Starting a Horror/Haunting Novel

With NICE GIRLS DON'T BITE making the rounds of agents, I wanted to start another novel right away. Amanda Hocking recently interviewed me in her blog, one of her questions being what monster I feared when I was young. In the process of answering I mentioned that our house had a ghost who was not frightening. That house, its rural location, and that ghost had been perking in the back of my brain for some time. I determined to write a horror/haunting novel. The location descriptions would be easy because I had lived in that weathered two-story frame house for seven years. It had a ghost whom I saw often and named Oscar, but he was benign and occupied himself by walking from room to room and staring out windows. What did cause a little frisson of spookiness, however, was the name of the previous owners of the property. The family's last name was Sleeper. I would title my novel SLEEPER, it would take place in that old remote frame house, and it would have three malevolent ghosts rising from a bloody incident 70 years previous. I was excited by the idea and began by creating a 14-page, single-spaced outline. The outline is my way of knowing if my concept has meat on its bones and if I have enough arc to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion. It's something like the way The Man I Married first builds a fully-detailed scale model before he begins construction of a stage set. Thanks for reading. Joan Sween.

Following Stephen King's Advice

It was at this time that The Man I Married heard a radio interview with Stephen King and repeated to me what Mr. King had said. What TMIM understood Mr. King to say was not to organize, outline, or solidify your novel ahead of time. Just start telling the story and let your characters take you where they will. As I considered Mr. King to be a genius and myself to be a former English teacher cursed with a pedantic style, I welcomed this advice. Yes! I would just start writing, and maybe what I wrote would sound natural and not heavily pedantic. About 12 chapters into "Nice Girls Don't Bite," I ground to a halt, impossibly snarled in what I had written, without a clue as to where to go next. I went to my best thinking place, the shower, and puzzled over my problem until the hot water ran out. I saw the light. Mr. King, still a genius, was talking about mainstream novels. I, still a pedantic doofus, was writing a commercial novel. Organization and plotting are the bedrock of mysteries. The author absolutely must plan ahead of time who the murderer is, how he committed the crime, where the clues have to show up, how many red herrings to plant, what order the detective follows, and a lot of other good stuff. I went back to the beginning, wrote a 12-page outline, and started the novel all over.