An Unconventional Tool for Writing Societal Critique, Grief, Death, Change, Loss, Regret, and Guilt.
Lesson 4 of Writing Horror That Does More Than Just Scare
Lesson 4 of 8 - The Craft of Fear: Writing Horror That Does More Than Just Scare
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Hi, and welcome back to The Craft of Fear. I’m your horror host, KKU! And when I was drafting this lesson, I almost accidentally named it “Are All Ghosts Gay?” before remembering that, for once, I’m not necessarily teaching a queer horror workshop but a horror workshop in general — but of course any time I teach anything, there’s plenty of space for discussing queerness. So let me know in the comments: Do you think all ghosts are gay?
All jokes aside, we’re talking about the narrative power of ghosts and hauntings today! You’ve probably begun to notice that these lessons all sort of build on each other and reference each other. You’re definitely encouraged to go back to previous lessons and apply things you’ve learned in subsequent ones to how you approach or re-approach the writing exercises. For example, perhaps after immersing yourself in the realm of ghosts today, you’ll want to go back and place a ghost inside your haunted house!
Ghosts are useful devices in horror for exploring grief, death, change, loss, regret, guilt. Ghost stories are often some of the first scary stories we encounter, told around campfires or during sleepovers or among families. Everyone has a ghost story, don’t they?
The lasting appeal of ghost stories
Like ghosts themselves, ghost stories will never die. Ghosts are found throughout literature, and they can take on many shapes and representations. Sometimes, ghosts are loud and intrusive. Sometimes, they’re quieter, more subtle presences, such as in the iconic ghost tale Turn of the Scream by Henry James, or the not-quite-there but palpably felt presence of Rebecca in Daphne du Mourier’s Rebecca. Ghosts can be the narrators of their own stories, such as passages from Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing.
In her piece “The Ghost Story Persists in American Literature. Why?”, literary critic Parul Seghal writes: “The ghost story shape-shifts because ghosts themselves are so protean — they emanate from specific cultural fears and fantasies.”
“However, ghost stories are never just reflections,” she continues. “They are social critiques camouflaged with cobwebs; the past clamoring for redress.”
Through ghosts, you can place your story and its characters in direct communication — and possibly direct conflict — with the past. Ghosts can tell us about land, about who and what haunts it. Ghosts can reveal or offer societal critiques based on how they died, why they can’t move on. The relationship between the living and the dead can also be informed by culture, tradition, and different belief systems. Ghosts can be a way to explore or interrogate spirituality.
I think ghosts are compelling because they eradicate one of the ultimate “borders” in life — that between the living and the dead. If there are no firm boundaries between those two spaces, what other possibilities can we imagine? What other boundaries and borders can we erase? (Here, you can probably gather why I believe there’s so much queer potential to ghosts!)
Ghost stories are common, but that doesn’t mean they have to feel conventional, and you’ll see in the readings below that there are many ways to execute ghost or ghostly narratives. Ghosts present so much space to project onto and explore. Ask yourself what kind of ghost story you want to tell. What do ghosts symbolize in your own life? Have you had ghost encounters or something like it before? As a way to ease yourself into writing today, jot down some thoughts on those experiences.
The readings are a bit lengthier this lesson, so let’s dive in now and then get to writing.
Readings
Love Like Ghosts by Autumn Fourkiller
This is an essay about ghosts, a dead father, and addiction.
Discussion: How have ghost stories affected you?
Why The Turn of the Screw Haunts Us 125 Years Later by Kate Griffin
I wish we could read and study The Turn of the Screw together, but we haven’t the time for that, so instead enjoy this critical essay about The Turn of the Screw, which also provides enough context for the classic ghost tale in case you have never read.
Discussion: Think about how this essay ties back to our discussions on ambivalence.
Birds Surrendered and Rehomed by Kristen Arnett
This is a story in which a woman’s parrot starts mimicking her sex sounds after the death of her wife.
Discussion: This is a subversion of the ghost story, as it doesn’t include a ghost but rather a possessed parrot, mimicking not the dead woman but rather the one still living, but how does this story still tap into the work of ghost narratives?
Writing Exercise #1: One-sentence ghost stories
Yep, it’s all there in the subheading. You’re going to write one-sentence ghost stories. Set a timer for three to five minutes and write as many one-sentence ghost stories as you can. The goal here is not to write long, over-packed sentences but rather to play with compression, restraint, and simplicity.
By the way, this exercise works great for nonfiction, too! I hope you’ve been enjoying some of the horror nonfiction examples in these lessons. They’re meant to show you that horror can encompass many genres at once and is really quite the expansive mode of writing. If you’ve experienced a ghost or a haunting in your life, write the one-sentence version of that experience. Or if you haven’t but have been told another person’s ghost story, write the one-sentence version of that. Feel free to write a mix of nonfiction and fiction for this exercise. Remember: Blurring lines between reality and fiction can often yield great horror.
Need some inspiration? Here are some one-sentence ghost stories I’ve written when doing this prompt during my own workshop:
I always assumed I was the only one who saw her, the little girl with the tangled hair who stood in the middle of the kitchen with a tray of fruit, until I noticed my sister walking a curved path around her, too.
At night, George slept in silence, but every morning, the second the sun creamed her room pale pink, the tapping started.
Maybe you won’t believe me because you saw me piss-drunk the night it happened, but I swear I swerved into the guardrail because I saw my dead mother standing in the middle of the road.
Slumber parties at Jade’s always started with a walk through the cemetery next to her house, where we felt their marble eyes on us and pretended not to care.
To properly commune with the dead, you have to be willing to die.
Writing Exercise #2: Give flesh to your ghost stories, so to speak
Now you’re going to set a time for five to seven minutes and select one of your sentences from the previous exercise to flesh out — whether that’s into a full micro or flash piece or into the opening of a longer story.
I recommend challenging yourself by selecting a sentence at random from the previous exercise rather than the one that’s perhaps your “favorite.” You can always come back and give attention to your favorite. But something I’ve started pushing in a lot of my workshops is the notion of “disruption,” which no I do not mean in a tech bro way, don’t worry, I’m not creating an app to disrupt the writing space. That sounds like a horror story in and of itself. No, what I mean by disruption is actually shifting your writing process or instincts in a significant way. This isn’t something you need to do ALL the time; I’m not suggesting you reinvent your own writing process every time you sit down to write. Rather, when approaching generative prompts or in moments when you want to challenge yourself or work through a creative block, I think it can be helpful to do things differently than how you would normally do them. Write a story out of order if that isn’t something you usually do. The haunted house prompt last lesson was designed to forcibly disrupt your writing process by having you create two things disparately and then stitch them together. In that spirit, close your eyes and pick one of your sentences from above to flesh out into a fuller snapshot or scene. Or roll literal dice if you’ve got em and pick a sentence that way.
Share one of your one-sentence ghost stories below.
Our next lesson on Monday, October 21 is all about monsters - the best ones don’t just look and sound scary; they mean something. If you want in on that…
“Hauntings in films are all jump scares—bloody scratches and hollow raps—but in my grandmother’s house the spirits were tired, flimsy things, leaving fingerprints on the walls and stroking my hair at night until I was finally able to sleep.”
Thank you so much! The prompts have all been so fun and generative.
I thought I'd need to make some stuff up for the one sentence ghost stories, but apparently I have more than enough to draw from just using reality- never realized my life was so full of ghosts! The one I went with is this:
I'd never met Charlene's dad, but after he died I saw his body hanging from everywhere: the streetlights, the trees, and the handles on the bus, jostling against one another every time it jerkled to a stop.