Pen and Paper - A Writers Clan

Does anyone have any tips for writing spooky/horror stories? I'm not great at it.

I'm not big on spooky stuff but whenever I want to make something tense/frightening to the reader I capitalise the fear of the unknown. rather than say "the monster walked behind them" say things like "he heard a creak on the floorboard behind him but when he spun his head to see what it was, the room was empty" the reader knows something was there, but not what. This can also lead to speculation in your PoV characters head to try and misdirect the reader. so you can follow it up with "the house was old, old houses make strange noises, he told himself firmly. He wasn't sure if he really believed it though"

I'm just not good at it. lol. I'm really bad at it.

Make the characters likeable, give the reader a reason to be scared for the main character(s). Also the monster or the creature isn't that important, focus on the scene and the atmosphere around the monster or murderer, this makes it scarier and also gives more punch when the creature and/or person shows up in the story! I hope this helps!

I've never been good at accomplishing my goals with NaNoWriMo, but that doesn't mean I've decided to give it up this year! I'm making smaller goals for myself to accommodate for recent lack of energy and fatigue, but I do want to get at least 25 thousand words done in all, even if its with separate projects. I'm trying to remind myself of the fact that I should be writing for me, not for the praise of anyone else. It's helped get a lot more work done, as I'm not being as hard on myself. Perhaps we will even see a spooky short show up in the forums about my spooky little lost souls of everything goes to plan!

I noticed that my prepping for NaNoWriMo isn't so much the plotting and planning for what I want to write, but making sure to finish some older wips so I won't feel guilty about not working on them during November. As for writing spooky/horror stories, I like the genre, but I'm still practising the suspense needed for such stories. I don't think I'm doing a really good job with it. But sometimes they don't need it. The last ghost story I wrote was more aimed at psychological/drama elements and didn't need any suspense or scare elements. TheTrueMothman: writing for yourself is definitely a good thing to keep in mind. And if smaller goals help you there's nothing wrong with doing that. That's what I like about Camp NaNoWrimo, you can set your own goals there. I did 20k this year.

Dropping by here to say that I've actually started work on writing the backstory out for my shiny and albino phantumps! The hope is to get this short finished in time to then complete a second horror-based one in time for Halloween, but we'll see how things go. I think it would be fun to finally have some work posted here, and some actual writing done for the character concepts I've had for this site so far! not sure what the policy is for sharing wips, but if anyone is interested I'd be happy to post a small snippet :)

As long as it is PG, you can share snippets here. If you want to post something that exceeds the PG rating, it's better to post it in the 15+ or 18+ forum and then share a link here.

@calle thank you so much for your response!! -- apologies for yet another reply, but I managed to piece together the first part of the story I was talking about and post it into Pokemon FF 15+ ! It changed from being two separate one-shots to one project with multiple parts for my own ease as I use this as a writing wind-down from working on my actual projects (just posted a brand new fic on ao3 and have been working on it very hard, don't want to pressure myself too much with this one since it's for fun haha) This story will touch on some heavier topics, hence the reason for the 15+ placement.The content warnings are as follows. Here is the link to the post in the Pokemon FF 15+ forum

Now NaNoWriMo has officially started everywhere in the world, I want to wish everyone who participates good luck with your writing. Feel free to share your word counts and any snippets you wish to share. And the writers who aren't doing NaNoWriMo, I hope you will find some inspiration for the stories you are working on! Happy writing everyone ^_^