For example, maybe you have an intense fear of losing your grip on reality and hurting someone close to you. You may then use this fear as inspiration for your story about a character who loses their sense of reality and spirals out of control.

Your main character may have an internal flaw, like a struggle with self-esteem or jealous around others. The character may also have difficulty with an external flaw, like a physical ailment or a physical trait they find unattractive. For example, your main character may be a young girl who is struggling with puberty. She may struggle to make friends in high school and relate to other girls her age because she is seen as a freak or a weirdo. She may have a preference for disturbing stories of the insane and the mad.

For example, perhaps your main character is triggered by an intense moment with a bully at school. She may then start to lose her sense of reality. She may make choices or decisions that she would not make otherwise if she were not in a disturbed state of mind.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. It by Stephen King. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.

You can create a terrifying atmosphere by including details that feel slightly off or unsettling to the reader. Twist what seems normal into something disturbing and surreal. Add a dash of horror to even the most everyday experiences and events. For example, you may add a strange twist to your main character’s day at high school where her experiences seem a little unsettling or off. Maybe she opens her locker to find a pile of someone else’s hair or perhaps she looks out the window in class to see a girl who looks just like her across the street.

You may try to set up your character to experience terror or horror in their life in degrees, starting with a small thing that goes bad and working up to a larger thing that goes terribly wrong. You may also have other characters around your main character experience bad things, creating a general sense of drama in your story. For example, you may have a main character who makes poor decisions due to her disturbed state of mind. She may become violent or lash out at others, leading to bad things happening to those closest to her.

For example, you may describe a character’s experience of a manic episode as “feeling like the world was split in two and I was on the side of darkness and confusion. ” You may also try to describe the way blood smells or tastes, rather than lean on familiar descriptions of blood as “crimson red” or “scarlet. ” You may describe blood as “bitter and metallic” or “wet, red rivets that pooled around my sneakers. ”

One way to avoid these cliches is to take a situation that is familiar and making it personal to you and your perspective as a writer. Maybe you add a twist to a cliche story line, such as a family with a deep, dark secret that is revealed at the very beginning of the story, leaving the characters to deal with the aftermath in the present. Or perhaps you make your “woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown” specific to your experience of anxiety or a friend’s experience of trauma so the story feels more specific and nuanced.

You may decide to make a plot outline for your story to help you build up to a disturbing ending. You can use a plot diagram or the snowflake method to create the plot outline. For example, you may have a main character who does not realize she had a psychic break until the very end of the story. The big, unsettling twist may be that your main character finally realizes that all of her visions were made up in her head.

You may underline or mark any sections that need to be reworked or revised. You may also highlight any sentences that seem to work for you, as you can then try to figure out how other areas can work just as well.

Be willing to accept constructive feedback from others. Getting your story critiqued by attentive readers can make it that much stronger.

Once you have revised your story, you may show it to your readers again to determine if you are that much closer to a finished draft.