The Scares Are In the Sounds

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

During a scary part of a movie, we often close our eyes, or peek through our fingers over our eyes, but we forget to cover our ears. The sounds are often the scariest part. Have you ever thought about the sounds that scare you the most?

In movies, a person called a foley artist, uses all sorts of things you might not expect to create the sounds you hear.

Check out this fun video showing a foley artist at work:

And here’s ACMI’s Foley Sound Exhibit

As writers, we also have a bunch of interesting tools for creating sounds:

• Onomatopoeia – is the term for words that sound like what they describe. Fun words like bang, crash, boom, pow, bark, meow, cough, hiccup, hum, and splash.
• Euphony and Cacophony – Euphony is an agreeableness of sound, a combination of sounds that please the ear. Cacophony is a combination of sounds that grate on the ear like the harsh and jarring j, x and k sounds.
• Alliteration – the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words.
• Assonance and Consonance – Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in words that are close to each other in a sentence or phrase. Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds.
• rhyme and slant-rhyme (or close-rhyme) – Slant rhyme is a rhyme of words with sounds that are similar, but not the same. I especially like the Yeats example rhyming young with song.

OctPoWriMo

In last year’s first post of Writober, Letters: Symbols of Sound, I shared a chart that separates consonants by where they are formed in the mouth. I really enjoy reading across the chart and feeling the change of the sounds from the front of my mouth to the back of my throat. Which consonants sound scarier? Which consonants feel scarier? How could you use this in your poem?

Example Poem: Nocturne by Li-Young Lee from Poems Dead and Undead_(Aal)

Nocturne 

That scraping of iron on iron when the wind
rises, what is it? Something the wind won’t
quit with, but drags back and forth.
Sometimes faint, far, then suddenly, close, just
beyond the screened door, as if someone there
squats in the dark honing his wares against
my threshold. Half steel wire, half metal wing,
nothing and anything might make this noise
of saws and rasps, a creaking and groaning
of bone-growth, or body-death, marriages of rust,
or ore abraded. Tonight, something bows
that should not bend. Something stiffens that should
slide. Something, loose and not right,
rakes or forges itself all night.

~Li-Young Lee

How does this poem create a scary soundtrack?

Prompt: What sounds scare you? Think of a time you were startled by a sound, in the dark, alone at night. Describe it as clearly and with as much detail as you can. In your poem, try to recreate the fear you felt through only describing sounds.

Possible Form: Sound Poem A Sound Poem is intended primarily for performance and emphasizes the phonetic aspects of language and downplay the importance of meaning and structure.

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Two 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.

Flash Fiction Tip: Write everything that comes to mind, then chisel away everything that isn’t absolutely necessary to get to the heart of the story like sculpting your flash fiction.

Inspire Thoughtful Creative Writing Through Art from edutopia

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.

Remember, all of the prompts are provided as inspiration. You may use any of them or none of them. The only goal of the challenges is to come up with creative work each day. Hopefully the prompts will help you stretch yourself, and try new things. Have fun!

Here’s some music to get you movin’ and in the mood: