Randy Turner's Blog - Posts Tagged "writer"
Creating an effective horror story
Nothing is more enticing to a young writer than a horror story and beginning today my eighth graders will try their hands at writing one.
This is the second year for the Horror Story Contest and I look forward to seeing what creative, original ways my students come up with to express themselves.
Of course, to get to those gems, I will undoubtedly have to read several dozen derivative slasher stories, with plenty of gore and little in the way of real plot or character development.
I remember my first stab (pun intended) at writing a serial killer on the loose story. It came when I was in ninth grade and we had an assignment to write a short story. I worked night after night for a week and came up with 10 handwritten pages that were clearly a ripoff of Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None.”
Apparently, my teacher knew a ripoff when she saw one and I was lucky to receive a B for that assignment. The story had nothing in the way of setting, plot, realistic characters, or imagination.
I didn’t try my hand at a true horror story until 2005 when I came up with the basic idea for Devil’s Messenger. It came to me one day as I was trying out Instant Messenger, which was popular at the time, and remembered a Lon Chaney horror movie from the early ‘60s. The movie was terrible, but its title, Devil’s Messenger, always stuck with me.
Since my students were introducing me to numerous technological marvels at that time, I came up with the simple concept- a teenage girl communicates with her murdered father through instant messenger.
Since my preferred genre for fiction has always been mystery, I wanted to combine the horror story with mystery. Who murdered Cassandra Harper’s father?
That character, even more than the manipulative deceased Richard Harper is the unknown evil lurking behind everything that occurs.
The novel centers around three women- 15-year-old Cassandra, a withdrawn blogger who develops a creepy relationship with her dead father, her 16-year-old sister Brittany, the blonde, peppy cheerleader, who is much stronger and whose character is much deeper than you would think at first glance, and their mother, Sharon, a woman whose charm and beauty led three men to fall in love with her. Two of those men are dead and she is growing closer and closer to the third one, a man we see cleaning blood stains from his car.
The novel plays on three fears that many of us have:
1. No one loves us. That fear often leads to our making unhealthy decisions.
2. Technology is taking over the world. Are we the masters of technology or is it pulling the strings on our lives?
3. The unknown. Someone is out there controlling everything that happens in our lives, manipulating us for his or her own advantage and there is nothing we can do about it.
A key to a successful horror story, whether it is on a movie screen or on the written page, is to have characters that we care about. Too many horror stories follow the same formula of putting together stereotypes and then connecting the dots.
A successful horror story, one that lingers long after the final credits are shown or after the final page is turned, is one that haunts us because we invested in the characters. If we don’t care about the people in the story and are just there for the body count, that particular horror story is going to be one that quickly fades from the memory.
Some of my favorite comments about Devil’s Messenger have come from young female readers who say they saw themselves in Cassandra or Brittany. That does not happen when characters are stereotypes, tossed into a story just to be sliced and diced at some opportune time.
So as I prepare for my second year of reading chilling horror stories from teenagers who have grown up with the genre, I anxiously await the opportunity to read the type of grim mayhem these young minds devise.
They always manage to find a way to surprise me, and as we all know, the element of surprise is the key to any successful horror story.
This is the second year for the Horror Story Contest and I look forward to seeing what creative, original ways my students come up with to express themselves.
Of course, to get to those gems, I will undoubtedly have to read several dozen derivative slasher stories, with plenty of gore and little in the way of real plot or character development.
I remember my first stab (pun intended) at writing a serial killer on the loose story. It came when I was in ninth grade and we had an assignment to write a short story. I worked night after night for a week and came up with 10 handwritten pages that were clearly a ripoff of Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None.”
Apparently, my teacher knew a ripoff when she saw one and I was lucky to receive a B for that assignment. The story had nothing in the way of setting, plot, realistic characters, or imagination.
I didn’t try my hand at a true horror story until 2005 when I came up with the basic idea for Devil’s Messenger. It came to me one day as I was trying out Instant Messenger, which was popular at the time, and remembered a Lon Chaney horror movie from the early ‘60s. The movie was terrible, but its title, Devil’s Messenger, always stuck with me.
Since my students were introducing me to numerous technological marvels at that time, I came up with the simple concept- a teenage girl communicates with her murdered father through instant messenger.
Since my preferred genre for fiction has always been mystery, I wanted to combine the horror story with mystery. Who murdered Cassandra Harper’s father?
That character, even more than the manipulative deceased Richard Harper is the unknown evil lurking behind everything that occurs.
The novel centers around three women- 15-year-old Cassandra, a withdrawn blogger who develops a creepy relationship with her dead father, her 16-year-old sister Brittany, the blonde, peppy cheerleader, who is much stronger and whose character is much deeper than you would think at first glance, and their mother, Sharon, a woman whose charm and beauty led three men to fall in love with her. Two of those men are dead and she is growing closer and closer to the third one, a man we see cleaning blood stains from his car.
The novel plays on three fears that many of us have:
1. No one loves us. That fear often leads to our making unhealthy decisions.
2. Technology is taking over the world. Are we the masters of technology or is it pulling the strings on our lives?
3. The unknown. Someone is out there controlling everything that happens in our lives, manipulating us for his or her own advantage and there is nothing we can do about it.
A key to a successful horror story, whether it is on a movie screen or on the written page, is to have characters that we care about. Too many horror stories follow the same formula of putting together stereotypes and then connecting the dots.
A successful horror story, one that lingers long after the final credits are shown or after the final page is turned, is one that haunts us because we invested in the characters. If we don’t care about the people in the story and are just there for the body count, that particular horror story is going to be one that quickly fades from the memory.
Some of my favorite comments about Devil’s Messenger have come from young female readers who say they saw themselves in Cassandra or Brittany. That does not happen when characters are stereotypes, tossed into a story just to be sliced and diced at some opportune time.
So as I prepare for my second year of reading chilling horror stories from teenagers who have grown up with the genre, I anxiously await the opportunity to read the type of grim mayhem these young minds devise.
They always manage to find a way to surprise me, and as we all know, the element of surprise is the key to any successful horror story.
