Macabre Writing Prompts From My Backyard

This week Ellen Kazimer, MFAC alum of 2014, shares a few creepy stories and free write exercises based on true events.  Read on, if you dare...


When the call came out for Halloween inspired postings, I didn’t wander past the woods behind my house to dig up a few writing prompts. This time of year, globe spiders spin webs across my windows, bats perform aerial acrobatics at dusk, and toads cover my front walk. 

Halloween decorating? I’ve got that covered. So for your writing amusement, I present three “true life” vignettes from my woods, each with two writing prompts. Hope they inspire your monster muse.

Vignette I 

There are ten unmarked graves behind my house and possibly more. A dismembered arm indicates there is still another body to be found. Three dead baby dolls and seven dead Barbie’s is a case for the Behavior Analysis Unit on Criminal Minds. I suspect that in yards across America, you will find a buried doll or two, but ten? What twisted mind would do that? (I tried reviving the dolls, but they were too far gone. Tiny insects had crawled into their heads through their hair follicles.) 

A. Write a picture book, middle grade, or young adult scary story where your protagonist either buries or unearths dolls in their backyard.  Would you choose gothic, noir, supernatural, or psychological? Picture book noir, anyone? 

B. The last Barbie I found had hair so full of leaves and mud, that her hair was stuck in place as if it were styled that way on purpose. Perhaps I had a woodland fairy instead of a zombie. Are the dolls changelings? Write a story using the buried dolls as fantasy elements. 


Vignette II 

Last winter, in the middle of a snowstorm, I spotted a piebald deer. I'd never seen one before, and we are replete with deer. A few days later, a neighbor found a tree stand in the woods and deer entrails strewn into the creek. (Deer hunting is illegal in our woods.) The kill was fresh. Turkey vultures had not found the entrails yet. That piebald deer never appeared again. Who killed and gutted the poor piebald deer and why? 

A. Write a story where your protagonist discovers the entrails using one of the three types of terror defined by Stephen King, the Gross Out, the Horror, or the Terror. 

B. Write a story where this unusual deer is a magical beast loose in the suburbs. Perhaps go back to the ancient legends of the mythical white stag. 


Vignette III

I have a trail camera takes six rapid photos when it detects motion. Most of the time it catches deer, foxes, squirrels, or me walking the dog. One night the camera went off, and there was nothing in the pictures except an “orb.” If you are a fan of shows like Ghost Hunters, then you know this could be a spirit orb. (Or it could be an insect or pollen, but let's stick with a spirit orb.) 

A: Write a story where a spirit orb or ghostly apparition haunts your protagonist by appearing their trail camera. 

B: Write a story where the orb is a “will ‘o the wisp” leading your protagonist to another world. Hope you found some spooky inspiration for your stories of mayhem, horror, and the supernatural. I’m off for a walk in the woods.


Thanks for answering the Halloween call, Ellen!  Hopefully these spooky true-life events will give you some great starting points for you own seasonal scares.


*Ellen Kazimer is a 2014 graduate of Hamline MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. When she’s not sweeping spider webs off her windows, she writes picture books, nonfiction, and middle grades novels. Her bio can be found on her website and blog where she shares “Odd Bits of Research that Washed Ashore.”  Learn more about her work on her author website or visit her blog.

Alumni Voices with Deborah Davis: Teen Inspiration

Every summer for the past six years I have taught five-day creative writing workshops for teenagers, eight to fourteen kids at a time. Most of the teens love to write: they'd craft stories, poems, and journal entries even if their parents didn't send them to writing camp. A few used to enjoy writing, until writing school assignments soured them on composing with words. My workshop aims to rekindle their interest in writing, help them discover or reconnect to a love of putting ideas into words, and build their confidence in both writing and reading their work aloud.

Working with teens is exhausting—but it’s also exhilarating. Planning exercises that are a match for their jet-propelled, angst-ridden energy and indomitable curiosity, and then writing with my students, I step out of my own comfort zones, reconnect to my own love of writing, and have a lot of fun.

Here are three things I do with my teen writers. I hope you use all three yourself—on your own, with your writers group, or with your own students, if you teach.

1. Adopt Jane’s Mantra

Thirty years ago free-writing instructor named Jane encouraged me to write whatever came into my own angst-ridden, yearning-to-write, 26-year-old brain—and then read my pages aloud to all the other workshop participants. If we tried to apologize before reading aloud, Jane would stop us. "Your writing isn't good or bad," she'd say in her Zen-like way. "It's just interesting." She taught us to examine our writing for their potential: what is interesting or compelling? What needs delving into? Which words are charged or dead or heavy on the page and need to be busted wide open--explored and expanded and developed?

I use Jane’s mantra with my teenage students. After saying it a time or two on Day 1 of the workshop, I rarely have to say it again. If anyone balks at reading or apologizes before they start, the other students chime in, encouraging the bashful, reluctant, or apologetic one: "Your writing isn't good or bad," they admonish each other gently. "It's just interesting!" The mantra makes us all fearless, gives us permission to trust every weird, slippery, or raucous idea that comes to us so that we can discover, when we read our work aloud or silently later, what intrigues us and what seems worth exploring.

2. Apply Pressure

Just as our characters need pressure to grow and change and take risks, so do we. One of my favorite workshop exercises is writing "minute poems." I give the group a word and then set a timer for one minute. In that minute, each writer writes a poem inspired by the given word. Any word works, and the resulting poems are often extraordinary. Like this one, by 17-year-old Emily:

Whoa,

that lemon just spoke.

