this entire time. So they internalize this belief. Your protagonist who's entering into this cave.

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Samantha Skal: and the real, the emotional Aha! Moment again, is that realization that their assumptions about what happened or what somebody did to them, or the motivations behind it were wrong. And so it's like a 1 line like sometimes even just one word moment in your book that crystallizes the entire emotional moment. But we can't understand what that is until we figure out what actually happened to them.

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Samantha Skal: what their backstory is. And I don't need, like, you know, 40 pages of character Bible. It's really just thinking about like, what is that tiny little

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Samantha Skal: like dark voice inside that's making you question everything. And how loud does it get?

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Samantha Skal: Really loud? Because horror? And what is that moment that flips their filter so that they can think like, Wait! No, I am worthy of love. I can do this.

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Samantha Skal: I'm not scared anymore. I can face this, whatever it is.

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Samantha Skal: This emotional Aha moment leads to action and flips the narrative of the story flips the power. That's another good way of looking at it is like when we enter the story, we're typically like reasonable power, medium power, even even high. Whatever cocky, when we're going down into the cave, and the power goes down, down, down, down, down, until dark night of the soul. And you know the voice gets louder and louder and louder up here.

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Samantha Skal: This like parallel moment, this climactic moment is when it flips, and then the protagonist has all the power, and whatever your villain is, has little power. And this all happens at this emotional Aha! Moment.

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Samantha Skal: So like, I said, it's a it's a single line of inner thought. I can't versus I can survive this. Conquer this figure, this out, whatever it is. It's preceded by something external, usually. Somebody saying something. Some, you know, if you have a human villain, and somebody says something that makes them realize that like oh, they were wrong about their assumptions of motivations.

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Samantha Skal: Something like that is going to trigger this realization that, like I can do this. I've reached my breaking point. Or whatever it is, and it's going to lead to many other realizations about the story present plot and many actions. Right? So you have the I can't do this to oh, my God, I can. Then what do they do with it? Right like, how do they survive this? Conquer this figure it out

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Samantha Skal: so arcs need not be positive particularly. I'm just checking our time here we're doing great, particularly in horror. Things can end really badly. The result can be far more dangerous than we initially expected. You want a wildly uncomfortable reader, is the goal, even if you decide to end it. Okay, at the very end, like maybe only one person out of the 10 that goes into the cave, survives.

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Samantha Skal: Or you can have someone have a negative arc right? Like they get to that breaking point. And instead of being like, I can face this. It's like, Oh, I can face this, and I don't care about the consequences. I don't care who else suffers because of what's going on here. I'm going to go like full dark that can be interesting, and it can be something to play with, and I think that some of the you know, particularly TV, that's coming out right now, there's some really fun kind of

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Samantha Skal: negative arcs like this, where, like the protagonist makes a decision that objectively, is like morally evil, and ends up having like a decent life after it.

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Samantha Skal: The the hitman is one that without ruining anything like was sort of like that for me. And I was like, no, I really really love what we're playing with here. So you know, don't be afraid to think about like, what if it gets worse?

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Samantha Skal: It can be really interesting. So using twist timing to maximize the emotional Aha impact, I know that's a lot of words. I will go quickly through this to have it make sense. So twists and horror are expected.

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Samantha Skal: Similar to mystery, thriller and suspense. I think that they can be a really good scaffolding for figuring out how your plot kind of moves through, and you know it's not quite as like we really need a midpoint twist at exactly 50%. If we're kind of hitting the genre expectations for thrillers, for example. But we do want something to happen in the midpoint, and we want that to be a pretty big turn.

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Samantha Skal: I'll go more into that in just a second. But

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Samantha Skal: Twists are not something that come out of nowhere. If you've not heard me talk about this before, they are a reveal of an incorrect assumption from the protagonist about the motivation or goals of the villain or scary thing. And so

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Samantha Skal: yeah, let me just finish talking about this, and I'll go into the next thing. So they are a view of the villain's truth. So if you think about your villain is the person who

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Samantha Skal: you know whether they are a monster or something else, they're the one who's kind of operating beneath the surface of the story, and as such authors have to know the villain story in order to write a twist. If we don't know what the villain is doing, we can't write twists, because again, twists are the reveal of the villain's truth, and they're twisty because the truth is unexpected to the protagonist, and therefore the reader.

