How To Become a Gothic Writer
If you’re wanting to be labeled a Gothic writer, or would just like to add the genre to your portfolio, it’s important to remember that it takes more than just a few creepy elements to make a piece truly Gothic. One of the most important things to keep in mind is that, while many other genres appeal to our senses (Romance for example), the Gothic appeals to us psychologically. The trick is being able to develop a story that is at once universal enough to strike a wide audience, but have specific enough details to touch each individual where it is most effective. Sounds counterintuitive doesn’t it? Well, it is really, but there are some tricks you can use to actually accomplish this.
One of the best techniques to accomplish this is to not actually show your reader what it is that’s so scary. Our minds naturally and unconsciously make connections between things whether we want them to or not, so, if you spend your time focusing on what this scary thing does in your story without giving a clear description, you force your readers to conjure up their own ideas on what it could be. Each individual in your audience can (and will) make far more poignant connections to something frightening in their own head if you leave them to fill in the blanks than if you specifically spell out what the disturbance is. I can guarantee that whatever they come up with will be fare more disturbing for them than anything you could have thought up. This is why, as far as writing stories goes, not revealing something is usually far more effective than revealing it.
For example, I could describe someone’s shirt at a party (not that this is scary, but bear with my illustration…):
Jonathon’s electric green shirt glowed even without the help of the black lights over the dance floor. As she moved closer to him, she saw that it was edged in dark brown piping and had a delicate pattern of intertwining tulips woven into the fabric.
Now, I tried to conjure up a pretty unattractive shirt, but there’s always a possibility that one of you out there has a shirt just like this at home, or maybe your grandmother had one just like it, so you remember it fondly. Whatever the case, I not only lost the chance to effect whoever may not agree with my tastes, but I may have even insulted their tastes enough for them to put down my book. So if I really want people to react to just how hideous this shirt is I would write something like this:
Jonathon moved out of the range of the black lights, but his shirt was still glowing like a beacon. Each time she caught a glimpse of him she noticed a new detail in the fabric that made it more and more nauseating. She decided then and there that this shirt came into existence through a long and unfortunate string of blind designers and merchants. However, she couldn’t decide whether Jonathon was blind himself, or had a girlfriend with a particularly cruel sense of humor when it came to giving gifts.
With this passage I’m hoping the reader will be piecing together this shirt with their own experiences and opinions of what a truly unattractive shirt would look like. If I’m successful, each and every one of my readers will react with the same extreme level of disgust, all while each of them pictures a completely unique shirt in their head. It works the same way with creepy critters, or disturbing events.
I was actually reminded of this quality of Gothic writing while strolling through a book store recently. A young blue-haired girl was having a rather loud discussion with her bookish friend about how bunnies could never be frightening no matter what you did to them. (Naturally, I wanted to mention that awful creepy bunny costume in Donnie Darko, but I minded my own business—for once.) So, no matter how matted with blood or adorned with human body parts you make your killer bunny, this girl wouldn’t be disturbed by it, in fact, as she claimed herself that night in the history section, she’d still want to pick it up and hug it. It doesn’t matter how skilled you are at infusing your writing with your own fear, if it’s at all bunny-related, you’ve lost her if she’s in your audience.
Don’t think that I’m suggesting that you not include details, or trying to contradict the classic “show don’t tell” rule of creative writing. What I’m saying is that the mind of the reader is the Gothic writer’s playground. Once you learn how to tap that fertile resource, you can make Hulk Hogan call his mom and sleep with the light on.
Writing Exercise #1:
Keeping what we’ve just discussed in mind, write a short paragraph describing something in your childhood that really scared the snot out of you—so much so that you still remember it with vivid detail. It could be an object (that freaky mechanical monkey with the cymbals and the satanic smile), an event (your first Halloween haunted house experience), a person (crazy Uncle Joe with the glass eye and a newspaper clipping collection detailing unsolved murders in his home town), or anything at all! The trick, though, is to write your story without telling your reader exactly what was so frightening. Try to write it in a way that will lead the audience into their own minds to find something in their childhood to fill in the blanks.
Good luck and gory writing!