Welcome to Part Two of my workshop on how to write your own scary stories! In Part One I talked about ways of finding ideas for a story by looking at your own worst fears – if you write about something that you are afraid of then it will seem genuinely terrifying to a reader! If you haven’t read Part One then check it out here, and as always if you’d like to download the full worksheet that goes with this workshop then you can find it here!

Part 2: What If…?

Okay, so if you’ve been following this workshop from the beginning then you’ll hopefully have a list of things that scare you. These can be anything you like – spiders and snakes, ghosts (or goats), vampires, werewolves and zombies, teachers and homework, vegetables, disease and death and, of course, CLOWNS – the important thing is that you are genuinely scared of them, or they at least creep you out a little!

At the moment, though, these things are just that: things! They aren’t stories yet. What we’re going to do now is look at ways of turning those things into ideas. And luckily we don’t need some kind of sophisticated inspiration machine for this, all we need are two simple words:

What if…?

Most books started life as a what if: what if a boy discovers he’s a wizard and gets sent to wizard school? What if a girl moves to a new school and meets a hunky vampire? What if a boy is convicted of a crime he didn’t commit and sent to an underground prison full of monsters? (Er… that last one is mine in case you didn’t recognise it!) What if‘s are at the heart of all stories.

What if‘s are a writer’s greatest tool for discovering ideas, and if you get into the habit of asking that question everywhere you go then you’ll soon have so many ideas for stories that you won’t know what to do with them all. If it sounds a little weird just give it a go. Look out the nearest window, what do you see? Right now I can see a very old building opposite my office: what if it was once the headquarters for a group of monster slayers and beneath the streets is a vault containing dozens of creatures in cages, just waiting to escape? What if I saw somebody running up the street being chased by thugs, and I let them hide in my office only to discover they have stolen a mysterious object that people will kill to possess? What if I went to leave the office (my office is in a very old hotel full of weird corridors and hidden tunnels) and the layout had magically changed, and there was no way out, and ghosts started appearing from the rooms, and… Okay, I’m going to stop there before I freak myself out. But do you get the idea? Just think about all the strangest and scariest things that could happen wherever you are, all of the possible what if‘s.

So, what I’d like you to do now is try and add some what if‘s to your own worst fears. They can be as weird as you like, but try and pick things that would absolutely terrify you if they actually happened. Go crazy! The things that really terrify me are marionettes (those spooky puppets) and porcelain dolls (the single most nightmarish objects on the face of the planet. So some of my what if‘s could be:

What if somebody gave me a puppet as a Christmas present and it came alive and tried to kill me?

What if my sister’s porcelain doll was actually a young girl who had been placed under a curse centuries ago and needed to be set free?

What if a puppet contained the soul of its maker who was trying to find a new body to inhabit?

What if somebody found a way to control another human being the same way a puppet master controls a puppet?

And so on! I’ve just come up with these now, so they could be better, but I just wanted to demonstrate how easy it was! It will take a little while to get into the habit of asking what if, but I promise you if you ask that question everywhere you go, whatever you’re doing, then you will be swamped with new ideas. Of course not all of them will be suitable for a story or a book, and some may have been used before, but sooner or later you’ll have a eureka moment and hit on an idea that could become the new Harry Potter or Twilight (or, um Furnace)!

Take some time and think about what if‘s for each of your worst fears. And next time you’re out somewhere try it then too. One of the best places for what if‘s is at school: what if you’re looking for a book in the library and you discover a pamphlet about how to put a curse on somebody? What if you go to the toilet and your reflection does something that you don’t? What if your teachers started experimenting on pupils? What if your school holiday abroad turned out to be in a zombie plague area?! The pool of ideas is endless!

Check back soon for Part Three, where we’ll be taking a break from ideas and looking at how to create characters that really feel as if they’re alive! And if you have any questions about what if‘s then just ask!