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Samantha Skal: but logical because the clues were on the screen. And so what do I mean by this? What is a villain in horror so it can be a human. It can be a monster. This is the force of opposition to your protagonist or thing.

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Samantha Skal: Doing the bad thing, and we have a concept here of a fake versus fake villain versus a true villain. So this could be that, like the protagonist faces the monster in the climactic scene, and it's actually being puppet mastered by your true villain, which is a human

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Samantha Skal: or vice versa, faces the human, and it's puppet mastered by a demon or something. So you know your villain is just this ultimate force of opposition that wants the opposite thing from the protagonist. And in whore that's typically your protagonist wants to survive, and your villain does not want them to survive. The protagonist is the person we most closely follow and care about.

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Samantha Skal: And again, what the protagonist thinks the reader thinks so in mystery, thriller suspense, and horror. The villain's journey is experienced by the protagonist. What do I mean by that for those of you who have watched me talk about this before? I'll go quickly. New people, happy to answer questions about this. So I want you to picture a story like a piece of cardboard. It's kind of thick. It holds its own right, and on the top of the cardboard. This is your protagonist

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Samantha Skal: walking up the hill, not knowing what's coming next. You'll note the fog there.

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Samantha Skal: and sometimes, okay, there's a cave. There's a theme here, and this cave is going to be a hole in the story that's poking up so hole in the cardboard, and sometimes you know your villain is beneath the surface. They're the one in the cave kind of doing all these things like you think of the piece of cardboard as

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Samantha Skal: what the reader sees is only on the top. But the villain is operating and doing all kinds of things underneath here that's like off screen for the reader. We're not really going to see it until they poke up through these holes like a cat might out of a bag. I love cats. They're not villains, but you know, that's a really good graphic. So I'm using it. So think about the fact that, like your villain is beneath here, and when they poke up through. That's what the protagonist is going to experience.

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Samantha Skal: They're not seeing the whole story. They're only seeing one little part of this. And then at some point, your protagonist is going to face off with your villain, and that can either be in the climactic scene or the final twist, like 98% kind of ending scene, but they will face off with them eventually. Otherwise we don't have any respite from the suspense, and your reader is going to end up feeling kind of

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Samantha Skal: unsettled in a bad way. We want to give them what they came to to read about, which is to be horrified. And so it is chaos to chaos. You can have it get worse after. But we do need this like meaty face off scene at some point.

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Samantha Skal: So in horror, the twist. Expectations are as follows, so we have a slow build usually starts out normally, you know, someone's going for a hike sees a cave, decides to go in or decides to go in the cave from the outset, like in the descent, the 50% midpoint is truly no return. So in other genres, sometimes this can just be like a turn for the story. It can be a new

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Samantha Skal: a new person that we think is doing the bad thing. It can be something. Some aspect of like the story gets taken away so that, you know they have to move through to the end of the story. But in horror. It's usually just like, Okay, we can't leave the house. We can't leave the cave. There's no escape. I have to face this, or I'm going to die like that's kind of the

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Samantha Skal: the expectation is that once we get to the 50% mark of this story, like, there's truly no way out. We have to keep going, which, of course, makes the reader be like, oh, my God, what's going to happen? And it's really great. Your climactic scene is the face off. But it's not typically the time when your suspense is totally like the balloon loses all of its energy. Right?

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Samantha Skal: It's a little bit of a respite, but it's not totally released, and you can think of suspense like a balloon, you know, if you have it full, it's going to keep getting blown up all the way, and then at some point, it's going to lose all of its air. That doesn't happen until the very end, and sometimes in horror. It may not totally deflate. Right? You can have it be like kind of half full in mystery, solar, and suspense. You do need to deflate that kind of almost all the way, because you want

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Samantha Skal: chaos to order. So think of the balloon like chaos, and it doesn't have to get totally. But it needs to still be a little bit there in horror, so that we

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Samantha Skal: we don't really know how bad it's going to get.

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Samantha Skal: So, as I said, twists are the reveal of the villain's truth, but we have to know why the villain is doing what they're doing, and of course, in horror. You don't always have a human villain. You have ghosts, demons, entities, monsters.

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Samantha Skal: and so, if it's human, you know, and they're sentient, we're going to know their motivations and their goals as an author, and at some point in the story your protagonist is going to learn what those motivations and goals are, and to be able to defeat them or not. Right. If they're not human, we have to know their goals. So if you're dealing with like a ghost, what is its goal is its goal. To be seen is its goal. To really just like

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Samantha Skal: down the world like what's going on there, and how bad is it going to get. What are they willing to do to

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Samantha Skal: make this happen for themselves, and then think about, how can your protagonist be wrong about their assumptions, about those motivation and goals. That is how you ideate a twist in horror.

