gothic creative writing lessons

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Master the art of crafting sumptuous Gothic fiction that drips with atmosphere.

Develop a cast of characters that meets the needs of a Gothic tale, while putting your own spin on expectations.

Find the perfect beginning and ending to match the mood and tone of the story you wish to convey.

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Discover how to add a Gothic flavor to just about any genre – not just horror.

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KS3 Introduction to Gothic Creative Writing

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An introduction to gothic fiction going over the conventions A timeline of gothic fiction Introduction to the describing gothic characters through analysis of Dracula and Frankenstein's monster This short scheme of learning could span 6 lessons

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November 13, 2020.

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100 gothic fiction writing prompts

November 28, 2023 by Richard Leave a Comment

Here are 100 gothic fiction writing prompts that go bump in the night. Shadowy figures are lurking in crumbling mansions. Ominous family curses and disturbing secrets. Welcome to the macabre world of gothic fiction. With its atmospheric tales of horror and suspense, this haunting genre never seems to die.

And now, you can let your dark imagination run wild thanks to these 100 spine-tingling gothic fiction writing prompts. Inside, you’ll find story ideas involving haunted sanitariums, possessed dolls, vengeful spirits, bizarre experiments gone wrong, unsettling wax museums, and so much more.

Creative inspiration awaits on every chilling line, from creepy portraits and abandoned opera houses to agents of the occult and sinister doppelgangers. Not for the faint of heart, these prompts pull back the veil into spaces where the darkest dreams and nightmares dwell just out of sight.

Venture forth, if you dare. Let the ghosts and shadows guide your pen to weave deliciously dramatic tales to make readers shiver. Just be warned—once you immerse yourself in these macabre realms, you might never wish to return to the comforting glow of the light again. The spirits will eagerly await your next visit to their darkened domains.

