 Horror/Scary: August 27, 2014 Issue [#6515] |
  Horror/Scary
This week: On a Dark and Stormy Night Edited by: Kate - Writing & Reading  
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All that I see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Edgar Alan Poe
Welcome to this week's edition of the Writing.Com Horror and Scary Newsletter, where we explore ways to inciting horror with our words in verse and prose.
Never state an horror when it can be suggested.
H.P. Lovecraft
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Greetings,
Let's begin with a question -
Why do Horror Stories and Verse Scare Us 
The word 'scare' conjures images of fright, fear, terror and thoughts like 'I'm gonna die!' All are valid aims for the horror writer, but what if the writer doesn't want to conjure up fear? What if the writer was aiming for something deeper, something more disturbing, something like ... well ... horror. 
 To be horrified is to feel the foundations of your humanity move in a way that disturbs your certainty in, not who you are, but what you are. Is humanity really so vile? And this, it might be argued, is the true aim of writing horror.
 Horror disturbs the emotions. The emotions you target are the darker ones, the ones that leave your reader reviewing their survival instincts. Great writers such as Poe, Lovecraft and King each targeted these emotions.
 Great horror not only targets your darker emotions, it wakes them from the recesses of your mind - bringing them to the forefront, disturbing them - this disturbance and awakening creating the seeds of horror. We may flinch at the gush of oozing intestines but when we can envision the man in the street wielding the knife, our sense of safety, of community has been compromised.
What if you just 'knew' there was someone/thing 'out there' waiting for you - nothing nothing specific, just a vague sense that you'd 'know' this was the perpetrator the instant before he showed his blade, claw, hammer, teeth... The real cunning of the horror writer is to take the reader by the hand and lead him outside (or inside, as the case may be). Create a need to peek through the curtains or open the door where the perpetrator is watching, then when you turn back, finding me with the knife in my hand.
Horror is scary not because we present the horrible, but because we prepare the reader for the revelation. The writer tills the ground, fertilizes and plants the right seeds. Weeds are removed before they appear and the crop is nurtured until ready to fruit. But then, at the moment of harvest, the writer steps aside and allows our imagination to wield the scythe and collect the rewards.
The scare, the disturbance, is inside the reader. To get that disturbance, the writer must gain access to the reader's inner fears. Good stories and poems invoke images, the product of the reader's imagination that takes the reader from the safety of his/her armchair to a different world. It might look the same, it might even be the very place they are reading from, but it is no longer the mundane ordinary world. It's the creation of the reader's imagination responding to the writer's otherworld.
The writer of horror plants the seeds with scenes and images that allow the reader to enter the otherworld at the right moment to bloom to full horror. With subtlety and craft, incite the reader to enter on 'a dark and stormy night' - yes, the occasional cliche works to lull the mind onto apparently familiar ground. Also, an urban myth or folk tale can serve to open the reader's mind to one possibility, but your take on that myth or tale will quickly draw the reader into an otherworld he or she didn't see coming, but which incites an image, a sense and taste of believable horror in his/her own mind. Do take care, however, with the cliches or overly familiar images, that something un-expected happen shortly thereafter to keep the reader coming, deeper into the otherworld, so that he/she can't find the way out without reading to the end, if then.
Write On! Weave your Otherworlds to incite a 'conversation' horrific between reader and writer 
Kate
Kate~Shadow Fox (300)
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I invite you to enter the 'otherworlds' designed to incite your imagination and induce a sense of horror or perhaps just a good scare ~ do let them know with a comment or review ~ and the take a step out into the 'dark and stormy night' and share your story'.
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Thank you for this brief respite in your virtual home this dark and stormy night ~ or elusively bright, sunny day  .
I bid you adieu ~ as far as you know ~ until we next meet,
keep locked your door (or open if you think I didn't leave).
Write On 
Kate - Writing & Reading
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