Lester Dent and Me

So this one was in response to people saying my previous ghost stories weren't scary enough. By that some of them clearly meant weren't horrible enough in a gory sense. I thought I'd write one that was, but of course you can be the judge of whether I succeeded. I was aware that this is a Monster in The House story, using Blake Snyder's genre typing. The main rule is "don't get eaten" which has an ironical meaning in this story. If you are familiar with Snyder's ideas, this genre is typified by someone being in a place they can't get out of due to physical or other impediments and a monster has been created by their "sin". They have to face their sin to resolve the issue.

I also wanted to try out Lester Dent's method for writing short stories. This is based on four parts each 1500 words each. I went over this word count in the rewrite by about a third, but I thought that was forgivable. +Karen Woodward  discusses this very usefully on her blog.  Dent was writing pulp action fiction so his is all about murders and fist fights. Clearly that wasn't going to work in a horror story where you don't want the monster to appear until much later, if at all - creating the atmosphere by hints rather than revelations. (Do revelations ever create atmosphere?). I also wanted to avoid laying too much pipe as Blake Snyder says - I didn't want much exposition at all. When I'd finished I found that I needed a little bit more.

I was also aware of +Michael Moorcock 's advice about dropping little bits of mystery in - even if you're not actually going to explain them at the end, though I think it all becomes clear. 

So, I did all that to the plan and I finished a story that I was 50% satisfied with. I wondered whether that was because it just wasn't tense enough to anyone, or it wasn't tense enough to me because unlike when I pantsed stories before, the story itself was a surprise to me and therefore tantalising or scary to me, I knew the bones of this one and so maybe it was too clinical?

I don't know. I'll wait for the reviews. My kids liked it anyway, but maybe they just wanted to sweeten me up so I gave them money?

Tony