• An old mansion hides disturbing secrets and supernatural forces in the attic that slowly take control of a new homeowner.
• A family curse causes a daughter to transform into a ghostly spirit every night, haunting the ancestral castle.
• Gargoyles and stone figures seem to move when no one is watching in an ancient monastery turned hotel.
• Mysterious scratching and cries can be heard within the walls of a creaky old plantation house at night.
• An innocent mother is accused of witchcraft in 1600s Salem and condemned to death for her occult “crimes.”
• A widow uncovers her dead husband’s strange double life after finding his hidden portrait stashed away in a forgotten attic.
• A mental patient believes a possessed doll talks to her at night, urging her to commit violent acts.
• Strange marks and blood keep appearing on a daughter after she becomes obsessed with communicating with spirits using an antique Ouija board.
• A decaying sanitarium still bears unsettling traces of its horrific and bizarre medical practices on abandoned patients.
• Villagers suffer violent sleepwalking fits that coincide with rumors of a vampire stalking the night.
• A daughter tries to figure out if she’s going insane or truly haunted by the vengeful ghost of her dead mother.
• A perilous staircase within an abbey spirals into unknown realms below.
• A pallid masked ball conjures macabre visions of the past that hint at an unsolved murder.
• A family becomes increasingly corrupted and haunted after moving into an ancestral home their new baby inherited.
• Dogs around a village go mad after a meteor crash, savaging their masters at night.
• Mysterious medicinal tinctures at an asylum seem to only make patients exhibit worsening fits of insanity.
• A gravedigger realizes the corpse he just buried seems oddly still sentient and desperate to escape.
• Villagers are plagued by a daemonic specter leaving behind inexplicable nocturnal phenomena like imprints of cloven hooves.
• An innocent girl is abducted into a convent as punishment for her mother’s sins but discovers the nuns secretly practice witchcraft at night.
• An accursed cask of Amontillado wine drives its victims murderously insane.
• A troubled widow uncovers her home’s accursed foundations are strangely shifting every night.
• A shadowy cabal seeks occult texts and artifacts for mysterious rituals from the catacombs below a corrupted monastery.
• In the candlelit rooms of an abandoned Gothic manse, ghosts endlessly recreate a tragedy.
• A prisoner is spirited away every night from his cell to a ghostly masked ball even as he awaits execution.
• Sinister medieval torture devices are revived to torment victims of an obsessive cryptic society within a dungeon.
• Glimpses of fatal visions in ornate mirrors drives the viewer slowly mad.
• An eccentric gentleman scientist conducts deranged experiments bringing corpses to life with disastrous consequences.
• A remote island filled with exotic flowers breeds an opiate-like scent that draws visitors only to never let them leave again.
• A silver bell that rings unexpectedly in the night signals another soon-to-be victim marked for death by a vengeful spirit.
• Eerie doppelgangers take the place of loved ones, deceiving everyone except one person who knows the truth.
• A crumbling gothic tower imprisoned artists driven mad trying to capture visions of a beautiful muse who tragically perished.
• An asylum patient speaks a dead language to mysterious entities living within the walls.
• Sinister satanic rituals take place in the catacombs below a remote monastery.
• An eccentric widow performs bizarre elaborate funerals for her dead pets left to wander restless on the grounds of her decaying estate.
• Terrible secrets fester behind the boarded up windows of a foreboding Gothic manse sinking into a swamp.
• A cursed ancient artifact causes a strange wasting plague to rapidly age victims until they become desiccated ghoulish remnants.
• Phantasmagoric illusions plague a masked ball, showing omens of tragedy within the mirrors.
• Witch hunters accuse women in a village of secret satanic pacts causing children to dance madly to macabre magical flutes only they seem to hear.
• A miserable masked carnival performer transforms into a real grotesque creature when offstage after being born malformed.
• An old wooden marionette begins subtly manipulating its puppeteer.
• Mysterious locked rooms once used for occult rituals drive the curious to obsessively seek ways to see inside.
• Winged vicious creatures stalk the elaborate stone halls of crumbling ancestral castle.
• Unmarked graves in family cemeteries disturbingly sink every year even after exhumation.
• A vampiric contagion spreads from rats boldly biting citizens in a shadowy slum.
• A wretched foundling child suffers violent fits and harbors a cruel second soul those in the workhouse strangely indulge.
• A portrait’s eyes seem to hauntingly follow you as if the spirit remains trapped within.
• An intricate puzzle box found in the ashes of an old burned down asylum proves maddeningly impossible yet sinister to solve.
• A masked stranger seems to mysteriously die multiple violent deaths before your eyes at the same masquerade ball over centuries.
• A sleep experiment induces ghastly nightmares that continue to haunt waking victims.
• A wax museum’s strikingly lifelike figures seem prone to subtly shifting when unobserved.
• Mourning paintings morph the dead’s faces into cadaverous skulls if stared at too long.
• Disturbing eerie echoes of macabre theater scenes continue to repeat within an abandoned Opera house attic even without players.
• A widower’s pained artistic attempts at revival seem to succeeding at resurrecting his deceased wife into an uncanny creature.