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Samantha Skal: So, using the emotional Aha moment to manipulate the reader into feeling the most fear. This is absolutely what I'm going to encourage you. If you take one thing away from this presentation, do this. So think about manipulating your reader. Think about how you want them to feel scared at the beginning, because they know this is a horror novel. And so as they move through the story, even if nothing happens, for, like the 1st 3 or 4 chapters which

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Samantha Skal: I don't really recommend doing, because we do want to give our readers something. If nothing scary happens, we want the plot to move forward. You know the reader is going to be like, Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God! You know like when we pick up a horror movie and watch it. It's the same thing, right? Like anytime. Anyone's just doing anything normal. We're expecting the worst because we've been told that this is in the horror, genre, and we're here to feel horrified.

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Samantha Skal: So your choices for when this happens, so dark night of the soul always precedes the emotional Aha! Moment. It has to, because we need to get real dark before we figure out who we are, but it doesn't need to immediately proceed it it can be, you know. Dark night is here.

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Samantha Skal: and then we, you know, in kind of a classic way, we have dark night of the soul. We have this realization like I can do this, and then we have the protagonist go into the climactic scene and face off, and then keep facing off until the very end, or you can have dark night of the soul. Enter into the climactic scene, not knowing if they're going to win. But they don't really care. They're just like kind of trotting along. And then they realize I can do this. And that happens during

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Samantha Skal: you can have the climactic scene happen, and the person gets through it, and that's the realization is like, Oh, my God! I can do this. And now I can go into the final and face off, or you can have the emotional Aha! Happen at the very end. It can be after they've after they have this final face off, and they realize like, oh, here's what's going on

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Samantha Skal: that can be really powerful as well. And it can also, you know, increase the suspense, because this whole time the reader through the protagonist is like, Oh, my God! How are they doing this? What's going to happen like, how bad is this going to get

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Samantha Skal: so some pros and cons. You can kind of easily picture these, I'm sure, but if you do it before the climactic scene or during, there's more agency for the protagonist. So there's they think, going from like I can't to I can. The reader is rooting for them. If you wait, it'll be like I die trying to. I have a reason to live which can be a little darker and scarier. Right? So play with it.

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Samantha Skal: Think about what your emotional Aha is, and know that either way the action that they take off out of that realization the translation of what to be scared of what's going on. That inner thought is incredibly key.

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Samantha Skal: So how do we do this without being predictable? The biggest thing about this is that you know, tropes are frowned upon in general because they are predictable. So in twists not recommended. I don't recommend using a well-known twist, because the reader will see it coming from a mile away, and it's not going to land as well. It's not going to have as much impact.

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Samantha Skal: however, in emotional arcs. Universal resonance equals connection, so I can't to. I can. I don't feel loved and to. I do feel loved. I am not strong enough to. I am strong enough.

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Samantha Skal: That can be really powerful, and it's a universal thing, and so use it, you know, like we want to engage our readers. So you know, like I said earlier, facing the fear super common in horror, and it works so make it fresh and new with like what now at the end, and ask yourself, like, what does my character realize? And then what actions do they take after that?

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Samantha Skal: And so when you're thinking about this, this emotional like misbelief and this like

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Samantha Skal: what happened to them, and

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Samantha Skal: you know what's their deep kind of deep pain, and what caused that little voice to start, be shouting so loudly? Ask them, ask yourself, why do they believe this? What happened to them like we talked about? And the 5 whys, if you haven't heard of this, give it a quick Google later. It's basically just asking like, why do I think this? I think this because of this? Okay, well, why do I think that that's because of this and keep going all the way down until you find that order.

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Samantha Skal: origin, story for your person, your character, and you know sometimes it's going to be something really simple. It'll be something like, oh, there was like this thing that happened in 3rd grade, and I internalized it, and I didn't realize it.