In this occasional series I shall look at the main obstacles the writer faces when attempting to transfer words from the brainbox, down the arm, into the hand – or talon if you’re an owl – and thence via pen, crayon or keyboard (computer, not piano) onto paper for the reading of.

Here is the first instalment, coming, as it does, before any of the others:

Enemy No.1 – Distractions

One of the greatest obstac… Oh look! A cloud in the shape of an organ grinder!

Sorry. As I was saying, one of the greatest obstacles to actuall… I wonder how high I could pile these dry roasted peanuts on top of each other?

What? Oh right. As I was saying, one of the greatest obstacles to actually sitting down and writ… I bet you a fiver I could throw this scrunched up bit of paper into that hollow plastic badger on the other side of the room with my eyes closed.

ARRRGGGH!!!

You see, the problem with distractions is they’re just so… distracting.

It’s amazing how unbearably irresistible hoovering a small rug becomes when you have an important writing project impatiently demanding your undivided attention.

I mean just look at those deliciously tempting, food-encrusted dirty dishes simply begging to be washed. And that grass isn’t going to mow itself is it? (though it would be very handy if it did mow itself, if a little unsettling).

My house is never as clean and tidy as it is when I should be writing.

The distant murmer of the television draws me, Siren-like, to be writer-wrecked on the sofa. And don’t even talk to me about the Internet.

No, seriously, DON’T talk to me about the Internet, because I’ll only start listening to you and then I’ll talk back and before we know it we’ll have chatted about the Internet for two hours and I won’t have done any writing and by then it’ll be time to iron my socks or pluck my knees or something.

No distractions allowed!

So the only way I can really make sure I concentrate fully on writing is to shut myself away in a small corner of a darkened room with a blanket over my head, disable the Internet on my laptop, put headphones on and play loud music (preferably something instrumental or sung in a language I can’t understand) to block out all external sounds.

Inside the writer's studio.

The only distraction I’m left with is daydreaming. But then, for writers daydreaming is one distraction that isn’t just allowed, it’s positively essential.

(I was going to carry on to cover procrastination, but I’ll do that next time.)

Whenever I do events, I often get asked the same questions. The most popular of these is “Are you rich enough to buy a helicopter?” The answer to this, sadly, is not yet, although I often look at them on eBay and will hopefully one day get myself one. The second most popular question, usually from a teacher this time, is “Can you buy me a helicopter?” Again, the answer is no. Sorry about that!

Anyway, once the questions about helicopters / tanks / ferraris are out of the way, the next most popular question is “Where do you get your ideas from?” I’m sure most writers are asked this wherever they go, and although all writers probably give different answers, most will probably mention that ideas for stories are much easier to find than you might think. When I run workshops in schools I talk about some cool ways to find ideas, but since I can’t do a workshop for every school in the world (the monsters refuse to let me out for more than seventy-two hours) I thought I’d run a workshop here! Over the next few weeks I’ll suggest a few ways of finding ideas and turning them into stories, and it would be great if as many of you as possible joined in!

To start with, I want to talk about ideas! So without further ado I present you with part one of my horror writing workshop! Feel free to use the comments box below to share some of your ideas and stories!

Oh, and if you’d like to download the full worksheet that goes with this workshop then you can find it here!

Part 1: Facing Your Nightmares!

One of the most important things about writing a horror story is finding something scary! There are loads of places to get ideas, but it’s always best to start by looking at what YOU are afraid of. If you’re afraid of something, then when you write about it, it will seem genuinely terrifying!

What I want you to do first is write down some of your worst fears. These can be anything – spiders and snakes, ghosts (or goats), vampires, werewolves and zombies, teachers and homework, vegetables, disease and death and, of course, CLOWNS! Write down as many as you can think of, the more fears you have, the more you’ll have to work with!

Three great places to look for ideas are:

-     Experience: Things that have happened to you – did anything really scary happen when you were younger, like getting lost in the woods, or being woken by a noise that might have been a monster?

