I’ve always found it difficult to maintain a blog. Mostly because, despite being a storyteller, I don’t think I’m that interesting. So I decided to plan a story series, something I could do once a month. Something short, so I could commit to it easily. That’s when I found myself thinking about two sentence horror stories.
When two sentence horror stories came to the forefront about ten years ago, I remember not being impressed. It broke the mold of what I considered a story to be. I don’t know if I’d call myself a traditionalist, but I do have some OCD tendencies, so that was probably the source of my distaste for the form.
However, before I wrote my first story, I’d already been writing poetry for years. As an adult, I helped mentor the poetry club at the school where I worked. It was there that I fell in love with haiku.
A highly disciplined form of Japanese poetry, haiku made a good gateway form. While most of the students usually moved on to free form almost immediately, I usually lingered with haiku for a couple weeks, sharing not only the finished work, but also my drafts.
Because a lot of new writers (including me, when I was a new writer) believe that the art is in the inspiration, the word in the moment. And while there is something to be said for the inspiration that drives the creation of art, it is the craft of editing and development that can elevate good writing to great writing.
But horror haiku didn’t feel quite right.
I tried approaching the conundrum from another angle, thinking about when I was going to do this. The number 13 already has so many associations with the horror genre, posting every 13th of the month seemed like a no brainer. That’s when I connected an obvious dot.
Because 13 words is a manageable length. It needs to be disciplined, so you can’t waste a single word, but still recognizable as prose. But it’s more versatile than two sentences.
So, 13 Words was born.
For my first one, published on December 13th, I reached back into my poetry notebook for inspiration. I’d worked on a narrative poem for several months, but it just wouldn’t coalesce. But I still had all of my drafted stanzas and notes, which I distilled down to the poem’s original inspiration:
Pets missing from backyards. No squirrels in trees. Something scratching at our door.
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For this month’s 13 Words, I took inspiration from an unpublished story I’d written, “The Devil’s Chord.” Lovecraftian in nature, as I worked on this month’s 13 words, I reworked it more in that direction.
You can read it here.
The Chimerical Dark 