Don’t Look Her in the Eye

Writober 2025: Our Deepest Fears>Prompt Post

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🔗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: Snakes/Gorgons

Gorgons are scary for lots of reasons: they have snakes for hair, and if they catch your eye, you’ll turn to stone. When we think of the fear response, we think of fight or flight as our possible responses, but there’s another possible fear response: freeze—not being able to do anything at all.

Imagine being turned into a statue. You can’t move. You can’t turn your head. All you can do is observe what is directly in front of you.

As writers reframing our point of view, and working within limiting constraints can help spur creative ideas.

Quick framing exercise: Cut a two inch square in a piece of cardboard the size of your face. Hold this square in front of you (about a foot from your nose) and observe what’s right in front of you for five minutes. What did you notice? How was observing through your frame different from how you usually observe?

OctPoWriMo

When writing poetry, we employ many self-imposed constraints. Poetic forms each have their own constraints: syllables per line, stresses and feet per line, rhyme scheme, repetitions, etc. In a lipogram the constraint is to not use a letter through the whole poem, or to only use one vowel. We use constraints to decide how we’re going to break our lines: enjambment or end stops. We use constraints to decide how we’ll break our stanzas: couplets, tercets, quatrains, etc.

Any rule or constraint we make up for ourselves while writing or revising a poem is a way of reframing how we think about a topic. The poet Bernadette Mayer made a huge list she calls writing experiments. (You may have to sign up for ModPo to view this, but it’s free and I highly recommend it).

Example Poem: “Monsters I’ve Met” by Shel Silverstein from Poems Dead and Undead_(Aal)

Monsters I’ve Met

I met a ghost, but he didn’t want my head,
He only wanted to know the way to Denver.
I met a devil, but he didn’t want my soul,
He only wanted to borrow my bike awhile.
I met a vampire, but he didn’t want my blood,
He only wanted tow nickles for a dime.
I keep meeting all the right people—
At all the wrong times.

~Shel Silverstein

Prompt: Who are the monsters in your neighborhood? The monsters that you meet, while you’re walking down the street each day? What mundane things might these monsters do, or ask you for?

Possible form: Couplets (stanzas of two lines)-Write a poem in couplets where the first line is that of expectation and the second line is what actually happened. Or the first line is the human voice and the second is the response of a monster.

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Eleven 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.

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.

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