My husband didn’t return to me as an animal or ghost. He didn’t send messages in code or possess other people to reach me. My dreams of him were just dreams, subconscious flotsam and jetsam. I’d stopped searching for signs of him. But a part of me was still waiting for him, and waiting was just searching in reverse.

Sometimes, late at night, I snuck off to my neighbor’s place to consort with the living.

There was another man, a divorce lawyer, I sometimes saw too. The twenty-year-old I was trying to be loved to indulge her warped sense of time: What day is it? What year? My disorientation was real, but I embraced it. But the part of me that knew exactly what she was doing also knew, exactly to the day, when six months since my husband’s death had passed. And on that day, that part of me said it was time to grow the fuck up.

That night, my eyelids popped open like some horror-movie doll’s and the time blazed blue across the room: 3:01. The clock practically spoke, its phantom voice insinuating, insistent: neither my own nor my husband’s. But maybe death had changed him. What was he trying to say?

These were precisely the kinds of thoughts I could no longer abide. I flipped on the light, grabbed the nearest book, and pretended to read until I pretended to sleep.

The next night it happened again: the sudden opening of eyes greeted by a bright 3:01. I sat up and almost reached out to clutch the handle of the three. Then I remembered: Just numbers.

But why those numbers? My husband had died in the afternoon: one-something, no threes. And why not an even hour? Why that pointer finger of an extra minute? To what did it point?

Perhaps at me, at my compulsive need to look for answers where there were none. Or maybe it was just scolding me for not looking hard enough. Maybe the very grief that had driven me to seek my husband had clouded my seeing, as it had clouded everything else, and he inhabited myriad mysterious forms I couldn’t discern.

So be it. I was determined to now grieve like a good Anglo-American, or better yet, a made-for-TV upper-class Brit. Like the very best citizen, I would work and work to refill our emptying coffers and cram my mind with useful thoughts. Most importantly, I would focus my efforts on parenting: I would not flee to my room to protect my daughters from my madness and misery or, worse yet, to protect myself from theirs.

Still, every night I awoke at 3:01. With every new wake-up, the numbers grew—larger, closer, breaking free from the clock. Soon, they broke free from the dark. One afternoon, the electricity fritzed out. When I checked my phone to reset the clock, it was 3:01. I ran to the store to get groceries: the timestamp on my receipt said 3:01. A self-help book I was proofreading used, as a negative example, someone who stayed up each night until 3:01. “Typo?” I wrote in the margins. Maybe it was a typo, but it wasn’t, I knew, a mistake.

When my oldest called home from school with a migraine, I barely glanced at the time. I already knew what it would say: I was right. In the car on our way home, I couldn’t help quizzing her about the circumstances of her headache: Had it come on gradually or suddenly? How much time had passed between its onset and her phone call? Did she feel a sense of urgency when she called me or was she listless?

“I don’t know,” she said. “Why are you asking me all these weird questions?”

I couldn’t tell her that I hoped her father was somehow communicating with me through her.

I wanted to believe, but didn’t believe it enough to risk her believing it, too. When we got home, I fed her ibuprofen and fled to my room.

My husband and I used to read to the girls before bed, but by each day’s end, I could barely function. My oldest now played phone games long into the night and my youngest raced around the house in circles. I understood that the distress I forced myself to feel about this came from a rarified set of values based on culture and class, one in which my children were supposedly in training to become both masters of the universe and responsible citizens who were to “better” the world while collecting on their advantages. On the other hand, I knew the importance of self-discipline and sleep for basic well-being from my own chronic lack of both. I also knew I was allowing their behavior not out of a revolutionary spirit but because it was easier to ignore it.

One night, after my youngest had supposedly gone to sleep, her feet once more quaked the house. I loved her thumps, the micro and macro rhythms, the jackhammer and the pause. Still, I wrenched myself out of my bed.

“Hey there,” I chirped. My youngest glanced at me and kept moving, her beige hair flapping wildly. I tried again. “It’s late. You should be in bed.”

“I can’t,” she said, still running. “Liv kicked me out.”

“Kicked you out?” I barged into their shared bedroom. “Did you kick out your sister? From her own room?”

“If I had my own room,” she said, “I wouldn’t have to.”

“We’ve been over this,” I said, my jaw clamping to staunch my fury. “I’m still trying to figure out how we can keep this house, so you can forget getting a bigger one. You know there are whole giant families that share one room apartments, right? Count your blessings.” When she blinked her disdain at my platitudes, I yelled: “This is what you care about now, of all things? This?”

She turtled her head. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, but it came out snappish. I tried again. “I’m sorry.” In the rest of our little house, my youngest continued to thump around. “I’m going to get Ava now.”

“But Ava won’t stop talking,” she said, clutching her hands as if around a little neck.

“Ava’s just sad. We all are. It’s okay.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. How can everyone being sad be okay? That’s, like, the opposite of okay.”

“I don’t know,” I said, my answer to everything.

Before she could respond, I slipped out of the room and tried to stop my youngest. But she made a game of it. She hopped on the couch, pouncing on the arm that had already caved in from her previous pouncing, then climbed the top of the couch that had already split open from her climbing. The more she hopped around, the younger she seemed, as if she were traveling back to the lost time, when she was five or three instead of nine, before her father got sick and died. She found her own antics hilarious and started narrating her moves, using her chosen regression persona, “the doggo.”

“The doggo is running away from the mommo!” she cried. “The doggo is jumping on the doggo couch.”

“It’s late, sweetie,” I said. “That’s enough.”

“The doggo needs exercise.”

“The doggo needs sleep.”

“The doggo needs to chase a squirrel.”

I tried to intercept her and missed. She shrieked with delight. Then I grabbed at her again and she tripped and went crashing, headfirst, into the wall, the frenzied glee knocked so completely out of her that I longed for its instant return.

