Take ten minutes to discover what you can create, and what strange and wonderful effects you can produce. And after ten minutes, you'll be left holding a mysterious new poem or tiny short story, as if it materialised from thin air to visit you. How? Well, as the GHOSTLY + GOTHIC workshop creeps nearer, I've got a brace of free Writing Skills lined up for you, to whet your appetite and get your pen moving. And here's the first: The Sound of Silence.
In any kind of writing, silence is one of those things that we need to evoke rather than name, for it to create any effect on the reader. Counterintuitively, the way we do that is with sound. Tiny, quiet sounds. There's a reason the cliché for a long silence is "Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked": it's only when everything else falls still that we hear those distant or quiet sounds.
You can use this to create a ghostly + gothic poem or a piece of flash fiction (a very short story). Start off by playing with silence: you can use the place where you are right now, a very quiet place that you've visited, or a memory of a very quiet time. Create its silence by describing all the tiny sounds you can hear. To keep it to ten minutes, spend seven minutes just describing those tiny sounds as precisely as you can. (If you're hankering for a longer stretch of writing, you could spend 15 minutes on the description.)
If you're creating a poem: To lift the description into a sense of meaning infusing your poem, think what that silence might mean to your poem's narrator, or what realisation they might come to in it. (The poem's narrator can be you, but doesn't have to be.) Include that meaning or realisation in the final lines, keeping it as discreet as you can: we want the sense of meaning to infuse a poem, not to label it.
If you're creating a tiny short story: To storify your description, you could take the same approach of realisation as the poemers, as a quiet piece of literary fiction. Alternately, you could tap into the potential creepiness of silence with a final revelatory line that explains, chillingly, the reason for the silence. Then go back to the start of your piece and add a first line or two to tell us who the character in the space is and why they're there, and introduce some sort of question that will make us want to read on to find out more.
Why this skill?
When we want to create a particular effect for the reader – a sense of silence, a creepy atmosphere, a particular emotion – it almost never works to simply the name the thing we want to evoke. Concentrating on the small ingredients that add up to that effect works far better and pulls the reader into the experience, as something they're sharing, rather than telling them about it. This is especially useful for GHOSTLY+GOTHIC stories, which depend so much on atmosphere and wildly heightened emotions. Once you've practised this skill with silence, you can explore it further with other effects you might want to create: what actions will show a character's excitement, trepidation, fear? What tiny ingredients turn an empty sunlit room for peaceful to unnerving?
The GHOSTLY+GOTHIC workshop is on 28–29 October, live, online, and open to bookings from anywhere in the world. Through games, discussion, and quick-fire writing, you'll explore the dark and misty genre of the Gothic, and create your own Gothic story. All in fabulous company with a lovely bunch of story-loving people. Click here for more details and to book. And to make sure you don't miss next week's Writing Skill, sign up to the newsletter on the side / underneath this post.
