Tried writing a horror story about my concrete pour and it actually worked

So I was sitting down to write a horror prompt for a contest last month and I just couldn't get into the usual haunted house stuff. I was super frustrated after like 20 minutes of staring at my screen. Then I remembered this job I did back in July where we poured a slab for a shed and the ground started shifting weird underneath. The mud started bubbling up through the rebar and the foreman just said "that's normal, keep going" but it felt so wrong. So I wrote a short story about a guy pouring a foundation and realizing the dirt underneath is alive and hungry. I submitted it to a small online horror zine and they actually published it. Learned that the best prompts come from stuff you already know about even if it's boring concrete work. Has anyone else pulled from their day job for a story prompt and gotten good results?

2 comments

2 Comments

avery_roberts676d ago

Jump right into proving you can make anything scary (even drywall, trust me). I wrote a whole flash piece about hanging drywall in an old house where the dust kept forming faces in the air before settling (like, you could see eyes and mouths for a split second). The trades are perfect for horror because nobody thinks about how weird materials actually behave. Concrete bubbling, drywall dust moving, wood creaking at specific times... it's all creepy if you just sit with it long enough. Plus you get technical details that make the lie feel real, which is basically cheating at writing horror if you ask me.

beth5596d ago

That dust thing is close but not quite right... drywall dust doesn't really hang in the air like that. It's heavy, falls straight down in a pile. You'd get face shapes on the floor or on your boots maybe, but suspended in the air? Only if you're using a fan or something. The concrete bubbling one is spot on though, that's real. So is the way old plaster dust has this weird almost greasy feel to it when you sand it. Those little real details are what make the fake stuff land harder.