Post-mortem: writing This house is haunted (or 'whoops, this is written in second person')
Opening the door on the choices made while writing a short horror story.
Last week I shared a new short story, this week I’m opening the door (pun intended) on a few of the writing decisions behind it… and one very big non-decision that just happened!
Today I’ll be looking at:
Whoops, this ended up in second-person perspective
Avoiding and exploiting repetition
Prioritising non-visual senses
Before we crack open that window and sneak inside, this post will contain spoilers for the story so it’s a good idea to check out the 1k-ish words short story before reading on:
All good?
Let’s turn the key and enter:
Whoops, this ended up in second-person perspective
I didn’t mean to write the story the way it came out.
I understand that’s a weird thing to say, but this is sometimes what happens with writing: you set out to do one thing and the words lead you elsewhere.
This is one of the reasons I enjoy writing short stories. With novel-length fiction I create massive spreadsheets to plan my chapters, character arcs, conflict, cause and effect, etc. In short stories, I often have an image or a goal, and just write to see where it ends up.
The goal I set myself with This house is haunted was to write a purely descriptive piece. I intended for the story to have no human in it at all, seeing if I could rely purely on evocative and subtle detail to create an interesting atmosphere.
What actually happened, as you’ve read, is that the story jumped into a second-person perspective.
What is second-person perspective?
First, let’s quickly look at the more typical first and third person viewpoints.
First person
In first person, we might write:
I stepped outside my house and the cool breeze told me I’d forgotten to dress that morning.
Everything is written as if the narrator is speaking the story to the reader.
Sometimes it’s important who the reader, AKA the listener, is when you’re writing in first person, and this can be implied:
As you know, officer, I’m an honest woman and I’d never dream of stealing the Scottish nation’s supply of Irn-Bru.
Here, it’s implied the reader is a police officer, and we understand we’re listening to some kind of interview or confession.
However, often the role of the reader is ambiguous. Either way, the use of ‘I’ and ‘my’ outside of spoken text is a clear sign we’re in first-person perspective.
First-person perspective writing gives a sense of companionship, trust, and intimacy. We might be told their innermost thoughts. Nonetheless, we can still feel like we’re outside of the head of the protagonist, being told a story, and they could be lying to us or themselves.
Third person
Third-person perspective views characters from outside, and typically names them:
On a whim, Achmed drove his tractor into a tree, just to see how it made him feel. Mostly, it was bruised.
Notice we have a name, Achmed, but also pronouns such as ‘his’ and ‘him’. This tells us we’re observing him—we are not listening to him. We also have a comment about internal motivation: he did this to see how it would feel. This is presented as an objective insight, free of the protagonist’s own filter.
We can have different flavours of third person, such as ‘third person omniscient’ which gives a god-like perspective capable of skipping between viewpoints and observing everything from a distance or close-up. Sir Terry Pratchett mostly used this perspective in his wonderful Discworld novels:
Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it.
That’s the first line from Night Watch, my favourite Pratchett (US link, UK link, affiliate links). Pratchett describes characters, but also scenes and settings. He meanders into social descriptions and commentary that the protagonists wouldn’t be thinking about.
We also have ‘close third person’, where the author still refers to the character by their name, e.g. ‘Johanna did this’, but the narration sticks to their viewpoint (at least for the duration of the scene). The narratorial voice might even dip inside the protagonist’s head, to hear their thoughts:
Johanna listened to the suspect’s confession, but she wasn’t buying it. Where did all the Irn-Bru go?
Close third person is probably the most common form of fiction writing, because it can make us feel like we’re experiencing the events in a very intimate and unfiltered way.
So…
What is second person?
When we write in second person, we address the reader as ‘you’, as if they are part of the story.
The best known version of this are the old Fighting Fantasy ‘choose your own adventure’ books:
![The front cover of 'The Forest of Doom' by Ian Livingstone, the third of the best-selling Fighting Fantasy series of books. On the cover, a humanoid lizard creature is bearing brown torn medieval clothing. It stands in a forest setting and is turned towards the viewer with an expression that may be surprise, anger, or intrigue. The front cover of 'The Forest of Doom' by Ian Livingstone, the third of the best-selling Fighting Fantasy series of books. On the cover, a humanoid lizard creature is bearing brown torn medieval clothing. It stands in a forest setting and is turned towards the viewer with an expression that may be surprise, anger, or intrigue.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6d5d2db5-fcb7-4ac3-8f83-4061d2ad48e8_664x1066.jpeg)
In these books, it would say something like “After a long trek, you arrive at a village. You can investigate a pub with lights on, an empty looking church, and a well. All other buildings appear locked.”
