How to Write a Dark Academia Novel: A Manifesto from The Dark Academicals
Originally published on The Dark Academicals Substack, where we spiral about literary obsession, dark academia tropes, and everything cursed in between. This post struck a nerve (or a tentative WIP), so we’re bringing it here, for posterity, and for you.
There comes a point in every writer’s life when they glance at their half-drunk coffee, the annotated copy of The Secret History, and their spiral-bound notebook filled with phrases like “wretchedly handsome” and “ritual gone wrong,” and they think: I could write dark academia.
And the answer is: yes, you absolutely could.
But should you? And how? That’s where I come in with a little bit of assistance.
Below is a checklist-slash-guide to help you write dark academia with actual depth, haunting tension, and just enough pretentious flair to get away with a Latin epigraph or two.
Contents
Because even chaos deserves a syllabus
1. A Setting That Smells of Dust and Guilt
2. A Central Obsession
3. Unreliable Intimacy
4. Dialogue That Could Be a Thesis or a Threat
5. Someone Has to Die
6. The Aesthetic Is a Lie (But You Still Need It)
7. A Legacy of Rot
8. Do You Need Spice? (And When Should You Set the Page on Fire?)
9. A Touch of the Uncanny
10. Guilt, Baby. So Much Guilt.
11. Endings That Don’t Quite Close
12. Final Checklist
A Setting That Smells of Dust and Guilt
Dark academia begins with a setting that feels like it’s watching you. It should be old, yes, but more than that, it should hum with memory or better yet, legacy. Campuses with locked wings, libraries that echo long after you’ve left, lecture halls that were built to keep secrets.
This isn’t a backdrop, it’s a character. And like the best characters, it should be capable of as much harm to your protagonist as it does good.
The setting is where your themes nest. If your book explores corruption, you can make the university built on stolen land (which considering recent events…). If you’re writing about isolation, make the dorm a labyrinth of locked doors and thin walls. If it’s about generational trauma, let the dust on the banister be the same dust that settled there fifty years ago, when something went very, very wrong.
Think:
How does your setting reinforce the dread?
What memories live in these walls, and what refuses to die?
A Central Obsession
Your protagonist cannot simply want something. They must crave it. Enough to betray a friend, ignore the signs, or walk willingly into the fire.
Obsession is the cornerstone of dark academia; whether it’s the pursuit of knowledge, power, beauty, love, legacy, or meaning. But it can’t be abstract. Make it tangible. If they’re obsessed with knowledge, they could skip normal meal times, lose sleep, bleed for it. If they’re obsessed with a person, they could read their handwriting like scripture and know the ins and outs of every obscure edition of their publications.
Obsession distorts. It glamours. It corrodes.
Use that.
Try this:
What would your protagonist do if they were told to stop? What would they sacrifice to keep going?
Unreliable Intimacy
In dark academia, love is rarely soft. Intimacy is always complicated, usually dangerous, and often misinterpreted. You’re writing about relationships built on shared secrets, high-stakes loyalty, and the constant fear that someone might know too much - or too little - about who you really are.
This isn’t enemies-to-lovers. It’s friends-to-accomplices. Lovers-to-witnesses. Sometimes even strangers-to-obsession. Trust is a currency, and it’s always running out.
The most effective dark academia relationships are the ones that teeter on the edge of devotion and destruction. The kind where someone says I would die for you, and means it.
Write intimacy that unnerves. Love that corrupts. Connection that costs. It’s not healthy, and your protagonist usually knows that, but they still can’t stop it.
Dialogue That Could Be a Thesis or a Threat
Your characters aren’t just talking. They’re sparring. They’re seducing. They’re laying out philosophical landmines and daring each other to step on them.
Dialogue in dark academia should feel dangerous. Not in volume, but in weight. It’s a whispered quote from Euripides at the wrong moment. A half-smile during a confession. A retort that says more about the speaker’s past than the sentence itself.
Even small talk should carry the risk of revelation.
Pro tip:
Let dialogue expose character flaws. Show us who can’t stop proving they’re the smartest person in the room, and who quietly, ruthlessly is.
Someone Has to Die
Literal or symbolic. Someone’s going under.
Dark academia thrives on sacrifice. It’s not just about who dies, but why they die, and what it says about the story’s moral compass. A character dies to protect the secret. To preserve the lie. To prove their devotion. Or maybe just because someone else thought they were expendable.
It doesn’t have to be a murder. It could be the death of a belief, a friendship, a self.
But the loss should change everything.
Ask yourself:
What’s the blood price of this pursuit? And who’s willing to pay it?
The Aesthetic Is a Lie (But You Still Need It)
The tweed. The candlelight. The annotated classics and crumbling arches. The aesthetic pulls readers in, but it shouldn’t protect them.