She palmed the top of her head. I was already seeing stretchers, hospital beds, the hidden hematoma that fatally burst. At the same time, I refused to believe anything could be wrong.

“I’m okay,” she said, before I could ask. “I just need a little ice.” She went to the freezer and pulled out the cold pack my husband had long ago purchased for such occasions. Even now, I expected him to rush ahead and grab it for her himself.

Now my oldest was up, asking questions and holding the ice pack to my youngest’s head. I so loved them both and I wanted to sleep forever. How could such impulses coexist? When I finally got my girls to bed, I set my alarm, to check on my youngest, for 2:58 a.m.: enough time to fully wake up before 3:01 and not enough to fall asleep again then arise at the fateful time. I would break the pattern, whatever it augured. When the inevitable display of numbers appeared, I would stare them down and bid them farewell.

But I awoke as I usually did, disturbed by nothing but my own brain, at 3:01.

I smiled. I suppose I was thrilled. Not so long ago, I would have spoken to my dead husband about 3:01 and imagined his response. But in that moment, I found that I couldn’t do it anymore. His silence had grown too loud for me to talk over.

In the soft black of my daughters’ room, I sat on the edge of my youngest’s bed and inhaled her warm sugary scent. I wanted to tuck myself behind her, glue myself to her folds, the way I used to, sometimes, with my husband when I couldn’t sleep. Above, my oldest nested beneath her comforter, her thumb, I knew, poised nostalgically against her mouth.

I began the careful climb over my youngest. Her eyes flew open, the whites piercing the night. “Mom?” she said, gazing up at me. It seemed like a big question, all the hope and need and trust packed inside that small, dull word.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s just me.”

Gemini Burns pressed a fingertip into the soil around her bonsai tree to check its moisture levels. She got as close to the plant as she could, pretending to stand beneath it, imagining the staggering heights a tree used to be able to reach. The daily ritual of inspecting its tiny leaves for signs of…

I had a dream about you after everything happened. We were five again, playing in the schoolyard. I was aware of your body even then, how sinuous it was compared to mine. In my dream, recess came to an end and you were behind me in line. You weren’t talking because you were starting to…

Dear lovely reader,

You thought this editor’s note was gonna be about comics. But you’d be wrong. It’s about tampons.

Specifically, about the instructions on the back of the tampon box.

You see, dear reader, I struggled to read growing up. The letters were more interested in wiggling around than being deciphered. Phone numbers were impossible to remember. I couldn’t spell anything to save my life. Little b’s and d’s conspired to look identical. Beads of sweat formed on my forehead at the mere mention of reading aloud in class.

Stubbornness became my strongest ally. Dani Hedlund, I told myself, wasn’t going to admit she couldn’t do something, that she had a problem. She was going to be just like everyone else, and even if she wasn’t, if she was “behind,” she was just gonna fake it ‘til she made it.

But having not cracked reading by the age of twelve—and having gotten past the humiliation of being the one kid in my class who went to special ed—I started to think I could just live without the skill all together. My little town was too small and too poor to have a proper special ed teacher, to even know what the word “dyslexic” really meant, so I’d instead been branded with the title “slow.” Well, by the teachers anyway. My peers had other words for it.

So, the game became not about learning to read, but about pretending. I’d mastered asking my dad to read my homework to me at night, memorizing anything I might need to “read aloud” in class. Not to worry my parents, I would sit between them as they read in front of the roaring fire and stare down at my Goosebumps books, carefully turning pages when they did, eyes running back and forth over meaningless words.

And really, the pretending wasn’t that hard. Sure, my grades weren’t great. Despite studying all the time, I lived in a world of Cs. And yeah, I dreaded school, dreaded failing, dreaded the sympathetic looks of my teachers even more than the mockery of my peers, but hell, it was just school. How much did school even matter? Like my parents, I wasn’t planning on going to college. Just the thought made me feel nauseous. No way I’d willingly subject myself to four more years of torture.

But then, everything changed.

In the locker room, I heard about a girl in my class getting her period. And although I hadn’t yet, I panicked. Later that night, sitting on the floor of my parents’ bathroom, I realized my hack of having Dad read things to me wasn’t going to work this time. I remember staring at my mom’s pink tampon box, trying over and over again to make the letters form words, to make those words form sentences. To understand what the hell those sentences meant.

I was so sure they would explain away the horrifying black and white diagrams on the box (so much scarier than the illustrations in my Goosebumps books), that the words held secrets to being an adult, to being independent, that I just couldn’t unlock.

And I started to wonder: How many other things would there be like this? Things I wanted to know privately? Or what about the times I needed to read something, and my dad wouldn’t be there? In a small farm town, we didn’t really have street signs—or, well, streets—but the city, what if I wanted to move there some day? Surely, I would need to read the signs? Figure out which bus goes where?

Soon the tampon box was even harder to read, my tears making the wiggling letters even wigglier. And like those letters, I felt the promise of independence grow blurrier and blurrier… until I couldn’t see it at all.

A few days later, I knocked on my Dad’s office door, where his bear of a body was hunched over the table, glasses slid down, nose nearly touching the fly he was tying. Dad tied the best prince nymphs in town, always eager for a break to take us fishing. But when he couldn’t get away—which was most of the time—he’d sit up in his office and stockpile flies, like a man who longs to travel but can only pack bags he’ll never take to the airport.

“What’s up, pumpkin?” he asked, not looking up.

I don’t know why I didn’t go to my mom about this. It was a girl thing, after all, but my mom was always so put together, never a wrinkle on her pink blouse, never an eyelash uncurled, and I feared that perfection. Someone like me would never be able to live up to that standard.

