Hey Maggie! I was just wondering if you have any tips or advice for aspiring writers trying to create a creepy/ominous atmosphere (not much unlike the Raven cycle.) I'm struggling quite a bit. Thanks so much.

Dear thetwofridas,

Magic is horror. Horror is magic. 

It’s not that they are two sides of the same coin; there is no coin. There’s just the one orb: magic-horror. Both wonder and awe come from something that is heightened beyond the usual. A flower just a little more vivid than its neighbors; a child with eyes just a little too large to make sense. Standing in an empty wood yet feeling watched. Standing in a an empty bedroom yet feeling watched. In the deep end of the pool, a ripple reveals a supernatural creature. A boy is attacked by his father; a thorn appears in his father’s hand without explanation. A boy is looking in a mirror; his eye looks away without his permission. Both horror and magic are both uncanny and elevated. The author or the reader is the one who imposes a value judgment on the otherness we’ve just witnessed: are we awed or afraid?

It’s perfectly possible to be both.

There’s a reason we delight in hearing ghost stories. The fear is how you know the magic is working.

For both magic and horror, it’s easier if you nudge the truth just a little, especially at first. Ghost stories become less frightening if you introduce a bogeyman straight off. If you leap right to an axe murderer hacking in through the roof of the car, the chill dissipates. We’re not really afraid of axe murderers on our car. It’s too far from the ordinary; we don’t believe it. We believe that we forgot to lock our car, though, when we went in to pee at the gas station. We believe that when we get in, we should have looked in the back seat but didn’t think about it until we were driving and anyway it’s too late now and it’s not like someone is back there. We believe we hear a tap, tap, tap on the back of our seat but maybe it was something we ran over in the road. We believe we hear the radio crackle a tap, tap, tap in timing with the back-seat tap. We believe we feel a tap, tap, tap in our heart. We believe we look down, suddenly, at the passenger seat, and there’s an axe, and we certainly didn’t put it there, did we—?

Don’t get all splashy right away. Just a smear of blood on the radio’s volume switch will always be more effective than a pool of it around the passenger-seat axe. Just a sense that you’ve managed to live the same minute twice in a row is a more tilting magic than leaping back and forth through the years willy-nilly.

Good magic is a little horrific, and good horror is always a little magical.

urs,

Stiefvater