Tag: novels

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an incomplete list of unsettling short stories I read in textbooks

  • the scarlet ibis
  • marigolds
  • the diamond necklace
  • the monkey’s paw
  • the open boat
  • the lady and the tiger
  • the minister’s black veil
  • an occurrence at owl creek bridge
  • a rose for emily
  • (I found that one by googling “short story corpse in the house,” first result)
  • the cask of amontillado
  • the yellow wallpaper
  • the most dangerous game
  • a good man is hard to find

some are well-known, some obscure, some I enjoy as an adult, all made me uncomfortable between the ages of 11-15

add your own weird shit, I wanna be literary and disturbed

The Tell-Tale Heart, The Gift of the Magi, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County, Thank You Ma’am

the box social by james reaney. i remember we all had to silently read it in class, and you would hear the moment everyone reached the Part because some people would audibly go “what”

wHat did I just put my eyes on

“The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury

Not quite a short story, but read in class: “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” from The Twilight Zone

Harrison Bergeron, Cat and the Coffee Drinkers

“Where are you going and where have you been” by Joyce carol oates

“The Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury

the lottery by shirley jackson

i can’t believe Roald Dahl’s “The Landlady” wasn’t already mentioned

and also it’s not so much unsettling as more absurdist but “The Leader” by Eugene Ionesco definitely made me go wtf

Ett halvt ark papper.
I cried so much.

Ночь у мазара, А. Шалимов

A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury

I Have no Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury 

Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby, by Donald Barthelme

We read lots of good disturbing shit in hs or in the writing groups I joined in hs but somehow the top of the heap for shit that haunted me’s still indisputably Ethan Canin’s “The Palace Thief”. It’s not horror as such but it freaked me the fuck out. 

There was another O. Henry short story we read that was also really alarming but I had to google a major spoiler (which is also a warning) to recall the name – “The Furnished Room”.  

there will come soft rains by bradbury was very unsettling for middle school me

I had no idea so many were all written by Ray Bradbury, why did he do this to us

“Emergency” by Dennis Johnson – not entirely disturbing but really weird and there’s one Bad Part

“A Small, Good Thing” by Raymond Carver – again not all that bad but sad and kind of creepy 

i had to read a collapse of horses by brian evenson for a writing class last year and it’s. very fucking weird

“the birds” by du maurier

Bradbury wrote a lot of weird shit. But, “The Book of Sand” and"The Library of Babel" by Luis Borges.

“It’s a Good Life” – Jerome Bixby
“The Little Black Bag” – Cyril M. Cornbluth
“The Cold Equations” – Tom Godwin
“The Nine Billion Names of God” – Arthur C. Clarke
“Mars is Heaven!” – Ray Bradbury
“Born of Man and Woman” – Richard Matheson
“That Only A Mother” – Judith Maril
“The Country of the Kind” – Damon Knight
“Mimsy Were The Borogroves” – Lewis Padgett
“Lamb to the Slaughter” – Roald Dahl
“We Can Get Them For You Wholesale” – Neil Gaiman
“BLIT” and “Different Kinds of Darkness” – David Langford (set in the same universe) (there are a couple of other “basilisk” stories and they’re worth checking out)
“The Secret Number” – Igor Teper

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Nearly anything by Borges tbh, he specializes in unsettling

Technically read it on my own in high school but Guts by Chuck Palahniuk wigged me out for a while.

Also, from college, A Very Old Man With Enourmous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Magical realism as a genre and genres inspired by it have some nutty fucking short stories and there are a lot that I remember imagery from but not the titles or authors (Borges is one).

POPULAR MECHANICS

I forget the title, but there was a story in one of my textbooks where the narrator  hangs a kitten after his dad can’t stand its mewing and says someone should kill it.  He gets in very deep trouble with his parents, and his dad says he didn’t mean it.  I felt weird for days.  We didn’t read it in class, but I was one of those bright kids who did extra reading.  For fun.

“Leiningen Versus the Ants,” Carl Stephenson.

“The Voice in the Night”, William Hope Hodgson

“Survivor Type”, Stephen King

How to Plot A Complex Novel in One Day (It WILL take all day)

lizard-is-writing:

Now first, I have to say, that the plot you’re able to come up with in one day is not going to be without its flaws, but coming up with it all at once, the entire story unfolds right in front of you and makes you want to keep going with it. So, where to begin? 

  • What is your premise and basic plot? Pick your plot. I recommend just pulling one from this list. No plots are “original” so making yours interesting and complicated will easily distract from that fact, that and interesting characters. Characters will be something for you to work on another day, because this is plotting day. You’ll want the main plot to be fairly straight forward, because a confusing main plot will doom you if you want subplots. 
  • Decide who the characters will be. They don’t have to have names at this point. You don’t even need to know who they are other than why they have to be in the story. The more characters there are the more complicated the plot will be. If you intend to have more than one subplot, then you’ll want more characters. Multiple interconnected subplots will give the illusion that the story is very complicated and will give the reader a lot of different things to look at at all times. It also gives you the chance to develop many side characters. The plot I worked out yesterday had 13 characters, all were necessary. Decide their “roles” don’t bother with much else. This seems shallow, but this is plot. Plot is shallow. 
  • Now, decide what drives each character. Why specifically are they in this story? You can make this up. You don’t even know these characters yet. Just so long as everyone has their own motivations, you’re in the clear. 
  • What aren’t these characters giving away right off the bat? Give them a secret! It doesn’t have to be something that they are actively lying about or trying to hide, just find something that perhaps ties them into the plot or subplot. This is a moment to dig into subplot. This does not need to be at all connected to their drive to be present in the story.  Decide who is in love with who, what did this person do in the 70’s that’s coming back to bite them today, and what continues to haunt what-his-face to this very day. This is where you start to see the characters take shape. Don’t worry much about who they are or what they look like, just focus on what they’re doing to the story. 
  • What is going to change these characters? Now this will take some thinking. Everyone wants at least a few of the characters to come out changed by the end of the story, so think, how will they be different as a result of the plot/subplot? It might not be plot that changes them, but if you have a lot of characters, a few changes that are worked into the bones of the plot might help you.
  • Now list out the major events of the novel with subplot in chronological order. This will be your timeline. Especially list the historical things that you want to exist in backstory. List everything you can think of. Think about where the story is going. At this point, you likely haven’t focused too much on the main plot, yeah, it’s there, but now really focus on the rising actions, how this main plot builds its conflict, then the climactic moment. Make sure you get all of that in there. This might take a few hours. 
  • Decide where to start writing. This part will take a LOT of thinking. It’s hard! But now that you’ve got the timeline, pick an interesting point to begin at. Something with action. Something relevant. Preferably not at the beginning of your timeline – you want to have huge reveals later on where these important things that happened prior are exposed. This is the point where you think about what information should come out when. This will be a revision of your last list, except instead of being chronological, it exists to build tension. 
  • Once you’ve gotten the second list done, you’ve got a plot. Does it need work? Probably. But with that said, at this point you probably have no idea who half your characters are. Save that for tomorrow, that too will be a lot of work. 

After you’ve plotted the loose structure of your novel from this, see my next post to work on character!