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Samantha Skal: And you know when I face off the monster, I realized that, like that person was in a lot of pain. And so you know them pulling their chair out from under me in 3rd grade like wasn't because they hated me. It's because this other thing was happening to them. That is such a like lame origin story, but you kind of get the point. And that actually happened to me. A kid pulled a chair out from underneath me in 3rd grade, and I held on to it for a real long time until I figured out that it

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Samantha Skal: wasn't really about me at all. So maybe it's not so bad. So origin story for what it is a lot of like psychology in here. Right? So think about, you know, digging deep and figuring it out. Another thing I really like about horror is that it often can help you realize stuff about yourself if you're drawn to a certain aspect of horror.

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Samantha Skal: play with it, see what comes up safely in therapy, if that's what you need. I'm not a therapist. Okay? And then, once you figure out that whole origin story, I want you to reverse engineer the Aha moment.

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Samantha Skal: and so think about how can the story present plot and form a new way of viewing? We'll do the chair thing in 3rd grade of viewing somebody pulling out the chair in 3rd grade leading to the oh, moment. So, maybe in this situation I'm in a cave, and there's a bigger monster that eats the little monster, and the little monster freaks out and tries to run away. And I make the connection that that actually matched what this kid did in 3rd grade

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Samantha Skal: loose. But you know, you kind of get the point. So think about

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Samantha Skal: What can happen externally, and how it can go back to this. And again your emotional Aha! Moment I'm facing the fear and conquering I will survive. This is very super classic, and the fresh ending. How you make it fresh without it being tropicious is, how does this change me? What now? It's a hallmark. So

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Samantha Skal: it's a chance to leave the reader with what? If so, again, this is where you can have that negative arc where it's like, Oh, okay, I survived this. So what else can I do? How bad can I go break your reader's viewpoint on life? What is safe, what they haven't even thought to be scared of, you know, like

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Samantha Skal: how. Maybe, like every house is haunted ever, and we just don't see the ghosts until our eyes are opened, or something. Maybe we're in constant danger, and we don't realize it. Maybe every cave is like the origin of demons, and that's why caves are on the planet Earth.

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Samantha Skal: I don't know. Leave your readers super uncomfortable and think about being manipulative with this right? Like, think about how you scare them terribly. And then I'll just mention really quickly. We're going to wrap up, I promise Michelle. Showing the thing is really scarier than imagining the thing. Signs is a super classic example of this. So

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Samantha Skal: that whole movie, we don't see the aliens until just like one little clip.

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Samantha Skal: And there's a reason that everybody freaks out when they see, that is because we've had this suspense build up so much. But we haven't actually seen the thing. And so when we actually see it, it's far more terrifying than it would have been if those aliens had been there from the very beginning.

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Samantha Skal: Genius and it's similar to romance. So in in like romance and romantic suspense. When the 2 people get together, the suspense lessens right when they form their bond, if you will. We now know that the romantic suspense is going to be. The deflation of the balloon has happened. And so, save that, say, you know, in romance there's there are beats that we need to follow. So that's

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Samantha Skal: you know, the the analogy or the comparison ends there. But think about with whore, keep that that balloon expanding, expanding, expanding, and then only lessen it when you're ready to.

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Samantha Skal: and use your character, fear and emotion to amp that fear and suspense, and really connect the reader. Don't let them go, and then I'll end with my normal warning. Please do not compare yourself to books in the bookstore. They did not spring forth from the beginning. In their final state. They went through like 87 pairs of eyeballs.

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Samantha Skal: a lot of training, a lot of like the writer sitting there and figuring out what to do, and 50 drafts and all of it. So, you know, be the best version of yourself. Write the story that you need to write, give it your best shot and happy writing, and please write more horror because I love reading it, and that is where I will leave it.

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Samantha Skal: So

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Samantha Skal: yeah.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Awesome. Thank you so much. We do.

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Samantha Skal: Of course.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Some Q&A. Already. But if you would like to get your questions in, make sure you enter those in the next couple of minutes, and we'll try to get through as many as we can. So 1st off, Joshua asks, how would you distinguish a horror novel versus a dark fantasy novel.

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Samantha Skal: Interesting, so very similar, right? Fantasy just has a lot more that you can go into. And that's honestly, it's not my, that's not the genre that I know the best. There are other people who can talk about dark fantasy a lot better than I can, but in terms of like amping fear and manipulating the reader into feeling the fear I think you just have.

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Samantha Skal: There's a lot more fun and fantasy side than the fantasy side of things, whereas horror is all about the fear. Fantasy can be about expanding your mind in positive way as well. So even though you have some scary stuff happening. It's going to be a little bit more positive

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Samantha Skal: is how I would take it. But great question, and I would find a dark fantasy expert to ask that question to you as well.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Joshua also asks, could you combine 2 misbeliefs into one? For example, I am unworthy of love because I can't protect those I love.

