Post-mortem: The Ocean Turns

Examining the writing techniques in last week's tiny horror story

Photo by Venti Views on Unsplash

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This week we’re back with a post-mortem, meaning this post will be analysing the writing choices made in last week’s short horror story.

I’m going to highlight a couple of things that I believe make the story work, and I’m going to poke one of the story’s weaker parts.

There will be spoilers ahead, so if you’ve not read it yet, go check it out (it’s only about 400 words!) and then pop back here:

All good? Let’s get into it!

Last week’s story is snappy and it’s got a good level of weirdness combined with something relatable (I mean, who isn’t angry with the human race at the moment?).

First, under the ‘what works’ section, we’re going to look at the isolated setting, the threat, and the story’s tense (as in present-tense, not tension-tense).

What works

The isolated setting

Putting the story on a cargo ship is a key strength.

When you’re writing horror, 99% of the time it’s important to isolate your character(s) in some way.

Isolation is often physical:

• Stephen King’s Overlook Hotel in The Shining is isolated by winding mountain roads and the intense snow.

• Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is set in an estate and a drive away from the nearest town.

• The cabin in the woods in Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead or countless other films is… well, it’s a cabin in the woods.

• In Where I End by Sophie White (please for goodness sake go read this incredible book Amazon US Amazon UK (affiliate links)) the story takes place in a tiny island community, but it’s even further secluded by the protagonist living in a three-person family unit in a flinty cottage on a cliff at the edge of the island.

Isolation can be social or psychological too:

• The kids in Stranger Things have to deal with monsters by themselves because adults don’t believe them

• In Goosebumps books, adults (typically parents) don’t believe in monsters so think the kid are making a fuss over nothing

• In the 2023 time travel slasher comedy Totally Killer, the protagonist tells the police there’s a killer on the loose, but they laugh at her — this isolates her from any conventional support. It’s an important enough moment that it’s the first shot they chose to use in the trailer:

  

  Cigarettes: the filmmaker’s shortcut to say ‘this is in the past’ (an image from Totally Killer where the protagonist is dismissed by the authorities)

• Again, in Where I End by Sophie White (did I mention it’s terrifying and you should read it? Amazon US Amazon UK (affiliate links)), the protagonist is not only physically isolated but her family is shunned by the islanders. This is often the case in horror: our characters can be both physically and socially/psychologically isolated.

Isolation is important. By isolating the main character, we ensure it makes sense for them, and only them, to take action.

Any sensible person would flee from danger, call the police/their whole family/the army/the exterminator/Godzilla/etc. when confronted by the threats they face in our stories. They could make the call, retreat to a suitable a distance, wait for someone else to nuke the site from orbit, and their story is over.

However, if they are isolated from support, the protagonist is going to have to dig deep inside themselves and save themselves. Along that path, they’ll discover strength they’ve never needed to use before. This self-discovery process makes stories work!

The threat

Every creature in the ocean simultaneously saying ‘enough is enough’? That’s pretty damn creepy.

We love story versions of the ‘FAFO’ principle (F**k Around, Find Out), i.e. what happens when you’re stupid and the obvious consequence of bad decisions come back to haunt you.

There are many horror examples of this:

• Alien — “Should I wander into this creepy giant ship and then stick my face over a massive egg that’s been awoken by my presence?”

“This will never backfire.” FAFO in action.

• The Evil Dead — “We might be in a cabin in the woods where we’ve found a book covered with a tortured face, but let’s just listen to this spooky recitation of a cursed prayer, because that’ll be fine.”

• Jurassic Park — it literally says in the script ‘“They were so busy wondering whether they could, they didn’t stop to think whether they should”.

Like in Hitchcock’s classic The Birds (Amazon US Amazon UK), I decided to make the threat in my story The Ocean Turns something mostly natural.

While we know it’s unlikely giant flocks of birds would suddenly turn on us, there’s part of our brains that think ‘maybe they could? Maybe they should?’. When we read about orcas (killer whales) attacking and sinking boats, part of us goes ‘yep, that makes sense’.

So, the threat of all oceanic life ganging up to destroy cargo ships feels intuitively right, while also uncanny.

Freud wrote about the uncanny as a subversion of the known with elements of the unknown, as if the rules of modernity and science turn out to be untrustworthy and dangerous unscientific ideas from the past are revealed to be true.

It’s a powerful idea, that I’ll go into in a future newsletter, and it’s part of why ‘fish fight back’ works as a concept: fish shouldn’t have the intelligence to collaborate like this, suggesting there is an unknown intelligence at work. Like in The Birds, the unknowable intelligence makes the attack unknown and unpredictable, which leads to greater fear.

Using the present tense

Writing in the past tense is the default for most fiction, but I’ve read a lot of present-tense writing recently and find it much more punchy. I wrote my story in the past tense, but it simply wasn’t as powerful, so went back and changed it.

Compare this in the past tense:

The warning siren jolted me awake. Its screaming howl resonated through the ship. I fell from my bunk, and the floor lurched underfoot, slamming my ribs into the bunk-frame.

The jolt is in the past, so the shock is old. The unstable floor has probably stabilised by the time the story is being told. The slamming ribs can’t have been too bad because the narrator is able to talk about it.

Now read it in the present tense:

The warning siren jolts me awake. Its screaming howl resonates through the ship. I fall from my bunk, and the floor lurches underfoot, slamming my ribs into the bunk-frame.

Isn’t it a little more immediate? Doesn’t the injury feel more dangerous?

I umm-ed and ahh-ed about the tense until I reached the end of the story. While I don’t show their death in the story, because some things are better left to the imagination, the narrator is doomed.

Writing this in the past tense makes the story weird: how is the narrator telling us this? Who are we, the reader?

Writing in the present tense doesn’t necessarily solve the issues entirely (how are we floating along with this character?) but it eliminates the weirdness of spectating the point-of-view protagonist’s imminent past death while the protagonist is somehow alive to tell it.

For horror, so much of the tension comes from ‘will they survive?’ that I’m becoming increasingly convinced that present tense will be the right choice for a lot of stories. It won’t be right every time, particularly for historical settings where the writing of the time would be in the past tense, and it might sometimes be a bit jarring for readers, but I think its benefits are worth it.

What doesn’t work

Note for non-paying subscribers: sorry! If you want to know what could’ve put an editor or publisher off from printing this story, you’ll need to subscribe. See you next week (or you could raise your subscription?).