You might be thinking, it’s a bit early for Halloween. Some people think about horror, I mean, Halloween, all year long.

But if you’re a writer, it is important to start brainstorming and writing early, so it can be edited, revised, and polished as a reader magnet or published around the holiday. I love getting into the spirit of things by reading books based around pumpkins, costumes, and tricks.

And I enjoy watching Halloween movies for great ideas. Everything from family fun, like Halloween Town, to psychological horror, like Lady in White.

Here are some ideas to get you started writing your own scary stories to tell the the dark.

Spooky Writing Prompts

These are writing prompts for everyone. Both kid friendly and for those who enjoy the fun aspect of the holiday. The tricks are mild, and the treats are sweet enough to get the juices flowing. What makes Halloween stories great is the focus on the setting elements.

• Goblins and spooks treat Halloween as a night to hide.
• You find an injured bat on Halloween night.
• The ghosts, witches, etc. use Halloween as a time to join the groups and stock up on candy for the year.
• You get an invitation to a mysterious Halloween party/ball.
• There’s a Halloween gathering of black cats.
• What if the uncarved mini-decorative pumpkins started self-dividing in a mitosis manner all over town?
• Everyone knows the person who lives in the house on the hill is a witch/ghost/vampire. Write a letter inviting them to your Halloween party.
• You got so excited about collecting candy that you and your friends just kept going, following the crowd, until suddenly it was just a few of you, then just you and your friends, and you realized that you were lost.
• You won best costume at a Halloween party. But you’re not wearing a costume.
• New neighbors move in on Halloween, or you move into a new neighborhood on Halloween.
• The town is decorated with jack’o’laterns, cobwebs, and skeletons. The only problem is, it isn’t Halloween.
• What if costumes weren’t necessary to change your appearance and behavior on Halloween?
• Every year your town makes the corn maze in the same field where there is a giant oak in the center. This year, you stand at an opening next to the tree when it is hit by lightning. And you can see something inside the center of the tree.
• Your ability to create jack’o’lanterns, decorations, or costumes that are super realistic is literally magic.
• Take a Day of the Dead twist and write a story about someone who spends Halloween celebrating in a cemetery with their dearly departed.
• There is a new candy this year that everyone wants and has to have.

Scary Halloween Story Prompts

For those who like the scare, horror, factor of Halloween, these prompts up the trick level and add some sour to the treats.

• You and your sister visit the sweet old lady who always offers gingerbread (modern Hansel and Gretel).
• The ghouls and ghosts attack those who smash pumpkins and jack ‘o’ lanterns.
• The Great Pumpkin Spirit arrives in a pumpkin patch and consumes the teenagers there.
• On Halloween, the chalkboard of the school room starts writing on its own.
• Gremlins are doing the tricks around town because they aren’t getting treats.
• Dead mice, rats, and birds litter the yard of someone handing out full-sized candy bars (or other highly prized treat).
• How many zombies are too many?
• The story you tell around the campfire on Halloween night becomes real.
• Teenagers are daring one another on Halloween, until things get way too out of hand.
• You’re playing “light as a feather, stiff as a board,” and the person in the middle begins floating.
• You inherit the family home. Everything is fine, until you get out the Halloween decorations.
• You are alone at home. The spouse has taken the kids out trick-or-treating, and you run out of candy. You think there are some lollies in the chest freezer, but you open it to find a dead body.
• The spirits only stay away on Halloween as long as the candle in the jack’o’lantern on their grave lasts. Then, they can escape the graveyard.
• A teacher or parent tells a group of children why Halloweens of the past were so deadly and why they aren’t anymore. Or at least for now.

Best Halloween Creative Writing Prompts

Some of these were my favorite visuals that can lead anywhere to any type of story. But in the spirit of Halloween, see if you can up the trick factor by flipping your initial ideas on their head (pun intended).

• There’s a witch sitting alone in a cemetery on Halloween.
• Death with his scythe is sad, standing next to a jack ’o’ lantern.
• The abandoned jack’o’lanterns become angry the day after Halloween.
• Only adults trick or treat on Halloween.
• People walk outside in the fall leaves. Suddenly, the leaves touching people cause different events to happen. Those that are hit by red leaves have something happen to their blood. Those that are hit by a falling orange leaf become angry. A yellow leaf that touches someone causes them to become overly optimistic. A brown leaf means they die. 

Unique Halloween Topics

All the stories are about witches, ghosts, pumpkins, black cats, and trick’ or’ treating. What else is there? Try to think outside the box, and consider some of these same things differently. Or consider different things that could be a part of the holiday.

• A love potion mixed into the Halloween party punch goes horribly right or wrong.
• Every time someone says trick-or-treat, a mechanical randomizer tells the homeowner which to do.
• The porch lights on after dark on Halloween doesn’t mean you get candy.
• What if when trick or treating and you see a specific-colored pumpkin on their porch, you could go to the back door instead for something different?
• Instead of black cats, candy, and corn, Halloween is celebrated with orange tabbies, tooth brushes, and unicorns. And people dress the most like themselves.
• Halloween is outlawed.
• What if it was fall or Halloween all year long?
• You get to choose a new holiday tradition to add to the Halloween festivities.

Halloween Story Starters

Maybe you want to write something with a little more meat to it. These starts have enough possibility to take you all the way to a full novel, though depending on how you’ve been inspired, any of the prompts here could take you on the journey to writing a full story.

• Like Dorian Grey, a family’s bad deeds become a living curse exemplified in their family manor, and it comes to a culmination on Halloween.
• It’s Halloween on a dark highway where the road keeps changing and eyes are watching from the sides.
• Explore the experience from the eyes of the ghosts on Halloween.
• What would Halloween of the future be like after there has been a rift in space/time where the creatures are real or aliens have joined us that have a similar feel to things like werewolves, ghosts, and vampires?
• Halloween decorating and the town carnival are mandatory. No one has ever broken the rule, except you cannot participate this year. Why can’t you participate, and what is the penalty?
• You wake up alone in a room with no memory of who you are or how you got there. There are no doors or windows and nothing inside the room except for a calendar on the wall with a day circled and Halloween a week away with a big red ‘X’ on it.

Conclusion

From everything from short story reader magnets, to full length fiction novels, Fictionary Storyteller can help you see if you have really hit those elements of the setting super group in the ways that best tells your Halloween story.

With holiday stories that take place in autumn and around Halloween, the locations are a bit different than in just any old story. There will be corn mazes, funhouses at fairs, fall festivals, and the decorations. Mysterious Halloween stores and costume shops pop up all over the place in abandoned strip malls. And people spend more time at pumpkin patches or getting hayrides.

The five senses are key to Halloween and horror. The sight descriptions can be bright and fun or disturbing. Hearing can help with tension, especially if you can hear things you can’t see. You know something is getting close when you can smell it. But smell can also invoke the happy memories of childhood. Touch can mean you are in loads of trouble, or it can mean safety and security because you are now within arm’s length. And somethings can taste delicious, while others are truly horrible.

Fictionary StoryTeller keeps track of all these elements within each scene. The story map can give you an overview of where there are patterns or cliché uses in your story or an element is absent. Then, you can edit and revise your story into one that really draws your reader in and makes them laugh, gives them chills, or leaves them with a scream.

I hope this list of ideas can help you get started and gets the creative flow moving as much as it has for me. I found writing this absolutely fun, and it gave me a unique way of looking at the world around me.