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Samantha Skal: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I love that. That's that's a really good idea. And you know, that's another thing like the

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Samantha Skal: you don't want to make it too complicated because you want the emotional Aha moment to be literally one line, right? So like, you know, if the realization is, I can't. I'm unworthy because I can't protect. And then they do protect something. What do they realize from that? Is it actually like, does that inform the belief it's like. Well, I did it here, but I can't. I'm not gonna be able to do it for the rest of them, and then they have to flip the switch to understanding that they can

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Samantha Skal: that can work. But if you add, like another thing on top of that that can start to get too complicated to have one realization. And so you have one core realization, and then that can expand out to other realizations. But make sure you're getting to like the core of why they feel that way, you know, like what happened so that they can't protect their people. Did they screw up when they were in 3rd grade?

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Samantha Skal: yeah.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Lucia says, I'm currently writing a second Gothic horror book with the same main character. Her emotional arc in the second book relates to events in the 1st book. How much do I refer to the events of the earlier book, recap the events of the earlier book, or try to write the second book as a standalone.

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Samantha Skal: Oh, such a good question! I love this

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Samantha Skal: so series are a thing. There's lots of advice out there about how to write and and catch the reader up. I am of the firm, firm belief that you should always write every book in the series to be as much of a standalone as you can. And so if you read series which I'm assuming we all have, like

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Samantha Skal: Jim Butcher does a good job of this in the Dresden files like every book has, like maybe a page where it's literally the same, right? It's like the same. Recap that sort of just like talks about who he is and what he is. So you have to anchor the reader a bit. If the events of what happened in the 1st book heavily inform the second. You don't need to like. Go on for pages, but you need a little bit of flashback, and you know you can do it very deftly where it's like, Oh, when I lost this person

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Samantha Skal: at during this time, your readers who have read the 1st book are going to understand that they're. That's the reference to the 1st book. And your new readers are going to be like, okay, they lost someone got it moving on right? So you don't need to. What you want to like focus in on is the core of the emotion. Again, because that's what matters. That's what connects readers and so lost someone. Did they matter to them? Yes. Why, okay, moving on so it doesn't need to be

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Samantha Skal: like hammered. But you do need enough so that the reader understands what's going on there.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: We have an anonymous question, do emotional arcs vary by subgenre? Are there different genre expectations.

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Samantha Skal: Oh, another good question. So I personally think that every book ever should have a very strong emotional arc. I think that that's what connects readers in general.

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Samantha Skal: Horror, like, I said, is based on getting somebody to that, like worst possible time in their life and making them break, and then figuring out who they are in romance. It's often going to be something like

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Samantha Skal: you know. Oh, I I don't feel like I can get married, or I don't feel like I'm worthy of love. I can't let you in. I'm scared, you know, and so it's not gonna be like a life and death realization. But it is going to be very core and very painful. And so I guess that's a good way of thinking about it is like, think of like that inner voice, and that that painful little like you're not good enough, or whatever voice

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Samantha Skal: And then have that voice get bigger, no matter what it is and have them face it. But the actual core, emotional arc, not really that different right? Because we all have those little voices. It's not always something quite so negative. It's like I can't do it, but everybody has these. We all have little

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Samantha Skal: little angry voices in our head that makes me sound like I'm

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Samantha Skal: just sitting over here with a lot of different voices. But aren't we all so.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Truth.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: we have another anonymous question for a horror comedy. How best would you balance the horror and comedy aspects.

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Samantha Skal: Oh, God, I love horror! Comedy! I think it's probably my favorite genre. So it is a little harder, right? So I want you just to think about

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Samantha Skal: how scared like. Think of the the push and pull, because comedy is a suspense relief, right? It's like the the air going out of the balloon a little bit. And so Tucker and Dale versus evil.

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Samantha Skal: fantastic movie, really good example of how scary horror comedy can be, because it's Super Slasher. And they're like taking all these tropes from all these different movies. But it's told from the standpoint of the villains like that. The kids think are the villains. And actually the villains are just these 2 guys who are bumbling through the woods and are confused as to why the teenagers keep killing themselves right? So it's scary, because

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Samantha Skal: we are seeing the fear from the teenagers. It's also scary from the villain's perspective, the villain, because they're confused as to why all this, like mayhem is happening around them. And so again, it's about the translation.

