Lexie Wellington

Tell all the truth but tell it slant

wallpaperpoetry:

by Emily Dickinson

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

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Writing Something Actually Scary

moleskin-journal:

It’s October. It’s the perfect time to watch scary movies, catch up on you Stephen King reading, shake your head at that lame new Goosebumps movie that’s coming out whenever (seriously what are they thinking?), and try your hand at the horror genre.

As the scary story/movie season begins, I’d like to leave you with this guide.

• The best horrors are psychological. At the time of my writing, I just finished watching The Awakening. I was impressed over all. I’d recommend it to a friend who was looking for something not so scary but maybe just haunting (no pun intended). It was more of a psychological thriller.
  
  If you’re like me, you’re a wimp but also very disappointed by the amount of awful horror movies that have come out this past decade (I’d like to put the blame on Paranormal Activity for starting the first-person jump scare craze). They’re bad for a simple reason: they’re shallow.
  
  To write a good horror story, you need to know what frightens humans. We’re all frightened by the unknown. There’s something in our brians that flips out when we’re met with something unfamiliar or something we can’t decipher quite right. Here is a beautiful Vsauce video that goes more into depth about what we find “creepy” and why. (Warning: There’s some unsettling images and video clips in this one).
  
  Possibly the greatest horror stories were in the T.V series The Twilight Zone. They were rarely terrifying in the sense that there was a ghost throwing glasses or a monster was hiding in a basement. They were scary because only one man saw the monster on the airplane’s wing, or the neighborhood couldn’t find out who the real monster was and were reduced to attacking one another. They were scary because they played with our minds. If only William Shatner could see the monster, what damage could it do without anyone else knowing? How oblivious was everyone else to the threat? If all the neighborhood was suspecting someone was a monster, then how could they prove innocence? In the big reveal (I won’t spoil the end), we know that the actual danger was 1) human nature and 2) another unstoppable force. They made the audience think after each episode ended. They were unsettling – the basis of all fear.
  
  
• Don’t rely on stereotypes. Horror takes some thinking. You really need to understand what you’re writing. If you’re going off something you read in several other books or heard around several campfires or watched on several movie screens, you’re beating a dead horse. Sure, they may be scary, but why settle for something that is basically being half-assed by you? Let’s be honest, if you go off any stereotype for any genre, it’s going to be half-assed solely because you didn’t put original thought into it, and you don’t truly understand it.
  
  
• AVOID THE TYPICAL WHITE MALE SURVIVOR CLICHE. It happens almost all the time. The women (or woman, as a lot of media typically will have only one female character) always die. The black guy always dies (again, only one if any at all). The white guy cries over the loss of his noble friends and/or love interest (’cause you know he’ll be kissing the female protagonist at some point) but gets to walk away. 
  
  This is similar to the point above. Just make your writing more diverse all around.
  
  
• Not all great horror stories have monsters or ghosts or werewolves. Sometimes our own thoughts are the problem. Sometimes it’s our imagination that gets the best of us.
  
  
• Don’t be afraid of keeping it common. Halloween was a great movie. What made it great was that it could have happened to anyone. It was an ordinary man in a ordinary mask targeting an ordinary teenager. There was nothing special about any of these characters. It was just something that happened and didn’t seem too foreign. At least with more traditional horror stories, we can tell ourselves at midnight, alone in our own beds, “Ghosts don’t exist.” 
  
  
• It’s a very broad genre. Go for anything. Experiment with old folktales or mythology. Create your own monsters. Make your own Latin chants. Have fun with it and try to make someone afraid of the dark again. 

Enjoy Halloween and nearly peeing yourselves. 

(via theticklishpear)

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