But Dad? Dad was messy, funny, weird. His hair was always wild, like he’d been driving with the windows down. His Hawaiian shirts were often buttoned incorrectly, flip flops held together with electrical tape. And it wasn’t just his appearance. Dad didn’t think or talk like the other parents. Dad thought Dune was way better than the bible, that lightning storms were better than the movies, that school would never be as important as the Rolling Stones and a great mayfly hatch. Surely, he wouldn’t judge me.

“Dad, I… well, the thing is… ”

“Take your time, kid,” he said, finally looking up to see me blushing. “And hand me some thread.”

“Which color?”

“Surprise me.”

I walked over to the wall of thread spools, all neatly organized, a rainbow of possibilities. Dad knew that always calmed me. The colors. Being creative. Not having just one right way to do something.

He also knew that talking was easier for me when I had something to do with my hands, when I didn’t have to make eye contact.

“I think… I’m… bad at reading,” I finally confessed.

“Why do you think that?”

“Well, the words… I… they don’t stay still. I can’t… I don’t understand them. They hurt my head.”

“All the time?”

“Yeah.”

I heard him lay his tools on the table, click, click, then the creak of his chair as he sat up straighter.

“But your Goosebumps books?”

I swallowed, fingers shaking over a bright yellow spool of thread. “I’m just… looking at the pages.”

“But… you seem to genuinely enjoy them? I’m always looking up and you’re smiling.”

“Oh, yeah… I’m, ah… I’m making up the stories in my head, from the illustrations.”

“But you aren’t reading the words?”

I could feel myself tearing up, shame burning through me. I remember being so sure my dad could see my whole body blushing, the skin on the back of my neck like a red stop light. Turn back. Go no further, the sign said. This girl is stupid. Worthless. Unlovable. Stop before you get tangled in the wreckage.

“How long?” he finally asked.

“For… ever. Always.”

“Hmm.”

I remember how long the silence felt. Endless. Finally, I heard him stand up, walk over. I was too afraid to turn around, to see how disappointed, disgusted, his face would be. Something lifted in front of my line of sight: the nymph he was tying. I remember its fluffy gray body woven around the hook with a little green feather coming out the back, like a bird’s tail.

“What do you think?”

I knew the question wasn’t about the quality of the fly (Dad was the best) but about the color to add next. Fish aren’t entirely color blind, but the conditions of the water affect how their sight has evolved. Freshwater fish, like trout and salmon, can see reds, oranges, blues, and greens, and you want to make a fly that catches their attention.

I looked from the fly to the wall of threads, carefully selecting a burnt orange and then a shimmery, metallic purple. “Orange first, on the body,” I said. “But maybe a stripey layer of purple on the very top? So they get to see the glitter, and we get to see the cool colors.”

“Magic.” He took the thread, and unlike me, his hands were big enough to hold both spools in one hand. “Listen, Pumpkin, I don’t know about the reading thing. Let me think on it. But…” He waited until I looked up at him to finish. “I do know something already.”

“What?”

“You’re not dumb. I promise. It’s like what Mick Jagger said, ‘Different isn’t dumb.’”

A smile cracked on my face. “Did Jagger really say that?”

Dad shrugged. “Probably… at some point. He’s a talkative fellow.”

A week later, I was summoned up to Dad’s office and handed a present. It was summer, but Dad still wrapped it in Christmas paper. Taped to the front was the orange and purple fly with the green tail. When I tore the paper away, revealing the cover of a book beneath, I was instantly disappointed. How in the world did Dad think I’d be able to read this? Was he telling me I was just lazy? That I just needed to practice more?

But then I flipped it open, and there weren’t walls of daunting text. There were illustrations everywhere.

And not the sporadic black and white sketches in my other books, but big, colorful drawings on shiny paper. Some of the illustrations had words in text bubbles or in boxes, but it wasn’t overwhelming.

“It’s called X-Men,” Dad said. Then he leaned behind him to pull out another identical comic book. “I got one for me too, and I thought we could read them and then talk about them. Like a book club.”

“But… what if…”

“It’s okay. The images will do most of the work, showing you what’s happening. But try to work on the words, okay? I think it’ll get easier.”

And it did.

Dad didn’t know any of the amazing research about how comics are an incredible tool for low-literacy and reluctant readers. He didn’t know that the lack of justified formatting of the text makes it infinitely easier for people with dyslexia to read. He didn’t know why I struggled, but he knew that I loved stories, and if I could just find a way to engage with them, to get pulled into the plot and characters, then I would have enough passion to try, to really try, to get past the fear of doing it wrong. To create a system that worked for my brain.

Decades later, when you ask my mom what my struggles with reading were like, she always tells the story of me running through the house, loudly and frantically reading everything—cereal boxes, postcards, the back of her tampon box. That’s always the one she remembers, me standing in front of her in my My Little Pony pjs, reading the entire back of the tampon box like it was Shakespeare.

“It was like a lightbulb turning on,” Mom always says, “and then you couldn’t stop.”

But Mom was wrong. It wasn’t a lightbulb. Wasn’t an “ah-ha” moment. It was a long road. A road paved with brightly colored panels of superheroes. And like my favorite X-Men, Rogue, mastering her mutant powers, it took eons to learn my limits, to practice, to be strong enough to not despair. I learned to look for patterns instead of individual letters, to use the easy-to-identify words (nice short ones) as anchors to more effectively guess at the bigger ones—just as I had used the illustrations to anchor the text in my comics. With a strong coding framework, I could read most words as long as they were in context, even when all the d’s looked like b’s and all the n’s masqueraded as r’s.

But Mom was right about it being impossible for me to stop. Once the passion turned on, I was hooked. For me, reading became a portal to other words, to other experiences. And although it was hard, although it took me so much longer to read anything than my peers, I loved it. Not just to the act of reading. But what it gave me, how it changed who I was. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t the scared one, the quiet one, hoping to go unnoticed.

I was the girl with her hand raised in class, the girl who knew the right answer.