A dark academia story often begins by seducing the reader with beauty. The exclusivity. The prestige. The late-night study sessions and whispered rituals. But as the pages turn, that beauty should curdle. The library becomes claustrophobic. The professor is not who you thought. The rituals start to hurt. The seminars too intense.
Don’t strip away the aesthetic, corrupt it.
Let the reader fall in love with the world. Then show them what’s rotting beneath it.
A Legacy of Rot
This genre isn’t about starting fresh, it’s about digging up what was buried.
There’s almost always a generational shadow. A disgraced family member. A suppressed archive. A legacy that promised greatness and delivered madness.
Institutions in dark academia are rarely clean. They’re haunted by old sins and propped up by elegant decay. They taught the same curriculum thirty years ago. The chandelier in the dean’s office was a gift from someone who was later erased from the alumni records.
Your protagonist isn’t the first to ask dangerous questions. They’re just the latest.
Tip:
Think of your plot as an excavation site. Every layer tells a story. Some of them lie.
Do You Need Spice? (And When Should You Set the Page on Fire?)
Let’s be honest: some dark academia books feel like they’re one slow kiss away from combustion, while others keep their characters so emotionally constipated it’s practically academic performance art.
So do you need spice?
Not always. But if you're going to include it, it has to serve the story.
In dark academia, intimacy is never just about attraction. It’s about power. Control. Worship. Manipulation. Devotion so fierce it curdles into destruction.
Ask yourself:
Is this sex scene revealing something new about the characters?
Is it building or breaking trust?
Is it the reward, or the curse?
A well-placed, breathless scene can deepen tension, shift dynamics, or serve as the final, irreversible crossing of a line.
Spice in dark academia should feel like lighting a candle in a dark, locked room with no windows and too many flammable furnishings. It’s intimate. Dangerous. Possibly unwise.
A Touch of the Uncanny
The supernatural in dark academia is often suggested rather than explained. You don’t need full-on fantasy to make a reader shiver, you need uncertainty.
Is it a ghost or just unresolved trauma? A demon or a metaphor? A cult or just a very intense extracurricular?
The uncanny should make your protagonist question themselves. Their memories. Their mind. And it should make the reader hesitate, too; did that really happen, or is this character just unraveling?
Less is more. A single line of dialogue can summon more dread than ten pages of exposition.
Guilt, Baby. So Much Guilt.
Every dark academia protagonist should be haunted, by what they did, what they didn’t do, or what they were complicit in by staying quiet.
Guilt adds texture to the prose. It’s what makes your main character flinch at praise, snap at friends, stare too long into mirrors.
Let the guilt bloom gradually. Maybe they’re fine at first. Maybe they even feel vindicated. But then something shifts. The shadows get longer. The dreams get weirder. The past starts bleeding into the present.
Good dark academia doesn’t just ask “what happened?”- it asks “who is still suffering for it?”
Endings That Don’t Quite Close
You can tie off the plot, but never the consequences.
Dark academia endings often leave questions unanswered, wounds unhealed, and truths half-buried. This isn’t laziness. It’s craft. You’re leaving the reader with a feeling, not a resolution.
Maybe justice isn’t served. Maybe the hero becomes the villain. Maybe the group breaks apart, not with a bang, but a silence.
Your ending should feel inevitable, but not obvious. Tragic, but not hopeless. If it leaves your readers staring at the ceiling, wondering if they missed something crucial, then you’ve done it right.
Final Checklist
Before you submit to the cursed literary journal or whisper your manuscript into the ivy clad walls of the university…
[ ] Setting: Atmospheric enough to kill someone or cover it up
[ ] Obsession: Your protagonist wants something so badly they might burn for it
[ ] Tension: At least one relationship that feels like it could end in sex or betrayal
[ ] Dialogue: Equal parts seductive and ominous, preferably mid-seminar
[ ] Death or Sacrifice: Physical, metaphorical, emotional. Just make it hurt
[ ] Aesthetic: Beautiful but cracking at the edges (like your protagonist)
[ ] Legacy: Someone buried the truth. Someone else is digging it up.
[ ] Spice: If it’s in there, it means something. If it’s not, it haunts the margins
[ ] The Uncanny: A sense that not everything in this world, or classroom, is explainable
[ ] Guilt: Shame as a character, not just a feeling
[ ] Ending: Ambiguous enough to make the reader stare into space for ten minutes
In Closing...
In the end, writing dark academia is less about the bodies you bury and more about who digs them up later, and what they find when they do. Your story should linger like smoke in a lecture hall, or the echo of a name no one admits to knowing.
If you’ve made it this far, you’re either writing a novel or assembling a very compelling case file. Either way, excellent work. Just remember: in dark academia, someone always ends up writing the final chapter in someone else’s handwriting.
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