I am capable of writing humor, and I have written a tiny bit of horror. Maybe the horror I wrote is more of a psychological thriller, but those two categories might be describing the same thing.

While I may have my doubts about my ability to write horror, I’m confident in my humor writing. There are parts of The Repossessed Ghost that are funny. I lend Mel my sense of humor.

And, I’ve set out to write humorous posts, from time to time. Some of those posts are my favorite.

If you ask me how to do it, though… for the most part, I don’t know.

With both humor and horror, it’s about building up an expectation and then delivering on it or subverting it in a way that evokes the emotional reaction you are trying to achieve. It is the unexpected, which can make someone laugh or gasp. The timing for either is similar, if not the same. There is a setup to establish where we are starting from, then a buildup, and finally a reveal.

That is most storytelling, though. The keystone to good storytelling is setups and payoffs.

For me, voice is a huge part of writing humor. Mel’s wit (and my own, most of the time) is wry. A wry voice lends itself to snark and observational humor. It’s often about finding and revealing the humorous oddity through a question or observation.

The absurd often pairs well and leans into humor. Cleverness is also one of humor’s bedfellows.

Absurdity is to humor what unsettling is to horror. Skittering, slimy, asymmetrical things that click and scuttle from shadow to shadow, always just out the light and only seen in the corner of your eye. You can’t seem to look directly at it. You grit your teeth and force yourself to face it, until you feel the trickle running down your lips and chin and find your nose is suddenly bleeding.

Horror and humor are spices that can be sprinkled into a story, and those flavors don’t have to be overpowering. They just have to be done with purpose.

If you ask me how to write horror or humor, I will probably tell you that I don’t know. It’s true. I can do it, but it feels weird trying to explain it, because I don’t think I was ever formally taught. I know what those story flavors are and I can write them, but for me it’s more a matter of following my intuition than anything else.

The answer may be to read a bunch of horror or a bunch of humor. That’s what I did. I read a ton of Stephen King, and I read everything I could find of Douglas Adams. Berkeley Breathed is probably a huge influence on my sense of humor, too.

So there’s the real and true answer: If you want to write humor or horror, you need to read a bunch of humor or horror. And then you need to practice.