Tiny Writing Tips from the Writers of ‘Tiny Nightmares’

As this year’s Spooky Season wraps up, giving way to A Time of Merriment (Forced or Otherwise), the Catapult magazine editors reached out to the writers published in Tiny Nightmares, an anthology of stories that are very short—tiny, one might say! In this book, published by Catapult in 2020, these leading literary and horror writers spin chilling tales in only a few pages so evocatively that we had to ask them: Do you, as a writer of Tiny Nightmares, have tiny writing tips to share?

Below, nineteen of the authors share their best tricks—and treats—for writing good thrilling fiction—a good fiction, more broadly. Pick your favorite; write it on a Post-It; stick the Post-It above your desk. And get to writing . . . like your life depends on it. (Insert evil laughter here.)

“Think about the terrible jobs you’ve had . . . then add something spooky. Zombies at the warehouse. Cthulhu at the office. Ravenous selkies at the cafe down by the beach. Work is already terrifying. All you need to do is add a few cannibals and let things get weird!”

— Corey Farrenkopf, author of “Mother’s Wolves” on Catapult

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“Think of a situation that would scare you; something that would make you shake and cry and vomit. Then, slap your protagonist in that situation and try to have them figure it out.”

— Pedro Iniguez, author of Control Theory and Synthetic Dawns & Crimson Dusks

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“Lean into your fears. Then, make fun of them.”

— Michele Zimmerman, author of “Step-Beast” in Blood Orange Review

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“Readers can tell if you’re faking. It’s best to dive deeply into your fears, to remember what it felt like to experience them and then try to embody that feeling in your prose: Even if you’re writing about other fears, the feeling is the same. That puts writers in a position where they and the reader are sharing the fear, rather than the fear being inflicted by the writer on the reader. You and the reader are in it together. The reader can feel that.”

— Brian Evenson, author of The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

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“Often the horror lives not in the tension between the question and the answer, but in getting the reader to wonder if they want to know the answer at all.”

— Josh Cook, author of An Exaggerated Murder

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“Be clear in your descriptions but never explain the world. Horror that makes sense is just fantasy.”

— Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying

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“In writing scary stories, I return to Mark Fisher’s definition of the eerie as ‘a failure of absence or a failure of presence.’ Is there something there that should not be? Is there something missing that should be there? Both necessitate establishing expectations and subverting them.”

— Jac Jemc, author of The Grip of It and False Bingo

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“This goes for any kind of fiction: The best advice I ever got was to have people touch something in your stories. Tactility easily gets left out, and for horror specifically, an unexpected touch (the oddly clammy texture of a book cover, the brush of a thumb nail down the back of a neck . . .) can transmit straight into the body of the reader.”

— Helen McClory, author of Bitterhall

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“If form follows content, then build your world out of the question you are writing around.”

— Eshani Surya, author of “Veins, Like a System” in Terrain.org

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“There are several fears and fear-associated behaviors that we often call ‘irrational’ but are actually worth finding a logic to. There may be one instinctual step of reasoning between I must run from this axe murderer and I will die if I do not, but more complicated, societal fears—abandonment, failure, being stuck in a loveless marriage—take a number of steps to understand and become more horrible with explanation. Identify these logical steps and use them as a means of guiding your story.”

— Monique Laban, author of “We Know How It Ends” in The Offing

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“Keep the dream sequence. Add another.”

— Andrew F. Sullivan, author of The Marigold

“Keep the dream sequence. Add another.”

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“You’re alone in the dark and swear you hear someone else breathing, even though you know, logically, that there shouldn’t be anyone there. That’s where horror starts, with that feeling of anxiety and hyper-alertness, when every creak has the potential to be a monster’s footsteps. Build your story around that unease.”

— Lena Valencia, managing editor of One Story

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“Try setting your scary story in a normal setting. I find that things feel creepier when something is ‘off’ in an ordinary location . . . a laundromat, the waiting room at the podiatrist, a completely empty hardware store. Then let the first shoe drop.”

— Whitney Collins, author of Ricky & Other Love Stories and Big Bad

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“Write about the terrifying by writing about the alluring.”

— Theresa Hottel, author of “Vaults” in Vol. 1 Brooklyn

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“When selecting a setting for your horror story, think of the way the setting speaks to the character. Setting can become an obstacle or an extension of the character’s emotions. Always find a way to make the once familiar, safe setting become unknown.”

— Lilliam Rivera, author of We Light Up the Sky

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“You know that pit-of-the-stomach moment that we, in real life, seek to avoid and/or get out of as quickly as possible when we find ourselves there? That feeling is exactly where you need to stay when writing the horror story.”

— Rion Scott, author of The World Doesn’t Require You

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“I like scary stories bound by an apparent narrative structure or familiar container, where you have an engine that moves events along a clear-enough path toward a likely-enough ending. (Maybe your container is a haunted [building of your choice]; maybe your structure comes from a folktale or urban legend or some modern experience like an Uber ride.) When you build a short story this way, you’re helping your reader see ahead just enough to anticipate whatever unsettling escalation or surprising subversion you might have around the corner—and when we’re talking spooky stories, anticipation is just another word for dread.”

— Chase Burke, author of Men You Don’t Know You Know

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“Choose your monsters with care. We, too, are among your readers.”

— Vajra Chandrasekera, author of The Saint of Bright Doors

“Find a way to make the once familiar, safe setting become unknown.”

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“The real power of a story has to do with whatever it actually makes you desire the most while you're reading it. A good horror story, I’d say, makes you desire one of two things: power or escape. On the one hand, I want to kill or conquer whatever’s threatening me; on the other, I want to flee from it. And that’s my advice: If you want to arouse horror, you should try be sensitive, as sensitive as a child, to your own impulses to overpower or to escape, and nourish whatever provokes them.”

— Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories

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“The heart of horror is heart. Horror deals with desire—to be safe, to be loved, to be free. And the flip side to that desire is fear. The fear that the fear will never end. And sometimes that fear of endless fear compels our characters to make tough choices. Foolish choices even. Selfish or mean or hurtful choices. And sometimes that fear just drives them mad. But it comes from the heart, always, where love lies bleeding, and that’s where you’ll find your monster—licking it up.”

— J.S. Breukelaar, author of The Bridge

Tiny Nightmares is published by Catapult. Get your copy here.

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