Scares Can Get Sticky

Writober 2025: Our Deepest Fears>Prompt Post

🔗Post contains Amazon associate links (shown with Aal in parentheses)
🔗Links in the Table of Contents are Jump links to each of the challenges to navigate easily to the prompt of your interest: OctPoWriMo for poetry; Writober Flash Fiction for flash fiction; Halloween Photography Challenge for photography
🐦‍⬛Example poems are copied here for educational purposes.
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🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Texture

What does fear feel like? It can be ooey, gooey, oozing and dripping, or prickly and sharp, slicing and stabbing. It can be extremely hot, exploding and bursting into flames, or it can be extremely cold, shivers down our spines and goosebumps on our moist skin.

Often textures combine with smells, like putrid mushy rot, or earthy swampy decay; the sharp metallic iron of dripping blood, or the sweet snap of crisp ant armor. There’s an exciting world of texture words to explore, but texture in writing can also mean layering different techniques.

Try describing three or more different sensory perceptions, then a physical reaction, and a contradictory thought. Or you could use sensory imagery from at least three different senses, follow it with a flash of triggered memory, then a conflicting physical sensation, or several conflicting sensations at once.

You may want to look for some textural inspiration at The Museum of Frights from Google Arts & Culture.

OctPoWriMo

Think of all the different textures around you. How many different textures are you touching right now? How do these textures affect your mood, your physical well-being, your thoughts? Did you choose these textures yourself?

What textures do you avoid? What textures scare you? What makes them frightening?

Example Poem: “Web” by Mary Oliver from American Primitive_(Aal)

Web

So this is fear.
The dark spider scuttles away
over the underboards.
I watch the blood bead on my skin
and think rapidly:
the last dollar,
the last piece of bread,
lightning sizzling under the door.
Whether it hurts or not
I imagine it does.
I remember a bat caught years ago
in the attic, how he tired
among the swung brooms,
not knowing we would let him go.
I get up to walk, to see if I can.
So this is fear.
The trapdoor
unnails itself; in the dusk
the curtains move
as though the wind had bones.

~Mary Oliver

How does this poem bring textures to mind?

Prompt: What textures frighten you? Choose one or more that brings a clear memory to mind. What rapid thoughts rush in while you’re exploring this tactile memory? Include the textures, rapid thoughts, physical sensations, and the memory in your poem.

Possible form: A Calligram – The calligram is a form of concrete poetry published by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1918. The calligram creates shapes with words. The shapes are as important to the poem as the words. Unlike typed concrete poetry, the calligram uses changes in size and shape of the lettering, and leaves white space in the image.

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Three Image

Click on the link and take a look at the image. How might this image relate to today’s theme? Write a piece of flash fiction, anything from a six-word story to 999 words. Feel free to bring in the OctPoWriMo prompt and the Photography Challenge prompt, anything that inspires your story.

You may want to take a look at Adding Texture to Your Story by Kara Jorgensen.

Halloween Photography Challenge

Thank you so much for joining me for this year’s October challenges. Remember to support each other by visiting and commenting on as many links as you can as we explore our Deepest Fears in anticipation of Halloween.

Here’s some music to get us moving: