Writing Spooky Stories
People love spooky stories, from cozy-creepy to hard-core horror. As a reader, it’s exciting to see how people react when put in danger, to indulge our curiosity without real world consequences, to experience fear from a safe place.
As with humor, horror works by subverting the familiar. In comedy that might come from an insertion of something absurd or ironic. In horror it will be something intensely threatening. Since we’re wired to have agency and control over our lives, when we’re reminded that we don’t, it creates fear.
Tim Waggoner, author of Writing in the Dark says:
“It’s the distortion, the violation of what we think of as the rules of reality—of society, of nature, of humanity, of physics, of space and time—that engenders horror.”
The intensity and severity of that distortion determine where the story falls on the cozy to hard-core horror spectrum. So, as storytellers, how do we create this reality-distorting fear? How do we go about writing spooky stories?
1-Establish the Normal
The first thing you want to establish for the reader is the status quo. What does normal life look like in this world? Before you introduce a threat, the reader needs to have a good idea of what’s being threatened.
2-Explore the Shadows (Find Your Antagonist)
Once you’ve established normal life in your story world, start looking around for an antagonistic force. You can dig around in the literal shadows, looking for something that doesn’t belong (a person or entity), or you can dig around in the shadows of memory and consciousness. Think about how one’s own thoughts can be a threat.
3-Avoid or Repurpose Clichés
It’s very easy to fall into cliché when writing spooky stories. If you’re going to use common elements—vampires and ghosts and haunted houses—give them a fresh take. Consider making your ghost a hero instead of a villain. A haunted retirement home could be as terrifying as an old mansion. Take old tropes and use them as jumping-off points for something imaginative.
4-Utilize Setting
In addition to the larger set features like haunted buildings, eerie forests, and crime scenes, you can use setting to influence the tone of the story in subtle but powerful ways. A great way to do this is to take an everyday thing that makes us comfortable, a thing we like, like clean upholstery, and put a stain on it. Curdle the milk, crack the glass, blister the heel. Ruining things in even small ways will create unease in your reader.
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5-Let the Reader Fill in Some Blanks
The human mind loves to have the opportunity to fill in the blanks. Think about how this works in movies—it can be powerful to watch a scene from a distance or have the camera cut away just as the blade drops. Mix what’s happening on the page with moments where a reader can imagine what might happen. Let them question what is real and unreal.
6-Filter the Fear Through a Perspective
This might be my most valuable piece of advice, so I’ll spend a little more time on it. When writing spooky stories, it’s important to avoid telling the story through a default perspective. Yes, you might be able to write a spooky story from an objective point of view, but most of the time you’re at a disadvantage if you don’t root the story in a specific consciousness.
What I mean is, a demon alone in a house with no one there to perceive it is not scary. It’s only scary when it becomes a threat to a specific person. When you have a distinct, identifiable point of view through which to tell the story, you can challenge that character’s safety nets. You put their normal world, and what they value, under threat.
Take aim at their families, relationships, bodies, religious institutions, and of course their very lives. You can put these normal things at the center of the plot and challenge them. Or you can threaten their safety nets in smaller ways—the phones don’t work, the car is out of gas, etc.
7-Read Spooky Stories
If you want to write spooky, you need to read spooky. Find a story you like and study the techniques the author employs. Reverse engineer it to see how it works. Figure out how the writer is setting the mood through setting, imagery, voice, or writing style. Look at how Ray Bradbury sets tone through imagery and word choice in the first paragraph of Something Wicked This Way Comes:
The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm. He came along the street of Green Town, Illinois, in the late cloudy October day, sneaking glances over his shoulder. Somewhere not so far back, vast lightnings stomped the earth. Somewhere, a storm like a great beast with terrible teeth could not be denied.
8-Think About What Scares You
When writing spooky stories, some of the richest sources of material are the things that scare you. What type of spooky writing excites you? Which writers and stories influence you? What would you be enthused to write? If you get stuck mid-story, let your own curiosity lead you. Ask “what if” questions. What element could you introduce to the scene to make things worse? How could you add a new threat?
Writing a good spooky story will require you to bring to the table many other storytelling skills and techniques, but this list can help you get started. So get to writing, get to practicing, and revise, revise, revise.