Your Own Ghost Story

Name:

Ms. Hayes

Honors Modern Fiction

Date:

Your own ghost story

As you read, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in response to a challenge to create the most terrifying ghost story. Consider other ghost or horror stories you have read or heard in the past. What elements of these stories made them so terrifying? List a few here:

Now, you will have an opportunity to create your own ghost or horror story. You should work in a group of four students to co-create your frightening masterpiece. This should be about three pages and submitted to Turnitin. You should follow MLA guidelines. Your paper will be graded according to your adherence to the following considerations:

When and where does your story take place? You canbegin with those old clichés. It’s agreat opportunity to bring in creepy and fun historicalelements, too.

Believe it or not, a goodghost story doesn’t always need a beginning, middle, and end. It’smore important that it has acreepy setup, a ghostly event, a nervous reaction, and a (partial) explanation.An example: A girl goes away for the summer to an old house in the country owned bya grumpy uncle. She begins to hear crying in the middle of the night and see messages scrawled in lipstick on the mirrors. Her uncle refuses to believe that anything out ofthe ordinary is going on. One of the lipstick messages tells the girl to look in the garden.When she does, she sees the skeleton of her uncle’s old fiancée, presumed missing forthirty years.OK, that’s very simple, but you get the picture.

Now, think about what kindsof things scare you. Some hints…

Details are scary. Start with things that exist in real life, then twist them. Thecloser your story feels to a “real” account, the scarier it will seem. Details build tension, anddetails have their foot firmly planted in the real world. Stephen King understands this—hetends to create an almost hypernormal world—so that when something isoff, you’re soimmersed you barely notice. The more normal the world is, the more upsetting it is whensomething out of the ordinary happens.

Uncertainty isscary. Settings are most definitely scarier when they are unexplained. If youhave too good an explanation for all the ghostly goings-on, it becomes less frightening.It takesa certain amount of self-control to write a good ghoststory. It’s easier and moretempting to explain things, but it’s usually better if you don’t.

Almost-but-not-quite isscary. Think about how scary it is to see something out of the cornerof your eye, or to reachout and touch something thatyou can’t see and can’t identify. The natural world not working the way it’s supposed to isscary. Cold when it shouldn’t becold, hot when it shouldn’t be hot. Being able to look through something that should be solid, or seeing shadows without anything there to castthem. Unexplained knowledge is scary.

A narrator with bad judgment is scary. It makes the reader tense, which is a good thing. It’slike shouting at the movie screen. Don’t open that door! Don’t go in that creepy house! Anarrator in a ghost story is constantly doing ill-advised things.

You are scary! Well, not really, or at least not all the time—but when deciding to writeabout something spooky, you should take atrip through your own imagination andfigureout your most vivid “point of departure.” What gets your heart beating? An enclosedspace? A choppy sea? A box of broken toys? Remember, a ghost story is just another way ofhanding of your worst nightmare to others. Flipping expectations is scary -- or fun, at least. Lead your readers down a path, letting thembelieve in one thing, and then get the jump on them with an entirely different outcome.

That’s all you need to get started. Now go! What are you waiting for? You’re not scared, are you?

Paper due in Turnitin by 11:59 pm on Wednesday, 11/19.