Article: Tap into your fears of losing family members, of being alone, of violence, of clowns, of demons, or even of killer squirrels. Your fear will then come across on the page and your experience or exploration of this fear will also grip the reader.  Make a list of your greatest fears. Then, think about how you would react if you were trapped or forced to confront these fears. You could also take a poll of what scares your family, friends, or partners the most. Get some subjective ideas of horror. Another approach is to look at a normal, everyday situation like taking a walk in the park, cutting up a piece of fruit, or visiting a friend and adding a terrifying or bizarre element. Such as coming across a severed ear during your walk, cutting up a piece of fruit that turns into a finger or a tentacle, or visiting an old friend who has no idea who you are or claims you are someone you are not. Use your imagination to create a horrifying spin on a normal, everyday activity or scene. One way to create a situation that will induce terror in a reader is to restrict your character’s movements so they are forced to confront their fear and then try to find a way out.  Think about what kind of confined spaces scare you. Where would you dread or fear being trapped in the most? Trap your character in a confined space like a cellar, a coffin, an abandoned hospital, an island, or an abandoned town. This will create an immediate conflict or threat to the character and set your story up with immediate tension or suspense. Maybe your character is a werewolf who doesn’t want to hurt anyone on the next full moon so they lock themselves in a cellar or room. Or maybe your character is so fearful of a severed finger in the bathroom, he does everything to avoid the bathroom until the finger haunts him so much he forces himself to go into the bathroom and confront it. Because horror hinges on the subjective reaction of the reader, the story should work to create several extreme feelings in the reader, including:  Shock: the simplest way to scare the reader is to create shock with a twist ending, a sudden image of gore or a quick moment of terror. However, creating fear through shock can lead to cheap scares and if used too much, can become predictable or less likely to scare the reader. Paranoia: the sense that something is not quite right, which can unnerve the reader, make them doubt their own surroundings, and when used to its full effect, make the reader doubt even their own beliefs or ideas of the world. This type of fear is great for slow tension-building and psychological horror stories. Dread: this type of fear is the horrible sense that something bad is going to happen. Dread works well when the reader connects deeply to the story and begins to care enough about the characters to fear something bad that is going to happen to them. Inspiring dread in a reader is tricky as the story will need to do a lot of work to keep the reader engaged and involved, but it is a powerful type of fear. Balance intense negative emotions with intense emotions of wonder or positivity. Stephen King argues there are several key ways to create a feeling of horror or terror in a story, which can then create different reactions from the reader.  Using gross-out details like a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, something green and slimy landing on your arm, or a character landing in a pool of blood. Using unnatural details (or fear of the unknown or impossible) like spiders the size of bears, an attack from the living dead, or an alien claw grabbing your feet in a dark room. Using terrifying psychological details like a character who comes home to another version of him or herself, or a character who experiences paralyzing nightmares which then affect their sense of reality. Once you find your premise or scenario, your setting, determine which extreme emotions you are going to play on, and decide the types of horror details you are going to use in the story, create a rough outline of the story.  You can use Freytag’s pyramid to create an outline, which begins with exposition of the setting and life or day of the character(s), moves into the conflict of the character (a severed finger in the bathroom, two men in a car), shifts upward into rising action where the character tries to solve or work against the conflict but meets several complications or roadblocks, reaches the climax, and then falls downward with falling action, into the resolution where the character is changed, shifted (or in the case of some horror), meets a terrifying death. Think of a short title that hints at the terror in your story.

What is a summary?
Think about what scares you or revolts you the most. Take an ordinary situation and create something horrifying. Use setting to limit or trap your characters in the story. Let your characters restrict their own movements. Create extreme emotions in your reader. Use horrifying details to create horror or terror in your reader. Create a plot outline.