It's easy to write a short story and frighten people for five

Yes — that quote is correctly attributed to Susan Hill, the acclaimed English novelist best known for her ghost story The Woman in Black (1983).

“It's easy to write a short story and frighten people for five pages, but to work at length, when you do it as in The Turn of the Screw or A Christmas Carol, it's different; you have to build it and build it.”
— Susan Hill

Context and Meaning

Susan Hill made this observation in an interview about writing supernatural fiction, where she discussed the craft of sustaining suspense and atmosphere in longer works. She was comparing the compact intensity of a short horror story to the slow, layered psychological tension required in a novella or novel.

By referencing Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol — two masterworks of the ghost story tradition — Hill highlights how the architecture of fear in longer fiction depends on character development, mood, and gradual escalation rather than quick shocks.

Interpretation

Hill’s remark underscores her philosophy of storytelling:

• Short fiction can rely on immediacy and impact.

• Longer fiction requires patience, precision, and structural discipline — the ability to “build it and build it” until dread becomes inescapable.

It’s a fitting reflection from a writer whose own work, especially The Woman in Black, exemplifies the slow-burn mastery of gothic suspense she’s describing.