• A sentient schizophrenic house’s architecture keeps fantastically warping.
• A broken antique kaleidoscope filled with tainted bone fragments shows macabre visions of death to owners.
• An inhabitant of opiate dens seems to project their delirious dreams of a haunted palace.
• Gargoyles mysteriously take the place of landlords thought to be away on extended trips.
• Elaborate startling illusionist tricks at a theater inexplicably shift into real supernatural manifestations.
• An ornate hand mirror shows the viewer’s face aging rapidly or glimpses their own gruesome death behind their shoulder.
• Ghostly debutante dancers endlessly waltz together unable to stop until dawn breaks the spell binding them to the ballroom.
• A widow uncovers her husband’s secret obsession with building uncannily perfect wind up automata replacements of recently deceased townspeople.
• A physician teaches his unusual nervously sensitive ward to enter a trance to retreat from reality’s disturbing stimuli into the meticulously crafted rooms of a haunted mind palace.
• Corpses of the recently deceased are stolen from cemeteries before materializing days later woven into elaborately posed configurations on church pews.
• A troubled writer frequents the sprawling haunted ruins of an alchemist’s strange estate, inspiring her wildly imaginative yet disturbing stories seeming to manifest elements into reality the more she writes them.
• A masked stranger haunts the private theater box night after night to bizarrely mentor an actress until she embodies her dead lover reborn onstage.
• Ghostly echoes of macabre deaths plague a murderer forcing them toward the scene of their crimes for a reenactment on every anniversary.
• Eerie music box melodies woven from metal pins and blood guide the imaginative inside a labyrinthine mechanical puzzle house.
• A widow trapped in perpetual mourning painstakingly applies her dead daughter’s preserved face to lifelike doll effigies.
• Disturbing unseen presences seem to forcibly puppeteer vulnerable drug addicts into recreating bizarre depraved theater shows.
• An intricately decorated artifact using human bones and teeth seems to promise supernatural visions yet also extract sanity as payment.
• A troubled detective frequents the bizarrely maze-like halls of his inherited family estate which seems to ominously shift and transform to mirror his fractured mind.
• A strange idol causes bizarre uncanny doppelgangers to manifest when studying your mirrored reflection too closely by candlelight.
• An ominous ancient grandfather clock always seems to countdown toward the hour of a person’s eventual mysterious death.
• Eerie echoes from a deceased twin haunt a surviving sister while her parents seem obliviously content to pretend the deceased child never existed.
• A troubled magician able to manifest realistic illusions finds the appearances slowly becoming autonomous entities no longer under their control.
• A melancholy doll somehow houses the soul of a drowned child submerged from a past tragedy mysteriously able to animate itself.
• A comatose woman’s nightmares seem to cross over into waking reality the longer she remains unable to wake up.
• A grieving eccentric covertly captures apparitions on antique photographic plates by stealing close keepsakes from dead loved ones to haunt the images.
• A drug addict watches a doppelganger slowly take over their life leaving them behind like a forgotten hollow shell.
• An heiress who haunts a decaying mansion seems to enchant guests into staying longer each visit until they waste away becoming dusty relics imprisoned by her loneliness.
• Death masks crafted from wax conceal a bizarre way for the wealthy secretly achieve eternal life by encasing souls.
• An intricate puzzle box found in an asylum’s ashes proves disturbingly irresistible yet maddeningly impossible to solve.
• Faded unnerving portraits hide being them twisted decaying corpse faces revealed by candlelight.
• An artist’s miraculously revived daughter rapidly becomes a bizarre inhuman creature.
• A grieving mother uses bodies of the recently deceased as bizarre life size macabre doll replacements for her dead daughter.
• Unmarked patient graves in an asylum’s cemetery subtly sink deeper when no one watches.
• A haunted portrait’s subject seems to possess those who gaze upon their beauty for too long.
• An intricate anatomical theater hides disturbing occult ceremonies deep below.
• A twisted sculptures garden filled with contorted stone bodies seems to come alive at night.
• Ghostly debutante dancers haunt an abandoned dilapidated ballroom unable stop waltzing even as the room crumbles.
• A magician’s transformative stage illusions become an addiction yet irreversibly distorts their appearance when not on stage.
• A troubling ornate music box plays seemingly random eerie melodies that prove to sadly match the tune of imminent real life tragedies.
• A grief stricken eccentric attempts increasingly deranged experiments to revive dead loved ones.
• An intricate mechanical puzzle house ensnares victims inside its constantly shifting labyrinthine rooms and halls.
• A haunted asylum’s disturbing experimental therapies leave victims in an eternally childlike regressed state even after death.
• Unearthly cries emerge from the boarded up ruins of a decaying estate no one dares gets near at night.
• An intricate mosaic floor patterns itself from the powdered cremation ashes of deceased institute residents.
• Mourning paintings hauntingly transform to show the dead’s faces become cadaverous skulls if stared at too long.
• An intricate clockwork automatons that perfectly resemble the newly dead seem to creepily enact aspects of their former living behaviors.
• An intricate artful anatomy theater hides disturbing occult ceremonies deep below its secret trapdoors.

