Writing Monsters: What Makes a Monster Scary, monster writing paper.

And another great quote: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t talking about Godzilla or Dracula, but he may as well have been. This plays back to the idea of unpredictability and “otherness.”

Monsters don’t just attack you

… Phobias take common fears to the pathological level. If these are the ten most common phobias (and I’ve found a few different lists, so your search may yield slightly different results), then there’s a good chance that someone who is reading your book, seeing your movie, or playing your game will have one or more of them to some degree. And even if your readers don’t completely collapse at the sight of a spider, they probably share at least a common uneasiness in the presence of one . or worse, many spiders!

Melissa had seen where the thing came from and even in her panic was wise enough to cover her own mouth with both hands. The thing skittered up her neck, over her cheek, and squatted on her left eye. The wind screamed and Melissa screamed with it. It was the cry of a woman drowning in the kind of pain the charts in the hospitals can never describe. The charts go from one to ten

Our Imagination Makes Monsters Scarier

1. Arachnophobia (fear of spiders)
2. Social Phobia (fear of a hostile audience)
3. Pteromerhanophobia (fear of flying)
4. Agoraphobia (fear of an inability to escape)
5. Claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces)
6. Acrophobia (fear of heights)
7. Emetophobia (fear of vomit or vomiting)
8. Carcinophobia (fear of cancer)
9. Astraphobia (fear of thunder and lightning)
10. Taphophobia (fear of being buried alive)

Exploring truly disturbing events can be difficult for many authors to work through, in the horror genre in particular. But fantasy and science fiction—really any genre of fiction—can ask you to plumb your own psychological depths. So what scares you? A little creature that eats your eyes first? Is that disturbing enough for the psychological sweet spot you’re trying to hit? […]

I asked myself this question while working on a fantasy novel in which I envisioned a world overrun by demons. In an effort to build a sense of increasing danger in the book, each new sort of demon my characters meet is more dangerous, more powerful, and more frightening than the last. To do this, I decided to look at my readers’ deepest fears and inject those fears into the demons. So off to the Internet I went in search of the top ten phobias. This is what I found:

In another way, creatures may seem harmless because they appeal to the softer, friendlier side of our imagination, but become monstrous when their true nature is revealed. Star Trek’s tribbles are an excellent example of this. When the crew of the Enterprise first encounters tribbles, their assumptions take over. They imagine the tribbles to be cute and harmless but have no specific information about their true nature. The tribbles slowly reveal themselves over the course of the story to be a sort of plague, like a swarm of locusts. Assumption and imagination can be very dangerous.

Children rehearse tricky words, plus reading whole sentences and captions.

Our mission is to help as many children learn to read as possible. The computer version is 100% free and we put profits from the app back into the Usborne Foundation, to continue to create new and exciting ways for children to learn.

Keeps children focused on rehearsing and consolidating what they learn in school.

As they progress, they rehearse a range of essential reading skills

Who are The Usborne Foundation?

Create a monster and take it on an adventure through a magical world. Travel to exciting places, meet fun characters, play games and win prizes as your monster learns the first steps of reading.

Minigames help children to develop speed and accuracy of letter recognition.

Peter Usborne is the founder and Managing Director of Usborne Publishing, one of the world’s leading children’s book publishing companies and Children’s Publisher of the Year 2012. He was previously one of the founders of the magazine Private Eye, and was recently awarded an MBE for services to publishing.

The game is for children in the first stages of learning to read, or for older children who need a bit more practice. Read more details about the three games .

Minigames help children to develop speed and accuracy of letter recognition.

The game runs on any normal laptop or desktop computer (including Apple Macs) and the app works on iPhone, iPad, Android and Kindle tablets.

For young children in the first stages of learning to read

Can be played independently by children either in school or at home.

What age is it for?

The game is for children in the first stages of learning to read, or for older children who need a bit more practice. Read more details about the three games .

Create a monster and take it on an adventure through a magical world. Travel to exciting places, meet fun characters, play games and win prizes as your monster learns the first steps of reading.

The game takes children on a magical journey, meeting colourful characters along the way and collecting fantastic rewards. When children are engaged, they’re motivated to learn.

The charity was founded by Peter Usborne MBE and his children, Nicola and Martin, one of the world’s leading children’s book publishing companies and Children’s Publisher of the Year 2012. He was previously one of the founders of the magazine Private Eye.

Charles R. Knight / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

Let's fast-forward 13 centuries, to the year 1933. That's when a man named George Spicer claimed to have seen a huge, long-necked, "most extraordinary form of animal" slowly crossing the road in front of his car, on its way back into Loch Ness. It's unknown if Spicer and his wife had partaken of a wee bit o' the creature that day (European slang for drinking alcohol), but his account was echoed a month later by a motorcyclist named Arthur Grant, who claimed that he narrowly avoided striking the beastie while out on a midnight drive.