I swear I'm not crazy

my mind might be hazy

and I know you won't check

'cause you're lazy.

But seriously,

that lemon is talking.

Writing minute poems is a great exercise by itself or as a way to warm up for other writing.

Apply pressure on yourself by setting a timer for other tasks as well. For instance, give yourself a specific assignment that pertains to your story—Write how Jean feels after seeing her brother die, or Summarize Bill's month in one paragraph, or Write the scene where Lulu discovers she's the lost princess of Aragondia—and set a timer for one minute, or five, or ten. See what you can do under pressure. You'll be amazed. And if you're not, well, set the timer and try again. And again. Watch your ideas pop like popcorn, fresh and fragrant and tantalizing.

3. Prop It Up!

Around Day 4 I ask everyone to bring in a wearable prop. They've brought, among other things, a feather boa, stunner glasses, spider gloves, a halo, cat ears, bunny ears, a martial arts sword, and a hamburger hat. Each of us chooses a prop and puts it on, and then we write, letting the prop influence or inspire us. A prop might enliven an ongoing story, or inspire a new action or character, or change the tone of a piece, or bump you out of your story so that you return to it refreshed.

Trying to write a sexy scene? Wear something sexy, or play music that feels sexy to you. Aiming for a humorous tone or creating a funny character? Wear something goofy. If it's danger you want to convey, place something potentially dangerous near you: a sharp knife, a bottle of pills, a container of bleach. Physical props--worn or kept at hand--stimulate our senses and our imagination.

By the time my teenage students leave at the end of the fifth day, I'm zonked, but I'm inspired. Like my students, I’ve generated pages of new writing and ideas, and I’ve laughed a lot.

So find that old feather boa, set the timer, tell yourself that your newest writing isn’t good or bad, it’s just interesting, and have some fun!

 

Deborah Davis is a 2012 graduate of the MFAC program and the author of several YA novels. She lives,writes and teaches in California. To learn more about her teaching and her books, check out her website.

Faculty Voices: Marsha Qualey

Dear Novelists,

Stop! Stop what you’re doing! Today you don’t need to worry about word count. Today the assignment is something other than the linear push forward. Today you will work on texture and back story—so often lost in the push to get words on the page.

Texture, of a type

I hear some of you muttering: “What does she mean by texture?” You tell me and get extra credit!

Today you will do some offstage exercise. (Stop groaning, former students of mine— I hear you!)

These exercises are meant to be fun! You are making stuff up! I insist you enjoy yourself!

Try a few, try them all. You’ve probably done some already or done none at all. It’s very likely that some might work better for you than others.

Here you go:

1. Make some lists for your character (C). For example, list 20 items on the walls of C’s room or in a locker at school. In the back of his/her car. Outside his/her window. And so on. You must follow this rule for list making: when you get halfway (#11, in this case) you can’t add something entirely new—each additional item must be a detail about one of the items mentioned previously.
2. Make a list of his/her peers, such as “Josie, C’s regular co-pilot on the Trinonium-Spooderama run.” Follow the rule for list making: halfway, no new peers, but another detail about someone already listed, such as “Josie, who likes to get a mani-pedi before every trip.”
3. Take two or three of those peers/friends and write a conversation about C that occurs when she/he is not present. 
4. Make a list of adults in C’s life. Remember the list-making rule.
5. Take two of those adults and write a conversation about C that occurs when she/he is not present
6. Make a timeline of C’s life so far. Load it with anything that might plausibly/implausibly have happened to him/her. This is not a list. Also, try using paper and pencil.
7. Pick a happy event from the timeline and write a page or so in C’s first-person voice about the event from at least a year after the event. Do the same for a frightening and/or sad event.
8. From ten years down the road, write a brief summation of the events of the novel in C’s first-person voice.
9. Construct C’s family tree. This is not a list. Also, try using paper and pencil.
10. Make up a family secret about someone on the tree. At what age and under what circumstances does C learn the secret?
11. Identify a relic from some ancestor that now belongs to C. Have C describe the relic while on a first date (or some other first encounter).
12. Write a detached clinical summation of C, pretending you are his/her teacher/therapist/spiritual counselor.
13. As C, write an hour-by-hour log of his/her typical day. 

Have fun. I insist.

A Very, Very Fine House

I recently finished a piece of writing that has been plaguing me for months. I’m letting it sit for a few days more before I look at it again and then proceed with the novel’s final section. Whenever I have a work in progress simmer like this I don’t like to write anything resembling it in either form or content.

The day after I closed the file I went out for a walk. I live in a lovely two-river city, in a section of town that is a combination of historic and student housing. When I was walking, one house in particular struck me and when I returned to the desk I devised a writing exercise that has generated a couple flash fiction pieces. I’m not about to share the stories, but I thought I’d share the process; maybe someone else will have some luck too.

• Pick a house, any house, the older the better.
• Beginning with the first occupants, write a brief history of the house, devoting only a paragraph or so to each family or business or such that occupied the house for a period of time
• Pick one of those occupants and write a story, also working in a physical attribute of the house and one object from within the house.
• Repeat for another later or earlier occupant.

It was a nice way to clear my head of the novel that’s preoccupied me for so long.