And that became addictive, being good enough, smart enough, knowing things. Not just how tampons worked (which, it turned out, was just as horrifying as the diagrams), but also how the world worked. Physics. Mathematics. Politics. The economics of why “spice” was so valuable in Dune. How Winston Churchill conducted meetings in the bathtub. How hard it was for Banner to control the Hulk. How, in all those stories, a single person, with enough stubbornness, could actually change the world and make it better.

It’s not surprising that I wanted to grow up to be like them.

Nearly a decade later, I sat across from a white man in a black suit at the University of Oxford and finally got diagnosed with dyslexia. I remember his shock, eyes moving from my transcripts to my newly printed cognitive reasoning score. I finally received official confirmation that I wasn’t slow, I wasn’t lazy. My brain was just a bit different.

I remember watching his eyebrows furrow, an unspoken question written in their confused curves. “How in god’s name did you get into Oxford?” those eyebrows asked. But he didn’t ask me. Instead, he took
a deep breath, saying instead, “Of course, reading and numbers are obviously a challenge. Anything with sequencing. But you can avoid that.” He picked up a paper before him, presumably my transcripts covered in firsts. “I assume you’re studying… arts? Painting? Maybe dance?”

I smiled, proud, stubborn. “English, philosophy, and maths.”

He laughed because he thought I was joking. I laughed because I wasn’t.

I was in the last year of my degree, and I’d decided to turn down every smart-move job offer to instead keep running a little dream of a nonprofit. A dream of books and storytelling and people like my dad, who looked past the obvious to find the potential hidden within.

I think of my laughter every time I step into a classroom, comics like the ones you’re about to read tucked under my arm. From low-income high schools to max-security prisons, we use comics to teach low-literacy and reluctant students, from dyslexic kids like me to those who have fallen through societal cracks in far more drastic and heartbreaking ways.

These comics don’t just help improve literacy, critical thinking, and communication; they can give us the biggest and most important gift of all: the ability and desire to change the story we tell about ourselves. To be heroes in our own narratives. To discover our own superpowers, to nurture them, to develop the resilience and stubbornness to fight for our future, even when the world tells us we don’t have what it takes.

In these pages, you’ll find nine amazing stories that do just that: make us think differently about the world. All of these works were first published in Brink’s publishing imprint, F(r)iction, a collection of amazing stories, poems, essays, and comics that we teach in all our nonprofit education programs. Spanning nearly a decade of publishing, these original short comics are our favorite and most effective teaching tools, helping students think differently about themselves and the societal norms that try to shape us.

Some stories are fantastical, saturated in family curses, apocalyptic worlds, long journeys to the stars. But, like the X-Men comics I first fell in love with, real themes and hard lessons live beneath the fantasy. Characters explore the difficulties of accepting their bodies, of finding hope in the darkest times, of letting go of the past to carve a new future. We see how caring more about success than the people around us can transform even the strongest hero into a villain, that fear can erode the good in our lives, that accepting our flaws is the only way to embrace our strengths. Others are steeped in reality, like the comic memoir that closes the issue. “Brilliance” came out of our Frames Comic Program, a story from a formerly incarcerated student who spent nearly a year reading and discussing comics with us as he sculpted his own powerful memoir.

For the comic lover, you’ll see some big names from your favorite comics and novels, but the majority of these stories are from emerging and debut talent. New, brave creatives whom we’ve mentored to make sure that the next generation of readers can be inspired by diverse, incredible voices.

I hope, as you read these stories, that you think of your own story. Of the decisions you’ve made that have created the person you’ve become, both the good and the bad. I hope you embrace the parts of you that you love and have the courage to acknowledge and accept the parts you don’t. And remember, above all, that you have the power to decide who and what you want to be. We might not have mutant powers, but we are all powerful. We all have unique talents and perspectives, and we can do truly incredible things with them.

And when in doubt, remember what Mick Jagger probably never said: “Different isn’t dumb.” Different can be a magic all on its own.

Dani Hedlund
Editor-in-Chief

Why do we dream? Science has yet to fully answer this question, though many theories exist. Some suggest that dreams help us consolidate and analyze memories and serve as practice for real life situations. Physiologically, experts believe the forebrain generates dreams while the brainstem generates rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the cycle of sleep during…

You’re in a torchlit cave in France studying a hunting chronicle left behind by an Aurignacian who scratched the burnt end of a stick onto rock. You’re in the Met trying to decipher the hieroglyphs etched onto a slab of stone by Egyptians. You’re in a pew in Wisconsin ignoring the sermon and taking in the vivid, sun-soaked colors of the nativity of Christ pictured in the stained glass. You’re in a bathroom stall in Spokane trying not to laugh at the most profane mural of graffiti even as you uncap a pen to add your own cipher. You’re in a bar in Austin and a man with whiskey breath pulls up his sleeve and shows you a rippling slab of muscle coated in ink and tells you a story of grief that explains why he spent twenty hours getting needled. You’re in a nursing home in Boca Raton and your grandmother is flipping through scrapbooks and photo albums, telling you wandering stories about the ghosts of her past.

Businesses like to categorize (and subcategorize and sub-sub categorize) things, even our stories. A bookstore or a record store will send you in one direction for horror or metal, another direction for romance or country. Streaming apps will direct your scroll into peculiar strands like “Feel Good Food and Travel” or “Buddy Late Night Comedies.” Producers and editors worry over metrics and formulas and graphs. But our brains aren’t driven by algorithms. And most storytelling ignores taxonomy.

Comics embody this truth; they are a medium of defiance and rebellion. I’m not just talking about their niche or underground status. Or how, throughout their history, they have been a topic of moral panic and censorship, maligned by parents and politicians and the media. I’m also talking about the way they rebel against any strict form, flout boundaries, lean into experimentation, appeal to synesthesia.

