Scary Stories
Wednesday Writing Weeklies: Scary Stories
Halloween is around the corner and after watching horror movies every night, I have lots of ideas to share with you all.
In movies, the love for gore, kill scenes, the crazier the better, pervades a lot of the horror industry. I watch these without flinching thinking, I don’t even care if these characters die because the storyline does nothing to make them someone I care enough to root for. With this said, I do love the classics—I’ll watch Michael Myers chase everyone over and over and I’ll sit through Friday the 13th just to figure out what props or devices they used to create each murder. (I recently watched the new “Child’s Play” remake, and it is my absolute favorite. It has the feeling of a good horror movie but with character development and you like all the characters and don’t want them to die so that is a big improvement.)
I want to talk about writing and the different goals a piece of literature has compared to movies with horror and how to avoid the cliches to create something that’ll make your reader shiver with anticipation or fear.
Writing a horror story or a scary moment in a story requires a few necessary ingredients that you might want to consider. All these ideas are optional—because it is your choice in the end—but these will help inspire or strengthen whatever piece you are working on.
People VS Monsters
The unknown and unexplainable things are scary, but having a person do bad things challenges the idea of how someone could come to do something so bad. That is scarier than a make-believe monster because it brings the horror closer to real life. With that in mind, if you still want a monster, do it! Just stop and think carefully about your choices. Don’t make the monster slimy with lots of teeth just to be creepy, pick its attributes and reasons for scary carefully and see if you can match it to the theme of your existing story and setting.
The same idea can be used in reverse! (let’s look at word choice here!) Calling a bad person or group of people “monsters” actually waters-down or weakens the idea of the bad thing they did. If a “monster” committed that crime, it is not human, therefore, no person would really do such a thing and the act becomes no longer something of reality but something of nightmares and stories. In history when remembering atrocious acts, historians go to lengths to continue to call those wrongdoers people—to keep the reality that something in a human experience and in our communities created a person who committed such a crime.
It doesn’t always have to be a monster. It can be something different or surprising! For example, maybe your character is a cat (and the reader might not know that until you reveal it) and the big creepy shadow that is following them is actually a pill-bug creeping around the house!
Items and Settings
Everything in your story is there for a reason. Don’t give someone a big creepy house if they don’t explore every inch of the place! Every detail, description, and choice you make as the writer must apply or connect to the story in some way. Don’t go all in detail about this beautiful greenhouse in the backyard and all the flowers or poisonous plants in it just to create a scene, if your character does not go in it or find something in there at all (Also, don’t create an object or setting just as a plot device).
This connects with character descriptions as well. We don’t need to know every detail and design, what the character looks like, or what they are wearing unless it says something directly about their personality or the plot. See more about this topic for descriptions and plot devices in my Characters Wednesday Writing Weekly.
For example: Have you ever noticed in horror movies that with every beautiful window, someone gets thrown through it? That window is there for a purpose—to shatter!
The All Powerful
Monsters or creations with no limits on power and no weaknesses…. That’s boring! You want something interactive, something the characters could at least try to figure out. They could think the bad guy is all powerful as they figure out how to defeat them, but if they really are all powerful and appear and destroy everything…that’s not really a story. I’m not saying the hero or main character has to live, you can totally kill them, but there needs to be a challenge, there needs to be attempts at those challenges, a mix of victories and losses to create a story. Declaring everyone is doomed and then just destroying them all without a fight is a plot where nothing happens.
Telling VS Showing
I bring this up a lot because it is the key to good story telling. If you tell the reader to be scared, you are not writing anything scary because you shouldn’t have to tell us to be scared if your writing was already showing us and making us scared to begin with. Give us all the creepy spookies and let us get freaked out on our own. Trust your readers to understand and fear the situation without you telling them too.
Don’t do things to make your readers feel a certain way either. Stick to the story and world you have created and let them do it for you.
In any genre, if you decide to kill a character because you want to make your readers cry—I’m going to think wow, you can’t even make us cry with your writing any other way, can you? You have some work to do. Pointless or plot-device deaths can wreck your entire story and can even make your reader stop reading.
Avoid cliches! These have all been said so many times, they stick out in your writing and ruin the flow because they are jarring to hear again and again:
Drips down my/their spine
Heart drops like a stone
Heart leap into throat
Blood chills/ bloodcurdling
Burns like a fire
Screams being ripped or torn from your throat.
