Writing in the Dark: How Horror Writers Can Win the War Against AI Fiction

Magnus Robot Fighter Fights Robots!

“If someone can write a book in a day with AI, and it takes me a year to write one, how can I possibly compete?”

I’m increasingly seeing comments like this on social media from writers who, if they’re not panicking yet, sound as if they’re on the verge of it. And who can blame them? AI is being hyped to the skies by companies desperate to be the leader in AI as well as tech-forward types who believe the Next Great Machine will make the world a perfect place (while also making them hella rich). Businesses and schools are rushing to adopt AI without any notion of what it really is or what it can do. The college where I teach created the AI Institute of Excellence – and is that name trying way too hard, or what? – but I couldn’t tell you anything about it other than its name since I never read the emails they send. No one has tried to force me to incorporate AI into my classes yet, and since I talk to my students about the ethical and environmental issues of using AI, I’ve already incorporated it as much as I want to.

And it’s not like the majority of students haven’t already incorporated AI into their education to at least some degree, and many surely use it to “write” their essays for them. I can’t really fault them, though. They’ve grown up in a world where technology does almost everything for them. Why shouldn’t it think for them as well? I’m so glad I can retire from teaching in two years. Once I’m out, if I ever teach again, I’ll do so without looking at a single word of a student essay.

I’m also starting to see people post that it doesn’t matter if a book was written by AI or not. Here are some comments I saw during the online uproar over Shy Girl. (If you’re not aware of the controversy, read this: https://slate.com/culture/2026/03/shy-girl-mia-ballard-novel-a-i-book-horror-reddit-hachette-canceled.html)

“I do not know whether a particular author has used AI to generate their work, but I can be certain that there is no way for me to know. So if I find the book and the author enjoyable, I will continue to read their content and promote it.”

“If a book is bad, it’s bad. If a book is good, it’s good. Period.”

“I cannot tell if something is written with AI or not, so if I enjoy it, I’ll keep reading it too!!”

It’s clear that at least some readers only care about their experience of reading a book, and they care nothing for its origin.

Stephen Marche recently wrote an article for The Guardian titled “I Wrote a Novel Using AI. Writers Must Accept Artificial Intelligence – But We Are as Valuable as Ever.” You can read it here:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/02/artificial-intelligence-writers-powerful-language

(He also wrote a book called On Writing and Failure: Or, the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer, which I recommend. Nothing AI-related in this one.)

People, who probably only read the article’s headline, took to social media to lambast Marche and AI in general. But his thesis is that while AI can produce crappy-but-good-enough writing for some tasks, only humans can produce work of higher artistic quality. (I wonder if the editors at The Guardian wrote the headline to purposely make it click-baity.) Here are a few quotes from the article that I found noteworthy.

“Generative models are fundamentally cliché machines. If you ask AI to write a film script, it will produce an average film script masterfully. If you ask it to write an essay, it will produce an average essay masterfully.”

“Thinking, creating, understanding – these cannot be replaced, certainly not by artificial intelligence.”

“Once upon a time, mastery of the banal was adequate for writers. It was enough to prove that you were capable of writing. But that skill has no purpose anymore – it can be automated. Skill will be found in the purpose of the work. What can you alone make happen with language?”

So if writers want to compete for readers’ attention in a world filled with AI slop, we need to write work that’s better than average and continue improving throughout our careers.

The following are some ideas on how we can do that. They’re geared to horror writers, but most of them can work for any fiction writer. (You may have read/heard me say some of the following before, but this time it’s in service of out-writing the cliché-machines.)

Read/watch a LOT of horror so you can avoid clichés.

As a creative writing teacher, I’m always surprised when a student tells me they want to write, but they don’t like to read. I guess the equivalent in the AI age is I want to be a writer, but I don’t want to write. The more horror you consume, the more you’ll come to recognize common – and average – ideas and prose, and the more you’ll be able to try to do better.

Also, read every subgenre of horror, so you can avoid all clichés. Plus, you might be an extreme horror writer who, after checking out cozy horror, may find that genre calls to you more strongly than any other.

A while back, I wrote a blog entry listing 61 horror clichés and how to make them fresh again. You can find it here:

https://writinginthedarktw.blogspot.com/2023/11/61-horror-cliches-and-how-to-make-them.html

Writer’s Digest published an article I wrote about avoiding clichés when writing horror:

https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/done-to-death

Seek out current, excellent, and innovative work.

If you want to write above-average work, you need to read above-average work. You can Google “best contemporary horror writers” and “innovative horror writers of the 21^st century.” You’ll find plenty of results. Check out a number of lists, though, since each one will likely be at least slightly different.

Here’s a list to get you started:

https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/the-top-50-writers-of-horror-weird-and-fantastic-fiction-2000-2025/

If you come across work that’s very unlike anything you’ve read before, and you’re struggling to get through it, don’t give up on it right away. You may need some time to adjust. As one of my professors in grad school once said, “Great books teach us how to read them.”