They blend visual and textual literacy so that the navigation of the page can be driven by color or border or letter or line. If the sentences of a novel or memoir are laid out as cleanly and uniformly as rows of corn in a field, the pages of a comic surprise and even assault you with every page turn, as you take in the epic visuals of a splash page or tick, tick, tick your way through the boxes of a nine-panel grid or descend and ascend through five vertical columns. You’re constantly relearning how to process information—which makes you lean forward, which makes you arguably more engaged and complicit in the act of storytelling.

Sometimes, when I read a graphic novel or grab a monthly issue off the rack, I slowly digest each page, savoring and delighting in every detail. But sometimes I flip through to pleasure in the art alone. And (I say this as a writer) here is the humbling truth of comics. You can ignore every dialogue balloon and narration caption and still finish the story and comprehend it and think, now THAT was a hell of a comic book. The artist is the true director and wizard of the medium, in other words. This is one of the reasons comics are considered such an excellent teaching tool. The reader is decoding language, yes, but the setting, the time, the arc of the plot, the behavior and feelings of the characters can all be comprehended on some level through the art alone, making comics a vivid gateway drug to literacy. And from there, self-expression, conceptualizing new futures, rewriting the negative narratives that the world has told us about ourselves. Let’s drop more anthologies like this one into classrooms and libraries and prisons (and and and and) please.

Even if superheroes have been gobbled up by the Hollywood machine, comics are far from mainstream. Seeking out the single issues and trades and omnibus editions remains a cult activity, the brick-and-mortar comic book shops often secreted away in strip malls between the vape stores and tanning salons. The true believers might bag and board their issues or they might read them over and over and over until they fall to pieces in their hands, but these are holy texts. The cape-and-spandex canon of DC and Marvel is the gateway drug that leads you to the punk rock published by Image or Storm King or Vault. And those stories might lead you to local zines or internet showcases like Webtoons…

…or journals like F(r)iction. The name alone—a name that embodies defiance, a welcome discomfort— makes it clear that this is an ideal home for comics. And over the past few years they’ve been publishing some mind-melting work by boss-level creators. See for yourself. In these pages you’ll be assaulted by the hack-and-slash aesthetic of Carmen Maria Machado and Shan Bennion, you’ll be seduced into the sepia-toned nightmare of Ben Mehlos, you’ll be lost in the desert darkness and spectral wonder of Rebecca Roanhorse and Isabel Burke, and more, so much more, a catalog of some of the most exciting and challenging work that will widen your eyes and light up all your nerve endings and constantly surprise you.

Dear lovely reader,Of the many embarrassing tales that plague my pre-adolescence, few haunted me more than the time I tried to fly. You see, it was rare in my elementary days to get an invite to a friend’s house, as I was, well, an odd child. Imagine bum-length, dishwater blonde tangles and a particular love of wearing my father’s…

Many writers suffer from a slump from time to time, especially while tackling a big project like a novel. After days or weeks of plugging away, you hit a wall and don’t know what the next word should be, much less the next few pages. Or else you encounter a part in your story that is more difficult to get through, like a B plot or lull after the climax. Whatever the issue may be, it’s easy to give up, put your writing project away, and hope for a day when you feel inspired again. But this is a trap—don’t fall into it! Use the tips from this blog for practical and creative strategies to push through writer’s block and rekindle your motivation. 

1. Prepare a writing prompt to answer for the day. 

Prompts can bring a fresh perspective and reduce that overwhelmed feeling you have when staring at a new blank page. Plus, they are fun to work with and can take your story in unexpected, but not bad, directions. Here are a few prompts to help you get started: 

• Describe a new setting in your story. Use as many descriptive words as possible, including those that appeal to the senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. 
• Write about a character’s back story that you haven’t explored before. What was their favorite food as a child? Describe a scene where they eat it. Who was their childhood hero? Explain how they learn about this hero for the first time. 
• Take a side character and develop a scene wherein they have a random, but funny, desire. Maybe they’re really hungry and want a freshly baked pie. Maybe they suddenly want to go for a swim. How do they deal with this desire and try to fulfill it? 
• Describe a scene where a character wears a new outfit—and they hate it. 
• Describe a scene where one character writes a letter to another character about something that has already happened. How do they describe this event? Why are they writing the letter? 

There are also a vast number of writing prompts available online, if none of the above work for you—or you’re looking for more. One fun thing I like to do is look up a list of 100 Writing Prompts, which usually has 100 individual words meant to inspire. Using even a single word to start off a new part of your story can get those creative juices flowing again. 

2. Draw inspiration from your real life and surroundings. 

You know those TV show moments where a character needs to lie about their identity so they glance around and come up with a silly name like “Iceberg Lettuce”? Well, as silly as it sounds, you can do the same with writing. Look around you. Who or what can you see that might inspire a story? One idea to help with this is to go to a public place, like a park or café and do some people watching. Observe those around you, see what they do, and when something captures your interest, write it down. How can you incorporate that into the story you’re already telling? 

3. Set a timer for 20 minutes. Write without pausing, and continue after if you feel like it. 

Timed writing sessions create manageable goals to reach. You know you only have to keep writing for 20 minutes, so it’s easier to plug away. And the writing doesn’t have to be good—it just has to be on the page. To make this writing session the most productive it can be, eliminate all distractions for as long as the timer is on. Turn off your phone (unless you’re using it as a timer), close all your tabs, and put yourself in a quiet place. Who knows, maybe you’ll feel so inspired that 20 minutes will turn into two hours!

4. Introduce a new character to stir the pot. 

Sometimes you’re stuck on a scene or at a particular point in a story because it lacks conflict. Adding a new character can bring a new energy and offer more avenues for drama and tension. Think about a character who acts as a foil to another character, or who is obviously working in opposition to them. Make your new character clash with the ones who already exist, ensuring that you’re furthering the drama of the story. Who knows, you may end up inventing your favorite person to write about!