-     Memory: Things from your favourite books and shows – what’s the scariest thing you’ve ever read or seen? Is there a way to use that idea but make it your own?

-     What if?!: Crazy ideas – this is the most fun way of looking for ideas. What if… your reflection suddenly started doing things differently, and began trying to take over your life? Or your parents, and everybody else’s, suddenly disappear? Or a neighbour turns out to be a vampire? Learn to question absolutely everything – why is the school basement locked? (What if that’s where the teachers experiment on naughty kids!) What happens when you are hypnotised? (Maybe you are possessed by an angry ghost!) Think up ludicrous and scary explanations for everything!

The idea for Furnace came from all these places: I once visited an old prison beneath the ground and was terrified by it (Experience), I was watching lots of prison shows on television at the time (Memory), and I wondered What If you are accused of a crime you didn’t commit and sent to a terrifying prison? And all of the monsters in Furnace are born from some of my worst fears!

Try playing with some of these idea-making ideas and you’ll have a basis for a story in no time!

Next, we’ll be taking your worst fears and turning them into story outlines. Check back soon for Part Two! And if you add some of your worst fears in the comments section then I’ll try and work them into stories as an example!

Part Two is now available here!

This is Alan Moore.

He’s the author of lots of my favourite stories (including Halo Jones, Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, Watchmen, Top Ten and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, to name just a few) and he’s also a bit of a hero to me.

These – as they appear in The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore, by George Khoury – are Alan Moore’s Five Tips for Would-Be Writers:

ALAN MOORE’S FIVE TIPS FOR WOULD-BE WRITERS

1. Don’t.

2. No, really don’t.

3. DEFINITELY don’t – I mean it.

4. Whatever you might be imagining about a life of writing, it’s not like that.

5. OK, if you’re going to anyway, if you’re going to be a writer of any quality, you will have to commit yourself to writing – which is something that, when you’re young and idealistic, sounds incredibly easy to do, but you should commit yourself to writing almost as if you were some ancient Greek or Egyptian committing yourself to a god.

If you do right by the god, then the god may, at some point in the future, reward you. But if you slack off and don’t do right by your talent or your god, then you are heading for a world of immense and unimaginable pain. If you have a gift that you choose to pursue, then you have to pursue it seriously. Don’t be half-assed about it, but realize what that commitment means.

Committing yourself to writing will mean, to a certain extent, your writing will become the most important part of your life – and that’s a big thing to say. It can have a distancing effect upon other relationships. It can be sometimes quite a solitary life. If you’re committed to writing, you’re going to spend most of your life indoors in a silent, empty room, concentrating on a pen and a piece of paper or their equivalent. Be prepared to take it seriously and be prepared to follow where it takes you, even if that takes you to some very strange places.

This is by no means the most glamorous profession.

Don’t say that I didn’t warn you.

Tough times for authors everywhere, what with the travelling to events in all corners of the planet, the meetings in backrooms with hardly a muffin in sight, the deadlines, the solitude, the crazy rants you find written on your bedroom wall when you wake up (and the shame when you realise it’s your own handwriting)…

So here’s a little motivational image to remind us all why we do it…

"Dear mother, I've stolen your favourite gnome and disguised him as my brother..."

Your own captions would be most welcome…

One answer I’ve always liked to the question of where ideas come from, is that they’re often the result of chance combinations: two or more things that come together unexpectedly in your mind. Well, here are three that have been colliding lately in mine…

Long-term followers of this blog might conceivably remember this post, in which I linked to this article by Warren Ellis for Wired Magazine about Rescue Fiction. He talked about Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s classic puppet-animated tv series Thunderbirds and the potential for awesomeness of stories involving colossal and ambitious engineering: crisis, ingenuity, resolution and rescue.

