54 - The Shadows of your World - Worldbuilding Horror with Seth Ring

B01_05 - The Shadows of your Setting - Seth Ring on Horror === Intro Cap --- Horror exists in the shadows. When we see something that seems familiar, but is distorted or altered in some way. It's unsettling. In this spooky season, we all crave the excitement of the unknown, the chill down our spine. When we're certain, we saw something just outside of our peripheral vision only to look and find that it's gone. How do we imbue our worlds with this sensation? Let's talk horror. Introduction --- Welcome to the WorldCraft Club podcast, a podcast devoted to helping you create the most immersive and gripping settings that will draw your audience back time. And time again. I'm your host James and today I'm talking with seth my partner in this worldbuilding journey he's just written a new novel in the horror genre and he was eager to share with us what he's been learning. We'll start by talking about what he's been up to lately, where the inspiration for his story came from. This is what we call the fairy cake of the given setting or the big idea, or meta-theme, it's the seed that has setting will grow from. Beginning of Interview --- so this latest one, you did a genre change up. You're writing horror now. Seth's Inspiration for the Story --- So it's still Game Lit. It's still in my, my genre, but I took a little bit of a turn. I I've been thinking about writing horror for a long time, actually. I've always been fascinated by it. I don't read horror and I don't like horror movies, Um, which is Feels like not a great place to start, like Yeah, But then I stumbled upon a book that was sort of a cosmic horror, So I've always really enjoyed Lovecraft and I've always enjoyed the horror elements of Poe. And so when I thought about horror and the kind of horror that I would want to write, it was very much that sort. Gripping, mysterious cosmic horror. And so as I set out to write a game lit book with horror overtones, that's sort of the direction I went. this was really a, a shift into sort of a new realm for me. So I was really excited to explore it. Yeah. That's really cool. So like, um, it's, I I, I, I'm hearing where your inspiration is coming from with this, looking at Poe and Lovecraft, but, um, like what prompted the, the pivot into this genre? So Seth's Story --- Like was there an inciting event? What was the inciting Yeah. Okay. So this is sort of weird and, and I don't know if I'm gonna do a good, I'm gonna do a justice, but listen, I go on vacation to a, a cabin that's North of where I live. We call it The Cottage and The Cottage. Has electricity, but you have to shower outside Yeah. there are not very many other places around. And so you're in this forest and this forest of very tall, very thin, straight trees. And all of the, all of the branches on the lower branches have been cut over the years. to provide, a view from the back porch of the, of The Cottage out to The Lake. Right? And so at nighttime it is both very dark, like very dark, but also the line of sight is good. You can see for a decent distance because there's no like underbrush, right? So imagine, imagine with me, standing out there taking my shower. All of a sudden my, my mind snaps back to an experience I had had earlier that day where I was driving in a car and as I came around a corner, I locked eyes with a man who was half crouched on the side of the road, Yeah. partly behind a branch, staring at me. And when I say staring at me, I mean we made eye contact until I went around another curve to leave. But he was in all black, he was bald and his eyes were huge. And I saw that and I was like, That was probably the weirdest experience of this year. saw, And then I didn't think about it anymore until I was outside, in the middle of a forest at night, taking a shower, Yeah. and I turned my, I remember I'm there, I'm lathering up. I'm like, All right. You know, it's cold. I'm, I'm happy for the warm water. But, but excited to go back inside. And I turned my head, and what pops into my mind is, what if that guy was standing behind that tree staring at me right now? And it wasn't, it wasn't a like, Fearful reaction at first in me of being like, "Oh no, maybe he's there". It was like a, oh, what if, what if he was, What kind of feeling would I have? And at that point, the feeling came. So the feeling sort of followed this thought that I had. mm-hmm. and all I could think was, "Man, I wanna write a book that makes somebody feel like this". hmm. Because I was freaked out. I was like, genuinely freaked out. I, I am not afraid of the dark. I don't care about dark. I walk around in the darkness all the time. I specifically don't turn on lights because I'm fine. Yeah. Like I don't care. It freaked me. Out. I don't think I've ever run upstairs in the darkness since I was like six. yeah. It was, it was wild. Oh my goodness. I did. I was so fast. That's so funny. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I I, off. I just like ran inside. No, I know what you mean. I, I've, I've had, I, I am probably a, a, a scardier person than you. This, this sort of thing actually like, is not uncommon to happen to me, where I'll just get an idea in my head and, um, you can't shake it. Yeah, it like plants itself, it's like, it's like, it plants itself. And so actually I borrowed that idea of something. Being planted in, the mind of the character for this story and also tried to make it scary. Tried to capture that feeling of what if he was right there staring at me? just the whole. Yeah, I had like, all I'm left wondering now is what the story with that guy is like. I'm so curious as to like what he was doing, just chilling on the road so weird. this dude. This dude needs a good staring. Oh my goodness. It was so so weird.There could have been 1,000,001 explanations, but like, I don't think I'd ever get comfortable with any of them, to be honest. That is, that is too funny. Um, So this is what prompted it. It's, it's Yeah. That's what, That's balding man dressed in black, watching you shower, Right . That's the story behind why I then, when I sat down to write, I actually said, Okay, no, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna write a, a horror novel. This story leans into a common feeling of being watched, but also adds a sense of credibility to it. Seth actually saw the person that was the object of his anxieties in that moment. There's the marriage between plausibility or immersion. And the dread of the unknown. The movie, The Conjuring nails, this perfectly little is shown, but much is implied. I've included a review for this movie by one of my favorite YouTubers, Ryan Hollinger in the show notes. It was actually also something we discussed at length in a prior interview I had with Zach going sometime back. There'll be a link to that in the show notes too The Conjuring and What you Don't See --- So like the, the technical content of the movie landed it at a PG 13, but they just went ahead and were like, "No, this is an R". You can't have kids watching this. Essentially. Like, they were just like, No, no, this is a horror movie. Like you cannot do this. It was a fascinating thing because the movie was so frightening and built such a sense of dread and foreboding in the very atmosphere. You could cut it with a knife. It was so, it was so tense, the whole movie. That makes me think a lot about horror and its interaction with worldbuilding. This idea that there has to be a plausibility. So you have to have a sense of immersion, um, and that then that has to fuel. Wonder, which will interchange with dread in this instance. And so, like, as you were building out this story, and a lot of it seems to be a sort of horror of a psychological nature, um, did you find yourself adapting your world differently and describing your world differently, Like applying it differently than you're used to? Yeah. The Use of Tropes --- So I tend to write. Fairly recognizable fantasy. Most of my worlds have a lot of sort of common tropes because I really like the shorthand of being able to say, "This is A X, Y, or Z," and people get it People are familiar with it, they understand it, and it allows me to. Put my world in place with relatively few set pieces. With this story, I realized fairly early on that I was actually bleeding tension from the book by not having weirdness in the world. And so what I mean by that, It's one thing for the main character to experience the weirdness. It's another thing if people in the story, like people around the main character are like, "Oh yeah, you have to watch out for the ghosts," Yeah. right? if supernatural elements or horrifying elements. are a sort of key component of the story, but you don't have other people in the world experiencing them. bleeds a lot of the, It bleeds a lot of attention because that is just a crazy person's experience, right? The main character is now just a crazy person, whereas, , if you have the other people in the story, if you have the, the surrounding cast, and have to mitigate against experiences with these people. Like, Oh no, we wear, we wear our silver crosses, right? As a matter of course, course, when you start adding elements like that, I found it's a lot easier to increase tension. because everybody knows that the tension is a possibility. And so you're, you're supporting cast will fear that tension as much as the main character will grow to. Does that make sense? well actually, here's the parallel that I'm seeing in this. You have a lead romantic interest for your main character, How do you set the audience up to know that they should be interested in this person? You have another character who is not the main character. Go, "Dang, they're cute." And then it goes from there. It can't be the lead character going, "I am interested in this person." It has to be somebody else. Right. Elizabeth Bennett does not say, "Mr. Darcy, how rich you are". It's somebody else who mentions how rich he is. exactly, and like the, the, the, it is for the main character to discover those things. It's for the world to know it. And it seems similar with horror. Um, at That's a really good way to put it. it was a weird parallel, but I was like, thinking about it. I was like, that sounds a lot like the romance issue that, you know, you run into. It's like, you don't know Gin weasley is pretty until somebody tells you she's pretty, and then suddenly Harry's like, Oh, like, Oh, I the point. Yeah, exactly. I've been, I've been informed by a reliable source, but like in the worldbuilding in this, it seems as if you need the other characters to, to recognize the tension and to be adapting to the world in which they find themselves and. Leaning on Tropes --- Because of that, you haven't been able to lean into your tropes as heavily as you might like, which is a, an interesting thing. At least your tropes for your, your general, your your primary genre. Your primary genre, and then You can secondary It's an interesting thing cuz like I I, I generally am in favor of the usage of, of tropes. They get, they help people find their feet more quickly. They can be very