I recently participated in an online horror writing class from the Writer’s Digest people called Horror Writing Intensive: Analyzing the Work of Genre Master Stephen King. It was taught by Philip Athans and I found it to be very informative and enjoyable. Here’s why.
I usually avoid online courses because I’ve had bad experiences and heard of the experiences of other people. Even in my own teaching experience, the online way of doing things has some limitations. In this case, the price was low and I had read Writing Monsters by Mr. Athans and liked that. This was enough for me to take a chance.
The first part of the course covered things that we find scary, and why, while the second part covered the more technical details of writing. For both parts, examples from Stephen King illustrated the key points. The works of other authors popped up as well. I thought the examples were excellent, and I enjoyed re-reading Mr. King’s stories.
The course included a forum where everyone taking the course could interact. The people taking the course at the same time were interesting and had some wonderful ideas about horror and writing. It was nice to have the interaction while the course lasted.
The culmination of the course was to write a short story, under two thousand words, and submit it to Mr. Athans for critique. Applying all the ideas learned in the course, I reworked an idea I had about a month ago to create my story. It came in at 1711 words and I thought it was pretty good. The title is Beer and Cemeteries.
The feedback on the story was very positive, in general. There was a part where I inserted a clever idea that should probably have its own story, but that disrupted the flow of the current tale. As soon as I read the feedback, I knew exactly what he was saying. Since then, the story has been revised to extract the extraneous. Now I just have to find a market for it.
Overall, this was a pleasant experience. I know my friends always tell me I should be writing horror, but their my friends and writer never really believes them. To have a positive response from someone in industry was a nice confirmation and confidence boost. If they offer the course again, I would highly recommend it.