We hope you enjoyed this list of Gothic writing prompts. There are many other writing prompts on our site you may enjoy. If you have any questions or concerns please leave them in the comments below. Feel free to leave us any work you want to share that was inspired by these prompts. 

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About Richard

Richard Everywriter (pen name) has worked for literary magazines and literary websites for the last 25 years. He holds degrees in Writing, Journalism, Technology and Education. Richard has headed many writing workshops and courses, and he has taught writing and literature for the last 20 years.  

In writing and publishing he has worked with independent, small, medium and large publishers for years connecting publishers to authors. He has also worked as a journalist and editor in both magazine, newspaper and trade publications as well as in the medical publishing industry.   Follow him on Twitter, and check out our Submissions page .

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Contributor Spotlight: Laura Hulthen Thomas

How long have you been writing? Like a lot of writers, I’ve always been writing and don’t really remember a time when I wasn’t. My first story was called “The Thursday Elephant” and I wrote it when I was six. It was about a shy elephant that would only come out of its hiding place on Thursdays. Clearly I was both a shy and a superstitious child! I mean, why only on Thursdays? The times when I have stopped writing loom much larger in my memory. It’s scary to quit, especially for any long stretch of time. I’ll do anything now to capture time to write and avoid that terror. The worst days writing are worlds better than the best days not writing.

What’s your connection to the Midwest? I have lived, gone to school, and worked in Michigan and Wisconsin for much of my life. But I was born in New Hampshire, a transplant from the East Coast, the daughter of decidedly Yankee parents. Navigating between Yank directness and that unique Midwestern firewall of cheerful distance has made for some interesting cultural collisions. Yanks have an opinion on everything right down to the angle of that day’s sunset and will tell you so straight and true, not always with a mind to spare your feelings. Midwesterners find some weird subterranean ways to tell you exactly what they think while smiling and thanking you for taking the time to listen. I still don’t quite have that gap figured out. With the Yanks I leave a conversation knowing a bit more than I aimed or even wanted to know, but days later I’m sometimes still trying to figure out what the Midwesterner has really just told me. Then I married a Southerner. Everything and nothing gets said in the course of a typical day. Kind of like my writing process, come to think of it.

How has the Midwest influenced your writing? Because I am such an uneasy Midwesterner, tethered here but always a bit of an outsider by temperament and family history, early on I was drawn to other outsiders. I formed my closest friendships and deepest fascinations with the kids of the Eastern European immigrants to my small town. As this was the late seventies and the eighties, these families had fled repressive regimes and very hard lives. The things I found perplexing about the Midwest these immigrants found easy, and freeing. The farm landscape of Southeastern Michigan that I thought dull compared to the White Mountains or the Atlantic felt familiar to the Romanian, Polish and Yugoslavian émigrés who had left rural villages behind. Owning a bakery, or working on the line at GM or Ford for union wages that paid for a house and car, was pure liberation. As they were accustomed to not speaking freely in their home countries, they were perfectly comfortable with the Midwestern friendly reserve that says much by saying little. And my Yank self felt at home with that Eastern European opinionated gusto and passionate curiosity in ways I didn’t feel at home in Michigan. So the Midwest first influenced my writing by inspiring me to write about other places to find my own sense of belonging. Many of my stories are set in Russia, and right now I’m at work on a novella set in St. Petersburg. But these immigrants also taught me to think of the Midwest as a place of freedom, peace, and a healthy sense of privacy. When I do write about Michigan, which is nowadays mostly where my fiction is set, my characters are often Midwestern “lifers” who don’t fit in, usually because they are behaving badly and don’t realize it until the damage is done, which I guess is another Yank influence.