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Samantha Skal: And so it can be kind of comedy forward, and then also be scary because you're translating what to be scared of. Yes, I just saw scream as well, absolutely right. Anybody who grew up in the nineties and watched scream for the 1st time terrifying, but also hilarious. I know what you did last summer, like all of those were in exactly rode that line, and it's because they were translating what to be scared of, even as the reader is like.

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Samantha Skal: really.

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Samantha Skal: so

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Samantha Skal: yeah, hopefully, that helps. But great genre, more, more horror. Comedy. Please.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Mckenna asks, is there a particular style or way to have the protagonist become the villain due to the climax.

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Samantha Skal: Oh.

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Samantha Skal: I wouldn't say it's a particular style. I think that's a negative arc, right? So like

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Samantha Skal: it's just it. We we break the person. They have a realization. And that realization is like, Oh, I can do this, and I can get worse than you

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Samantha Skal: like. I'm going to absorb what you did, and I'm going to go off and like. Put on this mantle and go and off, and be the villain now, like I'm going to take over what you were doing and do this thing. And so it's just a negative realization, ethically or morally, whatever you want to put your filter on. And so, instead of being like, Oh, I defeated this thing, and I'm going to go off and be in the world, and it's going to be fine. It's like, Oh, I defeated this thing, and guess what, I'm going to make it worse.

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Samantha Skal: So hopefully that helps. But it's it's just like it's just realizing something that

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Samantha Skal: is not a ethically positive thing.

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Samantha Skal: We objectively all think that killing people is bad, right? So.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Tom asks if you have multiple Povs, should each have an equal emotional arc? Or is it okay for some to be more pronounced than others?

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Samantha Skal: Yeah, great question. There's always only one protagonist. I know that we can have, like several quote unquote main characters, but there's always going to be one person that we follow more than anyone else. And that's truly who the story is about.

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Samantha Skal: Despite what I said about the story, really being about the villain. We have to know the villain in order to have the protagonist experience it. And so your protagonist can be the villain, and their villain is the person who's trying to do the good thing. You can have a cast like game of thrones always comes up for this. It's like who actually was the protagonist, and I'm happy to have that debate for hours. I actually haven't arrived on an answer that I really think is real. So I'm not even going to try to go there. But

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Samantha Skal: the answer, in short, is like, Yes, you can have varying degrees of emotional arcs, but I think for the emotional resonance, having, if you have a truly equal pov, giving each of them their own emotional arc, can be really powerful and engaging for the reader. But your protagonist is the most important. That's the person that's going to be in the climactic scene facing off

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Samantha Skal: with whatever the villain or monster is, and the other people are there to kind of support the story in that way?

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Samantha Skal: Does that make sense

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Samantha Skal: hopefully.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: We have one more anonymous question, what do you think is an effective way to incorporate horror elements into other genres? I'm a lit fic writer, specifically.

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Samantha Skal: Yeah. Playing with how bad it can get right? So you know, horror doesn't have to be monsters, or ghosts or demons, or what have you? It can be! How scary somebody else can be, or how scary you can be! How dark you go like horror is about horrifying. It's about

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Samantha Skal: dealing with the stuff that we normally kind of shy away from. It's going to like the deepest, darkest parts of people's Psyches and letting that come to light. And so in in literary fiction. Absolutely. That's why I was saying, like, I haven't quite figured out what the Venn diagram looks like with all the genres. It's something I'm working on.

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Samantha Skal: But I definitely think that the overlap of horror and literary is is there because I think that literary often explores the deepest, darkest things. That's why it can be so powerful, right? Because it's very emotional. And we're dealing with like.

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Samantha Skal: understand the psychology of why someone thinks something. So how scary can it be internally? And how much?

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Samantha Skal: How does the person feel about it? That's how you bring the horror into it.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Alright. Well, thank you so much. We got through all of our questions. This almost.

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Samantha Skal: Excellent.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: And we have the links in the chat for you again, and they are also on the hub. So be sure you check out all of Samantha's resources, and the replay and slides will be up on the hub soon. So we have another event beginning in just over an hour, so we will see you all there, and thanks. Thank you again, Samantha. It's always such a privilege to have you here with us.

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Samantha Skal: Oh, thank you so much. Thanks everyone for coming. This was so fun. Thank you.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Bye, everybody!

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Samantha Skal: All right, bye.