economical writing. It doesn't excuse us from having to handle them well, but they still, you know, using them should not be a, should not be an issue. with this, it seems as if you kind of had to take some of. Some of your trope training wheels off a little bit and, um, kind of give yourself a little bit more room to describe things and let your characters in your setting, convey what was going on. Yeah. So what I, what I discovered. . And a lot of the feedback I got early on in the story that was really helpful in, in helping me flesh it out was that that horror, and actually some of this comes from WorldCraft Club, so if you guys aren't, aren't on the WorldCraft Club discord, like there's value here, right? Horror especially. Psychological horror is found in the gaps. Yeah. It's found in, it's found in the mundane. That turns out to not be mundane. It's found in the thing you recognize that all of a sudden reality peels back and you realize that it is unrecognizable. Yeah, But if you don't have that initial recognizability, the second thing is just. Right? So it makes me think of the, the bug alien. The cockroach alien in Men in Black. Yeah, He's not scary as a cockroach, but he's really scary as a cockroach inside some guy's skin that doesn't quite. yeah. And And it's that gap. See, it's the gap that makes it terrifying. Yeah. And that, that's the thing is like this, this does tie into a lot of our, like, you know, if, if you're, you know, you're playing WorldCraft Club, bingo, this would pop up all the time. But this idea that you're laying down the breadcrumbs and allowing the audience to fill in the gaps in the middle, like the reality is, is that. While we, while we recognize the need for that white space, right? That un, that unpainted area of your world that people can fill in. There still needs to be enough line work that people That's they're looking at, right? Like, actually I was thinking about Men in Black the other day, and they do that in this scene where, uh, you know, this like drunk, , kind of rural hillbilly sort of dude is, um, being. Just a real jerk. And, uh, you, so, so, you know he is gonna die, right? Like in a movie, it's the guy, the guy's a jerk, they're gonna die. So, uh, he goes out and he meets the alien, But what happens is that thing crashes and smashes his truck, and he goes out there with his gun to investigate. And when the thing grabs him and pulls him down, They have this extended like sounds of him screaming and ripping sound effects going on and you can like sit here. He's still alive for like a big portion of like, what's going on? Are you doing wailing? And it's just like, it honestly is one of the, like for a movie that's not really. It's not horror. Designed to be scary. No, it's comedy scared the crap out. I always found it really chilling because you're kind of like, he's still alive. Like just oh, oh, what's going on down there? Cuz they don't show you anything. It's just in a hole, you know? But it's like, you wonder what he did with the rest of him and it's like, probably ate him, but like, And that, and again, it's the gap, right? It's, it's what shouldn't be. That's where I found sort of horror elements of my story flowed, the smoothest when they were, when they were cushioned or set, in. in a scene that already had those supporting pieces, Yeah. Yeah. had the, the fog, that had the, the weird, weird creatures that you know, but, but, and you know, you might know and are dangerous, but like they're normal enough that everybody knows them until all of a sudden they're not. Until all of a sudden there's something different about it. Right. It's the, it's the flower. That when you look closer, has an eye in the center like the, the center of the flowers at, you know, pupil, and you start going, Wait a second. What's happening? yeah, yeah. It's that unsettling element. it's not dissimilar to, um, sort of the sensation of Uncanny Valley where, um, things become so, so Uncanny Valley. I'll, I'll put a link to it in the show notes, but essentially it was an issue that they ran into when creating human-like, um, Kind of it, it's, it's really, it, it's robots essentially. it's mostly robots, but it, like, it, it exists in, in 3D animation and things like that where you create something that is not human enough and too human at the same time. And it's a very unsettling thing to look at. What I love about what Seth is doing here is that he's taking those familiar elements, those tropes common stories that we all know the beginning, middle and end off and altering them slightly. Using the familiar to immerse and the unknown to alienate. This seems to be the real trick of horror, that combination of familiar and alien. Next up, we discussed something much older fairytales and myths surrounding vampires, and the way those fears play on our understanding of the world. Another play on the idea of a slightly altered reality being a great source for Interjection: Slightly Altered Reality --- I think, I think that's why traditional vampires were so scary because this is an apex predator who happens to look like a better version of you. Yeah. And then, and then of course Twilight ruined it, like just ruined it. But before that, before. Vampires were legitimately scary and people, and, and the urban legends around them made people act differently at night because they were worried about them. