What is my assignment?

The assignment I chose to reflect on is from way back in the first quarter, in my English class. The assignment was to write a short horror story, in the spirit of Halloween. The goal of the assignment was to practice using imagery and mood in order to prepare us for our short story unit.

Identify

Here is the criteria for this assignment:

• Must be less than 500 words
• Must use the vocabulary words required: mausoleum, spectral, and macabre
• Remember: must have a beginning, middle, and end

Inspire

I remember feeling very excited for this project. The only thing was, I had no clue where to start. Using Google, I searched up ‘short scary stories.’ There were so many! I eventually wound up on Pinterest – my favourite website – scrolling through all of the short horror stories that people had come up with. It was amazing how many there were – some only had one or two sentences, and still gave me the chills. I also read classics like Lamb to the Slaughter and The Monkey’s Paw.

I remember thinking, “Hmm…I really like the horror stories where there are all sorts of little details and they come to a full circle right at the end, maybe I should do something like that!”

Interpolate

I collected a bunch of examples of short scary stories and typed them up in a Word Document. Then, I decided what I wanted my story to be about – a girl who has a dream about a serial killer, then wakes up and finds that there actually is a serial killer on the loose. I deleted the examples I wrote, then created my outline.

I just had to remember one thing – all of these short horror stories end with the sentence that brings everything together – the last sentence is THE MOST important part.

Imagine

Finally! I started writing my story. I had to make sure to include the vocabulary words, so I made sentences with them beforehand that could fit into my story. It took a long time – I was editing and re-editing, and typing then deleting. In the end, I had a finished product that I could be proud of. If you want, you can read my story here.

Inspect

Right before I handed in my assignment, I went back to my criteria. I made sure that I had included all three vocabulary words, and I had reached the word count requirement (I actually didn’t meet this one – I was six words over! But my teacher said it was okay). I asked my siblings to read my story and asked what they thought of it. They gave some feedback, I made some small changes, then finally, I handed it in.

If I could do this assignment again, I would probably not do everything at the last minute (oops). As I said before, there was a lot of writing and rewriting, so it would have been better for me if I hadn’t been stressing about running out of time as well. However, I am still proud of myself for writing a short story, and I was surprised when I realized that I had been using the Creative Fluency without even knowing it!