by Writing Workshops Staff
42 minutes ago
Since Halloween 2024, Fin Leary has been collecting people's secrets in a bag. Every so often, the person with the best one receives a bloody rose. It is a fitting ritual for a writer who describes themself as a vampire with a black coffee habit, and it gets at something true about horror: the genre runs on what people would rather keep hidden.
In Sustaining Dread: Writing the Horror Novel, a four-week online workshop at WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature, Fin takes on the hardest problem in the genre. A short story can live on a single spike of fear. A novel has to hold dread for hundreds of pages without wearing the reader out.
Beginning February 1, 2027, students will build characters around what they fear (and what their readers fear), draft an outline that escalates the threat through the murky middle, and learn what makes a horror ending feel earned. Each writer leaves with a revised first chapter and written feedback from Fin on up to 6,000 words of their novel-in-progress.
Fin is a 2024 Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ+ Voices Fellow, the 2026 Young Adult Writer-in-Residence at Porter Square Books, and a contributor to the YA horror anthology These Bodies Ain't Broken. Their fiction has been supported by the McCormack Writing Center (formerly Tin House), and they teach at Emerson College and GrubStreet. Below, they explain why they refuse to give prescriptive advice and what My Chemical Romance can teach a horror novelist.
Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Fin:
Writing Workshops: Hi, Fin. Please introduce yourself to our audience.
Fin Leary: I'm a vampire who drinks black coffee along with blood. In my free time, I enjoy breaking generational curses and bending gender-based magic system rules. I've been gathering people's secrets in a bag since Halloween 2024, and sometimes I give out a bloody rose to the person with the best secret.
Writing Workshops: What's the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?
Fin Leary: That there is no prescriptive writing advice except that you have to write. I never do prescriptive advice in any of my classes, and I share this with everyone. The only thing that matters is that you do write. Some of the ways you can do it will be more painful and painstaking—this is why people give advice such as "Don't edit as you draft"—but who am I to tell you not to write in a painstaking way? I accidentally hot-glued one of my fingers while making vampire gloves for my Halloween costume. Sometimes we learn the hard way, and sometimes we don't. In this class, you will learn that there is no way out of the haunted house except the path you take. If you run upstairs, you might put yourself in a difficult position. Or you might realize the ghosts in this particular house don't have desire paths that allow them to go upstairs. I'm really looking forward to seeing how you haunt your own narrative!
"In this class, you will learn that there is no way out of the haunted house except the path you take."
Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn't have before, what is it?
Fin Leary: I want students to know how to write a story that feels how Gerard Way and the other members of My Chemical Romance felt while writing Welcome to the Black Parade in the haunted mansion. They were all going a little insane while they were writing it. It's important to keep one's sanity, even while writing horror, so that's not what I'm suggesting. But the feeling that they captured in that album came from how they felt while drafting it from that location—and I want students to be able to put that feeling onto the page in their horror novels, and sustain it over the course of the novel.
Writing Workshops: What's the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.
Fin Leary: "We commit vanishing acts when things get too close. We flirt like lovers and love like ghosts." —Ana Dee, Untouched
Writing Workshops: Describe a moment in a workshop (one you were teaching or one you took as a student) where something clicked for someone. What happened?
Fin Leary: When my teen students in the GrubStreet program for writing speculative fiction really grabbed onto the character-building exercise, and took that as an opportunity to start building a collaborative story about their own characters. It was such a powerful moment, because the exercise was designed to generate ideas and conversation. Most of the time, writers have a little fun with it but then forget about it, or use it to deepen character-building and relational dynamics in their individual stories. But this time, students got together and wrote a story that they co-created, and I got to sit back and watch them get excited about this relationship they were now building together.
Writing Workshops: What's a craft move you're slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept, but a small, specific technique.
Fin Leary: What the characters aren't saying. I love a key moment where you can feel the disconnect between what the character is saying and what they're feeling. Usually this is shown through nonverbal cues or the places
Writing Workshops: What's a book you press into people's hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?
Fin Leary: Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino, because it really gets at the universal alien feeling so many of us have, and the joy and sadness of being human. Also, You Weren't Meant to Be Human by Andrew Joseph White because it's so grotesque and fun!
Andrew Joseph White's novel is on the reading list for Sustaining Dread, alongside Rivers Solomon and Carmen Maria Machado. Learn how the best horror novels keep the dread building for hundreds of pages.
Enroll in Sustaining Dread →Writing Workshops: What's the worst writing advice that sounds smart?
Fin Leary: Show, don't tell. Sometimes we need to tell the reader something. Also, telling doesn't always mean you're telling the reader the entire true story. Sometimes your narrator or another character is telling the reader something that isn't true, or the way it's being told is a part of how the story unfolds.
Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: "Most writing classes won't tell you this, but..."
Fin Leary: the scariest thing you can do is continue writing what you want. People will hate you no matter what, so write a song with the lyrics "spelling is fun" if you want to.
"Most writing classes won't tell you this, but the scariest thing you can do is continue writing what you want."
Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?
Fin Leary: When I was a kid, I read the first line of Because of Winn-Dixie and immediately fell in love with India Opal Buloni. I can practically still hear the first line in the voice I gave her in my head. To me, that captured what a protagonist should feel like: so real that she became her own person the moment I began reading.
Writing Workshops: What's your teaching vibe? One sentence, not a paragraph.
Fin Leary: I believe in kindness, no prescriptive rules, and centering every writer's autonomy, creativity, and voice.
Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?
Fin Leary: I don't have an MFA but I teach in an MFA program! And I've been swimming with sharks. I love facing my fears.
Fin swims with sharks because they love facing their fears, and that instinct runs through everything they teach. Horror asks writers to stay in the dark room longer than feels comfortable, to keep the dread climbing chapter after chapter, and to trust their own path out of the haunted house. Sustaining Dread: Writing the Horror Novel gives you four weeks, an outline built to hold, and a teacher who will never hand you a rulebook. Bring your half-drafted monster. It's time to haunt your own narrative.
Four Monday evenings, a full workshop with written feedback from Fin, and a novel outline that escalates the threat from the first page to the last. Class begins February 1, 2027.
Save Your Seat in Sustaining Dread →WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
