I have been writing horror professionally for eleven years. Tonight, apparently, my own manuscript finally managed to genuinely get me.
Scared myself so thoroughly writing my own novel’s climactic scene tonight that I genuinely had to get up, walk through my entire house, and turn on every single light before I felt able to actually return to my desk and finish the chapter, a specific, embarrassing admission I am making in this diary entry despite having written professionally in this genre for eleven years now, a career built entirely around trying to produce exactly this reaction in readers, apparently without ever quite expecting to produce it in myself.
I think there is a particular, well-documented phenomenon among horror writers that I have heard discussed at conventions over the years without ever having experienced it myself with quite this intensity, the strange, specific experience of genuinely frightening yourself with your own material, a phenomenon that seems almost paradoxical given that you, as the actual author, know exactly what is coming, have planned every single beat of the scene in advance, and should, by any reasonable logic, be the single person on earth least susceptible to being surprised or unsettled by your own carefully constructed reveal.
And yet tonight, working through the final version of this particular scene, a genuinely dark, sustained sequence I have been building toward across the entire preceding two hundred pages, something about actually writing it in real time, alone, late at night, in a genuinely quiet house, produced a specific, visceral unease that no amount of advance planning apparently protected me against. I think the actual writing process itself, slowing down enough to genuinely inhabit the scene’s specific sensory details, the particular quality of silence, the specific sound I gave one crucial moment, created an immersion my earlier, more structural planning simply had not.
I called a fellow horror writer friend once I had finally, properly recovered enough to actually finish the chapter, mostly just to share the slightly absurd experience of having genuinely frightened myself with my own work, and she laughed with immediate, warm recognition, describing an almost identical experience from her own most recent book, a specific scene she wrote that left her, in her own words, “sleeping with the hallway light on for a week afterward,” a confession that made me feel considerably less alone in tonight’s admittedly slightly ridiculous reaction.
I think there is something genuinely useful, beyond simply the mildly embarrassing personal anecdote, in tonight’s experience, a real, direct confirmation that the scene actually works, at least on some level, since if it managed to genuinely unsettle me, the person who planned every single beat of it in advance, I have real reason to believe it will land with considerably more force on a reader encountering it completely fresh, with none of my own advance knowledge softening the impact.
I finished the chapter, eventually, all the lights in my house still blazing considerably longer than any reasonable electricity bill probably justifies, and I am sending the draft to my editor tomorrow with a genuine confidence in this specific scene that I do not always feel this strongly walking into a first submission. Eleven years into this career, and my own manuscript still apparently has the capacity to catch me completely off guard, which I have decided, tonight, to treat as a genuinely good sign rather than any kind of embarrassing professional failure.
I sat with all the lights still on for a while after finishing, rereading the scene one more time properly, curious whether it would still land the same way now that I knew, definitively, exactly how it ended, and I will admit it did, a specific, lingering unease that stayed with me even on this second, fully informed read, which I think is genuinely the strongest confirmation I could ask for that the scene actually works on its own terms rather than depending entirely on any element of genuine surprise.
I am turning the lights back off now, slowly, room by room, feeling slightly ridiculous about the whole ordeal but genuinely unwilling to shortcut the process, eleven years of professional horror writing apparently not being nearly enough experience to fully immunize me against my own imagination working exactly as intended on a quiet night with nobody else in the house.
I think there is a genuinely useful, if slightly humbling, lesson in tonight’s whole experience about the actual nature of craft in this specific genre, that even eleven years of professional practice does not fully separate a writer from the same basic human vulnerability to fear that the entire genre exists to exploit in its readers. I had, somewhere along the way, quietly started assuming that professional distance and technical mastery would eventually produce a kind of immunity to my own material. Tonight proved, fairly conclusively, that this specific assumption was simply wrong, and I find myself, oddly, more confident in my own continued ability to write genuinely effective horror precisely because that immunity apparently never actually developed.
I am going to bed now, lights considerably dimmer than they were an hour ago but still, if I am entirely honest, brighter than my usual nighttime routine prefers, a small, private concession to tonight’s particular manuscript that I do not feel even slightly embarrassed admitting to in this diary, eleven years of professional credibility notwithstanding.
More from this author at Paige Shiver, prat.uk.
