Weekly Prompt: Daily Writing Gets Exciting with a Weekly Prompt #9

Weekly Prompt #9

How have you been this week?

Do you still want to be a writer?

Do you remember when we first started writing daily, when we were all determined to be writers and hit our word count goals?

Well, I had one of the senses all saved up until the end but since it’s been raining here all day and there are only so many cups of tea one can consume without seriously affecting word count. I thought I’d better do something a bit more interesting to help keep my butt glued to seat.

Can you guess what our weekly prompt is this week?

It’s not physical, so it cannot be seen.

It’s not real so you cannot do anything with it but the feeling it gives you is very real.

Do you feel someone staring at you from behind you as you read these words?

Do you feel someone there?

Look behind you. Is anyone there?

Ha! Ha! Made you look!

Seriously, I hope I didn’t scare you just now but that was supposed to be a BIG hint…😱

Yeah, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, you got it. Right? I knew you would. It’s the sense of the unknown.😣

The Unknown

What I particularly like about the unknown is its intimidating factor. You watch a terrifying movie and it’s not what’s showing on the screen that scares you, it’s more the stuff they haven’t shown you that totally creeps you out.

And that, my friend, is the sense of the unknown.

How does the sense of the unknown work for writers?

Well, it’s powerful because fear and doubt play a huge part in using the unknown and lets readers experience writing in a way that surprises or threatens.

I’ve found, the unknown, to be a completely entertaining form of writing. You write something with one thing in mind and that’s to baffle the reader with innuendos and double meanings whilst adding an eerie, somewhat sinister and frightening aspect to it. They want to know what happens. They want to keep reading but at the same time their afraid until finally they are committed to seeing what happens – even though they know the ending will scare the pants off them.

Let it be said that this prompt involves the sense of the UNKNOWN.

Weekly Prompt # 9

Write 200 words or more using the sense of the UNKNOWN.

If you are stuck for a starting point –

Here are a few prompters:

It was…

It almost…

I was only…

Something crawled…

If only she…

Good Luck!

Here’s my effort: The Unknown

IT’s the silence that gets to me first…

In the middle of the night, when everything outside falls away into darkness, I can feel it—the unknown, lurking just beyond my awareness. It almost feels like a presence, a cold draft sneaking through a crack in the door. I turn around, but the space is empty, and still. The hairs on the back of my neck prick.

I’m reading IT by Stephen King, trying to power through the last few pages. I’ve been glued to this book for hours, but the stillness in the room is too thick. I can’t focus.

My eyes kept darting to the shadows in the corners. Something crawls under my skin. It’s that sense of being watched, but I can’t tell where it’s coming from. I try to shake it off, but every creak of the floorboards seems to grow louder.

The tension in the room presses in on me.

The house looks the same, but it doesn’t feel the same.

There’s something off about it—like it’s holding onto a secret, something I’m not meant to know.

If only he had warned me, told me about the things that happened here before. But he didn’t, and now it’s too late. The unknown is closing in, right on the edge of my mind, just out of reach.

I turn another page, but I can’t stop thinking—what if IT is already here?

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