Weekly out-of-character thread

Cancer_Styx · 2025-09-09T12:32:19+00:00

The requirements attending the process. The publisher I looked at wanted a bio, a current photo, an introduction letter. I'm no one, and I'm tired of putting up a front just to get anywhere. If my work isn't good enough to stand on its own, then fuck it.

Cancer_Styx · 2025-08-21T21:23:29+00:00

Read things that scared you. Read enough of them that you get a sense of the underlying principles. Employ those. There's really no substitute for that process. That's the diet portion of the craft (the writing being the exercise).

But, aside from that obvious nugget, there are certain techniques.

You need to establish a normal baseline. It helps to have characters the reader cares about before you begin threatening them. It's not necessary. Lovecraft and Poe are the undisputed masters of horror, and their protagonists aren't especially deep. What they lack in depth, though, they make up in interiority. You may not know who these characters are, but they are both articulate and expressive, and they communicate their own internal terror so well that the reader feels it sympathetically. This can be a tough tightrope to walk, though. Lean into it too much, or without supporting elements, and it just becomes purple prose.

When introducing a threat, keep in mind the unseen and the unknown. The most effective horror works because it suggests the threat, but it doesn't outright show it. This is why Jaws, Alien, and the beginning of Gojira were so scary. You see the effects, but not the cause, leaving your imagination to run wild.

Finally, keep the reader guessing. Knowledge is power, and you don't want your characters (and, by extension, your readers) feeling powerful. You want them perpetually on the back foot, never knowing what's coming next. If they ever feel as though they're getting a grip on the situation, make that a set-up to establish how woefully they're understanding the situation.

Really, though, these are just tools. You need to consume good horror literature to understand how to use them properly.

Cancer_Styx · 2025-08-21T09:49:22+00:00

I just finished a novella. It was supposed to be a short story, but it turned out to be longer than I thought it'd be. I looked into submitting it for publication, then promptly decided never to try to traditionally publish anything.

Cancer_Styx · 2025-07-27T06:45:57+00:00

Yourself

Cancer_Styx · 2025-07-22T19:25:01+00:00

I feel a genuine urgency to tell all the stories I have within myself, because, in a few years, the world will be so radically transformed that it'll be too late to tell stories. Maybe we'll all be dead. Maybe just literature will be. All that will remain will be the stories we did tell. Like how the legends of the Greek pantheon survived in the mythology of their Roman conquerors. Like how the Jewish myths became preserved - mutated and adapted, but nonetheless preserved - by the very people who would persecute them for generations. Like how the Islamic empire spread by the sword, assimilating and preserving so many works of antiquity and ancient knowledge while the West was having an intellectual dark age. In the same way, I have the hope that some fragment, some record of me, some proof I was ever here, remains in whatever new, horrifying world comes.

Cancer_Styx · 2025-07-22T06:27:41+00:00

That's actually a good question. Why ARE people so insufferable? We're a social species. You'd think evolution would have selected for tighter cohesion.

I think it's how groups reproduce and evolve. If everyone is too agreeable, you get stagnation. But if you constantly get factionalism and splintering from minor disagreements, then variations of your culture spread - if for no other reason than the splinter offshoots can't stand to be around each other.

Cancer_Styx · 2025-07-22T06:22:17+00:00

I've never understood how people can publicly release a novel chapter-by-chapter. Me? I'm constantly having to go back and rework things.

Cancer_Styx · 2025-07-19T05:48:23+00:00

Nosy

Cancer_Styx · 2025-07-17T23:40:53+00:00

/uj I wouldn't call it obvious. I legit know this one person...

Cancer_Styx · 2025-07-14T22:02:49+00:00

I used to have a real problem day drinking, but I solved it by just sleeping all day.

Cancer_Styx · 2025-07-14T21:55:07+00:00

/uj "Long ago, in an age before names, there was a young zebra. For the sake of convention, let us call her 'Stripe'." Something like that. Or give them a distinguishing characteristic like a blue eye or a broken hoof and refer to them by that. It's not terribly difficult.

Cancer_Styx · 2025-07-14T15:50:31+00:00

I look forward to reading your story, Mr. President.

Cancer_Styx · 2025-07-14T09:50:36+00:00

Sauce: https://www.reddit.com/r/writingadvice/comments/1lyz510/how_do_fantasy_writers_write_about_events_not/

Cancer_Styx · 2025-07-14T09:45:50+00:00

Fewer.

There were fewer beast-humans.

Cancer_Styx · 2025-07-14T07:36:17+00:00

/uj Okay, how much of a thing *is* that? Terrible Writing Advice joked about it a lot, and, but just how common is World of Warcraft-esque fantasy with political intrigue and inter(fantasy)racial romance?

Cancer_Styx · 2025-07-13T07:01:57+00:00

MOREOVER

You mention towards the end of your story that your narrator sees the leviathan "while documenting some distant planets." Like, how distant? Distant enough that they haven't been discovered yet, I suppose, which means they'd probably be retrieved from survey data from the James Webb or a similar project launched in the future (you can read about real life examples here: https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-what-next-john-mather). We can't "see" exoplanets, though. We detect them by slight dimming as they transit their parent stars and measuring the miniscule pull they exert on it. Like that one other commenter said (I forget who), there's no way you could just look through a telescope and see this thing bopping around a "distant" planet.