You can see where we're going with this. The primary "evidence" we have for the Loch Ness Monster's existence consists of a pre-medieval manuscript, the eyewitness testimony of two Scottish motorists who may well have been drunk at the time (or lying to divert attention from their own reckless behavior), and a forged photograph. All of the other reported sightings are completely unreliable. Despite the best efforts of modern science, absolutely no physical trace of the Loch Ness Monster has ever been found.

Sergey Krasovskiy / Stocktrek Images / Getty Images

It's Also Unlikely That Nessie Is a Marine Reptile

Sure, Sasquatch, the Chupacabra, and Mokele-mbembe all have their devotees. But the Loch Ness Monster is far and away the most famous "cryptid" — that is, a creature whose existence has been attested to by various "eyewitnesses" and which is widely believed in by the general public, but is still not recognized by establishment science. The pesky thing about cryptids is that it's logically impossible to prove a negative, so no matter how much huffing and puffing the experts do, they can't state with 100 percent certainty that the Loch Ness Monster doesn't exist.

After Robert Kenneth Wilson's famous photograph was published, the resemblance of Nessie's head and neck to that of a sauropod dinosaur did not go unnoticed. The problem with this identification is that sauropods were terrestrial, air-breathing dinosaurs. While swimming, Nessie would have to poke her head out of the water once every few seconds. The Nessie-as-sauropod myth may have drawn on the 19th-century theory that Brachiosaurus spent most of its time in the water, which would help to support its massive weight.

Way back in the 7th century CE, a Scottish monk wrote a book about St. Columba, who (a century before) had supposedly stumbled upon the burial of a man who had been attacked and killed by a "water beast" in the vicinity of Loch Ness. The trouble here is, even the learned monks of the early Dark Ages believed in monsters and demons, and it's not uncommon for the lives of the saints to be sprinkled with supernatural encounters.

Miquel Rosselló Calafell / Pexels

Sure, Sasquatch, the Chupacabra, and Mokele-mbembe all have their devotees. But the Loch Ness Monster is far and away the most famous "cryptid" — that is, a creature whose existence has been attested to by various "eyewitnesses" and which is widely believed in by the general public, but is still not recognized by establishment science. The pesky thing about cryptids is that it's logically impossible to prove a negative, so no matter how much huffing and puffing the experts do, they can't state with 100 percent certainty that the Loch Ness Monster doesn't exist.

Why does the Nessie myth persist? At this point, the Loch Ness Monster is so intimately tied up with the Scottish tourist industry that it's in no one's best interest to pry into the facts too closely. The hotels, motels, and souvenir stores in the vicinity of Loch Ness would go out of business, and well-meaning enthusiasts would have to find another way to spend their time and money, rather than walking around the rim of the lake with high-powered binoculars and gesticulating at suspicious ripples.

A year after the eyewitness testimony of Spicer and Grant, a doctor named Robert Kenneth Wilson took the most famous "photograph" of the Loch Ness Monster: a dappled, undulating, black-and-white image showing the long neck and small head of a placid-looking sea monster. Though this photo is often used as incontrovertible evidence of Nessie's existence, it was proven to be a fake in 1975, and then again in 1993. The giveaway is the size of the lake's surface ripples, which don't match the presumed scale of Nessie's anatomy.

After Robert Kenneth Wilson's famous photograph was published, the resemblance of Nessie's head and neck to that of a sauropod dinosaur did not go unnoticed. The problem with this identification is that sauropods were terrestrial, air-breathing dinosaurs. While swimming, Nessie would have to poke her head out of the water once every few seconds. The Nessie-as-sauropod myth may have drawn on the 19th-century theory that Brachiosaurus spent most of its time in the water, which would help to support its massive weight.

The First Reported Sighting Was During the Dark Ages

There are plenty of exaggerations, myths, and outright lies circulating about the so-called Loch Ness Monster. This legend is especially galling to paleontologists, who are constantly being told by people who should know better (and by overeager reality-TV producers) that Nessie is a long-extinct dinosaur or marine reptile.

Okay, so the Loch Ness Monster isn't a dinosaur. Could it possibly be a type of marine reptile known as a plesiosaur? This isn't very likely, either. For one thing, Loch Ness is only about 10,000 years old, and plesiosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago. For another thing, marine reptiles weren't equipped with gills, so even if Nessie were a plesiosaur, she'd still have to surface for air numerous times every hour. Lastly, there simply isn't enough food in Loch Ness to support the metabolic demands of a ten-ton descendant of elasmosaurus!

Miquel Rosselló Calafell / Pexels