Thrills and Chills: Tension and Misdirection in Isolated Settings

Live Training with Lyndsey Croal.

About This Training

— Intermediate Level —

Join author Lyndsey Croal for a workshop on writing within restricted and isolated settings, with top tips and tricks for building tension and suspense. We will look at published excerpts, including settings like spaceships, deep sea, or cave structures, or settings where the character may feel trapped for another reason, and explore how the writers have built this atmosphere. We will then look at lessons learned to build your own stories. During the workshop, attendees will be guided through exercises and prompts for introducing misdirection, creating unsettling scenes, building twists, and writing unreliable narrators, while keeping your readers hooked. This will primarily be focused on horror, gothic, and sci fi texts, but should be helpful to anyone looking to build unease and atmosphere in their work.

Get the Companion Workbook here (recommended).

About Lyndsey Croal

Lyndsey is a Scottish author published in over eighty magazines and anthologies, including Apex, Analog, Weird Tales, Shoreline of Infinity, and Mslexia’s Best Women’s Short Fiction. She’s a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Awardee, British Fantasy Award Finalist, and former Hawthornden Fellow. Her longer works include Have You Decided on Your Question (Shortwave), Limelight and Other Stories (Shortwave ‘24) The Girl With Barnacles for Eyes (Split Scream Volume Five, Tenebrous Press ‘24), and Dark Crescent (Luna Press ‘25).

In 2019, she co-founded Edinburgh Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers and feels fortunate to have such an active literary scene on her doorstep. Her writing is influenced by her professional background in climate and nature policy as well as her experience growing up in remote places.

She has also edited a number of projects including ‘Ghostlore: An Audio Fiction Anthology’ and Shoreline of Infinity Magazine’s Climate Change Special.

Watch The Recording Below