yazar.io for Gothic Fiction Writers

What makes a novel gothic?

Since Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), often called the first gothic novel, most of the genre has been built from the same parts: an old, isolated building, a family with a heavy past, a secret waiting to surface and an old crime that still reaches into the present. In his preface to The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne states his moral plainly: 'the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones.' Fear can be part of the mix, but it isn't required. In Jane Eyre the tension comes from a secret kept at Thornfield, and in Rebecca from a dead first wife whose presence still fills Manderley.

Build the house like a character

In Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, the local peasants use 'the House of Usher' for both the family and the mansion, and by the end of the story both come down together. Plan a gothic house the way you'd plan a character: who built it, when and with whose money, which rooms are kept shut, who was born or died in which room, how it decays as the story goes on. Readers remember the layout. A door that should be locked but stands open in the next chapter unsettles them only if you meant it; otherwise it reads as a mistake.

In yazar.io you create the house as a location and give each room that matters to the plot a record of its own. In the Locations Field Template, add a relation field called 'Part Of' with Locations as its target type and 'Rooms' as its reverse relation heading. Choose the house in that field on each room, and the house's page lists the rooms automatically. Choose a room as a character's Birthplace or Place of Death, and the character appears under 'Born here' or 'Died here' on that room's page; events with that room in their Location field are listed there in order under 'Events that happened here'. To catch the mood of the place, put the photos you collect next to the cards of the house and its rooms on a board.

Put the truth in the family tree, not the official story

A gothic family has the story everyone tells and the story that's true: an heir whose real father is someone else, a marriage kept secret, a relative believed dead who is still alive. In The Castle of Otranto, everything falls into place once it emerges that the castle was taken through poison and a fictitious will, and that the true heir descends from a secret marriage. You can only surprise readers if you know the whole truth first.

So draw the ties in yazar.io's Family Tree as they really are. Link the real father as Father, and connect the man everyone takes for the father with a Custom connection you label yourself, such as 'Presumed Father'. To keep the family's version too, add a custom field like 'What Everyone Believes' to your characters, and both stories sit side by side on the character's page. For following generations, marriages and years together, see yazar.io for family saga writers.

Write the curse down word for word

Prophecies and curses in gothic fiction tend to come true to the letter. The old prophecy in Otranto says the castle will pass from the present family 'whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it', and the ending delivers exactly that. Write down the exact words of a curse or prophecy on day one, along with who spoke them and the condition under which they take effect, so you can come back to them in the final chapters.

Decide early about the supernatural, too. Is it real, as in Walpole's novel? Explained away at the end, as in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)? Or left for readers to judge, as in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw? In yazar.io, keep curses, prophecies and the house's legends as separate Lore records. When the curse's record mentions the house and the ancestor who brought it on with @Name, the curse shows up in the Linked pages list of both. Keep the real explanation behind the supernatural in a note: notes are never published to the Shareable Wiki.

What happened, and when the reader finds out

Gothic fiction rarely tells the past from beginning to end. It surfaces in fragments: a letter, a servant's unfinished sentence, a date on a gravestone, an object found in a locked room. The scattering only works if a clear chronology sits behind it, so know what really happened, and in what order, before you decide which fragment the reader gets in which chapter.

Keep that true order in the Event Flow tab of the Calendar section. Line up the crime that started it all, the secret marriage, the deaths and the night the will went missing, and link the people involved and the room where each one took place. The date note is free text, so something as vague as 'forty years ago, one winter night' works fine. Log the house's decline as events linked to the house, and its page shows the whole fall in order, from the day the north wing was shut up to the sale of the last painting.

Plan what the reader learns, and when, in Notes. Use Manage Categories to add a 'Secret' category of your own, then open a note for each secret with the truth, who knows it and the chapter that reveals it, and link the characters involved with @Name. The note shows up under Linked notes on those characters' pages, so while you write a character's scene you can see at a glance which secrets they carry.

Wills, deeds and portraits

Inheritance in gothic fiction often hangs on a document or an object. In The House of the Seven Gables, the deed the Pyncheons spent generations hunting for lies in a recess behind the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, who built the house. Keep the will, the deed, the portrait or the key as separate records in Items. Once you fill in the Owner and Location fields, the item appears under 'Items they own' on its owner's page and under 'Items here' on the page of the room where it's hidden.