Notice that it says ‘you arrive’, i.e. the reader is in the story, performing the actions.
The use of ‘you’ can be powerful for engaging the imagination of readers, but it can also be jarring—if the reader doesn’t buy into the journey in the text then there is cognitive dissonance that pushes them away from the events: “But I haven’t just arrived at a village, I’m only reading a story.”
Due to this tricky balance, second-person perspective is very uncommon.
How did I end up writing in second-person perspective accidentally?
I think this is the first time I’ve written in second person, but it spontaneously happened because of the challenge I set myself, i.e. to write a purely descriptive piece about a haunted location.
I began writing as if our viewpoint is simply a camera lens observing elements of the house. Without thinking about it, I started telling the reader what the camera saw and how it sees it:
You lean to squint through the gap at the door’s hinges, but the space is empty.
All of a sudden, I’ve put a person into the scene: you!
About halfway through writing, I realised what was happening, so I retrofitted a motivation for being in an unknown house, hinting this was an AirBnB-style short-term rental by adding new opening sentences:
You do not want to stay here. You want to cancel your booking. […] You place your single piece of luggage in the hallway.
I tell the reader roughly who they are and why they might feel compelled to check the place out, despite their feelings of foreboding: they’ve booked this place as accommodation.
Note that I also highlight there’s only one piece of luggage: it’s not a long stay, you aren’t moving into this house, and so it’s likely to be furnished.
There’s something a little creepy when you first enter a furnished rental property. It’s uncomfortably intimate to walk into another person’s home, and there’s also the tiny edge of doubt because you know for sure that someone else also has keys to that property.
While trying to avoid adding a character and desiring to evoke a visceral sense of presence, I accidentally switched to using the second person ‘you’, which solved my problems for me.
Sometimes you’ve just got to trust your subconscious knows what it’s doing, and I like how the story turned out!
Avoiding and exploiting repetition
Word choice
When you’re trying to describe a spooky house, it’s amazing how often you’ll want to say things ‘creak’. You’ll have to find solutions:
Leather sofa cushions creak… so I changed it to a modern fabric sofa to avoid the temptation
The steps on the stairs creak… I kept this and turned it into an uncanny feature—not just a creak, but the exact same creak as your childhood staircase. That’s freaky!
The door of a wooden wardrobe creaks open… I changed this to a squealing metal hinge with a reverberating thin wooden door.
Sometimes the answer lies in a thesaurus, but often it’s better to find a different sound altogether or even to change the material to give a different texture.
Repetitive paragraph structure
In the story, you walk between different rooms and observe each in turn. This means most paragraphs essentially start with:
In the downstairs hallway…
In the living room…
In the kitchen…
In the dining room…
On the stairs…
In the upstairs hallway…
In the bedroom…
In the bathroom…
You can see how this would get repetitive and distract the reader… Nonetheless, this is what happens, so I needed to disguise this. I used a variety of techniques to break this up:
In the downstairs hallway… When the front door closes, it kills the street’s bustling sounds. You place your single piece of luggage in the hallway. (audio description)
In the living room… In the living room (I kept this one!)
In the kitchen… At the rear of the building, a kitchen overlooks a walled garden space. (spatial description)
In the dining room… There is a small dining room. (size description)
On the stairs… The stairs to the upper floor creak (statement of tactile and audio senses)
In the upstairs hallway… In the cramped upstairs hallway (I kept this, but added an adjective to break the pattern a little)
In the bedroom… A sunlit bedroom calls to you. (how the room makes you feel)
In the bathroom… The bathroom is spotless. (how the room looks)
By breaking up the introduction to each room, I push myself to be more descriptive while also ensuring the writing doesn’t feel like a list.
Variety isn’t just about plot events: it’s also about the words we use and even the structure of the sentences and paragraphs.
When writing feels like it’s plodding, it’s often using too much repetition.
Purposeful repetition
There are three points where I chose to use repetition in this story, for slightly different reasons:
1. Describing the innumerable
First, I used repetition to imply innumerable objects:
porcelain figurines from the mid-twentieth century. There must be a hundred of these pale forms: doe-eyed children and coy milkmaids and grinning farmhands with wide-brimmed hats and three crows and a man riding a goat and a women cooking stew in a giant pot and a scarecrow and—easy to miss among the throng—a thin figure made of sticks and dirty string, with tarnished copper beads for eyes.
