February 11th, 2019

A Mini-Interview with PVWW Instructor Eleanor Lane

Eleanor Lane talks monsters, favorite horror authors, why certain craft elements are even more crucial when writing scary stories, and what non-horror writers can learn from all of this. 

"Scary stories are actually very similar to jokes in terms of how important structure is. If you put a monster reveal a moment too soon, or have too many similar standoffs between main characters and monsters, or choose the wrong tense to tell the story in, the story will fall completely flat."
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What is your favorite scary story? And why?
In terms of short stories, my favorite is “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman which captures so perfectly the narrator’s loss of connection to the world and descent into madness. The story puts readers into the mind of the Victorian madwoman in the attic. Shirley Jackson’s stories are also classics: she’s able to create small town claustrophobia through the most innocent details, and then, of course, there’s the opening sentences of Haunting of Hill House, which rival Rebecca in how immediately they draw the reader in. There's also Jennifer MacMahon, who writes stories where adults have to go back and confront their childhood demons. Her stories manage to feel very much like gothic mysteries despite the fact that there is rarely a big haunted family estate— in fact, in one book the main character grew up in a yurt. I also recently read a book called The Silent Companions, by Laura Purcell, that left me actually afraid of wood. It’s really a triumph to make wood terrifying.

What scared you most as a child? 
I read a lot of ghost stories, watched Are You Afraid of the Dark and The Twilight Zone, and the scariest ones for me were the ones where the character couldn’t trust their own senses and couldn’t trust the people around them. 

Favorite monster?
Arnold Friend from Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” He’s at once uncanny and completely familiar, and his wrongness is built from small details in a way that mimics how we often recognize danger in real life. 

Can you tell us a little about the elements/tools the scary story writer works with? Your class description mentions setting, characterization, and structure. How do those function differently in the scary story?
Scary stories are actually very similar to jokes in terms of how important structure is. If you put a monster reveal a moment too soon, or have too many similar standoffs between main characters and monsters, or choose the wrong tense to tell the story in, the story will fall completely flat. I recommend reading some failed Creepy Pastas online (and we will look at a couple in class), for examples of how this can happen. In my experience, we’re most susceptible to these issues when we think we have a really scary concept, and focus on that over character building, pacing, and setting. For your monsters, it’s usually good to consider the 50s B-movie: the monster is scarier before it’s fully on camera. Even if your monster is actually a human being, the unmasking is almost always part of the defeat because it takes away their power. If you reveal exactly what/who they are too soon, you risk it falling flat. 

What can a writer who doesn’t write horror or scary stories learn from these elements? They seem like they’d be useful for many types of writing.
Writing horror stories is really fantastic practice for writing any genre because you have to build descriptive skills and get good at choosing which details you need and which you can discard, and it’s often easier to see which details you can discard because they distract from the horror or ruin the tone. It’s kind of like how writing formal poetry is good practice for writing free verse: you need the same elements (tension, pacing, suspension of disbelief) in horror that you need in any other genre, but in horror the form forces you to focus on these elements to build your story. 

What are you working on now? 
I’m working on a collection of short stories and a paranormal YA novel.

Discussion: What's your favorite scary story or novel, and why? 

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ELEANOR LANE is the recent winner of LIterary Death Match's 2018 Bookmark Contest, Redivider's 2017 Blurred Genre Prize, and the Mary August Jordan Prize in 2011. Her writing has appeared in Meat for Tea: The Valley Review ​and in Redivider. ​Find her online at www.eleanorlanewriter.com.

JOY BAGLIO is the Founder and Director of Pioneer Valley Writers' Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared in Tin House, The Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, New Ohio Review, PANK and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from The New School and is the recipient of grants and scholarships from The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, The Elizabeth George Foundation, and The Speculative Literature Foundation. She serves as Associate Fiction Editor at West Branch and teaches writing in the Pioneer Valley and at Grub Street in Boston. Find her online at www.joybaglio.com.