Inside the Psychological Horror Writing Process – Creating 705

Manuel Sabater Romero
May 27
2 min read

Writing 705 isn't about ghosts. It's about people.

The kind of people who carry guilt in their bones. Who walk through hotel lobbies like they’ve forgotten how they got there. Who lie awake, haunted not by monsters, but by memories.

When I write, I don’t start with a plot twist or a creature. I start with a feeling.

Confusion. Longing. Disconnection. The strange weight of walking into a room and feeling like it remembers you.

705 was born from that space—the in-between place where identity slips. It started as a single image: a guest waking up in a motel, seeing their own body in the bathroom, and realizing… they’d been here before. Even if they didn’t remember it. That image became the first step in my psychological horror writing process.

I’m not interested in writing horror that jumps out at you. I want the kind that sits quietly beside you and waits. This is the core of my psychological horror writing process—slowness, silence, and truth. Not monsters. Memory.

The hardest part of the psychological horror writing process isn’t the plot. It’s the permission. The permission to dig into emotion, into dread, into the things we don’t say aloud.

The hardest part of writing isn’t the words. It’s the trust. Trusting that readers will follow a story built on silence. That they’ll feel the grief under the floorboards. That they’ll understand the motel isn’t the point—the people are.

Each chapter of 705 is a different guest, but the pain is shared. It’s the same question echoing in different rooms: “Who were you, before all this?”

I don’t write fast. I write deep. And every character costs something to build. But if even one reader feels seen inside this strange, haunted motel of mine—It’s worth it.

Thanks for being here. Thanks for checking in. Stay as long as you need.

—Manuel