Boo!
It’s October – time to turn our minds to the spooky and scary, the inexplicable and the inevitable.
When I first started putting together this micro prompt, I was a little intimidated. Scared, you might say. I haven’t heard a ghost story in years, and I didn’t know how to boil one down to the essential elements. I started with this: whenever we tell a story, we are trying to evoke an emotion. In the case of a ghost story, that’s fear.
It turns out that a good microstory and a good ghost story have a lot in common: they lean on sparse writing and the reader’s own senses. In such a short piece, there just isn’t a lot of room for exposition. And so, the simpler your vocabulary, the more likely it is that the reader can bring their own impressions to the story–and that’s what evokes the emotion you’re going for. Leave room for the reader to have a feeling, and you’ll have a story that makes an impact.
Take a stab:
This spookiest of months, we want you to scare the pants off of us with a ghost story in 65 words that concludes with:
But when [action], nothing was there.
Examples:
- But when Kai turned around, nothing was there.
- But when the sun came up, nothing was there.
- But when the box was opened, nothing was there.
- But when Diya opened the door, nothing was there.
The prompt words do count toward your 65-word total (5 prompt words + 60 words of your own). The prompt words may stand alone or be part of a sentence. (“I held my breath, but when Sarah pulled the curtain, nothing was there.”)
Tips and tricks for writing an effective ghost story:
- Ground your story in reality. Don’t just make a spooky house; make it as normal a house as possible—except for the ghost. Fear comes when something challenges our perception of reality.
- Similarly, make your story something that could happen to an ordinary person (as opposed to, say, a medium or psychic who talks to ghosts all the time).
- The ghost should want something. It’s not just hanging around moaning for no reason.
- Don’t worry about all the gory details. The more you describe, the less scary the story gets. Leave most of it to the reader’s imagination. Remember that ghost stories are about what we don’t see. They scare us because we are afraid of the unknown. If you fill in all the blanks, it won’t be scary: we’ll know too much.
- Leave a question about whether the ghost ever existed, or whether the whole thing was a product of the character’s imagination.
For more, check out this great article from The Noctrium: How to Write a Ghost Story
This is the badge you need:
Below is the YeahWrite badge you need for this month’s microprose challenge. Under the badge is a few lines of code. See that? Copy it and then paste it into the “text” or HTML view of your post editor. If you don’t copy it exactly, the image will not appear correctly in your post, and you will receive an error message when you submit the post to Inlinkz. If you have any questions regarding adding this code to your post or website, please contact us at editors@yeahwrite.me.
Need a hand?
Microprose sounds easy. After all, how hard can it really be to write a story with fewer than 100 words incorporating a prompt or two? But it turns out it’s our hardest challenge to really get right. Whether you’re a seasoned micropro or a brand new microwriter, it’s worth taking a minute to glance through the tips and tricks our editors have put together, like this quick refresher on what makes a micro great, or this one on how to incorporate mandatory prompts into adjudicated challenges. Make sure you make it to the vote this week: check your wordcount (we count those footnotes!) and prompts!
The microprose challenge ends in:
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How to submit and fully participate in the Microprose Challenge
Basic YeahWrite guidelines: must be in response to the prompt found above; your entry can be dated no earlier than October 3, 2018; a ghost story told in exactly 65 words. You may enter only one microstory per weekly challenge.
How to submit and fully participate in the challenge:
- Please grab the code beneath the microprose badge in the body of this week’s post and paste it into the HTML view of your entry;
- Follow the Inlinkz instructions after clicking “add your link” to upload your entry to this week’s challenge grid;
- Your entry should appear immediately on the grid if you don’t receive an error message;
- Please make the rounds to read all the entries in this week’s challenge; and
- Consider turning off moderated comments and CAPTCHA on your own blog.
Submissions for this week’s challenges will close on Wednesday at 10pm ET. Voting will then open immediately thereafter and close on Thursday at 10pm ET. The winners, as always, will be celebrated on Friday.
Thank you for sharing with us your hard work! Good luck in the challenge…
Loading InLinkz ...About the author:
Christine Hanolsy is a (primarily) science fiction and fantasy writer who simply cannot resist a love story. She joined the YeahWrite team in 2014 as the microstory editor and stepped into the role of Editor-In-Chief in 2020. Christine was a 2015 BlogHer Voices of the Year award recipient and Community Keynote speaker for her YeahWrite essay, “Rights and Privileges.” Her short fiction has been published in a number of anthologies and periodicals and her creative nonfiction at Dead Housekeeping and in the Timberline Review. Outside of YeahWrite, Christine’s past roles have included Russian language scholar, composer, interpreter, and general cat herder. Find her online at christinehanolsy.com.
