Sixth Day of Class

Somehow, KRenee managed to keep to her schedule. As she had promised, they assembled in the classroom during the first week of March. The students settled in quickly, a couple of students that had befriended one another chattering away in the middle row. Several minutes passed before the professor actually walked into the room with her laptop, flashing a grin at them as she set herself up on the table at the head of the room.

"Hey, guys," she greeted cheerily as she leaned entirely too close to her monitor so she could take attendance. "Today, we're going to go over the genre that is horror."

Several students looked to the ceiling, mildly irate. Most of them wrote action/adventure-type stories, so the fact that KRenee was going over every single genre (and taking forever to get to the genre they cared about) was a little off-putting. The professor sighed, looking a little resigned.

"I know, I know. Most of you probably don't write horror stories. But! Your stories don't have to be exclusively horror - or any genre for that matter - to include scenes or elements of other genres. You can have a nightmare that's totally in the horror side of things in the midst of an action/adventure story. You can have a short mystery of some kind that influences the plot in a romance. You can write in one genre for the overall story, and still include elements or scenes that relate more closely to other genres. If I were to have a nightmare as the first scene in my story, people might assume it was a horror story because of how graphic and horror-y it is."

A few students chuckled lightheartedly at KRenee's unabashed use of made-up words. She smiled broadly, pacing around the front of the room. "Mixing genres like that - even if its only a bit here and there - will make your story more interesting. If the only thing happening in your action/adventure is fight scenes and adventuring, I can safely say that your story will likely be less interesting than it could be if you, say, included some elements of romance, or maybe mystery."

"Most of you probably already do that," KRenee stated. "But a lot of you probably also have some trouble with it. And by trouble I don't mean you have a hard time doing it - I mean you have a hard time doing it well.

Especially when it comes to adding the slow-paced romance to the fast-paced action/adventure story, which is probably the most common combination of genres in Fanfiction. It's not necessarily hard to do it, but doing it properly takes effort. It's actually quite a simple feat to rush through your romance, especially when your story is already pretty face-paced."

"So, I think that covers that bit. We're gonna go ahead and talk about horror now. First of all, horror is supposed to be scary. That makes it hard to write, because things just aren't as scary when you read them." KRenee told them as she continued to pace around the front of the room. "Good horror uses suspense with a certain amount of shock value. Shock value can come from blood and gore - though that gets boring after a while - or something shocking, like Godzilla stepping on Bambi. The effect that you're looking for is to scare or startle people."

She paused at in the middle of her pacing route, smiling slightly at them. "If you wanna write good horror that doesn't rely on gallons of blood everywhere, put yourself through the trouble of looking up some human psychology. Figure out what scares people, and use that knowledge to your advantage." The professor told them, "There is probably very little that has never been tried in terms of the kinds of things that people have written horror stories about. Everything from giant tarantulas to a really scary clown living in a sewer. That doesn't mean that the thing you try won't have the capacity to become really scary, though."

"One of the better things you can do with a horror story or scene is to leave as much as possible to the readers' imagination. Use shadows and sounds to your advantage. You don't have to make the setting scary to make what's happening scary." KRenee looked around the room again, offering a smile to her students, some of whom looked fairly bored, while others looked mildly enraptured.

"Anybody who wants to write horror should give themselves the pleasure of reading Edgar Allen Poe. If you already have, read more. What made Poe good was the suspense and how he would describe things that are really horrifying." The smile on her face widened, a nostalgic glint showing in her violet eyes. "Bricking someone into a wall without them - or the reader - noticing until the last second, or a person getting cut in half slowly by a swinging pendulum-blade that comes down one inch every hour. What needs to happen is you need to take a character, make him or her sympathetic or likeable, and then have horrifying things happen to him or her."

"Also, don't be afraid to kill your hero/heroinee in a horror story. Don't be afraid to end the story with them never getting out of whatever horrifying situation they're in. Horror is the only genre in which its okay to kill your hero or heroine." She paused, glancing towards the clock on the wall behind her students, though they couldn't tell if she was actually checking the time or spacing out.

"Does anyone have any questions?" She asked, implying that they had come to the end of the section. She smiled at the students' mild surprise - that section had been ridiculously short. Not a single hand went up, so KRenee nodded at them and started speaking again.

"So, just like we did with the mystery unit, I want you to write a scene from a horror story - any scene or story you want, up to ten pages. If you want to write something really short and Poe-like, that's fine. If you want to write just one horrifying scene from a horror novel, go for it." She told them. "I'm going to leave prompts on the blackboard for those of you who need them. If you don't need to use one of the prompts, I only ask that you tell me what you're writing about in a short summary. If you do use a prompt, just tell me which one."

"So, that's all for the horror section! I'll see you all sometimes during the first week of April, when we go over action/adventure." She grinned at the several students who lit up at her little "spoiler," before walking around the table and collecting her things. She waved an absentminded hand at the blackboard and a piece of chalk floated up and started writing.

The students who already had an idea of what they would write about filed out of the room one by one, while those who remained watched the blackboard and wrote down each prompt in their notebooks for later review.

...

The Blackboard

- Write a scene that would take place in a horror story. It doesn't matter where, when, or with whom the scene takes place. Use whoever and whatever you want. Just remember that you're writing horror, and think before you write!

- Prompt 1 (A Location): The streets of Brooklyn, NY

- Prompt 2 (First Lines): It was the only road out of town, but in retrospect, taking is was a terrible idea.

-Prompt 3 (Dialogue): "We're the monsters from the fairly tales. We're supposed to be the bad guys." OR "We're the monsters from the fairy tales. We're supposed to be the bad guys."

Prompt 4 (Random Things): A mountain hiking trail, the cracked hull of a boat, and an unloaded gun.

Prompt 5 (An Event): Your character finds a key, and what it opens is completely unexpected.