You’re writing a ghost story. A murder mystery. A psychological thriller with a supernatural twist. A pulpy monster mash featuring a headless horseman.

Whatever it is, one thing you know for certain: it’s a scary story. At least, that’s what it wants to be when it grows up. You’re writing a story with jaws that bite and claws that catch, and you want to make sure your readers feel the same chills running up their spines that you felt when first you conceived of it.

But when the first draft is finished, it feels a little… flat. Its teeth are dull, its claws are clipped. It’s missing something; it’s dark, but not necessarily scary. It’s time to crank up the fear factor, but how?

Here are a few creative ideas for how to make a scary story scarier—just in time for Halloween.

What Makes a Story Scary?

Before you roll up your sleeves for revisions, ask yourself this: what makes a story scary in the first place? It’s tempting to turn to some obvious tropes for help, but before you do, consider this:

• Gore can make a story disturbing, but simply strewing random strings of intestines around a tale like party streamers is more likely to induce nausea than goosebumps.

• Monsters can be terrifying, but they can also be big loveable fuzzballs. Even if you’re sure your monsters aren’t the cuddly kind, they might still come off as merely threatening, rather than scary, depending on how they’re described.

• Location isn’t as important as it seems. Pretty much any place can become Spook Central if presented in the right light. On the flipside, many of the more obviously scary locations, like a haunted castle or corn field, can easily feel too familiar if you’re not careful.

• Phobias can be tricky devils. Leaning too hard into a phobia as a plot point can alienate readers who have a certain phobia for real and can’t stand reading about it, but also those readers who don’t have that phobia and don’t understand what makes it scary to those who do.

• Character death is not a magical mallet that will cast a spell of terror over your readers if you simply hit them over the head with it enough times. The fear factor here is also often less about death itself than about the circumstances that bring it about, and how the reader feels about the character who is dying.

In other words, scary stories aren’t scary because of their contents, but about how you present those contents to the reader. Truly scary stories touch on our deepest fears, engaging with our own personal inner demons rather than forcing someone else’s upon us.

Now, just as you obviously can’t be expected to read the minds of every single one of your future readers to learn exactly what would scare them the most, I cannot tell you exactly what language to use to make a specific story scarier. The words you need to use, the atmosphere you need to create, the traps you need to set that will trick your readers into scaring themselves—those are yours to discover. But I can offer a few ideas for how to make a scary story scarier that you can use for just about any horror narrative you write, now or in the future.

Creative Ways to Make a Scary Story Scarier

Rather than telling you what to write, here are some ideas for how to write more spookily.

Use what scares you the most. Don’t overthink this. It doesn’t have to be a rational fear; in fact, the more irrational, the more fun you might have with it. Consider also not just what you fear, but why you fear it—what is it about this thing that shakes you to your core? If it makes you nervous just to write about it, you’re probably headed in the right direction. The first person your story should scare, at least on some level, is you.

Use your readers’ fears against them. You may not be able to mind-read, but you can ask your readership directly what scares them for some inspiration. Don’t have a readership yet (or don’t want to give anything away)? Do some research; look up what common nightmares people in your ideal reader demographic have, and what fears and phobias are most common.

Set the mood. I’ve always found it incredibly helpful to mimic the atmosphere I’m trying to write in my surroundings when possible. For a scary story, you don’t need to go stay in Bran Castle to get the mood right—just try dimming the lights and listening to some creepy ambient tracks or spooky music. Soundtracks can work too, but take care—you don’t want to write a rip-off of The Exorcist by accident because you’ve been listening to “Tubular Bells” on repeat for three weeks. You can also decorate your writing area a bit if you’re a more visual person—just don’t use it as a constant excuse to procrastinate!

Make it interactive. In my opinion, video games and interactive fiction provide some of the scariest narrative experiences possible. Why? The interactive element of these mediums adds layers of responsibility, anticipation, and mortal peril that few narratives not of this type can achieve. What’s scarier than reading about a ghost haunting a house? Reading about a ghost haunting your house—and knowing you’re the one it’s after. However, if you’re not up for learning some programming just now, there is another way to add a slight interactive element to your narrative without switching storytelling mediums: leave things to the imagination. Often, the scariest parts of your story will be the parts your readers make up in their own heads, rather than a minutely detailed description you spent hours crafting to ensure your readers knew exactly what was going on.

Do some research. Maybe UFOs really are only the product of overactive imaginations, and maybe every ghostly phenomenon can be explained by science as a totally natural event. So what? Dig into some documentaries or some historical source materials about the legends surrounding whatever you’re writing about. A scary story should feel true, even if it isn’t, and using real accounts—regardless of how believable they may be—can sometimes help add a few layers to that realness.

What if I Make My Story TOO Scary?

I remember when P.T., the playable teaser for Silent Hills, came out in 2014, it was so viscerally terrifying that a discussion soon sprang up around the idea of games being “too scary.” Do writers and creators have a responsibility to reign in the terror factor in order to maintain the enjoyability of a narrative? Is it even possible to make something truly too horrifying to be worth publishing?

While I don’t think any narrative can be too scary on a general scale, it’s certainly possible that you may accidentally write a story too scary in terms of what you intended. Maybe your ghost story was just supposed to evoke a fun, campfire story sensibility, but your beta readers are reporting insomnia and night terrors as side-effects. Or maybe your serial killer got a little too gory with the details, and now your YA murder mystery is suddenly stuck in the adults-only zone.

If this happens to you, first of all: congrats. This is a problem not unlike that of having too much money. Yes, there are real challenges involved here, but that doesn’t make your grass look any less green to us horror writers standing on the other side of the fence.

That being said… if you find that you have made your scary story too scary, consider first whether you are writing for the wrong audience. Maybe you’ve been telling yourself you’re a YA author, when in fact your style and sensibilities skew more toward adult fiction. If this is the case, the solution may simply be to market your story to a different, more appropriate demographic. 

Alternatively, it may be that you need to start over. Maybe you needed to write this stuff out before you got to what you really want to write—maybe you needed to exorcise your own demons before you could explore the softer side of Spookville. It’s okay to put this one away and try again with a different idea. Every author has a drawer of abandoned stories they may or may never go back to; this can be one of yours. Go and write something else–and maybe turn the fear factor dial down one this time.

And if it happens again—if your stories keep creeping you, or your readers, out more than you mean them to? Maybe it’s time to embrace your inner Stephen King or Shirley Jackson and revel in your darker side.

‘Tis the season, after all.

The Harbinger’s Head is an interactive fiction novel inspired in part by one of my personal favorite horror stories of all time, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Click here to check out the first chapter for free!