Horror/Scary
This week: WAKE UP Edited by: Satuawany More Newsletters By This Editor
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Part writing exercise, part inspiration, creepypastas keep me coming back for more.
I'm your guest editor this week, ready to introduce you to another kind of horror. (And hopefully I'm talking about the subject of my newsletter, and not my "Letter from the Editor." ) |
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Writing flash fiction is a great challenge, but flash horror can be one of the biggest challenges of all. The difficulty lies in creating the appropriate atmosphere in such a short amount of time. And atmosphere is so vital in this genre. (If you haven't, I encourage you to read Jeff 's newsletter from a couple of months ago, "Atmosphere" .)
Halloween is the season where I get in the mood for some short punches of scare. I get addicted and want more of then the more I read. Always telling myself that if the next one really knocks me out, I can stop reading for a while. But when I hit a knockout one, I go on because I need another shot of awesome. The ones that stick in my mind, that I keep going back to, are the ones that make me scare myself.
For examples, I'm going to draw on "creepypastas." These are short little ramrods of atmosphere that don't qualify as actual stories half the time. It's that half I want to talk about because they imply the story so well that you don't need the story written out for you. In this day and age of bestsellers that spoon-feed readers, it's nice to be free to use my own imagination now and then.
The term "creepypasta" comes from "copypasta," which refers to vignettes that have been copy-pasted and passed around the internet so many times that no one really knows their origins. They're like campfire ghost stories in that regard. When the copypasta is "creepy," it's a creepypasta.
Here's the first one I ever came across:
Did you ever see one of those videos where you were asked to look for, or follow, a specific thing throughout the video? Then, at the end, they reveal that as you were watching, something large and intrusive moved around in plain sight and you never noticed it. It's frightening how often that happens, like how I just moved from the doorway into your room as you read this.
"Satuawany," you cry, "that is not a story!"
But now you know what I'm talking about. Maybe you're like me when I first started going through these vignettes. I thought, Aw, I can do something like that. Easy.
It's not easy. Writing one that is short and convincing is difficult for one who is so used to writing stories, exploring characters. It's hard for anyone, really, as illustrated by the large amounts of bad creepypastas out there. And the people who make fun of the bad creepypastas, like whoever wrote this:
So ur with ur honey and yur making out wen the phone rigns. U anser it n the vioce is "wut r u doing wit my daughter?" U tell ur girl n she say "my dad is ded". THEN WHO WAS PHONE?
There are not even any "real" characters in my favorite creepypastas---just the speaker and the reader. Instead of trying to draw the reader into the characters and the story, you're telling readers they are the story. And that's a lot harder to do convincingly.
Take a look at this one:
Every family in every town in every country on every continent has one. It's a cabinet, not particularly odd, not out of place. The paint was peeling a bit on the corner and the knob was loose. The inside smelled like dust and the paint wasn't the same as the kitchen walls.
You hid in there once during a game of hide 'n' seek. No one told you it doesn't open back into your reality.
Don't worry; you can't tell the difference. But everyone misses you.
There's not even anything threatening in that one and it gives me the heebie jeebies. I didn't even have a cabinet like that...did I? Did I?
There are longer ones, more like flash fiction, more like the ghost stories we told on Halloween nights back when we were kids. You can certainly assign all the regular rules of storytelling to those.
When you can only imply the story, and you're addressing it to the reader, it has to be more universal. If you can even get the beginning of one down, you start to see the layouts of various potential stories. I've never finished one, but every time I try, I find myself sitting on a treasure trove of potential stories---stories I know I can finish, because they're stories. That takes me back into my element, where I can weave spells of characterization and plot progression.
It has been reported that some victims of trauma, during the event, would retreat into a fantasy world from which they could not WAKE UP. In this catatonic state, the victim lived in a world just like their normal one, except they weren't being victimized. The only way that they realized they needed to WAKE UP was a note they found in their fantasy world. It would tell about their condition and tell them to WAKE UP. Even then, it would often take months until they were ready to discard their fantasy world and PLEASE WAKE UP.
{e:shivers} That one still gives me chills.
No, these creepy little things aren't literature. Almost none are well written, and you just read one of the very few places where all-caps doesn't make me clench my jaw and make a low grumbling noise.
It's about the hook, drawing a little blood as quickly as possible. Another kind of atmosphere. The challenge inspires me, so I pass it on in the hopes it does the same for you.
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Here are a couple of Writing.com items that fit the kind of creepypasta I like most:
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There's a little bit more to these, but still great on the "creepy" factor:
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| | Invalid Item This item number is not valid. #998129 by Not Available. |
She doesn't have it labeled as "horror/scary," but it's got that "creepy" factor, and it's one of my favorite flash ficiton stories on the site:
| | Invalid Item This item number is not valid. #1692283 by Not Available. |
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