5. Create a situation in which a character explicitly fails to do something. 

Another way to create drama and tension is through failure. When a character does not succeed at getting what they want, it automatically adds depth and tension to the scene. The failure doesn’t have to be anything big—it could be something everyday, like losing an important item, failing to keep a promise, or answering a question wrong. Whatever it is, it will add layers to your story by putting your character into a situation in which they don’t succeed. How they react to that, and the effect it has on the rest of the story, can motivate you to continue writing. 

6. Use a tarot deck (or other deck of cards) for inspiration. 

Tarot decks are not just fun and mystical, they’re often also beautiful, featuring art by talented artists to represent the different cards. For a fun way to get some inspiration, try using one to give a character a reading or take a description from a tarot book to determine a plot point. Other kinds of games, like Cards Against Humanity or Wingspan or a regular set of cards could also be used to inspire! Even playing a game like Scrabble can be a fun way to take a step back and use your brain in a different way for a while, which can get the creative juices pumping once again. 

Don’t own a tarot deck? Check out our Literary Tarot. It’s a unique take on a classic tarot deck that utilizes famous stories to unlock the secrets of the arcana. Learn more here!

7. Change your surroundings. 

Sometimes, we feel stagnant because our surroundings are. It may be time to mix up where and when you write. Put yourself in a space where the people and sights around you can serve as invigoration. Some of our favorites include coffee shops, museums, parks, libraries, and libraries. Hearing others’ conversations or even just putting yourself in a new environment can help turn on the part of your brain that gets you writing.

Just Keep Writing

Aside from all these prompts and ideas, the most important thing is to just keep writing no matter what. Even if you end up scrapping everything you write based on these or other prompts, using them will help you explore your characters and world more and hopefully result in further inspiration. Everyone struggles with feeling unmotivated sometimes, and so even if you do need to take a break from writing for a few days, don’t let it discourage you. Remember to celebrate even the smallest breakthroughs—like putting words on the page after a week—and find ways to inspire yourself. 

Your Guide to Completing a Long-Form Work From Start to Finish

Now that you know different ways to outline a story, how to build suspense and tension, how to write compelling dialogue, and more, it’s time to get started on a first draft of your novel (or other long-form work)! With the tips and tricks gathered from the Facts of Fiction series so far, there are plenty of tools in the workhouse to use when writing a longer, more complex story. But how does one even begin tackling the challenge of writing an entire novel? 

First of all, know you’re not alone. November is now widely recognized as National Novel Writing Month, and whether you’re participating in the challenge of writing a novel this November or just interested in dipping your toes into writing a longer story, plenty of people are on this journey with you. Writing challenges can motivate you to strive for a realistic, if challenging, goal—such as 50,000 words in a month. Having this goal can keep you on-track for writing a novel. Our goal is to provide you with tools, like the ones outlined below, to keep you on track in beginning and maintaining momentum throughout writing a first draft of a novel or other long-form story. 

Setting and Keeping Writing Goals

Setting goals is one of the best ways to get words on the page. For example, a goal of completing 50,000 words in one month to about 1,700 words per day. Knowing and striving towards this daily goal will be the first step in setting yourself up for success in completing the challenge. Plus, it will force you to get into the habit of daily writing. 

While not every writer writes every day, getting into a regular habit of writing will help you become a better writer—and will ultimately result in much more content. Depending on your schedule, setting aside time to write is the first step in tackling any writing project. You might follow a schedule that looks like this: 

• 30 uninterrupted writing minutes after breakfast. 
• 1 hour writing period at noon. 
• 30 uninterrupted writing minutes after dinner.

Or maybe it will look like this: 

• 2 hours writing period before work. 

Or like this: 

• 7:00 PM – 11:00 PM: Writing time! 

Or whatever works best for you. Some writers find it easier to break writing periods up into smaller sessions. Others like to settle in for longer periods of time to really flex their writing muscle. Either way, the important part is making it fit into your schedule and what feels good for you.

Aside from time goals, setting a word count goal can also help. You should base this on your own writing pace. Someone who likes to write quickly might want to set a higher goal, whereas someone who takes their time should avoid overwhelming themself. Generally speaking, between 500 to 1000 words per day is usually doable. Add more to make faster progress. Take some away if you find you’re struggling to hit your count. 

There are also plenty of tools to help you do things like set a writing schedule and hit a word count each day or session. Here are three of our favorites: 

• Scrivener: This writing tool has templates for easier story creation, such as for novels, screenplays, short stories, and more. You can also track your word count or use pre-set templates for various novel writing challenges. Scrivener costs about $50 to $60 depending on what type you get, but once you have it it’s yours forever. They also have a 30-day free trial option. Tip: Ask around other writer friends to see if they have a Scrivener discount code lying around. 
• Word Count Trackers: Of course, word processing softwares like Microsoft Word and Google Docs also provide word count tracking. Other trackers include places like Writer, an online typewriter that offers a distraction-free place to get started and finish work. You can find different word count trackers online, so if you don’t want to invest in a program like Scrivener, it should be easy enough to find one that works for you.
• Notion: The organization software Notion provides free (and paid) templates that can help you track the progress of a novel or other story. Notion is free (though there is also a paid version) and can be an especially helpful tool in the planning process of a longer piece. 

You really don’t need anything fancy to write. These tools can be helpful if you find that you’re not getting as much writing done as you’d like, or if you need a place to organize all of your thoughts. But at the end of the day, it’s putting the pen to the page—or the fingertips to the keyboard, in this case—that will get you results! Other goals you might strive for are: number of pages written, story progress based on an outline, or chapters finished. 

Different Approaches to Revising Work

One question that writers always have to answer is what their editing process is going to be like. When tackling a challenge like writing 50,000 words in a month, we recommend just going for it and leaving the editing for later. But for regular writing, you may take a few different approaches. 

