[Over the course of my month as writer-in-residence, I’ll be sharing artifacts that I’ve connected to fiction writing. I almost always start in one place and quickly veer off course. This is the first exhibit in the series.]

Even as far as soap operas go, Dark Shadows is pretty awful. There are scenes where the boom mike appears in the shot, house flies land on actors’ faces during close ups, actors drop lines but keep going even though their dialogue becomes nonsense.

At the same time, Dark Shadows proves a point that’s carried me a long way as a writer: You can create an effect (in this case, horror) through dialogue and atmosphere.

Under the pressure of producing five shows a week on a limited budget, the Dark Shadows crew didn’t have the resources to create anything other than cheesy effects.

What Dark Shadows had was characters talking to each other on screen. Add to that creepy theme music and sound effects to create the atmosphere of an isolated small town along the New England sea. Mixing those two elements, they created vivid horror and suspense — even with their god-awful production values.

What I’ve always liked about the horror genre, from a writing standpoint, is that it knows what it’s about, whether it’s creating chills, making you jump, or getting in your head just a little. Horror writers pursue an effect that hits readers on an emotional (or intellectual) level. Horror views reading as an experience, and milks it for all it’s worth. Fiction writers, on the other hand — and this is a brash generalization — tend to think of their writing less as a reading experience than pure storytelling.

I tend not to write horror, not that I am a snob about such things. It’s just a genre that’s not for me. However, I believe strongly that non-horror fiction writers can learn something from horror in terms of focusing on the effects that contribute to the reading experience.

Horror often relies on gimmicks and cliches to achieve its effects. I’ve always thought that fiction, when it reaches the level of art, achieves a wide range of effects without resorting to melodrama (no pun intended).

The emotional and intellectual states that good fiction writing create are difficult to describe. In many cases, they don’t even have names. All the craft in the world can’t teach a writer how to create this kind of experience without showing the puppet strings. The way to achieve effect-driven fiction without melodrama is through hard work, opening yourself up to possibilities, trying out new storytelling forms, and placing the reader’s experience above all else in your writing.

In the meantime, here’s a suggestion for writers wishing to pursue effect-driven fiction: Take a cue from Dark Shadows and start with dialogue and atmosphere but with more refinement and craft.