When the Tiny Become Giant

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: Giant Insects

Small insects are scary enough. They have too many legs and crawl all over things including us. Many have colonies and work en masse to overtake other creatures much larger than they are. So when we imagine these creepy crawlers as giants, it triggers our universal fear of extinction: moving us from the top of the food chain to the bottom.

Hyperbole is a rhetorical device using intentional exaggeration for emphasis or comic effect. Hyperbole is also called auxesis which literally means growth. Using hyperbole in our writing, we can take a tiny insect and make it grow and grow and grow until it is giant and frightening.

I found this crazy page that puts you in a field with some giant insects called Giant Insect World demo from Royal Entomological Society, if you’re looking for some giant insect inspiration.

OctPoWriMo

Poets use hyperbole or exaggeration for emphasis and for emotional effect. When speaking, I often exaggerate when talking, and don’t even notice I’m doing it. It’s so easy to say “everyone was doing it” or “there were millions of them” or “it was huge” when none of those statements were factual.

Example Poem: “The Bat” by Theodore Roethke from All Poetry 

The Bat

By day the bat is cousin to the mouse.
He likes the attic of an aging house.

His fingers make a hat about his head.
His pulse beat is so slow we think him dead.

He loops in crazy figures half the night
Among the trees that face the corner light.

But when he brushes up against a screen,
We are afraid of what our eyes have seen:

For something is amiss or out of place
When mice with wings can wear a human face.

~Theodore Roethke

How does this poet use hyperbole? What effect does it have?

Prompt: Think of an insect that you think would be terrifying if it was giant. In your poem describe it in detail. How would it move? What would it do? End with its most terrifying feature. Have you used hyperbole?

Possible form: Lyric poem

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Thirteen 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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Music to get us moving: