Mutations

Writober 2025: Our Deepest Fears>Prompt Post

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🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Mutation

Horror mutations happen for different reasons: toxic sludge, radiation, genetic experimentation, mad science: however mutations happen, they trigger the universal fears of ego-death (humiliation, embarrassment) and separation (being ostracized, alone).

As writers, mutation can lead to inspiration. We can take aspects of different stories and mash them together to get a completely new idea. Think of the myriad of stories that are modernizations of Greek myths or Shakespeare’s plays.

Quick Mutation Exercise: Choose two stories (books or movies) from two genres you consider opposites like Sci-fi and Historical fiction or Romance and Horror. Select stories that are as different as you can think of. Now list ten different ways that you could mash your two stories together.

Did you come up with at least one story idea that interests you and you don’t think has ever been told before?

For some mutation fun you may want to check out The Virtual Ninja Turtle Museum. Though this site is all about the TMNT action figures, I found the mutations of the different villains really fun and interesting.

OctPoWriMo

In modern poetry, every poetic movement is a mutation of poetic ideas. Each new poetic “school” with its own manifesto redefining what poetry should or could be that made them new and unique, quick to be swallowed up by the next school. Each poet creating variations, mutations to forms, allegories, themes. If poetry does one thing, it changes—mutates—constantly.

Example Poem: “The Superstitious Ghost” by Arthur Guiterman from Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre

The Superstitious Ghost

I’m such a quiet little ghost,
     Demure and inoffensive,
The other spirits say I’m most
     Absurdly apprehensive.

Through all the merry hours of night
I’m uniformly cheerful;
I love the dark; but in the light,
     I own I’m rather fearful.

Each dawn I cower down in bed,
     In every brightness seeing,
That weird uncanny for of dread—
     An awful Human Being!

Of course I’m told they can’t exist,
     That Nature would not let them:
But Willy Spook, the Humanist,
     Declares that he has met them!

He says they do not glide like us,
     But walk in eerie paces;
They’re solid, not diaphanous,
     With arms! and legs!! and faces!!!

And some are beggars, some are kings,
     Some have and some are wanting,
They squander time in doing things,
     Instead of simply haunting.

They talk of “art,” the horrid crew,
     And things they call “ambitions.”—
Oh, yes, I know as well as you
     They’re only superstitions.

But should the dreadful day arrive
     When, staring up, I see one,
I’m sure ’twill scare me quite alive;
     And then—Oh, then I’ll be one!

~Arthur Guiterman

In this poem the poet mutates the meaning of the word “humanist”. How else is this poem a mutation?

Prompt: Think of your deepest fear. Now imagine it is afraid of you. Write your poem from the frightened fear’s point of view. Why does it fear you? What expert would it site to defend its position? 

Possible form: Mutate a form. Take any form and make it your own: change the rules—the syllable count, the meter, the rhyme scheme, or any other aspect of the form. Or create your own poetic form.

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Fourteen 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.

If you enjoy these posts and the work I do here, please head to my buymeacoffee page and show your support! Thank you so much. Every bit helps keep this site going.

Music to get us moving: