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by Sharon Blumberg

Spooky Story Starters can foster creative writing by children and young adults. Children can also draw illustrations to accompany their stories. Most children grow up with many unforgettable spooky Halloween experiences. Help your child, or your students if you’re a classroom teacher, create some fun spooky stories for Halloween.

Before you have your children start writing, remind them that effective stories for children need to contain essential elements. Aside from a beginning, middle, and end, those elements are as follows:

1. A point of view character. Write the story from the point of view of the main character.

2. A problem or conflict for the main character. The story must have a problem that needs to be solved. Try to present this as early in the story as possible in your story, or your reader will move on to something more enticing.

3. Rising action. Once your problem is established, create some rising action, where the conflict begins to build in intensity.

It is acceptable to have parents involved in the story, but the main character should try and solve the problem himself/herself.

4. Dialogue and Action. Try to tell much of the story through dialogue. In other words, “show,” don’t just “tell.” Be sure you have plenty of action, though. You story needs to be MORE than just people talking.

5. A Twist. Have your story end with an unexpected “twist.” This could be something the reader never saw coming, but would wonder why he didn’t.

Now for some Spooky Story Starters to help your children start writing:

1. You just moved into an old, large home with your family, in a new town. Everyone at school tells you the house is haunted. You are alone on Halloween evening, giving out candy, when you hear footsteps coming from the stairway.

2. Nobody ever Trick or Treats at the dark house on the corner of your block. Children have seen a shadowy silhouette of a women peering out of a second story window, and viscious dog-barking rattles the front windows. Your companions have dared you to ring the bell for Trick or Treat.

3. Every Halloween night, your neighbor down the street tries to scare children by growling, and jumping out of his door while wearing a costume. In addition, creepy-sounding Halloween songs blast from a boom box on his lawn. However, this year you notice something a little different. You don’t see your neighbor jumping out with a costume, nor do you hear the scary Halloween music. What you do see is a tall, dark hooded figure standing behind a clump of tall, evergreen trees near your neighbor’s house. Your friends still want to go Trick or Treating at this house. You don’t want to go, but you don’t want to seem like a wimpy baby by backing out.

4. You are interviewing a well-known vampire about his best Halloween memory. He is known for terrorizing bullies in the neighborhood on Halloween night. He tells you one time he…..

5. You have gone Trick or Treating ever since you were a young child because this particular house gives out the best treats. You are now 12 years old, but you are not quite ready to give up Trick or Treating while you still have younger friends. The lady at the door insults you by saying you are much too old to still be Trick or Treating. In fact, she says you should be ashamed of yourself. But she eventually gives you a big candy bar anyway.