Blake+Berry

Here is my UFG Genre: Horror-Short Story

Why Interested: I very rarely write any type of longer piece without any humorous elements to it, so I'd like to have an experience writing without much emphasis on comedy. In an attempt to get out of my comfort zone I would like to take a stab at writing something suspenseful and engaging to the reader (I felt as though writing a dramatic story would be too dry and boring to get through). I plan on keeping this story relatively short.

What I know about the genre: I'd be willing to guess that most of us have seen scary films in the past, therefore the point of writing one of these is to give your readers goosebumps. I grew up reading R.L. Stine's work, and I also deeply admire some of Poe's short stories. These two authors will most likely be very influential on how this piece ends up turning out.

//Dear Blake//: //I'm disappointed there is no User's Guide or Annotated Bibliography. One obvious need is to determine the length and therefore the structure of your brief version of the horror story. You should read 5-10 examples of the kind you wish to learn. Without that, your genre attempts are going to be futile//.

Bill

Annotated Bibliography

-Gallo, Donald R. "What Are You Afraid Of?". 2007. Candlewick Press. Cambridge, Mass. This is a collection of nine short stories each based off of a particular phobia. I have already taken the time to read "Calle de Muerte" by Ron Koertge and "No Clown Zone" by Gail Giles. One thing that stands out to me thus far is the variety of directions that you can take your short story with in regards to setting and plot structure. Each of these stories ranges from 10-25 pages in length, and I will probably shoot for around 2,000 words for my story.

"How to Write Your Own Scary Story." //readwritethink.org//. N.p., 2004. Web. 11 Feb 2011. . This webpage basically gives a template to follow when writing a scary short story while also allowing room for the writer to fill in other blanks with their own personally-composed details. This document was definitely written with an educational context in mind and I would surely use this if I was teaching spooky writing to an upper-level writing class.

-Stine, R.L. //Nightmare Hour//. 2000. Parachute. New York. I've read some articles that have declared R.L. Stine as "the Stephen King of children's literature", which works well for this project because I am writing a shorter work that can take several hints on the genre from Stine's work. In this short anthology book. For example, I noticed that Stine chose to make heavy use of dialogue in order to build up suspense and "keep the reader from blinking."

Robinson, T. "Horror 101: Nine steps to writing a scary story." //www.suite101.com//. N.p., 2/4/2007. Web. 11 Feb 2011. . This brief article begins with the author's story about why horror stories can be more enjoyable than other genres. The author then proceeds to outline several common characteristics seen in many spooky stories. This definitely gives me a few more common devices to work with when I compose my piece.

User's Guide to Short Horror Stories

The main objective when writing any type of scary story is to keep the reader engaged. The horror genre is meant to prevent readers from taking their eyes off the page. It is not common to hear much buzz surrounding boring horror stories. In order to prevent a story from being dull, one needs a certain premise, or a "what if?" that would make for an interesting set of events to follow it.

There are a few common traits that are deployed in almost all scary stories. Typically, there are one or more main characters that the story chooses to follow around for the majority of the piece. Along with these main character(s) comes a type of villain or evil entity that somehow terrorizes the main character(s).

Once a writer has determined the main character(s) and the evil that he will unleash upon them, it is the next logical step to determine the setting where the story will take place, perhaps this is already determined by the evil thing that the writer has chosen (a story about a man-eating shark will probably take place near water). Once the story is actually being planned or written, a writer should set the table for their scarefest by making use of rising action. Very few times will one see the climactic part of a story come first followed by an extended period of down time. Creating tension is key to keeping your audience interested in the story. After one has used the majority of their story building up the tension, it is time to begin writing the climax, the "final" confrontation between your hero and the evil, with the hero mostly always prevailing. You must make this climax damn good, or the extended buildup becomes irrelevant. After the climax, usually writers will choose to have the hero apparently come away from this experience as a stronger person who has learned valuable lessons. However, this aftermath period is very often followed by a surprise twist ending that demonstrates that the evil has not really been vanquished after all and returns to further traumatize the hero.

Horror stories can be told effectively from either first or third person perspectives. One of the biggest challenges in writing a scary story today is orginality. Many of today's readers have been exposed to hundreds of possible horror scenarios, and coming up with one that most of one's readers have not already seen in some capacity is very rigorous. When a writer considers that idea, creativity is paramount when writing in this genre.