Post-mortem: Empty Influence
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Hey folks, this is the newsletter from Mata Haggis-Burridge, where I share original short horror stories, critiques that look into the writing methods, writing tips and exercises, and other fun things. If you’re a writer looking for inspiration, or a reader who likes peeking under the keyboard to see how things work, you’re in a great place. Posts are weekly, most stuff is free, but paying subscribers get a fragment of my soul.*
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Today our lens is aimed squarely at last week’s microfiction short story, Empty Influence.
THERE WILL BE SPOILERS! So go read the story first, it’s less than 900 words:
Topics for today:
Establishing mood
Metaphor families
Past tense or present tense?
Let’s go!
Establishing mood & genre
It’s important to give readers an idea where they’re going with a story. Many readers come to a horror story with questions based on the subgenre:
Is this going to be gory?
Will the dog die (if there’s a dog)?
Will there be torture?
Is the enemy human or supernatural?
Will there be intimate physical threat?
For some things, we can (and arguably should) add trigger warnings. These can be controversial in writing—particularly for horror where surprising dark twists are core to the genre—but I think they can be important for readers with particular dispositions. Personally, I’m mostly in favour of them.
But, if we are intentional, we can deliver some of this with the writing.
In the opening lines of Empty Influence, we immediately identify the protagonist’s core problem:
I didn’t feel any change at first. Maybe my followers noticed the glint in my eye was different—emptier—but inside I felt fine.
They highlight the growing emptiness is the issue (note: this story is another example of where it’s not necessary to give the first-person protagonist a gender, see also this previous story and its post-mortem).
There are many ways to go about addressing this sense of emptiness: making friends, trying a new hobby, getting a pet, appreciating art, etc.
In the horror genre, there are also plenty of routes that could be taken here, such as the person becoming a serial killer to pass the time, or summoning a demon for company.
The second short paragraph doesn’t build much on the mood because it’s setting up the character’s profession—this comes back as being essential later on. The protagonist is constantly on-camera, but at the moment this seems only to be background, not essential foreshadowing.
Foreshadowing, red herrings, and deus ex machina
If you’re not familiar with the term, ‘foreshadowing’ is when storytellers give hints about the future path of a story, hopefully in a subtle (shadowy) way which doesn’t make things too obvious. When done well, it means the later events feel rationale and inevitable but also remain surprising.
This is the opposite of a ‘red herring’, which misleads a reader about a future revelation or event.
One use of foreshadowing is to avoid a ‘deus ex machina’ ending (meaning ‘god in the machine’). This term is used to describe an ending where some outside factor comes in to save the heroes from their fate, rather than the heroes overcoming the challenge themselves.
These often turn up when a writer has raised the stakes so high they don’t know how to let the protagonists overcome the challenge. Rather than letting the heroes die, the writer brings in an unconnected outside party to save the day.
A classic example is the giant eagles suddenly popping up to save Frodo and Samwise at the end of Lord of the Rings. The Harry Potter books also do a lot of this, with conveniently timed phoenix or ghosts popping up to save the day.
Anyway, back to setting the mood in Empty Influence…
In the third paragraph, we open with:
When I’d talk with others like me, we’d say how it was natural to fall out of love with the work.
The setting for the character’s conflict is all about their internal feelings: ‘fall out of love’ isn’t something that’s likely to head in a direction of violent resolution. There’s a sense of fatigue and melancholy here.
Here we enter into a rather obscure horror niche genre: quiet horror.
In quiet horror, the story is going to rely on internal conflict, the sense of the uncanny, and eeriness. It won’t aim for big-bang, shock and gore, decapitations, and suchlike.
This is much more like the territory of classic horror writers, such as Shirley Jackson or M. R. James. The fear in The Haunting of Hill House is the fear of madness, not a physical or embodied terror (it was also one of many books I read last year - check out more of them here).
We’ve got some internal stakes, we’ve got a sense of melancholy, and then we wrap up the opening paragraphs with another bit of foreshadowing:
the real OG influencers, they’re just machines: they can record on and on and on. They live for the screens.
Perhaps this time it’s enough that we realise this over-dedication to recording is going to be the source of the horror. We don’t know exactly where we’re going, but the tone and genre are set.