Why do you believe there has never really been a regionalist push for Midwestern writing in the past like there has with the South or even the West Coast? Why the Midwest has been late to define what makes its literary art unique to the region is perhaps a question of perception. I think readers view the Middle West as fundamentally American, representing the whole, rather than a distinct part, of our country. Our great Midwestern authors of the past, like Hemingway, Dreiser, Richard Wright, Twain, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and even a writer like Zane Grey, an Ohio native, live in the public literary imagination as capturing a quintessential American experience. While New England lit and Southern lit evoke specific regional associations, we talk about these Midwesterners as telling American stories. Their characters are Chicagoans or Michiganders rather than Southerners or Yanks, their stories tied less to regional histories and demons and more to the joys and terrors of their American places and times. I see this view of Midwestern places as America’s places in my own experience of writers I admire. When I make literary pilgrimages to New England, I visit the writers’ homes—Louisa May Alcott’s and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s houses, Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond. My Midwestern pilgrimages are to the places of fiction—Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River on the way to where my husband grew up in the UP, Dreiser and Stuart Dybek’s Chicago, Jeffrey Euginedes’ Detroit, Laura Kasischke’s Benton Harbor. I’m drawn to find the Midwestern writers’ mysteries and hearts where their stories live rather than in the spaces where they work.

Now I actually see a strong push towards defining our regional literature in journals and in the national arts media, as writers such as Kasischke and Bonnie Jo Campbell step into national literary influence with their excellent work. Midwestern Gothic is a wonderful “push”, and literary festivals like the Voices of the Middle West festival MG organizes with the University of Michigan’s Residential College are bringing the region’s literary vision to wider public attention and conversation.

How do you feel about social media to promote your writing, and do you use it? Since I teach in an undergraduate creative writing program devoted to community, I do use Facebook—Twitter too, but less often—to promote writing events, including my own. I was a late-comer to social media because I feared the time and care it takes to be active in a meaningful, non-obnoxious way on those platforms. I had mixed feelings before using social media, but there’s no doubt that Facebook reaches more writers and readers than any other media I have access to, and helps enormously with getting the word out. Now I’m happy to use social media to reach students and readers. Drawing more readers to book stores and other intimate reading spaces is wonderful for literature, especially for the independent voices who do not have a big publishing house to promote their work.

Favorite book? Impossible to answer! I’m embarrassingly indiscriminate in my reading, which I think helps me as a writer; keeps me open, accepting, exploring. I’m often in love with whatever book I’m reading at the moment. I just finished teaching Giovanni’s Room to my university freshman seminar and was so moved by the students’ excitement over this book. Every single line breathes. Baldwin captures enormous physical and emotional experiences in intimate, precise detail. So at the moment, this gem is my favorite. I’m a few chapters in to Louise Erdrich’s The Round House . By next week I’m betting it will be my new favorite.

Favorite food? You’ll think I’m saying this just because it’s a Michigan thing, but I love cherries. My son Bennett’s Pepper Pasta Sauce with his homemade meatballs made from an old family recipe is the hands-down winner of food I love. I follow this meal with my favorite dessert, my son Nathan’s Oreo cake. Yep, Oreo cake tastes as good as it sounds.

If you could have coffee (or tea or a beer) with any literary figure, alive or dead, who would it be? I would have tea with Ivy Litvinov, an English writer who married the Russian revolutionary Maxim Litvinov. Maxim became an ambassador under Lenin, and then Stalin’s Foreign Secretary. Ivy married Maxim and moved to Moscow in the 1920s after they were both a part of the radical Bolshevik movement In England. As Ivy was both an Englishwoman and a Jew I find this decision remarkable. Moreover, she had two young children and was pregnant at the time she traveled to Moscow. She miscarried on the voyage, and faced a very hard life in the Soviet Union. It’s this time I’d love to ask her about, the point at which what you believe in and whom you love inspire you to change your life so drastically. While in Moscow, Ivy wrote novels and stories, as well as translated Chekhov and other standards of Russian literature. Although Maxim Litvinov figured prominently in the Bolsheviks’ early agitations and crimes and was the architect of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy, Ivy never wrote of her life as a prominent political figure’s wife. The stories she finally published late in her life, in The New Yorker in the late 60s and early 70s, were set stubbornly, some thought, in the English countryside of her youth. Although publishers repeatedly hounded her to write an autobiography of her tumultuous Russian life, until her death Ivy insisted that her original home was her real story.

