Workshop Your WIP: Show Us Your Scary Bits!
Share your freakiest fictional moments in The Community Corner
Hey there, writerfolk.
This month’s Freaky Flash workshop is all about how to make your writing genuinely, pants-wettingly scary — from classic horror movie jump-scares to the subtle, unsettling moments that (literally) creep up on you…
And sometimes the best way to learn is by seeing what others have done, so do your classmates a favor and share: What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever written?
Maybe it’s a poem so frightening you had to bury it under the floorboards
Maybe it’s a scene from your work-in-progress that gives you the shudders every time you look at it
Or maybe it’s not something ‘traditionally’ scary (zombies), but is real life terrifying (doing your taxes)
Tell us all about it, and if its published online - drop the link!
Was it fun/difficult/spooky to write about? How did you achieve your desired level of creepiness? Or do you need some community brainstorming on how to make it even more horrific..?
👻 Share your fictional scares in the comments! 😱
P.S. Oh, also, don’t forget the incredible resource that is our Community Skill Share post, which contains a wealth of knowledge from your fellow workshoppers on real life scary subjects like night terrors, cemeteries and nuclear power plants.
Now go join in with the Freaky Flash workshop and write something spoOooopy…
Doing my best to follow Jo's instructions with my scary snippets so I'm not just dropping links, but (hopefully) sparking a conversation. So, this flash was published in "Crow & Cross Keys", & writing it fused a few obsessions: Eastern European & Scandavanian folklore (and its eerie, but also poetic aesthetic), the practice of ekphrasis (writing from art), and the idea of nature as sentient (also often explored by obsession #1).
It wasn't published with the painting that seeded the story ("Mother Mushroom with her Children" by Polish artist Edward Okun), an encouraging affirmation to me that the lit mag's editor felt the story could stand alone.
"The Dream of Fly Agaric" ended up being my first attempt at a genre sometimes called "body horror" as well as being fabulist in style. Additionally, I set myself the challenge of evoking body horror within a poetic aesthetic - not easy! More comments follow after the link.
https://crowcrosskeys.com/2024/04/03/the-dream-of-fly-agaric-melissa-coffey/
The idea of the markings on the birch trees being "eyes" was the first "eerie image" impression that leapt out of the painting, and so I explored that metaphor, making the birch trees weep, watch, and bear witness to events.
My first challenge was to evoke the forest's silence, yet also to make it active and sentient through almost-invisible activity (ants, roots, seeping sap) and absences (creatures that had just left the "scene", wind that had ceased). The next, to give each element of nature a sense of "character", even backstory, as in Mother Mushroom's case.
Next, to evoke the interconnectedness of the forest, so the human character who enters in the 2nd part is perceived by the reader as an intruder. My research on toadstools (fly agaric) revealed they have a symbiotic relationship with birch trees, so I wanted to try and incorporate that idea.
Initially, I resisted the idea of the artist being completely possessed by the spores as "too freaky", something my inner censor loudly protested against attempting. In fact, my 1st published version of this story on The Ekphrastic Review's fortnightly challenge stops just short of this transformation from man to mushroom. So, with writing horror, I think this can often be a challenge - to bypass one's inner censor. Do others find that? Yet when you do, that's where (I believe) your originality and power hides as a writer of horror. We have to find the courage to open the door to our own inner "bloody chamber", and write what we see there. I found that this was also the case for key scenes and plot points for my WIP novella, a dark reimagined fairytale. Those scenes have been the hardest, but also often the most rewarding to write - yet I'm stilll resisting a few of them!
You asked for scary. I think the deliberate actions of the gangsters are more disturbing than the cliche psychopathic monster slasher, or the malevolent ghost. Remember the dentist chair scene from Marathon Man?