 Horror/Scary: July 20, 2016 Issue [#7756] |
  Horror/Scary
This week: Don't Look Back ! 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
Never state an horror when it can be suggested.
H.P. Lovecraft
Welcome to this week's edition of the WDC Horror and Scary Newsletter, where we explore the means of inciting horror with our words in verse and prose. |
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Greetings, fellow purveyors of terror and horror and malicious mayhem. 
Don't look back! ! !
Did you just look back, because I said, 'don't look back'? Why?
Why do they always look back? Don't they know by now that looking back leads to capture, torture, death, or worse?
They look back because that's the way it's been done, and if it works, don't fix it, right?
But I've also heard, if it works, take it apart and see how you can make it better, stronger, or just plain different  
Let's explore how our characters can defy one convention and, maybe, next time? not look back.
In horror writing, as in other genres, there are conventions we commonly know and follow, because we think that's what our readers expect. There's the monster hidden in the closet, the locked door keeping out/or in a horrific terror, the knowledge there's no way out, the fear of what's known, the fear of what's unknown, running in abject terror from something known, or unknown. You know, they may expect it, you may expect it, and there's nothing wrong with it. But don't you think, maybe, both your readers and you would be intrigued by a tale that doesn't go as expected, that's different than the norm?
As you read work by Stephen King, Peter Straub, Dean Koontz, Jack Ketchum, Cormack McCarthy, and several other 'edgy' horror writers, you'll see they take common, expected models in their tales of horror and shift them, sometimes just a bit, to create something that's perhaps unfamiliar, unexpected, yet just as, if not more horrific for being unexpected. It's kind of like taking a poetic form and shifting it a bit to create something if not unique, un-common.
How do we do it? Create a tale that's different enough to be new and fresh (of stale, you know, decomposing) in a different way.
 Consider the opposite  of what's expected. If your character is being chased, maybe instead of looking back, he will turn and fight or toss a banana peel to slow the chaser or, perhaps thinking flight the better part of valor, put his head down and run for it, looking only ahead for obstacles in his path.
 Change the setting. Instead of a dark and stormy night, how about the sun shown bright on a clear, cloudless, soundless summer day. A simple word in the second image creates an ominous image, expectant of something we have yet to see.
 Change the appearance of the 'bad guy'. In place of the creeping skin peeling zombie, perhaps it's the buff lifeguard at the pool that gives chase not with an axe but maybe the channel lock he just used to tighten the pipe after stuffing his latest casualty into the filtration system in the double-kidney pool.
See where I'm going ~ just slight difference, subtle or overt, creates a twist on the tale, a horror that's unfamiliar to reader and character. A challenge to be met and either won or lost, depending on the character's next action which, we hope, will be un-common enough to stump the guy with the channel lock 
Until we next meet,
Write On
Kate
Kate - Writing & Reading
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Check out the following tales and see how the characters react, to place, to situation, and let the writers know, if you will, how they scared you, perchance with a review
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#1891284 by Not Available. |
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#2090376 by Not Available. |
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#1696610 by Not Available. |
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#2086578 by Not Available. |
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#2047935 by Not Available. |
| | | Hunted (13+)
A hunter chases her prey through the night (this is one of my older stories).
#2032842 by Elliot Haynes  |
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Thank you for this brief respite in the relative safety of your virtual home. Now I leave and until we next meet, keep the door latched shut, windows locked, unless it's already in and then, run for it, head down, arms pumping, and don't look back
Write On 
Kate
Kate - Writing & Reading
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