The Craft of Fear: Generating Scares in Fiction

Fiction Writing Workshop with Adrian Van Young

This workshop focuses on the finer points of generating fear in fiction. We'll examine contemporary fiction and film and engage in generative exercises to help you craft your own terrifying tale.

So often in horror we're taught: you must scare! Yet so few resources are geared towards how to—the actual mechanics of how to scare people. Exploring concepts such as creating an atmosphere of palpable dread, subverting genre expectations, setting as character, the Uncanny, establishing temporal dislocation in a reader, and the interconnectedness of screaming and laughing, this craft-oriented workshop will focus on the finer points of generating fear in fiction. In addition to exploring these concepts, watching a few terrifying film clips, and reading contemporary excerpts from authors such as Brian Evenson, Alice Sola Kim, Kelly Link, Victor LaValle, Karen Russell, Carmen Maria-Machado and others, we'll also embark upon a series of generative exercises that will set well you upon the path toward devising a chillingly effectively tale of your own.

All levels of adult writers welcome. 

Adrian Van Young is the author of four books of fiction: The Man Who Noticed Everything (Black Lawrence Press), Shadows in Summerland (Open Road Media), Midnight Self (Black Lawrence Press), and Rough Beast (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in October 2026). His fiction, non-fiction, and criticism have been published or are forthcoming in Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, Black Warrior Review, Conjunctions,  Guernica, BOMB, Granta, McSweeney's, and The New Yorker online. More at adrianvanyoung.com. 

Sponsored by the Library Foundation of New Orleans. 

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