One option is to edit as you draft. The risk of this approach is slowing down your progress because you’re constantly going back to fix what you’ve written. This can sometimes feel like taking two steps back for every one step forward and may even have you questioning elements of your story to the point of frustration. If that’s the case, just remember that a first draft is a rough draft and you shouldn’t be striving for perfection with it. However, this approach can result in a more polished first draft, which can make further revisions feel less overwhelming. 

Another option is to wait until the end to edit anything. This will help you reach whatever writing goals you’ve set (especially if you’re working from an outline), but it may also give you more work for further drafts. Writers who enjoy this approach may find themselves with more content overall, which can either feel good or overwhelming. 

Finally, a third option is to combine the two. If you’ve set up a writing schedule that you’re trying to stick to, maybe once or twice a week you can build in a specific period for editing. This way, you’re not constantly editing, but you’re not leaving it all to the end either. 

Every writer does it differently. Our advice is to not let yourself get bogged down with the little details, whichever approach you take. Making the process of writing joyful is the best way to ensure you’ll make it a habit, from the first page of your novel to the last. 

If you decide to edit while writing, limit yourself to editing only a certain amount per day—and make sure you’re still hitting your word goals. If you prefer saving all the editing for the end, try highlighting places you know you want to fix so you have guidelines when you do dive into editing. Always remember that your first stab at writing something isn’t going to be the best version. Only through the process of revision can you land on a final draft that feels complete. So don’t be afraid to take risks with the first version of any story and just get those words on the page!

Wrapping Up Your First Novel and Beyond

When tackling a complex project like a novel, it’s important to: 

• Celebrate the small milestones. Each chapter you complete or each week you maintain motivation and write to your goal is worth celebrating. Decide how you want to celebrate these milestones ahead of time: maybe it’s a sweet treat or dinner out with a friend. Maybe it’s getting up and dancing at your desk. Whatever you decide, know that it’s worth a congratulations and you should feel good for getting this far!
• Reflect on your journey. Each week, ask yourself questions like: How did I feel while writing that? What do I like best about what I’ve just written? Where do I see areas for improvement in what I’ve just written? Are the goals I’ve set for myself working out? Reflecting will help you realize just how far you’ve come and adjust your goals as needed. 
• Plan the next steps. After finishing a first draft of a novel, what’s next? It may be time to dive into the editing process. Prep for revisions by rereading your work, finding critique partners, and potentially even thinking about what it will take to get your work published. Not all work is written with the goal of publication, but if that is your goal, it’s good to start thinking early about what you might need to do to make that happen. 

It’s All About the Journey

No matter what happens, taking on a complex project like a novel is a huge task. You should feel good about even considering it! Let us know what kind of novel you plan to embark on soon on our Instagram. And if you feel great about a short story, poem, flash fiction piece, or creative nonfiction work you’ve written, consider submitting to F(r)iction. We’re always looking for new voices to feature. 

It’s spooky season! You know what that means. Besides all the Halloween decorations in stores that have been there since August, and perhaps even some leaves changing colors on the trees, it’s the season of scary stories. The allure of such stories lies in how they evoke chills and keep the audience on edge. But what makes a story spooky? Does it have to be about ghosts or ghouls or other creepy things? Should it always take place somewhere scary—like an empty gas station at night? 

If you like all things Halloween or horror, this is the blog for you. But even if you don’t, you can still learn from how writers build suspense and tension—the key ingredients to all things frightening and dramatic—in their work. 

What Makes a Story Spooky? 

Mood, pacing, and tension building all contribute to a story’s overall spookiness. Horror and suspense come from the balance of all these elements. The longer you can keep an audience in suspense through these techniques, the more engaged they’ll feel in the story. 

Mood is a literary device that describes the feeling the audience gets while experiencing a story. In written work, it is carefully crafted through the words used in each sentence. In visual work, it is created through visual elements, like colors, lighting, and physical reactions. Moods can be anything—a poem about a lover may be praiseful and romantic, making the reader feel warm and loved; an action-packed blockbuster may be fast-paced and thrilling, making the viewer’s heart race. With spooky stories, mood is a key part of building suspense and making the audience feel fearful and uncertain. 

• Example of mood in action: Two similar sentences can evoke different moods depending on the words you use.
  • The broad expanse of the field, full of lush green grass and chirping critters, stretched before him.
  • The field loomed ominously before him, and a strange mist rose up from the dark grass, muffling and warping the noises of creatures trapped within. 

Pacing describes the speed at which the audience experiences the story—which may differ from the speed at which it takes place. For example, a part of a story that takes place over several years may be expressed in a paragraph or even a sentence. Getting pacing right can make or break how a story feels to its audience—or even if they finish it. Go too slow, and the audience may lose interest. Move too fast, and they may miss key details or feel overwhelmed. In scary stories, pacing can be used to build suspense by slowing things down and then speeding them back up at just the right moment. 

Tension boils down to the feelings of suspense and anxiety the audience experiences during a story. And it isn’t only used in spooky stories—everything from literary fiction to nonfiction and more benefits from and utilizes tension to keep readers engaged. Without it, the audience may get bored and stop engaging with the story. It is especially essential, however, in moments that seek to scare the audience. Without tension, the story will lack stakes to feel nervous about and look forward to ending. Tension asks the question, “What’s going to happen next?” 

None of these elements are unique to spooky stories; they appear in all kinds of storytelling. But getting them right in a piece meant to thrill and terrify is the difference between success and failure. 

Suspense in Action

Suspense boils down to isolation, fear of the unknown, and uncertainty.  Let’s take a look at Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” a famous poem that builds suspense masterfully using all of the techniques outlined above. It starts: 

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, 
weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of
forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there
came a tapping, 
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my 
chamber door.
“‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my
chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.” 