Avoid or rework familiar tropes.

Tropes have power, but overused tropes don’t. Try to find the essence of a trope and then embody it in a new way. Take the trope of the Grim Reaper. As its core, it’s the Bringer of Death. A great example of a different way to handle this trope is the movie Radius (2017). In this film, after surviving a car crash, a man finds that anyone who comes within fifty feet of him dies.

Your dreams.

I don’t remember my dreams much anymore, and when I do, they’re like the dream I had last night, where I’m in the back yard picking up dog poop. But my wife has extremely vivid dreams, many of which turn into nightmares. Just this morning, she told me of a dream she had that featured faceless men with red stripes over their featureless skin. A faceless person is a horror cliché, but the red stripes add an interesting touch. And if you can find a way to make the stripes meaningful to the being in a way that shapes your story, you might end up with something truly different. Maybe the men’s skins are chalk white, and the stripes are because the men are made out of candy canes. The Candy Cane Men sounds weird and scary, doesn’t it? My wife may have been the only person in human history to dream of that exact image, and there’s an excellent chance your dreams will also be a source of original ideas and images (unlike mine).

Write about what you – and only you – see and hear.

To hell with vampires and werewolves. I love classic horror tropes, but I almost never use them. I try to stay observant throughout the day, and I write down any weird things I see or hear. Often, they’re mistakes in perception, the result of my horror writer’s mind interpreting something normal in a sinister way. For example, the last time I flew home after a convention, I saw an ad on a wall in the Dayton airport for The Gaping Void Design Group. I did a double-take, thinking I’d misread the sign, but I didn’t. I wondered who the hell would choose that name for their business? How many people who even noticed the name on the ad thought twice about it? I’m likely the only horror writer who saw that sign, noticed the name, and thought those thoughts. I wouldn’t want to use the exact name in a story, but I might swap design for another word. Maybe Gaping Void Logistics. Another example: One day, when I looked out the window, I saw a kid kicking a round, plant-like soccer-ball-sized object down the street. Again, I was probably the only person who saw that, thought it was really strange, and wrote it down as possible story material. You can do the same.

Read horror from writers in other countries.

And watch horror movies made in other countries. This way, you’ll expose yourself to different horror images, concepts, and narrative styles. The publishers of Valancourt Books have done an excellent job of making translations of horror fiction available, and I highly recommend you check them out.

The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories Vol. 1 and Vol 2 Edited by James D. Jenkins and Ryan Cagle

https://www.valancourtbooks.com/the-valancourt-book-of-world-horror-stories-vol-1.html

Use as many of your personal experiences as possible.

AI can draw on other people’s experiences that are in its database, but it can never live and reflect on those experiences. Drawing on your own experiences brings an authenticity that AI can’t replicate. You don’t need to write strict autobiography, but your experiences can add realism and emotional depth to your stories.

Write with a deep point of view.

AI’s writing never gets below the surface, because all it knows are words (and it doesn’t really know them the way humans can). When you write with a close attachment to a character’s point of view and aren’t afraid to go deeper, you’ll create fiction that readers will respond strongly to. I tell students that this is the greatest strength of fiction because, right now, no other technology can put us in the mind of a character. Plus, deep point of view allows for stronger horror. I tell students to imagine that your viewpoint character is wearing a GoPro camera that records what he or she sees and hears. But imagine the camera has a cable that’s embedded into the back of the character’s head, recording their thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations. The more you can depict a character’s full experience (without getting so bogged down in detail that the story grinds to a halt), the more your fiction will stand apart from AI slop.

Write vivid description.

The paragraph above covers most of this. I suspect a description that contains an emotional component or causes a character to have an emotional reaction will stand out strongly from AI writing. Also, use distinct similes and metaphors (without overusing them). The more original they are, the better. For example, I once saw a sketch on a comedy show (whose name I can’t recall). The sketch featured a mom and dad who were berating their teenage son about something, but the entire family spoke in bizarrely original similes. When the son got fed up, he started yelling at his parents, and at one point, he describes his dad falling out of a boat on a lake. “He flopped over the side like a soiled mattress and sank like a sack of batteries.” I saw this sketch decades ago, but those similes have stuck in my mind ever since. When you come across effective similes and metaphors in your reading, pause and ask yourself what makes them so effective for you. As an exercise, you can write your own similes and metaphors describing the same concept as in the story. So if a writer describes a messy rest stop restroom as “looking like Tijuana Mike’s shitter after All-You-Can-Eat Burrito Night,” you can try to write a different, but equally colorful metaphor for a filthy rest stop bathroom.

Include subtext.

Simply defined, subtext is the true but unexpressed meaning behind words or actions. For example, if you ask your spouse what’s wrong, and he or she says, “Nothing,” in a cold tone, you damn well know something is wrong, and you were likely the cause of it.

