Frighten friends and freak out family with your own spooky story
If you love a scary tale, especially at this time of year, why not try penning your own? How hard can it be, after all*? To show you just how easy it is, we asked author and creative writing tutor Susan Elliot Wright to help us put together this Spooky Story Kit. Simply choose one beginning, one ending and five scary elements from below, string them together with a few verbs and conjunctions and Bob’s your Uncle (and The Bride of Frankenstein’s your Aunt). Go!
Beginnings (choose one)
She had thought the house was empty as she pushed open the creaking door…
Four hundred years after her death, Esmerelda sat up in her coffin…
A mile or two into the forest road, Roger Peebles’ car choked to a halt. He had run out of petrol…
Endings (choose one)
And that would be the last the town saw of those vampires, for now at least.
He put the knife back where he had found it. No one would ever know he had been there at all.
But the rats continued to run.
Scary Elements to add to your story’s sandwich filling
An electric light that doesn’t work. Characters may pull on it frantically and pointlessly.
A crow. Particularly one with beady eyes or a malformed foot or two.
A rocking chair that rocks of its own accord. Just a little bit too quickly and silently to have been set off by a human.
A clown. Not a funny one though. A malign-looking, silent one, preferably seen from a distance.
Long corridors (they really should be <very> long, and also shadowy to allow plenty of opportunity for evil to skulk in their corners).
The distant sound of a weeping woman that can’t be located. The listener should ideally dash from room to room, with the noise of weeping becoming louder and quieter again at random.
A face at the window of a house. The protagonist should not be able to locate the room the face appeared in once inside the property.
Some things that ‘go’ when no one has set them off: a television, a gramophone, a slightly manic-looking wind-up toy monkey bashing cymbals together.
Something seen from the corner of one’s eye, only fleetingly. It should move swiftly and be gone when the protagonist whirls round (one never simply turns in spooky stories).
A deserted institution. An asylum is ideal but hospitals, churches and prisons are all good. Any building that would once have been bustling and may hide dark secrets.
Any child’s toy in the wrong context. A rag doll that appears in someone’s home and has never been seen before. A doll’s house in an abandoned home. Any mechanical toy that moves of its own accord.
*It’s quite a bit harder than we have made this sound, actually.
Susan Elliot Wright loves a spooky story. Her latest novel, The Flight of Cornelia Blackwood (Simon and Schuster) features some rather spooky crows, of which she is a big fan. For more of her writing tips and advice on getting published visit susanelliotwright.co.uk. For some more spooky inspiration, have a read of our feature Dare To Be Scared for ideas on paranormal outings you can do in a day (p80).
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If you enjoy a good mystery, don’t miss our November issue, in which we will be announcing the winner of our competition to write the ending for a murder mystery penned by Sophie Hannah. We'll be publishing Sophie’s own ending to the story (and the rest of it too, so you can enjoy it all in one go) here on the blog later in the month.