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's a lot of the fears that we harness in books as well. They, they are, um, They're kind of, they're, they're centered around very practical fears, you know, very reasonable fears, or explanations for things that are unknown. And, and, and the vampire with this sense of one, the undead element of it, the idea about taking someone's death away from them And there is a, There's the disease element of it. I think there's the idea that something looks human and is uh, and is really, as you say, an apex predator and yeah, that sort and you might invite it into your house. Strangers, yeah, that's the you might invite it into your house and then it will eat you while you sleep. Yeah. That is a little a betrayal there. Yeah. Yeah. Especially given that I'm given to understand that in many medieval cultures, treating guests well was a very important thing. Um, and, uh, that, that would fly against that, uh, in the form of a bat. This is interesting. So we've talked a little bit about the way that you have adapted your setting. You've realized that you couldn't lean quite so heavily on tropes that are traditional to your primary genre as you Yeah. And, and maybe, maybe I should clarify here. You can use tropes, and I did use tropes, but what I had to do to make them horror themed or to allow them to contribute to the horror setting was I had to take the trope and then I had to twist the end of it Yeah, into something that was different. Right. I had to, I had to change. Enough that it would produce the unsettling feeling as someone was reading through. Yeah. Well, I've, I've definitely got the, uh, title for this episode now. Twisted Tropes, Writing Horror with Seth Ring. Yeah. Yeah. It was fun, man. It was so fun. And I'm, I'm gonna do more of it. I think my first book is probably not going to be super scary. There were a couple of points that were definitely very, very chilling, uh, at. As a writer, I felt it as I was writing and, and readers felt it or reported it, my, some of my beta readers reported it. Yeah. I'm really excited for the second book in the series. I think it's gonna be even better. We're really leaning into the world of sort of the, the shadow of the world. If you can, if you can call it that. And I think that there's gonna be a lot more room to explore there. And I'm really trying to practice what I preach and take these tropes and, and massage them and, and move them and twist them until who's reading it is, is going to get to the end of it and be like, Oh my goodness, that's a new thing. And it's terrify. Key Takeaways and OutroFairytales --- so as we begin to close out here, let's talk about our key takeaways. First of all horror is found in the gaps. As I'd said earlier, horror, much like wonder, which we often talk about on the show is found not in what is clear and well-explained, but in what is unclear or perhaps even blurry. What a visitant imagines is often, far more chilling than what you're trying to create in the story. So leave room for horror in your story for your visitant to imagine. The second takeaway here is that you have nothing to fear from tropes, but planting them in a way that is a little askew to what your visitant are used to experiencing can be really effective. Another element that Seth touched on here was the utilization of familiarity with those tropes. What exists intention with wonder, or in this case, horror or dread is familiarity. Your visitant needs to have something to key into, which is where tropes come in. But what if you take that familiar thing and twist it slightly drawing your visitant into the uncanny valley. This tool can be extremely effective and heightened the discomfort with the setting Lastly worldbuilding in horror is critical. The world needs to feel the horror within the setting before your protagonist sees it. No one knows that the love interest is cute until someone tells them. The same goes with horror. The innate fear within a setting must be something that is understood by the broader cast of characters and felt within the setting. To combine it with the other two points above we'd recommend subtlety here and drawing attention to details that will let your visitant mind wander into dreadful possibilities. Perhaps draw attention to all the people in the village wearing silver crosses about their next is Seth suggested. Maybe the shopkeeper has one hand resting on a cudgel whenever newcomers arrive as if he anticipates danger at any moment. By way of conclusion. Horror is found in shadows. No shadows are cast by light, but they're also distorted by it. When you're looking at a shadow, you're looking at a presentation of a real thing, but. Changed. This is the essence of extracting horror out of your worldbuilding. Allowing enough of something concrete to shine through that a person can look at and name the shape they're seeing. But then allowing that shape to alter. To allow that sense of unease to drift into your visitant mind. Thanks for joining us today on the WorldCraft Club podcast. If you loved what you heard here, please give us a horrifying five star review on your favorite podcasting app. It's seriously is the best way to get the word out. If not drop us an email via the link tree in the show notes. If you're looking to get more serious about your worldbuilding and wants to join a community that can help you practice skills, check out our discord. Also on that link For Seth I'm James. And I'll catch you next time on the WorldCraft Club podcast. Stinger --- Sort of like this live action, uh, Lion King Yeah. Yeah. The cold dead eyes of a warthog. Like that's what I wanted to hear. Haku matata, I, I could complain forever about like why they is, which is why I mentioned