5 Tips on How To Write a Gothic Novel
Author Katie Lumsden shares five tips on how to write a gothic novel, and poses questions to ask yourself if the gothic tone and setting is right for your story.
So, you want to write a gothic novel? You’re certainly not alone. When I started planning my debut novel, The Secrets of Hartwood Hall, it was to gothic tropes and traditions I turned. There’s just something entirely compelling about the gothic.
Gothic literature has been around for a long time. The word “gothic” originally referred to a style of medieval architecture but was first applied to a novel in 1764, when Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto with the subtitle, A Gothic Story. 18th century British gothic novels were atmospheric, spooky, and often supernatural—as we’d still expect in modern gothic works—but they were also typically set in the medieval period, often in Continental Europe.
It was the Victorians, in many ways, who reinforced and tweaked gothic traditions into what we’d recognize today. Like the Georgians before them, they sometimes set their gothic literature in far-away times and places, but they also brought the gothic into 19th century British settings. The gothic had also made its way to the States, most notably with Edgar Allen Poe.
The popularity of the gothic endured throughout the 20th century, with Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, Susan Hill, and many more, and “Southern Gothic” emerged with authors like Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner. We’re still writing gothic novels today, and a lot of other modern genres borrow from the gothic, too: horror books, thrillers, some science fiction. Dark Academia, a subgenre that’s really popular right now, is very closely linked to the gothic.
So, if you’re interested in writing a gothic novel, here are a few things to keep in mind ...
1. Pick your time and place carefully
In gothic novels, the setting acts almost as a character in its own right. Early gothic writers set their books in the medieval period and abroad, because an unfamiliar setting allowed their readers to believe in the impossible. Authors have been doing similar things ever since.
When Emily Brontë wrote her gothic masterpiece, Wuthering Heights, she crucially didn’t set it in the 1840s, when the book was written, but in the final decades of the 18th century. She looked backwards to give herself the freedom to explore wildness and the supernatural.
For exactly the same reason, many modern writers of gothic fiction choose to set their novels in the 19th century, as I have done, or in the early 20th century: books like The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins, The Key in the Lock by Beth Underdown and A House of Ghosts by W.C. Ryan use historical settings to create a fantastic gothic atmosphere. However, a modern setting can be gothic, too—just look at C.J. Cooke’s The Nesting.
A typical gothic setting would be a big, old, spooky house—somewhere isolated and decaying—but you can also turn this on its head: explore internal isolation in a setting less remote; make a modern building feel gothic by what happens there; cut off someone’s connection to technology and the outside world. The most important thing is to pick a setting that lets you isolate your characters and create a sense of foreboding.
2. Build your atmosphere
The atmosphere is the overall mood and feel of a story, and for me, it’s the most important thing in a gothic novel. Atmosphere comes not only from the setting but from how your characters interact with the setting. Show us how your protagonist observes the world around them, what they can see, smell, hear, what it all makes them feel.
The atmosphere is created by your characters’ observations, and above all by their state of mind as they make these observations. Atmosphere also comes from the themes and word choice within your writing.
Look at how Wilkie Collins uses character tension and increasing isolation to build the claustrophobic atmosphere at Blackwater Park in The Woman in White—or how Shirley Jackson describes the eerie effect Hill House has on her characters. Immerse your reader in the world around your protagonist, and the atmosphere will follow.
3. Plot your mystery
Most gothic novels have some kind of mystery or secret at their heart. The setting and atmosphere give you your foundations, but the mystery gives you your plot. Think carefully about what the mystery is and why your protagonist wants to solve it (or indeed doesn’t). Consider what the solution will be and how you will reveal it.
Plot twists can be an important tool for a gothic writer; some of my favorite modern gothic novels—books like The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield or Fingersmith by Sarah Waters—have truly fantastic, startling plot twists. The mystery gives you a framework for the plot and provides a way to build tension; but the solution to the mystery—the plot twist or the reveal—is what really makes the novel.
4. Have fun with tropes
Gothic literature has been around for a very long time and comes with various tropes, elements, and clichés: both larger things, like old, spooky houses, the supernatural, or unreliable narrators; and smaller details, like creaking staircases, old legends, scared villagers, nightmares, rainstorms, fires.
Sometimes it’s effective to simply lean into these tropes. Look at The Woman in Black by Susan Hill; she uses all the staple gothic tropes and just runs with them, and her writing is so well-crafted and her characters so vivid that it works fantastically, never for a second feeling cliché.
Alternatively, you can play with and undermine gothic tropes, reworking them to meet your own needs, setting something up that the reader, from their knowledge of the genre, expects to be one thing, then surprising them. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters is a masterclass in how to do this. After all, the gothic is supposed to be a bit scary, a bit spooky—but a lot of the time, it can also just be fun.
5. Use the gothic as a means to an end
As I’ve hinted elsewhere, the gothic is more of a framework than a rulebook. Its tropes, themes, and traditions are great tools, but the gothic doesn’t have to be the be all and end all of your novel.
The best gothic works use gothic tropes to emphasize their themes. Wuthering Heights is more about grief, revenge, and generational trauma than it is about anything supernatural. There has to be a story you are telling, themes you are exploring, a character’s journey you are communicating.
Think about why—and indeed, whether—the gothic is the right foundation for the story you want to tell. How will a gothic atmosphere help you explore the key themes of your novel? What can we learn about your character from how they interact with the atmospheric setting around them? What is the mystery plot going to unveil? What are you trying to say, and how can gothic elements help you say it?
There are no hard and fast rules for the gothic, and it’s the framework more than the label that is useful—so pick and choose what works for you.
Katie Lumsden read Jane Eyre at the age of 13 and never looked back. She spent her teenage years devouring nineteenth century literature, reading every Dickens, Brontë, Austen and Hardy novel she could find. She has a degree in English literature and history from the University of Durham and an MA in creative writing from Bath Spa University. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the London Short Story Prize and the Bridport Prize. Katie’s YouTube channel, Books and Things, has 25,000 subscribers. She lives in London and works as an editor. The Secrets of Hartwood Hall is her debut novel.
