Owen Egerton is hella inspiring.

He is a writer and director who works across multiple mediums with equal skill. His films include Mercy Black, Follow, and Blood Fest. His most recent novel, Hollow, was named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR.

His latest project, Whistle, directed by Corin Hardy (The Nun) and recently acquired by Independent Film Company and Shudder, comes from Egerton’s own short story. The film follows high school students who discover a cursed Aztec Death Whistle that summons their future deaths when blown.

Through his teaching, interviews, and public appearances, Owen offers practical advice grounded in real experience navigating both traditional publishing and Hollywood. It’s no surprise that I came away from our recent conversation ready to open my copy of Final Draft and get busy on breaking my own story.

Enjoy these tips from Egerton, which will help you go big, get inspired, and be proud to call yourself a writer.

Give Your “Mental Bouncer” the Night Off

Egerton thinks our biggest creative enemy is the voice in our heads that judges ideas before they can fully form. He calls this our “mental bouncer.”

“You ask a little kid to come up with an idea, and they will spout off an idea and play with that idea and go off in different directions and weirdness and silliness and all kinds of things, and they won’t stop,” Egerton said. “But then, when we get to middle school, you ask someone like, ‘Hey, tell me an idea.’ And they clamp up and they start getting afraid. ‘No, that’s going to be stupid if I say that,’ or ‘They’re going to think I’m uncool.’”

That middle school self-consciousness never really leaves us. It just gets more sophisticated. 

“We have this bouncer in our brain, so this bouncer’s [saying,] ‘Watch out. That idea is going to be considered weird or cliche or offensive,’ and basically is patting down every idea before it’s really allowed to get to the front of our brain,” he said.

His solution is to temporarily fire that internal critic during first drafts. 

“When we’re writing those first drafts, we want to give the bouncer of the night off,” he said. “We want to let the door be open so that all the ideas can come into the party. Not just the first ones that are pretty cool and neat and polished and well-dressed, but the weird ones in the back of the room, the ones that are strange who don’t usually come to parties. The offensive ones, the strange ones, the outlandish ones, the ones just way, way back, who would never even show up at the door, except that they see, ‘Oh, I guess everyone’s allowed this time.’”

The best ideas often come from the strangest places. So why not embrace them?

“And that’s the idea that wanders in at some point, and you see from the other side of the room and you make eye contact with, and you’re like, that’s my idea. And you end up dancing the night away with an idea that never would’ve shown up if you had had the bouncer there, judging the whole time. The bouncer can come back when you’re editing, but when you’re first writing—man, you got to give the bouncer the night off.”

Write Too Far, Then Pull Back

Most writers err on the side of caution, then wonder why their work feels safe. Characters are small or all read the same. Dialogue feels rote. The action feels a little bland. Egerton suggests doing the opposite during the first draft.

“There’s a time to ask, ‘Am I pushing it too far?’ But that time’s down the line, the initial thing that we need to do is push it too far,” he said.

When I mentioned that it’s always easier to write back rather than trying to punch things up later, he agreed. 

“Yeah. There’s a sort of sweet madness or play that happens when you’re writing. This craft of upping the stakes and increasing the tension or sharpening the dialogue, that works. Craft is really, really important. But there’s also a magic, freeform, dancing weirdness that is hard to replicate without just losing yourself a little bit.”

Hunt Down Inspiration Instead of Waiting for It

Egerton has little patience for writers who sit around waiting for the muse to visit. Inspiration, he says, is something you actively pursue.

“A lot of young writers I think feel that they need to wait to be inspired, and I understand that. But that’s not our job to wait to be inspired. Our job is to hunt down inspiration,” he said. “Sometimes we feel that the idea will strike us like lightning. Well, maybe. But that means you have to go out into thunderstorms and with a big piece of metal over your head.”

Most adults choose comfort over curiosity, but writers can’t afford that luxury. 

“Part of our job is to seek out what inspires us. Again, this is something I think children kind of do in a natural way. There are so many adults who are living less than inspiring lives, and understandably, because there’s something comfortable about repetition, there’s something comfortable about safety.”

Writers need to actively disrupt their routines, he says. 

“Part of our job as writers is to walk a different path between where we’re working that day and home. Part of our job as writers is to get lost. Walk through doors that maybe don’t have an open sign on them. We need to seek out the wildness so that our pages can reflect that.”

When writer’s block hits, the solution isn’t staring harder at your computer screen. 

“I think if someone’s feeling writer’s block in the fact that they can’t type, well, there’s a lot more to writing than typing. It might be time to take a walk through your city, down the street you’ve never seen before. It might be time to sit next to someone at a coffee shop or at a bar and ask them when their heart was last broken. It might be time to write down everything they remember from the dream they just had, even if they think it was trivial.”

