Young Writers Society

I want to give my story a sort of haunting/creepy feel, but I'm not sure how to do that. Any suggestions?

Simply darken the mood of a given scene with dark imagery....

Seriously. Think about what creeps you out, and then use that kind of creepiness to set up your own haunted scene with imagery to boot.

Mkay. That makes sense. :D:D Thank you for the advice. :D:D:D:D

My pleasure.

you could say... this place gave everybody the creeps when they walked in.. this lets them know that this place is creepy i think its haunted... this lets the reader know wehre thies place is... its creepy and haunted... which is kinda like haunting... or you could be like... she entered the and was haunted by the creepiness.. which also conveys the feeling

Don't tell us more than you absolutely have to. Have you ever read Shadow Child by Joseph Citro? Read it. It's abso-freaking-lutely terrifying because he never reveals more than he has to, but what little he does tell us is really scary. That book creeped me out for weeks after I finished reading it.

Hm. That's an interesting idea. I think I'll put that into play. Mwahahahaha....

Honestly, bringing across the emotions and moods that I'm feeling through my writing is absolutely the hardest thing for me to do, but then I work on it so much that it's always the part I'm most satisfied with in the end.

So here's how I go about it, because I don't really know another way to give such advice. =/

I am very introspective. When I think about things that terrify me, I really dive into it, thinking about every aspect of why it terrifies me. What is it that makes it so horrible? What do I hate about it? When I can explain to myself why something is frightening to me, I can also explain it to other people, because just saying that it's slimy and creepy and gross isn't enough for me; I really need to know, if only for myself.

For instance, I'm scared to death of spiders: I remember my first school lesson about black widows. Such a small creature, and beautiful if you really look at it; long, slender legs of ink black, with only a scarlet mark on the sac as a warning. I can't recall being told that it's rare for their venom to actually be fatal; we were only shown clips of victims in their hospital beds, pale and tired, and were told that these people died after being bitten by black widow spiders. I remember a narrator saying that they're some of the most venomous spiders in the world, and then the teacher going on about other dangerous species that live in our area. Don't mind telling the nine-year-old that most domestic spiders aren't venomous at all, just tell her that there's a black widow's nest in her garage.

Now, whenever I think of a spider, what comes to mind is watching a butterfly struggle in a web of silk, trying to free itself. Then the spider appears, scuttling its eight legs like claws across the strings, a distinct sound like a clicking hiss coming from somewhere inside of it, and then it swiftly, coldly wraps the butterfly alive in a sac, punctures a hole through the silk, and injects its venom into the squirming prey until it stops struggling.

Now, usually I would spend hours and hours and hours going over that single paragraph, changing wording and sentence structure over and over to get the right effect, but I don't quite have that time right now =X So I know that it's not quite up to par with Goosebumps or (apparently) Shadow Child. My point, though, is that if you know why something is frightening, then the reader will most likely know too, and will most likely also be frightened.