That’s the first colliding thing. Here’s the second…

The Deepwater Horizon disaster: the rig explosion, the resulting catastrophic environmental damage to the Gulf of Mexico – and the unfolding story of the increasingly desperate attempts to come up with a solution when massive depth and crushing water pressure mean only remotely controlled machines can be used. Right now as I’m typing this – not to excuse BP or the other associated corporations for their part in creating this problem in the first place – some of the finest problem-solving minds on the planet are working against the clock. As this real-life case shows, engineering has drama.

Third colliding thing: this. It’s a post that appeared recently on one of my favourite blogs, Pink Tentacle, imagining some of the most fabulously ambitious engineering projects that the human race might conceivably engage in in its future, including floating cities, a space hotel and (my favourite) a plan to supply the entire world’s energy needs by means of a ring of solar panels on the moon.

Now: I have other books to write. I have my next two full-length projects lined up in my head already, and I don’t have the time or inclination to write this story right now. But that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t want to read it if it was written by someone else. Quite the reverse, in fact!

So, You, reading this now: how about it? How about writing some thrilling Rescue Fiction? I’m not talking about Thunderbirds, except how much I loved it when I was small, the world is already too full of sequels and remakes. No: I’m talking about you taking charge of this idea and writing something completely new and amazing.

…I know: having the idea is the easy bit. Or rather, once you’ve got your initial idea like this, you’ve then got to have more ideas: believable characters who have personal stakes in the story’s events, a satisfying structure, a way of telling this tale without too much exposition, plus all of the other bits and pieces you’ll need to thrash out so you can make the concept work.

But: I would love to read a near-future story of daring, ambition, spaceships, explosions and engineering ingenuity in the white heat of crisis. I think it would be awesome.

Someone write this. Please?

Sam

Pain is, frankly, something that I prefer not to experience for myself, if I can avoid it. But when I’m safely ensconced in a comfy reading spot I seem to have no problem with it being inflicted on other people…!

Tom Yamada, central character of new series The 5 Lords of Pain (published by Barrington Stoke) has a truly brutal ordeal ahead of him. Once a generation, men in his family have to fight the Contest – a series of one-to-one duels with demons with the fate of the world hanging on the outcome. But (though not for Tom-!) it gets even better. Not content with waiting until Tom is full grown, the demons have decided to start the Contest now, when Tom is only seven years into his training and he’s just fifteen years old…

I’ve had my eye on this series since reading this awesome interview with its author James Lovegrove in which he talks about Barrington Stoke, their editing process and exactly what makes their books so special. I read the series opener The Lord of the Mountain over the weekend and it was a blast: like Tom, this story’s fast on its feet with the potential to be utterly deadly. Follow-up The Lord of the Void is out now. I can hardly wait to lay my hands on a copy. Click through to The 5 Lords of Pain website if you’d like to know more.

Sam

I woke up a few days ago with this image floating around some of the more surreal corners of my mind. Try as I might the dream that had preceded this visual peek eluded me. Yes, there were sheep, plenty of them. And yes the weather was um, challenging. But as I lay there trying to snatch at a series of improbable images I knew the dream was lost to me. Sure enough, by the time I was munching my museli and wiping the puddles of milk from the kitchen floor left by my helpful offspring, this curious picture of snowing sheep was all that was left.

Actually, this sort of thing happens to me quite a lot. What sort of thing, I hear you ask? Well, I’ll tell you. I have a habit of drawing any old nonsense that comes to mind whilst sitting in front of the Tv. The best part about this is the fact I’m not really concentrating so it is often a surprise to me when I finally register what I have drawn. For some reason I have been drawing sheep recently and, no doubt, after an evening of sketching the silly things I took them with me to bed, so to speak. It’s all a bit bewildering, really. But, of course, it  is part of the answer to that familiar question ‘where do you get your ideas from?” Sometimes, it requires little thought, just a bit of mind doodling, be it written or drawn.

What any of it really means, quite frankly, I shudder to think. I will not be trying to analyse the signifcnace of such imagery. Somethings are better left well alone. Let sleeping sheep lie, I reckon.