Owen Egerton

Mine Your Own Fears for Horror Writing

For horror writers specifically, Egerton suggests looking inward rather than trying to guess what scares audiences.

“I think a lot of times we as horror writers make the mistake of trying to think, ‘What will scare people?’ Which is understandable. That is our job. But the way we do our job is spending some very honest time with understanding what scares ourselves and writing them down, which can be a terrifying process, and not having to understand why they scare us necessarily,” he said.

Your personal fears are more specific and authentic than any generic scary concept. 

“It is enough to know that if I am scared by a particular crinkle in that plastic that has been left out in the weather for too long, it’s fair for me to believe that that also will find other people who are frightened of it.”

Horror writers have a unique relationship with fear. Where most people run from disturbing thoughts, writers lean in. 

“I think the process is spending that honest, difficult time in discovering what terrifies us and why, that’s a really interesting calling for us. We are doing what most people around us would rather never do. Most people, if they have a disturbing thought, they quickly pick up their phone and look for something to distract them. If they have a disturbing fear, they walk away. If the dark is scary, they quickly turn on lights. If they meet a ghost, they run in the opposite direction.”

Horror writers do the opposite. 

“When we meet a ghost, we take out our notepad and start asking questions. We spend time with our disturbing thoughts. We allow the things to haunt us to speak ever louder so we can make note of it. And that is a bizarre calling of writers, of artists overall, but in horror specifically—to find what frightens us and take note of it.”

Wait to Explain Your World’s Rules

When building supernatural or fantastical elements into your story, Egerton suggests patience with exposition. Let readers feel the rules before you explain them.

He connects this to childhood games. “In the same way that Wes Craven basically discovered the rule, ‘Don’t go to sleep or you’ll die.’ I’ll figure out why later. Or Beck and Woods were like, ‘Don’t make a sound or you’ll die.’ There’s a rule that you’ve discovered. Bird Box, ‘Don’t look.’ Which I think in a lot of ways really strikes us—again, going back to the kid playing in us, where every kid I’ve ever met at some point played ‘the floor’s lava’—we make a rule and all of a sudden we can start having a story.”

Exposition is every writer’s nightmare. When I asked about handling it for his script Whistle, which features a Mesoamerican artifact that causes people to face their deaths, I wondered how you explore that without hitting the audience over the head with information.

“Gosh, man, isn’t that right? Exposition,” Egerton said.

“The worst,” I said. “It’s the worst.”

“Right?” he said. “I mean, how many movies do we have, including ones that I write where there’s some professor, they’re in a lecture like, ‘Ghosts. They’ve been with us since the beginning,’ and I don’t mind those. I like those scenes as well. Yeah, exposition’s always tricky.”

His approach prioritizes emotional investment over information dumps. 

“I do find that one thing I really think works in films, and I see this being done by some of the master storytellers, is waiting to explain,” he said. “We enjoy not knowing. As long as we are emotionally driven by the story and what the character is looking for in their own life and how this is impacting them, we don’t need to know why or how. Usually then the explanation comes at somewhat like a halfway point. And the halfway point, whether it’s, ‘I see dead people’ or something else, we’re like, ‘Oh, okay. This explains kind of the weirdness that we’ve seen through the first half of the film.’”

The timing serves the story’s structure. 

“Which in the second half of the film means maybe there’s a solution in some way, or a possible plan, that the mystery has some description to it. Exposition, you probably need less than you think. You write more and then you cut back, and then you have to make sure that those scenes in which info is being shared are really interesting and fascinating, and no one is yawning.”

Robbie Kay in 'Blood Fest'

Treat Writing as a Calling, Not Just a Career

At the end of our conversation, Egerton addressed something many writers are feeling right now—discouragement about the industry and the state of the world. His response was to reframe how we think about the work itself.

“I know a lot of writers right now and a lot of folks in the film industry overall are feeling disheartened. I think a lot of folks in the world, in our country, are feeling that right now. It is a dark and a hard time,” he said.

But he sees creative work as serving a larger purpose. 

“I do think the act of creativity, of creating art, is an act of generosity. Of course, we do it because we love it, and it’s a thrill, and we do it because we are excited at the possibility of seeing something we write be made into something that’s on the screen, and participating in the art that we love for sure. But I also know that the world’s starving for stories that have yet to be told, and there is a certain aspect of our job that is honoring that. Honoring the need of a world that wants stories.”

This perspective shifts the focus from personal success to service. 

“And when we respect that, when we respect that this is not a hobby, it’s not even a job, but maybe it’s a bit of a calling, I think that can motivate our words,” Egerton said.

It’s a reminder that comes at the right time. So take this advice, and keep writing—the world needs your story!