Metaphor families
This is a system I’ve used in my writing for many years, but was only reminded of the term again fairly recently. It’s a very handy term to bear in mind for writing characterful dialogue, and its especially important for establishing a character’s voice in first-person writing.
Metaphor families are groups of references that connect with the lived experiences and social context of a character. They’re linked with in-character jargon.
When a character speaks, either in dialogue or descriptive text in first-person stories, they use terminology and imagery that fits their world.
For example, a character who has trained as a boxer might say something successful is “a real knockout” or bad times have them “on the ropes”, whereas a chef would say a success is “delicious” or a bad idea is “half-baked”.
These shouldn’t be in every line they speak otherwise it becomes ridiculous, but occasionally peppering their language with metaphors and phrases reflecting their lives helps pull the reader into their perspective.
Alongside the more obvious metaphors, you can use jargon and other in-character terms to bring their voice to life.
In Empty Influence, I added these touches in a few places:
I kept my rigid schedule of recording new reels, streaming, AMAs, guest spots, and collabs.
Here, readers might recognise ‘reels’ from Instagram, but might not know what an ‘AMA’ (‘ask me anything’) is, and probably don’t say ‘collab’ but you can guess what it means. This jargon, on the edge of comprehensibility, invites readers into the trust of the protagonist.
When the protagonist sees a beautiful lake scene, they take it all in, then observe:
It would make a great backdrop.
Depending on a reader’s taste, this is either funny or bleak, but probably both. That’s a pretty good spot for horror!
I think my favourite line I’ve written using this ‘metaphor family’ approach is from a video game I worked on called PDC World Championship Darts Pro Tour (not my most famous piece of work, but I’m proud of what we created with a small team). In that game, we had real darts commentators come into the studio to record their lines, and I had to write the script for them.
One of those commentators was Sid Waddell, AKA ‘the voice of darts’, AKA ‘the thief of bad gags’. He had an idiosyncratic style, often referencing Northern English and working class culture. I watched over 20 hours of matches with him commentating to make sure my script matched his style.
My favourite line for him was to be spoken in the game when the player messes up their dart-throwing and gets a terrible score that won’t help them. Sid would then say:
“That’s as much use as a surfboard down a coalmine.”
To me, this captured Sid’s vocabulary and visual language perfectly… and he agreed! When he was done with the recording session, he picked up the script and tucked it into his jacket pocket. When I offered to get rid of it for him, he said to me:
“No, I’m keeping this. I’ll use some of these lines on Saturday.”
It’s one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received for my writing!
When you capture a person’s voice, by using language which fits the protagonist of the story, readers are pulled more vividly into their world.
Past tense or present tense?
Put simply, this is the difference between retelling something that has happened:
I walked down the street
compared to describing something as it happens:
I walk down the street
In fiction, it’s more common to write in the past tense. I think this gives an air of stateliness to a narrative. It means we can dilate time by diving into long descriptions or deviating from the main action, without the reader feeling the main action is barrelling ahead undescribed. It also makes it easier to skip things, e.g. jumping ahead days, weeks, or months.
Present tense gives a greater sense of immediacy. It’s perfect for when there will be shocks, surprises, or even deadly twists that kill the narrator. It brings risk, pace, and immediacy while sacrificing past-tense’s sense of narratorial control… In my opinion!
If you’re a regular reader, you might have spotted I often write in the present-tense:
This House is Haunted: present tense
Accommodating Mr Landown: past tense
The Ocean Turns: present tense
A Good Human Father: past tense
Come along, Grandpa: present tense
… And so on.
In last week’s Empty Influence, I used past-tense, but struggled against an instinct to slip into the present-tense.
I think I stuck with past-tense because it makes the final line sound more bleak when it’s spoken in the past. Here’s the original, in past-tense:
If lake was whispering to my soul, but I couldn’t hear it.
Having this in the past leads immediately to questions about where the protagonist went after this moment—do they still feel the same? Are they still trapped in that place with the same empty sensation?
Compare this to a present-tense version:
If lake is whispering to my soul, I can’t hear it.
This reads more as an observation. It doesn’t have an equivalent sense of finality or realisation.
It was a tricky choice for this story, but I think overall I went the right way, purely because of this final line.
Thanks for reading! Hope this was interesting and perhaps inspiring for you. Next week I’ll be back with a writing exercise.
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… And be kind to yourselves and others,
Mata
xxx