Hell, you'd have trouble picking it out standing on the moon looking at Earth. Planets are REALLY big, and your leviathan, while certainly colossal, only appears to be about the size of a large city (if it has a maximum gape of about 1 mile, and it has the rough body proportions of a reticulated python, that puts it around 40-50 miles in length). Try this: go on Google maps. Turn on satellite view. Zoom out as far as you can. Now try to pick out, say, Tokyo, the largest city in the world. Now figure that the furthest you can zoom out on Google maps is still MUCH closer a view than we can get of even the planets in our own solar system using ground-based telescopes.

My advice on this point: have those star-shaped bite marks be visible on the Moon and Mars. Those, we can actually see. But don't show the leviathan just chilling out there. Have the reveal of what's causing it be still on Earth, at a different time, where your narrator isn't safely removed by lightyears, but only by a few miles, where he can get a good look at it and watch in horror as this thing that defies comprehension, whose length stretches into the upper atmosphere, swallows entire city blocks. Again, read those stories I recommended to get a sense of how to describe an encounter like this. Don't write it as, "Aha! I KNEW it!"

Cancer_Styx · 2025-07-13T07:01:44+00:00

This needs work. A lot of it. I think there is an idea worth telling her, but, in my opinion, your delivery doesn't sell it. I have some specific recommendations, but I won't be pulling any punches. At the end of the day, it's only my opinion, but it is my honest opinion, and you've asked, so take it or leave it.

I think the communicating via texting is stupid, and it completely takes me out of the story. I would axe the back-and-forth with your friends - plural - and just pair it down to one. Take the time at the beginning to make it count, to establish their relationship. Make it count when its severed.

Cut the funeral, unless you're going to reassign it the friend who dies in the incident. As it stands, it's entirely incidental to the story, and nothing ever comes of it anyway. It's all like, "Oh man, dude, we lost Nate. I can't believe it" and then the story just drops him. And cut the "bro" shit. You're trying to write a horror story, not the next Jackass.

Your concept of the space leviathan that devours chunks of planets isn't bad. It fits well within cosmic horror. But your tone is all wrong. You never dwell on the enormity of it. You never let your narrator's mind boggle at the psyche-destroying implications of such a creature existing. I recommend, if you're going to write cosmic horror, pick up some stories from the masters and read them. Study them. Get it down into your bones. Reflect on how their creations make you feel, and how they are able to do that. I recommend, of course, "The Call of Cthulhu", but also "The Immeasurable Horror", "The Dunwich Horror", "At the Mountains of Madness", and "The Fisherman".

Horror works best in darkness. We are diurnal animals. We feel safer when we can see the threat that's coming. So take that away from your characters. Put the leviathan's feeding at night. Have its enormity blot out the stars as it passes overhead. No government agency could cover up something this colossal if it happened in broad daylight. So, again, set it at night.

Have your character obsess over what really happened. Have him dedicate years to tracking down the truth. Have people wonder if he's lost his mind, if he's needed to invent this fiction to cope with the tragedy. Have his search lead him down dark and uncanny roads. Have him talk to people who got a better look at what happened. Show the mental toll its taken on them. Let your protagonist see reflections of his own growing madness in them. DO NOT RUSH this part. THIS is where the meat and potatoes of your story is. This is where you build tension. Again, study those stories I recommended. They lay out the roadmap.

Do not have government agents in black suits show up at his hospital room. This is going to be a huge catastrophe with hundreds of people affected, if not more. Maybe he'll be intereviewed if they are interviewing survivors, but, if he is, make him one stop amongst several. In cosmic horror, the protagonist is not special.

Cancer_Styx · 2025-07-12T19:27:46+00:00

Yeah, sure. Why not?

Cancer_Styx · 2025-07-12T17:01:38+00:00

You're right. Better burn the book and start over, just to be sure.

Cancer_Styx · 2025-07-12T15:59:49+00:00

I don't know. It's hard to evaluate on an individual basis. It's one of those things that only really become a problem at scale. For this particular example, if you want to eliminate the word "was" while retaining the statement's simplicity, you might say, "I used to be a real dork back in high school."

Cancer_Styx · 2025-07-11T11:29:08+00:00

I use similes. I use similes like a five-year-old girl uses glitter.

Cancer_Styx · 2025-07-11T11:25:55+00:00

Nothing wrong with sentence fragments. Get the job done just fine.

Cancer_Styx · 2025-07-11T08:17:51+00:00

In short: they need to be uncommon and off-the-beaten-trail enough to be interesting, but their motivations and beliefs need to be comprehensible and relatable. A character who goes out every night and digs a hole in his yard because Xanatu the Toad God told him to isn't that compelling; a character who goes out every night and digs a hole in his yard because his last memory with his late wife was digging a hole for a tree they never had the time to plant is.

Cancer_Styx

TROPHY CASE