Where can we find more information about you? I’m the low-profile type, so the best place to find out more about me is through the Residential College website or our RC writers’ website: http://sites.lsa.umich.edu/rcwriters/

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Department of English

M.f.a. creative writing.

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M.F.A. Students

Raquel Gordon (First Year, Poetry) is a poet from Seattle and has a B.A. in creative writing and dance from the University of Washington. She has performed in music videos, dance films, and choreographed several stage performances including a solo performance in 12 Minutes Max in Seattle. She also loves to sing.

Jason Cahoon (First Year, Fiction) comes from Amherst, Massachusetts. Jason’s work concerns the simultaneous restrictions and empowerments of communal belongingness. He studied English at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Jason taught English at Eaglebrook School, an independent school in Massachusetts. In addition to teaching, Jason served as an editor for The Outlook, the school’s art and literature magazine.

Kathleen Walker (First Year, Nonfiction) grew up in the foothills of South Carolina. Her work explores her childhood spent in rural Appalachia, queerness, witchcraft, and animals both mythical and real. Kathleen was chosen by Nikki Giovanni as the recipient of the 2021 Giovanni-Steger Poetry Prize. Her writing has been published in a variety of publications, including CutBank and Susurrus Magazine.

Annie Burky (First Year, Fiction) calls Colorado home and returns to the West by way of Brooklyn. While earning a M.A. at New York University, she was awarded the Gallatin Review’s prose prize. She writes on gender, religion, and inheritance. She has worked as managing editor at Ms. Mayhem magazine, literacy specialist in Uganda and instructor at China’s Southwest University.

Jennifer Yu (First Year, Fiction) is exploring.

Reid Brown (First Year, Poetry) writes on themes of femininity, mental illness, the human body, and the threads that connect people, place, and memory. She is the Associate Poetry Editor for Fugue. She lives with her husband, Shane, and their kitten BMO, and collects an unhealthy amount of yarn for knitting projects in various states of incompleteness.

Rya Sheppard (First Year, Fiction) is from Kellogg, Idaho. She is a graduate of the University of Idaho where she studied English and creative writing. Rya enjoys coffee shops, painting, and cats of all kinds.

Karissa Carmona (First Year, Poetry) hails from western Montana and writes about rural identity, violence, and surreality in the so-called American West. She is the winner of the 2022 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry. Prior to University of Idaho, Karissa worked as a bookseller, community arts studio manager, and organizer for a coalition against gendered violence.

Trixie Zwolfer (Second Year, Fiction), is originally from Boise, Idaho. For her undergraduate degree, she attended Montana State University, where she studied writing and literature. She enjoys threading between the reality of our world and the speculative possibility of what it could be in her writing. In her free time, she can be found reading, hiking, and drinking copious amounts of tea.

Tymber Wolf (Second Year, Nonfiction), a Florida Gulf Coast University graduate, is passionate about writing about many things, including philosophy, the environment, personal essays, Judaism, and more. As a Florida native, Tymber is excited to see the environment her namesake inhabits. You can find some of Tymber’s award-winning work in The Mangrove Review. When Tymber isn’t writing, they’re probably doing one (or five) of an indefinite amount of hobbies.

Alicia Gladman (Second Year, Nonfiction), is from Western Canada by way of Chattanooga, Tennessee. She has worked in harm reduction for fourteen years, interested in conversations about accountability and personal freedom. She has a dog, two cats, and a lot of plants.

