darkwriting

It’s late at night and your home alone after watching a scary movie. Suddenly the darkened lilac-colored halls seem a little more sinister than you remember. You carefully venture around the house, telling yourself that its perfectly safe, you know there’s no maggoty corpse with a hunger for human flesh. A defening bang sends you flying out of your skin with fright, you quickly look to grab a weapon of some sort, an umbrella will have to do. The intruder is inches away. You can feel your heart just wanting to burst through your chest. You flip on the lightswitch with ninja-like speed and the intruder is…just your cat climbing onto the kitchen counter.

That silly sort of fear can also be produced through books, but it’s a little more tricky sometimes to create the horrifying visual with description alone. One important part of giving your readers the creeps is to set the atmosphere. A true scary story should make the reader feel like someone is watching them in an eerie way. Describing the characters reactions as true to real life reactions as possible will help create that fear. Think about the last thing that scared you, and try to recall the physical sensations, as well as the thoughts that raced through your head. Instilling fear in your readers is a great writing tool that can be used in many genres other than horror. Even romance stories. The readers grow close to well-written characters, and will be concerned for their well-being, making it easy to create stress situations. What makes a piece of writing “dark” is the theme of the story. You could write about a princess weaving daisy chains and it could be the scariest story in the world. The princess could be planning on using the daisy chains to strangle someone to death.

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