#'hey maybe writing A ROMANCE is different from (e.g.) including a romantic subplot. hey maybe writing A HORROR STORY is different from

[captain-lovelace]

I think the thing that really makes it so frustrating that people insist that you can write good horror without liking or reading or watching horror is that it comes from a refusal to acknowledge that horror as a genre requires skill specific to it. It's this assumption that because they've felt fear they understand it, and can therefore inflict it on their audience using whatever skills they already have. There's just one issue: not a single person on this planet has never been afraid, so it's a really easy emotion to get wrong in fiction. It's extremely easy for a portrayal of fear to come off as, for example, cheesy, or unintentionally funny, or disingenuous, or for it to just be too personal to be scary to other people. Studying how fear is written and portrayed, both effectively and ineffectively, makes you better at doing those things yourself. In order to write better horror, you have to treat horror as a genre worthy of attention and study. And I, personally, would argue that means that you have to interact with it.

One of the biggest and most important pieces of advice that I got as a writer was to read. It's hard to be a good author who doesn't read, and it's even harder to be a good genre author who doesn't interact at all with the genre that you're writing in, because you have massive gaps in your knowledge that you're not even aware of. You might not even be able to properly critique your work! You have nothing to draw from, nothing to be inspired from except things that were not made for the purpose of inciting fear-- you're fitting a square peg in a round hole and hoping it works.

The people who say no, you can write horror without having read horror, are the same people who would never say the same thing about whatever genre they like the most. On some level they're aware of how much it sucks to have someone with no experience in a genre come in with 100% conviction that they are actually the genre's savior, before coming up with something stale, bland, and full of half-baked inspirations from whatever bits and pieces of genre media they picked up through cultural osmosis, all of which they're convinced are so original because they have no idea they're drawing on any sort of larger tradition. But, because it's horror, this for some reason does not cross their minds.

The argument seems to be that you don't have to read horror to write horror. You don't have to like horror to write horror. You don't have to care about horror to write horror. It's a genre that requires zero effort, zero knowledge, zero skill you can't get elsewhere. It has no value-- but you, the person who doesn't know anything about it, you can give it value.

They don't seem to realize just how insulting that is to hear.

(Final note: queer horror and horror by POC both have rich histories, as does horror that isn't USAmerican or Western European in origin. It's a genre that is popular almost worldwide and has a lot of really excellent offerings from everywhere. Also, in addition to horror movies and novels I really recommend checking out horror short stories/anthologies, which can really show where the genre shines. Don't shy away from older horror, as well! Some of my favorite horror stories are from the 19th century.

If you love the idea of horror but have never really found anything that clicked, I guarantee that there is something out there that you will probably like, and if you want to write horror seeing the sheer breadth of what's out there will help you write better horror-- if at least to show you what you would like to see more of, or what might be missing.)