The repetition gives a sense of the mismatched mass, but also allows creepier elements to drip into the descriptions. Why is a man riding a goat? The woman with a giant stew pot sounds like a witch… And these culminate in one odd object, out of place, that is seemingly hidden among the rest: a spooky little twig doll.
2. Escalating panic
Here’s a different use of repetition:
You freeze. There is no sound from the concealed space behind the fabric, no rustle or drip or breath or sigh or sob or any sign at all that something looms there.
In this example, I used an unseparated list of items (i.e. without commas) to imply all the ideas rushing through the head of the protagonist. The repetition emphasises the panic and growing fear.
I use this method again, later in the story, but this time with commas:
Your fingers flail across the smooth and empty wood: there is no handle, no latch, no lock to undo.
I included the commas this time for the purpose of readability, but I also liked the more staccato rhythm it gives the sentence. It feels jerky and panicked, and it’s missing the ‘and’ which should be before the final item of the list. Dropping the ‘and’ gives the feeling of being rushed.
3. Sinister alliteration
Back on in the same description of the sinister shower curtain, notice how often a consonant ‘s’ noise is in the word choices:
There is no sound from the concealed space behind the fabric, no rustle or drip or breath or sigh or sob or any sign at all that something looms there.
Is, sound, concealed, space, rustle, sigh, sob, sign, something, looms.
Alliteration is typically used for the beginning of words, but I chose to give slight preference to words that used an ‘s’ noise to add an unconscious hiss to this tense moment which is otherwise suspiciously silent.
See, sometimes ‘suspiciously silent’ certainly sets a scene.
Which leads us to…
Prioritising non-visual senses
My goal was to describe a haunted house, but I knew I wasn’t going to write about cobweb-strewn chandeliers. Maybe I’ll write pure Gothic Victorian fiction someday, but usually I set my writing around the present day.
This gave me a challenge: the house was probably going to look pretty normal. I even said so in the opening:
It is a sturdy, everyday 1930s terraced house in an unremarkable neighbourhood, and on first seeing it you think: ‘This house is haunted.’
The house looks normal, and so I couldn’t rely on purely visual description.
In fiction, it’s always good to use other senses. We’re a very visual species, so describing how things look is our first step, but making things multi-sensory is typically more impactful.
I wanted to use some visual cues, but mix in other senses:
The protagonist sees the sofa cushion rebounding as if someone has recently stood up, but they hear the swish of cloth as if someone is behind the door.
They see the kitchen knives, but there’s a sense of unease which makes them not stop watching them.
They see the shower curtain is fabric, but feel it is cold and sense something beyond it.
When trying to leave the house, they cannot see or feel the door handle, they hear sinister noises from around the house, and the stairs are slowly engulfed in darkness preventing vision.
Notice how the climax of the story is more about the things you can’t sense, rather than the things you can! Lack of information can be more terrifying than seeing what’s happening.
In retrospect, I forgot smell! Smell is a great sense for adding creepiness to a scene.
Repulsion is a very visceral form of horror, so be cautious about using repulsive smells in your writing and use them within limits, but an out-of-place smell can set a powerful tone of unease.
I also wanted to use your (the reader’s) intellect for the scare-factor. I described the door of the wardrobe to paint you a picture:
on one door there are three gnarled knots in the grain: two round ones the size of a large coin, almost parallel to each other, and the third is a long near-black smear below.
Were you imagining a face like this?
Or this?
![The knots in the board look like a face : r/mildlyinteresting The knots in the board look like a face : r/mildlyinteresting](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7c703d17-8775-4116-95a5-6a35d3d2ede4_2988x5312.jpeg)
I hope you were!
I never called it a face in the story, but I hope your mind filled in the blanks.
By using your imagination, I tried to pull you further into the scene—you were actively connecting the dots, literally.
I also played with this in the closing realisation that, despite hearing a grandfather clock throughout, you didn’t see one in any of the rooms. How odd. Again, sometimes it’s the things we don’t see that are most peculiar.
Through combining all of the techniques above, I hope I succeeded in creating an engaging feeling of presence in the haunted house.
Thanks for reading this post-mortem peek behind the curtain of This house is haunted. If you fancy, go back and read it again with these techniques in mind, to see how they blend into the whole.
I’ll be back next week with… something else. I’m entering the summer break period, so we’ll see what I come up with, but it’ll be about writing, horror, or something fun.
As always, please like, comment, and share if you want to help my writing reach more people (or just to let me know you’re reading!).
Have a great week ahead, go be kind, and don’t forget to drink water!
Mata
xxx