AI can’t do subtext, but humans can. Machines are literal, and subtext is about the unspoken and unrevealed. It’s abstract and requires an understanding of human psychology, interaction, and communication. Take advantage of this in your writing.

Here’s an article about subtext in fiction: https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/how-to-use-subtext-and-the-art-of-dramatic-tension-in-fiction

And here’s one about subtext in horror by Lindy Ryan: https://janefriedman.com/what-isnt-said-still-screams-writing-subtext-in-horror-fiction/

Create complex characters.

Writing with a deep point of view will help you create well-developed characters, but you need to go beyond that. Make them eccentric, idiosyncratic, downright fucking weird… Give them weaknesses, contradictions, moral ambiguities… Let them be unlikable sometimes, let them fuck up and make a mess of things. Make them as deeply human as you can. This is one of the most important aspects of writing fiction that AI can’t replicate because this aspect doesn’t lie in any one word or sentence. It lies in the cumulation of them, of a thousand small details that the reader, with their experience of being human, can put together in a way a machine can’t, to get a complex picture of a complex person.

Experiment to develop a distinctive voice…because AI will never have one.

Voice is everything about you as a writer – content, use of language (vocabulary, sentence length and complexity, paragraph length, scene length, chapter length, etc.), structure (linear, nonlinear), story length, and on and on. While we can make conscious choices about voice, much – if not most – of it develops over time, the result of small unconscious choices we make. So experiment. Short stories are excellent laboratories for developing and honing your voice. Set creative challenges for yourself. Write a story with an omniscient viewpoint or one with no characters. Try formalism, using a different form of writing, like a newspaper article, to tell your story. Pay attention to reader response. If you write a story in first person present tense, and readers love it, maybe think about using that technique for more stories. Don’t drive yourself crazy searching for your voice, though. It’ll come in time.

“Five Ways to Develop Your Writer’s Voice”: https://janefriedman.com/5-ways-develop-writers-voice/

“How Do I Find My Voice in Writing?”: https://www.writersdigest.com/be-inspired/how-do-i-find-my-voice-in-writing

Take your time.

Don’t be like AI users who want immediate results. Write, read, explore, try different things. Allow yourself to continue growing as an artist. Generative AI can’t grow. It can only be fed more words to recombine and spew out. It might get better at spewing over time, but it will not grow. We can and should.

Astonish us.

As a theater education major in college, I only had to take two years of acting classes. My professor for my sophomore year in acting was Dr. Jeffrey Huberman, and at first, he terrified us. Not because he was mean or harsh, but because he knew we were capable of excellence, and he expected it from us. Whenever we would perform a scene in class, he would start us off by saying, “Astonish me,” the admonition that the famous dance impresario Sergei Diaghilev would give to his performers. It took some time, but we slowly began to believe in ourselves, and our acting improved dramatically. It’s a lesson that I’ve applied to my writing over the years. AI-produced fiction can never astonish us. Only work created by humans can do that.

Only work created by you.

So as they say on Letterkenny, “Pitter patter, let's get at 'er.”

Books that you might find useful:

Method Acting For Writers: Learn Deep Point Of View Using Emotional Layers by Lisa Hall-Wilson

https://tinyurl.com/2575spfu

Writing for Emotional Impact: Advanced Dramatic Techniques to Attract, Engage, and Fascinate the Reader from Beginning to End by Karl Iglesias

https://tinyurl.com/mtrw3mds

The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot by Charles Baxter

https://tinyurl.com/rx445rjy

Word Painting Revised Edition: The Fine Art of Writing Descriptively by Rebecca Mcclanahan

https://tinyurl.com/u9cuxmas

Experimental Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology by Lawrence Lenhart and Will Cordeiro

https://tinyurl.com/mr4a2hj4

The Art of Character: Creating Memorable Characters for Fiction, Film, and TV by David Corbett

https://tinyurl.com/bd6b8a2s

Plot Versus Character: A Balanced Approach to Writing Great Fiction by Jeff Gerke

https://tinyurl.com/mvcarsvh

DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION

This time, I’m going to highlight work of mine that will help you battle the mediocrity of AI.

Writing in the Dark is my Bram Stoker Award-winning book on writing horror. It’s follow-up, Writing in the Dark: The Workbook, also won a Stoker. Both are full of info that will help you take your horror to new levels. Let Me Tell You a Story is about writing short stories. It contains stories from throughout my career, and I write about how I wrote them and what I’d do differently if I wrote them today. You can find all three at the following link:

https://rawdogscreaming.com/author-tag/tim-waggoner/

Kindle versions are available on Amazon.

I’m also going to recommend my latest horror/dark fantasy novel, The Face of Pain. It’s made (like all my original work) from bits of my real life, images and characters that either don’t follow standard horror tropes or rework them, and my own surreal/nightmarish style, all of which adds up to my author voice.