If you are trying to write something why not try a bit of mindless doodling yourself. It could be anything you like. A list of words, a sentence, a paragraph (they really don’t have to make sense next to each other – just write anything down for, say 2 minutes, without stopping). Or try drawing – anything. Doodle shapes: leaves, twigs, whatever is at hand. Anything to get you started. You’ll be surprised how quickly your mind will wander and start making up it’s own shapes. You never know, it might just spark an idea. Forgive me if I have already mentioned this on a previous post but it is something a say quite often. Story ideas, for me,  is a bit like making a jigsaw puzzle. The joining together of often unrelated pieces that, when put together, form a bigger picture.

A friend reminded me today of one of my favourite quotations. I’ve had it up on my bebo profile for a long time, without really explaining what it means.

Apparently, the great Italian sculptor Bernini was asked how he created such a beautiful marble statue of an elephant. His answer was to get a block of marble and “take away everything that isn’t an elephant.”

In writing my stories, I always remember this, and strive to take away everything that isn’t an elephant. That is, to remove (or not insert in the first place) anything that is not absolutely essential to the story.

Michelangelo said a similar thing, but he said it with less wit and no elephants:

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

But then again, I do give Michelangelo a lot of credit for a different quotation, one which sums up my attitude to plot:

“A great sculpture can roll down a hill without breaking.”

A good book must have a plot that is absolutely indestructible and inevitable. You could throw it down a hill and it would land the right way up.

(PS. “People who love quotations love meaningless generalisations.” – Graham Greene)

Here’s a follow-up message I received in response to my previous post. Jacob from Coventry wrote:

Hey Sam, just wanted to say thanks, I have decided to write a book upon seeing that. I know it won’t be anything special but when I finish it I would love for you to read it. Thanks Sam, hope you’re ok,
Jacob

Here’s how I answered:

Hi Jacob!

You’re very welcome. Ali’s question is one I get asked quite a lot, so I figured my reply might be useful to people (and Ali gave her permission for me to quote her! ;D)

Two things. First, while I wish you the very best of luck with your writing, I can’t really help you directly – even by reading it. To be frank, I’ve kind of got my hands full working on my own stuff – and besides, I don’t want to run the risk of inadvertently discouraging someone or hurting their feelings by saying the wrong thing (it’s happened in the past) so I’ve made it my policy when people ask me to read their unpublished work to say no.

Sorry if that sounds harsh, it’s the way it is I’m afraid. But I can – if you think it’s helpful – advise you on your writing in a general sort of way if you like. So that brings me to the second thing: You shouldn’t go into the writing of a book saying it’s not going to be special!

I’m not saying be arrogant about it. But the best way to write a book, I reckon, is to do your best to write absolutely the most stunning and amazing and thrilling and gripping book you possibly can…

NB: Like the SPIDERCAT, these handsome BRAINSLUG CUPCAKES don’t have any particular intended relevance to this post either. But if you want the recipe, once you’ve finished reading just click here. ;D

…When I sit down to start thinking about a book, I ask myself a question that goes something like this:

If you, personally, were to come across a book that had everything you want in a book – that once you started reading it you wouldn’t want to stop even to eat or sleep – what sort of a book would it be? What would the elements be?

Make a list if you like (that’s how I started The Black Tattoo!) Then work out how you can make them into the best story you’ve ever read. The results may not turn out quite how you hoped, but your intentions, your ambitions, should be spectacular.

You have to be excited about your book. I think that’s the only way to go. Excitement about your book will keep you going through the tough bits of writing it. Better yet, that excitement will transmit through your words to your readers – because the best books are the ones that are filled with the passion and enthusiasm and commitment of the person who wrote them.

Hope that’s helpful, Jacob! Sorry again about the reading thing: I hope you understand. But as I say, if you ever want me to advise you on something about writing in a more general way, feel free to drop me a line again whenever you like.

All best wishes to you,

Sam

[My thanks to Ali and Jacob for kindly giving their permission for me to quote them here.]