Reason VS Random:
Someone or something deciding to do something bad is scarier than someone who is bad for no reason. Simply being evil is not interesting but we don’t need a big tragic backstory either. And stop yourself from the redemption arcs! If this is a mass murderer, actually evil person, don’t give them redemption just because you like your own character.
Killing for no reason and rage killing is boring too. Think about it. Even Jason had a reason—albeit strung out—to kill. Maybe “It’s the millennium, motives are incidental” might be your excuse as said in the movie “Scream,” but even that calls for a motive to try to achieve such a lofty idea. (i.e. The character thinking, they are better than something or certain motives or are trying to make up for something which in turn, incidentally, creates a motive.) In movies it’s all about the visuals of those kill scenes. Endless gore can be repetitive and boring for your readers if it’s in a book so pick your moments wisely and build up to them. Suspense and surprise are your best friends in the genre—if the reader is hooked.
Recombobulating Jump Scares
Let’s recombobulate the discombobulating event that are jump scares in literature.
When you think of horror, jump scares are usually on the top of the list. But where do you see them? In movies! Writing is a different beast. Different mediums such as movies VS writing have different ways to go about things. If you write in a sudden “jump scare” in your story, it will not scare your reader, it will only confuse them if not done properly.
Jump scares can be written in a story, but unlike the high-speed and sudden movie counterpart, you need to slow things down in this moment. If you have someone jump in super quick and out of the blue, your reader will not know what is going on and they might not even know what just happened. Moments like this need to be slowed down to make sure the reader can fully picture and be startled by the moment. Jump scares don’t mean write it as fast as you can to surprise someone. It doesn’t work that way.
First, your scene needs to be established. The setting and the characters need to be crystal clear to avoid confusion. You need suspense: maybe something doesn’t feel right, or the characters are somewhere they are not supposed to be. When the jump scare happens, you the writer, will zoom into that moment and show us what is happening. There is a balance here—when you get startled or something strange happens in real life, do you have that feeling of everything slowing down and you can’t tear your eyes away? That’s the feeling you want to create in the jump scare. Zoom in to a detail about the monster (not all the details because too many will be distracting) and the idea that it is moving towards your character. Doing this slowly and focusing only on the monster for the moment is like forcing your reader to see it and then be unable to look away from the scary thing.
Doing these things not only let your reader see and understand what is going on, but it will startle them for sure. Zooming in and slowing down gives more emphasis and shiver inducing feelings. I personally hate when I can’t look away or move quickly past a disturbing thing in a book. Why? Because the writer is doing a great job and the moment freaks me out!
Suspension of Disbelief
This is the single most important thing in not only horror, but in many types of writing.
In a story, you create a world, characters, and rules that operate and exist within that world. All needs to be maintained and growing within that idea but the second you break it with a character’s action or an idea that feels out of place, your reader will notice and will not believe or follow along with what you are telling them anymore.
To suspend a reader’s disbelief, you are stringing them along with suspense and questions they want answered later in the story. This keeps the reader turning the pages and keeps them invested in your story. The suspension of disbelief in horror is connected to the rise of suspense and the reader being curious about what is happening. Any abrupt changes in mood, characterization, strange plot devices, or accidental breaking of the rules in the story will cause your reader to stop believing in you and will close the book.
This is something that is easier to point out when looking at a text. In my edits, I point out breaks or cracks in the suspense but, that’s really the way to work with them. When talking about suspense itself, it is similar but not the same thing as the suspension of disbelief. They are the same because your choices in your plot or characters can break them and make the reader stop caring. For now, this is food for thought as I will spend some time thinking up examples and a way to dive in depth to this idea. (I’m just a little rusty on the explaining side of it!)
Conclusion
All in all, most of this is my personal opinion on these topics, but these are definitely some things to think about as you write your next story or edit an old one. While horror movies might be an inspiration, remember it is a different medium from writing with a different goal. I would recommend reading some pieces of literature to see how those suspenseful or scary moments are created in different books. Hands down, the best readings in my opinion are by Stephen King. I didn’t appreciate his writing when I was younger because I was deep in the mire that is wordy and description heavy fantasy. (I also received a not so nice letter from his agent or secretary when I was asking to interview him for school once, but that’s another story!) As I began studying creative writing, I saw his strength for clear and concise writing. I was reading some of his short stories (not horror, my heart can’t take it!) and everything is laid out for the reader to see as clear as day. That’s a massive goal to have while writing any genre. But in ones such as horror, fantasy, magical realism, that kind of writing is a must because without it, you might lose your reader in all the heavy details and unnecessary things.