The first stanza of this poem invokes the image of a dark, late night, and a person almost asleep over their books, only to be abruptly jolted awake by a knocking sound. Poe’s language, in particular his use of repetition—”rapping, rapping,”—slows down the pace of the poem, leading to a building of suspense as the reader imagines who—or what—might be at his door. The mood is already set through the description of the night and the sleepiness of the narrator. And the tension comes from that word, “suddenly,” which seems to come out of nowhere and surprise the reader. 

The poem goes on at this slow pace, the narrator considering who it could be and even talking to them, only to discover it’s been a raven all along. This, however, does not comfort the narrator; having been wound up by the tension built within their mind, they see the raven as a beast and omen, watching them, without blinking, endlessly. 

Crafting Suspense in Short Stories 

Brevity can be a major factor in keeping tension high and focus sharp. Think about a spooky story told over a flickering campfire. If it goes on for too long, you lose interest. But kept quite brief, it will cause unease and fear even among the most stalwart of campers. 

Building suspense quickly relies on careful pacing—a gradual build-up followed by a sharp twist—and balancing the “Unsaid”—what you purposefully leave out versus what you put in. After all, sometimes the scariest things are those we can only imagine. 

In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” for example, Poe takes time unfolding the events that take place, allowing tension to simmer beneath the surface. The narrator arrives at the house and observes its unsettling environment, but nothing dramatic happens immediately. Instead, a sense of foreboding grows through small details—the gloomy weather, the oppressive atmosphere, Roderick’s strange behavior, and Madeline’s mysterious illness. 

As the story unfolds, Poe builds suspense through a combination of atmospheric details, psychological tension, and narrative techniques. The eerie mood he creates through careful use of language keeps readers on edge from the beginning, and the sense of dread only escalates. Setting is a big part of this. The gothic language used to describe the Usher mansion and its surroundings play a part in setting the stage for something truly creepy to happen. Also, the personification of the house as a character in its own right enhances the malevolent presence as its physical deterioration mirrors the psychological decay of its inhabitants. 

Read the full story here to learn more from the master of suspense and horror. 

Suspense in Longer Formats

In longer formats like novels or TV shows, it’s a challenge to maintain tension over hundreds of pages or minutes on screen. Some ways to tackle this challenge include: 

• Utilizing cliffhangers. End major sections, like chapters or episodes, with unresolved tension to keep the audience wondering what’s going to happen next.
  • Don’t overuse these, however, as it can become cliché and quickly bothersome if done too much. 
• Employing different perspectives. Prevent the audience from uncovering too much of the story at once and keep them on edge with unreliable narrators or a limited point of view.
  • For example, Dracula by Bram Stoker is relayed through a diary format, which limits what the audience can know—they can only ever know what the current narrator of the story tells them through written word. 
  • Additionally, in horror TV and film, the camera often intentionally limits what the audience and the protagonist can see as a way to limit perspective. 

Mood, pacing, and tension building will also play a large part in any long-form suspenseful works, of course. Check out our Study in Classics series covering Dracula for an in-depth analysis of successfully built suspense in longer form fiction. Shows like “The Haunting of Hill House” and “American Horror Story” also do this successfully. 

Setting the Scene for Fear

Atmosphere is a literary device that refers to the mood or emotional tone of a story. Unlike mood, however, it’s not the feelings evoked by that work but rather what is actually on the page. Atmosphere contributes to mood, but mood can change from scene to scene whereas atmosphere permeates a work entirely. 

Atmosphere is primarily conveyed to the audience through the setting. For scary stories, this might mean gothic influences like those seen in Poe’s work or in Dracula. Dark nights, decaying, ominous mansions, and isolated locations make for a scary setting. Think about almost every horror film you’ve seen—how did the setting affect the atmosphere? 

In the famous spooky tale “The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving, the setting of a foggy, haunted town enhances the mystery. Everything, including plot elements, seem shrouded in that thick fog, keeping readers guessing until the very end. While the tone of the story remains light and almost whimsical for much of its length, over time, the supernatural elements coupled with superstition and fear culminate in the famous, suspenseful scene with the Headless Horseman. 

Another major way to convey the atmosphere of a work is through sensory details. The way that characters react to and feel in the world you’ve created will give your audience a sense of how they should be feeling as well. For example, if you’re trying to create a light, magical atmosphere, you might describe golden sunlight glittering over the ground, or a breeze fluttering playfully through the air. 

Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

There are faux pas when it comes to suspense and tension. Bad horror movies come out every year, and the techniques we’ve discussed have even been parodied in films like Scream. To avoid an overwrought or clichéd work, keep these tips in mind: 

1. Don’t over do the jump scares. Tension is almost always best when it’s subtle. Let the audience feel it simmering just beneath the surface rather than boiling over the top. Sudden shocks can be exciting and scary when used sparingly, but too many big moments will turn an audience off. 
2. Don’t make the plot too predictable. Keep an audience engaged by subverting expectations. If they can immediately guess what’s going to happen next, they will lose any sense of suspense or tension you’re trying to build. Without the uncertainty of what’s going to happen next, why keep up with the story?
3. Don’t over explain. As mentioned before, the “Unsaid” is often the scariest thing about a story. Let your audience fill in the blanks; this will only add to their feelings of anxiety and suspense.
   1. Example: For all of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, he tends to label the monstrous things witnessed by his characters as indescribable or inconceivable, leaving only a few details among a lot of mystery. This way, the reader imagines something far more horrible than he could ever write down. 

A Suspenseful Ending

Crafting suspense is about pacing, atmosphere, and withholding information. Balancing elements of mood and tension are key to ensuring your story feels surprising, intense, and unexpected. With the techniques outlined in this work, you can create your very own spine-tingling story for Halloween or any time of year. Put your pen to the test and try writing a suspenseful scene or two—you may be surprised where you end up!