Maggie Nipps (Second Year, Poetry) is a poet and playwright from Wisconsin. Her work appears in Figure 1, Pinwheel, Sporklet, No Contact, Sip Cup, petrichor, and elsewhere. She co-founded and co-edits Afternoon Visitor, a new quarterly journal of poetry, visual art, hybrid text, and visual art.

Spencer R. Young (Second Year, Poetry) is a queer, genderfluid poet obsessed with identity and its transient borders. Their work, published in Terrain.org, 13th Floor Magazine, and elsewhere, encounters these binaric borders of identity and attempts to envision the space beyond them. Twice nominated for Best New Poets, Spencer holds an MA in Literature and Creative Writing from Kansas State University.

Gianna Marie Starble (Second Year, Fiction) is originally from Colorado and received her undergraduate degree in Professional and Creative Writing from Central Washington University. Her work has appeared in Manastash Literary Journal and The Hunger. In 2020 she won second place for best creative nonfiction piece in the Write On The River competition. When she is not writing, she is probably running with her dog, Blue.

Miriam Akervall (Second Year, Poetry) was born in Lund, Sweden, and grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. For the past six years they lived and worked in high country; most recently, the Idaho Boulder Mountains. Lately, they have been thinking about how memory lives in the body. Their work has appeared in Stone Journal, Ariadne Magazine, Voicemail Poems, and Apiary Magazine.

Emily Holmes (Second Year, Nonfiction) has spent most of her life living in wild places, looking for beauty and adventure. She seeks to connect people to place by telling stories about nature and exploring human relationships to wilderness. While studying rangeland ecology at Montana State University, Emily learned more about ski-bum life, trail running, and environmental advocacy about rangelands. These experiences strongly inform her creative projects.

Alex Connors (Second Year, Fiction) is originally from the north shore of Massachusetts. They attended UMass Amherst, where they studied poetry and social thought. They are working on a collection of short stories that explores the complexities of friendship, family, and queerness within working-class communities. Before coming to the University of Idaho, Alex spent many years as a farmer in western Massachusetts.

Natalie Kinkade  (Third Year, Nonfiction) was born and raised in Bend, Oregon. She writes about art, religion, depression, childhood, and her puppy, Pippin, among other things. Before attending the University of Idaho, she earned an M.A. in English from Ohio University. Her work has appeared in Gulf Coast and The Rumpus and is forthcoming in The Harvard Review.

Michael Harper (Third Year, Fiction; Hemingway Fellow) completed his M.A. in English at the University of Vienna. His work has appeared in The Manzano Mountain Review, Litro Magazine, Decomp Journal, and CafeLit. Prior to the University of Idaho, he taught English as a second language in Europe.

Emma Neal (Third Year, Fiction) was born and raised in Boise, Idaho. She attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied creative writing and religion. Currently, she is working on a collection of short stories about young women trying to understand themselves and searching for their communities. Emma enjoys coffee shops, live music, and painting. She taught yoga for two years at Sarah Lawrence College.

Steff Sirois (Third Year, Fiction) is a writer from Connecticut who is currently writing about womanliness, the multiple versions of her Self, and ghosts. Some of her recent work has appeared in Prism Review, LandLocked, and The Washington Post.

Daniel Lurie (Third Year, Poetry) grew up in eastern Montana. He attended Montana State University, Billings, where he received his B.A. in Organizational Communications. Daniel is the Poetry Editor for Fugue. His work has appeared in NewVerseNews, The Palouse Review, and FeverDream. His poem “One Night Only” is stamped into a concrete street in Billings.

Isabel Marlens (Third Year, Nonfiction) grew up in California and Colorado, and studied literature and ecology & evolution at Bennington College. She went on to work in the nonprofit world, writing about local economies and initiatives for community and ecological renewal. She is working on essays that layer the personal with thoughts on literature, psychology, evolutionary theory, history, and politics. She spends most of her free time rock climbing and traversing the rural West.

