Making Faces

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: Jack-o-Lanterns

One of my favorite things to do for Halloween is carve Jack-o-lanterns. There are two types of Jack-o-lantern faces: the traditional, triangle-eyed happy smiling Jack-o-lantern, and the scary monster pumpkinhead. I really love turning a harmless gourd into a scary monster that glows in the dark. As I turn my pumpkin, looking for the best side for its face, it reveals its monster within.

While studying fear this year, I found there are also two approaches to facing our fears. One, the one we’ve heard since we were kids, is that we have to be brave, conquer our fears, and not be afraid. The other approach is to accept fear as part of our lives, befriend it, and use it to our advantage.

In Fear_(Aal) by Thich Nhat Hanh he says, “We may think that if we ignore our fears, they’ll go away. But if we bury worries and anxieties in our consciousness, they continue to affect us and bring us more sorrow.” But human nature is to move toward pleasure and away from pain, and fear, for most people, is an unpleasant experience. In The Art of Fear_(Aal), Kristen Ulmer says, “Suffering = Discomfort x Resistance.” And the part of that equation we have some control over is resistance. She says that instead of avoiding fear, we need to honor it, to treat it the way we want to be treated. Listen to fear and try to learn what it is there to teach us.

The initial physical fight, flight, or freeze response only lasts a few minutes, so if we don’t resist it, but breathe into it while facing it with wonder and asking it questions, we may learn to respect its usefulness in real dangerous situations, and minimize its adverse effects in situations of imagined danger.

As writers, making friends with our fear response can help us write more deeply. If we can honor our fear response and not avoid it, we will be more likely to sit with memories of formative moments in our lives that were frightening at the time. Fear is part of life. It will always cause discomfort, but how we respond to the physical discomfort is something we can practice.

One thing we can do before we sit down to write is make ourselves feel physically safe with somatic shaking:

OctPoWriMo

Like jack-o-lanterns poems can have many faces. A poet can write about one topic in a hundred different ways in a hundred different poems, or express many different points of view in one poem. Something that terrifies me may not scare someone else at all. They may not even believe it exists. Within each fear, each monster, we are each represented in different ways.

Example Poem: “Ghosts” by Anne Sexton from Poems Dead and Undead_(Aal)

Ghosts

Some ghosts are women,
neither abstract nor pale,
their breasts as limp as killed fish.
Not witches, but ghosts
who come, moving their useless arms
like forsaken servants.

Not all ghosts are women,
I have seen others;
fat, white-bellied men,
wearing their genitals like old rags.
Not devils, but ghosts.
This one thumps barefoot, lurching
above my bed.

But that isn’t all.
Some ghosts are children.
Not angels, but ghosts;
curling like pink tea cups
on any pillow, or kicking,
showing their innocent bottoms, wailing
for Lucifer.

~Anne Sexton

How do the similes and negations in this poem make the ghosts more real and more frightening?

Prompt: Write a poem about diversity within one type of monster. Use specific physical details along with similes. Use repetition. Use negation.

Possible form: A series of Lanturnes—a five line verse with the syllabic pattern: one, two three, four, one

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Twenty-five 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: