::mslexia workshops::

Write on the Wild Side #21
a writing workshop with Linda Anderson

THEME: HORROR

INTRODUCTION

IF YOU'RE anything like me, your first notions of horror come from fragments of old films. Hands emerge from walls. The wind (or the wolf) howls. The mansion crumbles. The power fails. The candles gutter.

These are the gothic clichés – but how can you create something original? You may be tempted to reach for the surreal or supernatural, but you don’t have to. A horror story is measured by the reaction it causes in the reader rather than by its contents. ‘Horror’ is defined by my dictionary as ‘a painful emotion compounded of fear and loathing’. Ghouls and gore are not the only things that provoke such feelings.

You could show a slice of ordinary life and demonstrate how fear makes it unbearable. There are always monsters in horror but they don’t need to be vampires prowling the night streets. The monster in your story might be that oddly courteous neighbour, or the jealous husband lying awake beside his unsuspecting wife. It might be the secret monster in the heart of a character in a tale of envy or vanity that brings terrible consequences.

In psychological horror stories, the terrors originate inside a character’s mind. And supernatural elements are often part of her malaise. It is her mental state that conjures the apparitions, malign ‘messages’, tormenting voices. Here’s the start of Ruth Rendell’s Adam and Eve and Pinch Me:

Minty knew it was a ghost sitting in the chair because she was frightened. If it were only something she’d imagined, she wouldn’t have been afraid. You couldn’t be when it was something that came out of your own mind.

This sounds so placid and ‘rational’, but it soon becomes clear that Minty is trapped in delusion. She is a fragile, sheltered woman in her mid-thirties who irons shirts in a dry-cleaner’s for a living. Her domineering aunt, with whom she lived since childhood, died a year ago. Shortly afterwards, Minty fell prey to Jock, who tricked her out of her inheritance. She believes him to be her dead fiancé, killed in the Paddington train crash. She is haunted by Jock, Auntie, and eventually, Jock’s mother – all of them menacing or accusing.

Minty believes she wants rid of them, though we can see that she also craves their company. They are born out of her monstrous loneliness. But her desire to rid herself of them turns Minty into a very dangerous innocent indeed…

In Rendell’s story, we plunge so intimately into Minty’s derailing mind that her visions become genuinely eerie – even though we know the monsters are not real.

EXERCISES

#1
Monsters within
Devise a character whose perceptions are compelling but unreliable. A Polyanna, for example, or a paranoid. What influences have made him or her like this? What might tip this character over the edge? If this idea takes fire, write a complete story.

#2
Mad worlds
If you prefer stories less tied to realism, one way to be original and topical is to create a frightening dystopia based upon real horrors. This might be a natural catastrophe like the new Ice Age in Maggie Gee’s The Ice People. Or a social disaster as in The Handmaid’s Tale, where Margaret Atwood portrays a society which enslaves its few remaining fertile women, forcing them into the service of barren couples from a righteous elite. Atwood made sure that every punitive code and tyranny she included really happened somewhere in the real world – which makes her ‘imaginary’ future all the more horrifying.

Try a similar strategy by taking some aspect of contemporary life that concerns you: the treatment of the elderly or homeless; global warming; drug-resistant diseases; human cloning; the power of the internet. Now imagine a related horrific scenario: the outlawing of old age; a power struggle between clones and ‘originals’; people fleeing from a flooded landscape; virtual relationships replacing real ones.

Be bold and extreme. Start a story or poem from the point of view of a character caught up in your chosen crisis. Try beginning with ‘This couldn’t happen. This could not be allowed to happen.’ See where it leads.

#3
Haunted houses
Setting is a big factor in horror stories, either to create a mood of foreboding or to provide a shocking contrast between an ordinary environment and an appalling event. In a deliberate mood-setting description of location, you can create a scary atmosphere by using precise and evocative details.

Emily Brontë starts Wuthering Heights with a description of a house so battered by the wind that its ‘stunted firs’ are ‘excessively slanted’ and a range of ‘gaunt thorns’ all stretch in one direction as if ‘craving alms of the sun’. The interior has a floor of smooth white stone; the chairs ‘lurk’ in the shade; dogs ‘haunt’ the recesses. Every detail conveys coldness and lack of comfort; every verb heightens the spookiness.

Think how different it would be if the dogs played in the recesses or the chairs just stood in the shade.

Think of a place, indoors or outside, where you have felt unaccountably afraid or melancholy. Describe this setting, conveying its atmosphere through your description alone, not by saying that it is scary. Now consider whether it might lead to a larger story. What sort of characters might inhabit or visit this place?

#4
Personal nightmares
Fear is personal and it hits close to home. To tap into your own horror-chamber, try this exercise. Quickly, without thinking, write ten sentences each beginning with, ‘Fear is…’

Fear is the pit-bull out of nowhere
Fear is your father forgetting your name
If you come up with an image which is highly charged for you, let it lead you into a story or poem.

Finally, remember that if you manage to scare yourself with whatever you write, chances are that