Christian Perry (Third Year, Nonfiction) is a white, Queer, Midwesterner born and raised in Michigan. They attended Michigan State University, where they studied a myriad of subjects and obtained a B.A. in English/Creative Writing in 2019. In 2020, Christian self-published their undergraduate thesis, thanks. Their free time is often spent playing Nintendo games and going on long walks.

Sam Simmons (Third Year, Fiction) is a writer from California. He is the current web editor for Fugue and teaches first-year composition and introductory creative writing. He is currently at work on a novel.

Cameron Martin (Third Year, Poetry) is a fat and queer writer originally from Michigan. He attended Wayne State University and the University of Idaho, where he studied English. Their writing has appeared in Sonora Review, The Normal School, Palette Poetry, and Afternoon Visitor. He’s currently working on collections of poetry and personal essays. In Moscow, they are one of the co-coordinators of the ‘queer-minded, queer-hearted’ Pop-Up Prose reading series.

Crystal Cox's (Third Year, Poetry) work has appeared in The Shore, Nimrod, Kissing Dynamite, The Bookends Review, and on the Academy of American Poets website. Her poem “Self-Portrait with Dolly Parton” won the 2022 Academy of American Poets University Prize, selected by Andrew Grace. She calls Missouri home.

Katie Ludwig (First Year, Nonfiction) has lived on the Palouse for 18 years. She is a performing singer/songwriter, Mom of 2 teenagers, and Native Plant Landscaper. She does exploratory writing about the Environment, Spiritual Philosophy, Self, Native Practices, and Hard Topics.

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Gothic Horror Creative Writing Lesson

Subject: English

Age range: 11-14

Resource type: Lesson (complete)

Last updated

15 September 2023

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An engaging and fully resourced extended writing lesson. Suitable for KS3 or KS4 AQA English Language Paper 1 Section B - Descriptive Writing practice. The PowerPoint includes:

• Overview of the features of Gothic literature
• Extract from Bram Stoker’s Dracula for analysis
• Creative writing image, activity and choice prompts
• Planning worksheet
• Peer assessment focus

In the past I also used this as a cover lesson which worked really well.

Please leave a review if you found this resource helpful :)

Or browse my online shop for other creative writing resources: https://www.tes.com/teaching-resources/shop/NovelTeachingUK

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Get this resource as part of a bundle and save up to 30%

A bundle is a package of resources grouped together to teach a particular topic, or a series of lessons, in one place.

Gothic Horror and Creative Writing SOW (4 x lessons and worksheets)

*Save 30% by purchasing four lessons together as a bundle instead of individually. Each lesson is fully-resourced and includes printable worksheets. * Lesson 1) Introduction to the Gothic genre Students write the opening to a Gothic novel using the prompts provided. Lesson 2) Symbolism in Gothic Literature Exploring how reoccuring symbols can represent a deeper meaning.* Lesson 3) Figurative Language Devices Students identify a range of language techniques and comment on the intended effect. Lesson 4) Analysis of Dracula and Creative Writing Students explore how Dracula has been presented in the extract. They then create a piece of descriptive writing about their own monster.**

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TES Resource Team

We are pleased to let you know that your resource Gothic Horror Creative Writing Lesson, has been hand-picked by the Tes resources content team to be featured in https://www.tes.com/teaching-resources/english-collection/creative-and-descriptive-writing in April and https://www.tes.com/teaching-resources/blog/english-your-start-term-toolkit in August 2024 on https://www.tes.com/teaching-resources/blog. Congratulations on your resource being chosen and thank you for your ongoing contributions to the Tes Resources marketplace.

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wharmbyanna89

This is a really great resource and my students loved it. Thank you.

NovelTeachingUK

Thank you for taking the time to leave a review.<br /> Feedback is always much appreciated and I am glad to hear you found the resource useful!

mihaelanolimal

Thank you for your 5-star review! The positive feedback is much appreciated.

Petrawalls1

Fantastic resource. Thanks.

Thank you for taking the time to write a review- it's always great to receive positive feedback. I'm glad you found the resource useful :)

russellhealy

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