Stephen Graham Jones never intended to be a writer.

“I only planned to drive a tractor and be a farmer,” he says.

Jones, a member of the Blackfeet Nation from Midland, Texas, saw either oil fields or cornfields in his future. But he always knew he had the chops to tell a good story.

“I was always spilling Kool-Aid on the couch and telling my mom a story that my little brother did it,” he says. “It was all self-preservation, of course, but to tell you the truth, I was reading novels since third or fourth grade and I would get to the end of those novels and I would think, ‘I can do that, I can end a story like that.'”

All month, Weekend Edition has been exploring why people are drawn to scary stories, how horror has become big business, and now Jones, a professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder, shares with us how to create a good spine-tingler.

It ends

“I think craft can get you through 95% of a novel,” Jones says. “The craft is mechanics. It’s the little techniques you use to achieve this or that, and situate the story and the reader. That’s all crafting technique.”

Jones says the actual art of writing a good story doesn’t really come into focus until you get to the wrap-up.

“I always think of it like the story is running along the top of a flat mesa, and it’s nighttime and 95% of it is even-footing. But then at the very end, you jump off into the night, into the darkness, and you trust that there’s going to be another toe hold out there,” he says.

Experts studying fear have theorized that one of the major reasons people are flocking to horror experiences lately — whether theme parks, novels or movies — is that the world feels so uncertain. Jones agrees and says “whether that ending is up or down, that ending is what we’re here for.”