26 October 2021

In the Mood to be Scared?


It's Halloween week, and what better time to talk about ghost stories? I had one published a couple of weeks ago. It's called "Wishful Thinking," and writing it was a lot of fun.

When I sat down to write a ghost story, I concentrated on mood. You want a ghost story to be scary, and what's scarier than ghosts you see? Maybe it's ghosts you don't see. The ghosts you fear are just around the corner. As my fellow SleuthSayer Bob Mangeot pointed out two weeks ago in a great post about Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, the scariest thing of all is what we conjure in our own minds, what we are afraid is out there ... just ... about ... to ... grab us!

How did I create the spooky mood in my story? Here are some of the ingredients I mixed in:

  • A graveyard
  • An abandoned, supposedly haunted house overlooking the town, with dead trees surrounding it
  • An urban legend about a long-dead bank robber who haunts that house, forever searching for money he stole that was later hidden from him
  • Wind and thunder and lightning and rain and fog (why use just one when you can create a weather bouillabaisse?)
  • Another urban legend of missing kids who went inside the haunted house never to be seen again
  • Doors that creak open and slam shut on their own 
  • Unexplained screams

Weather is a great writer's tool because, in addition to setting the mood, it can push a plot forward, such as when heavy rain pushes four tweens to seek the house's sheltertweens who might have had second thoughts otherwise. That's just one of the ways I used the weather throughout the story to move the plot.

I also wanted to make my characters jumpy as the story went on, so I made two of them scared to go inside. Eleanor voices her fear but gets convinced that there's nothing to be afraid of (ha!). The other scared kid, Travis, who narrates the story, is too afraid to say he's spooked for fear of being called a wuss. They are easily reactive to things that happen, things other people might try to shrug off.

The other two characters want to go inside: Sean is a bully who wants to search for the missing money; Jinx is smart and logical and brave and curious. Like the weather, Sean and Jinx push the action forward. Sean proposes the idea of exploring the house. Jinx wants to stay when even Sean gets scared, determined to prove there is no such thing as ghosts.

Individually, every scary thing that happens in the story could have a logical explanationor so Jinx would saybut add them all together, using the right wording, with the right rhythm to the sentences, and even the bravest kids might come to realize that maybe ghosts do exist ... and one is inside that house ... and it's coming for them. 

"Wishful Thinking" was published by Wildside Press in issue six of Black Cat Weekly. It also was published individually by Wildside Press and can be purchased for your Kindle or Nook or other e-reader through lots of online bookstores, in the US and other countries.

I should point out that the character Eleanor was not named in a nod to the character of the same name in The Haunting of Hill House. She was named in honor of my friend Eleanor Cawood Jones, who loves a good ghost story. There's also another name in the story, a character named in honor of my fellow SleuthSayer Leigh Lundin. (Surprise, Leigh!)

If you're in the mood for a ghost story, I hope you'll check mine out.

18 comments:

  1. Congratulations-Wishful Thinking sounds good.

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  2. Just picked it up. I do enjoy your stories. Happy Halloween!
    (I hope Jingles is cool with the tick-or-treaters.)

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    1. Thanks, Tonette! Hope you enjoy it. (Jingle is okay with trick-or-treaters, but I'm not participating this year.)

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  3. You make it sound so simple but we all know there's more to it. Sounds like a good story.

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  4. Barb, you did a great job creating mood in that story-like the characters I was jumping at every sound and movement in that house!

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    1. Yay! That makes me sadistically happy, Adam! Thank you.

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  5. I love a good scary story because they're so hard to write well. I've tried hard, but I've only managed to write two that I don't hate. Most people overdo the grue (to quote Stephen King), but your putting everything in the minds of the "victims" makes it all work. Great job.

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    1. Thank you, Steve. That's nice of you to say.

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  6. Yiiii! What?!

    Wow. I can't miss this.

    You had me at dead trees. I read way too much H.P. Lovecraft in the 5th and 6th grades, The Color out of Space, The Shadow out of Time, where the landscapes are dead ash. Then when I was 17 or so exploring rural countryside on my motorcycle, I trespassed upon a plot with two poisoned ponds and the scrub and trees were dead ash. Heaving a rock into a pond set off viscous ripples under several inches of nasty grey foam. I suspect the ponds were poisoned by a pulp mill closer to town. It left an impression!

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    1. Wow. Fictional dead trees and poisoned ponds are so much better than real ones. I hope you like the story--and the surprise.

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  7. Good post, Barb. I remember watching The Haunting of Hill House in high school, and reading it many years later. In this case, the movie was better than the book.

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    1. Thanks, Maggie. It's interesting you liked the movie better. I haven't seen it. (And since I'm a big chicken, I probably won't ever. I can write scary. Don't want to see scary.)

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  8. The story sounds terrific. I once lived in a house with a ghost I didn't see! This ghost made himself known by knocking on the walls, etc. whenever people in the house were getting physical with each other. My boyfriend at the time, had also lived in a haunted house & understood perfectly.

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  9. You sure that wasn't your mom or grandma trying to get you to stop? Just kidding. Thanks for commenting, Elizabeth!

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  10. I finally got the Kindle download, Barb. I believe Amazon was running behind with thousands downloading your story.

    Love the cover art, Barb. Love the story.

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    1. Thanks, Leigh! Wildside did a nice job with that cover. I'm happy with it.

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