What is a good way to start a scary story?

Answer 1

There are five ways to start a story.

1. Setting Description
2. Character Description
3. Introduction of the Narrator
4. Plot Elements
5. Philosophy

eg.

1. The night was dark and stormy and the rain fell down in torrents...
2. Edwin Adork was a man who never looked another in the eye...
3. I will tell you what I know and of what I have seen....
4. Something crashed and brought a shower of glass then came the blossoming roar of a gas explosion.
5. There are things that we can conceive of, yet still prefer not to have in our concept of the world.....

Answer 2

*WikiAnswers cannot give you ideas - writers must come up with their own ideas in order to be writers - click the Related Questions to learn how to find good ideas*

Horror means scaring your readers! Scaring does not mean blood and guts for the sake of showing blood and guts - it means making the reader believe that something horrible could happen to them! It means making them afraid to sleep with the lights off!

Here are some tips for writing a good horror story:

• Plan the plot in detail - you need to know exactly what is going to happen, so that you can have all your characters in exactly the right places for the horrible things to happen.
• Choose things that are scary to you - you're not going to be able to put fear into your story if you write about cute, fluffy, happy things! If you find roaches "icky," then write a story about roaches! If you feel the emotion, then the reader will feel it.
• Make your characters believable - describe the characters so that the reader can imagine them and identify with them. You should know how they look, how they act, how they talk, and what they want.
• Make the situation believable - don't just randomly toss characters into a horrible setting; give them a good reason for being where they are!
• Read the Old Masters - to write really good horror, you should have read enough classic horror by authors such as Edgar Allen Poe and Stephen King to give you a good idea how the story is done.

Here are some tips on what NOT to do from William Meikle (see Link below)!

Ten Horror Cliches to Avoid

• The woman alone in the basement.
• The Mom who isn't Mom any more.
• The experiment gone wrong.
• The mob of angry villagers.
• The priest who's lost his faith.
• Running through the woods in the dark.
• Playing with dark forces.
• "Let's split up and search!"
• The monster/whatever isn't really dead
• The love of a good woman

Answer 3

Joyce Carol Oates said it best: "The first sentence can't be written until the final sentence is written."

Worry about finishing your story, not about writing the perfect opening sentence! You can change anything you like once you've finished -- go back and think of a great first sentence then, instead of waiting for some magical "first sentence" to fall out of the sky and hit you in the head.

Now get off the internet and get back to writing that story!

Answer 4

The ending of a story is crucial. The whole climax of the story is building up to this point. The ending should bring closure to the horror of the rest of the story, and should show the reader what happens to the characters right after the story climax.

Horror stories have two major categories to base endings on:

1- Gore (Physical horror)

2- Psychological Horror

Making characters die is overly done, but easy. Everyone expects the teenagers who have sex to get killed, or the one who goes into the basement with just a flashlight.

Psychological horror is more difficult, and relies on mystery. You could have a mysterious fog, ghosts, deadly plagues, whatever.

The point of the conclusion is to wrap things up. Have all the horror done with and get the characters either to safety or to their doom!

Answer 5

Only you can come up with good ideas! An anonymous person on the internet cannot tell you what you would find interesting enough to write about.

Click on the Related Questions to see how to come up with your own ideas.

Answer 6

See the LINK below.

Nobody can write your story but you -- just start writing!