How To-8: "How to Write a Dark or Sad Story"

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Are you writing like Dr. Seuss? Or are you just not writing well, or dark enough? Well, here's how to do it.

Steps

1. Get an outline. Come up with images in your head and make words to go along with that image.
   
2. Wait for a day where it's Heavy rain. And just walk around. So that you get some sort of serious or dramatic feeling or inspiration.
   
3. Read some dark literature.
   
4. Get a feel going. Play a very sad or depressing song.
   
5. Write in a place where you're all by yourself.
   
6. Try to get the feel of what you're writing about. If you're main character is a patient with terminal cancer, then go visit someone who has terminal cancer. If you can't find one, go online and look up some journals.
   
7. Dim the lights when you write. You don't want any light to blind your sight into the words of your mind.
   
8. Write as if you're taking all the sadness, desires, hate, frustration, and hurt in you and turning them into words. This can be immensely cathartic.
   
9. Use good punctuation. Full stops at the end of sentences, and if you're not sure about the commas, then have someone with the eye of an eagle and the heart of a grammar nazi look it over for you. Don't overuse ellipses.
   

Tips

• Don't get distracted.
  
• Be sure that your work makes sense... read it a hundred times over if you must.
  
• Give your readers an idea of what you're writing.
  
• You don't have to be a serious person to be a serious writer.
  
• And you don't have to write on paper. With a typewriter or with a computer is just fine.
  

Warnings

• Don't copy other people's work.
  
• Don't mock your own work.
  
• Don't get too detailed!
  

Things You'll Need

• Story.
  
• Outline.
  
• Emotions.
  
• Dictionary.
  
• Thesaurus.
  
• And yourself...
  

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