2. What are your villain’s main personality traits? These traits will create the foundation for your character and will be put to work in the story. They should be evident in every scene and appear in your character the first time we meet him, her, or it. A criminal mastermind needs to be intelligent, cunning, and ruthless. The White Witch from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis is beautiful, proud, cruel, and she possesses a smoldering rage.
Tie these key traits to a backstory that explains how they were developed. Think of the shadow of every power trait: the dark side that may spell the villain’s doom.
3. Your character’s first impression on the reader is do or die. Decide if your aim is to terrify the reader, or foreshadow villainy to come. How does he slide onto the page the first time? In disguise? Raring for a fight? Without warning?
STACEY GRAHAM
Oh, the Humanity: What Makes Monsters Tick
STACEY GRAHAM has spent a good part of the last twenty years sitting in dark attics waiting to poke the paranormal and see if it giggles. When not wrestling ghosts, she enjoys writing zombie poetry, humor, and ghost stories. Graham is the author of The Girls’ Ghost Hunting Guide and the Zombie Tarot.
Trying to scare people these days is harder than it looks. Vampires sparkle, werewolves glisten where they should be hairy, and zombies can be almost charming as they stumble and drool. What makes a reader turn the page of a story when society is becoming immune to fright? It’s the little niggles in the back of the readers’ brains that within those monsters still lay the foundation of being human—that the monsters were once just like them. Finding the humanity within your monster creates a hesitation to hate it outright. Suddenly it has depth and you question, Why is it there? Where does it go after it leaves? Will it be back and what drives it to return? Are there more like it, and are they good dancers?
Speculative fiction dealing with the paranormal nurtures the uncertainty that we’re not really in control, that there are forces we can’t foresee or wrestle to the ground when confronted. As the writer, your job is to exploit that doubt and turn it into something that makes the reader check the closet twice before he or she turns off the light at bedtime.
EXERCISE
I love a good ghost story. Trapped between two worlds I wonder if they can hear us, are they trying to communicate or plot revenge, or do they simply want you to hit the snooze button on your alarm clock faster?
Write three scenes:
1. Put the reader in the ghost’s place: What’s his backstory? Was he a victim of a crime of passion? Illness? Does he know he’s dead? How does he interact with the living? Is he an adult or a child? If a child, how does your protagonist react to him? Describe the ghost’s first few days after the realization of his death. Is he terrified or excited by the freedom being a ghost may offer?
2. Create a setting: While spooky abandoned mansions spring to mind, ghosts don’t always hang around such gloomy digs. Ghosts have been reported on city buses, in restaurants, at daycare centers, and in fields. Take your story out of the familiar venues and see where it leads you. In this scene, use the inanimate surroundings to convey a feeling of being haunted without the overt presence of the ghost.
3. Make the familiar terrifying: Ghosts who succeed pull an emotional response from the reader. If they display traits that make the reader identify someone they know, it makes the story sharper and more memorable. Write a scene that takes place in your neighborhood. Use that backdrop to create a ghost from a mixture of people you know to create layers. What trait is most sinister? What seemingly benign characteristic is really hiding a secret instead?
MARK SEVI
The Uncanny Valley
Mark Sevi is a screenwriter with more than nineteen feature films produced including PTERODACTYL and ARACHNID. His latest, DEVIL’S KNOT, stars Reese Witherspoon and Colin Firth. Sevi teaches screenwriting and is founder and president of the Orange County Screenwriter’s Association.
“To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub.”
—Hamlet in Hamlet, Shakespeare
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”
—Prospero in The Tempest, Shakespeare
I’m a nuts-and-bolts writer (some would say nuts and a dolt, but they’re just haters). But in some things I’m as “new agey” as Shirley MacLaine’s spirit guides. The writer’s subconscious mind is one of those areas where I want to say “Ommmmm” with gusto and sincerity.
We are dreamers, we writers, especially those of us who dabble in speculative fiction. We dream large and in all directions and dimensions. I’ve always been a fanboy of sci-fi and known that it, more than all other forms of fiction, must do the same things as other works—make someone laugh, cry, fear, etc.—but it must also put those emotional responses and tight plots on a lunar colony, a spaceship, a bubble in an ocean, or a haunted house on Earth. Speculative fiction must do everything that Hemingway did, but backwards and in high heels (to paraphrase newswoman Linda Ellerbee).
We speculative writers must ask what, how, why, when, how much and turn those questions into answers that make sense to our characters.
Shakespeare understood this. Consider Hamlet, which starts with talk of a ghost. Imagine trying to sell that to his publishers. “A what, of who? Are you serious, Bill?” But The Bard understood that dreaming is connected to a world we barely understand and can’t, and shouldn’t, look at directly. However, that world, the “uncanny valley” of our subconscious is rooted wholly in the familiar.
So how do we express ourselves properly in worlds or situations that don’t exist? Putting our characters in bizarre locations and situations that must ring true? We go digital. And how is that happening?
We live our lives in analog, minute by minute, surrounded by the familiar but we dream in digital. Nothing is too random, outrageous, funny, or frightening in our subconscious state. We can be riding a skateboard that floats on water one second and the next be talking with dead relatives about a recipe for potato salad at a picnic on a volcano.
Practitioners of lucid dreaming learn to take control of their dreams in order to gain a better or different outcome. They “insert” themselves into their dreams and take an active role rather than allowing the dream to unfold as it will. Interesting. Sounds a lot like daydreaming to me. So what I propose is to lucid dream backwards in a manner—starting the process awake, not asleep.
Transcendental Meditation (TM) teaches us how to achieve a level deeper than sleep that is conscious and yet not, a place of “somewhere in-between.” No less creative giants than the Beatles practiced it and if you strip away all the mumbo-jumbo crap some have tried to foster about TM, you get a physiological phenomenon. A way to dream while awake. Lucid dreaming in reverse.
The idea is to not control the process of the dream, but to allow it to unfold as a flower would. Lest I get too touchy-feely for you, let me emphasize again that what I’m trying to pass on to you is a way for you to tap the dreamer in all writers, especially those who want to be in the speculative fields—and to learn to trust your subconscious like never before.
When I head to L.A. for story meetings or pitch sessions, I have prepared my material the night before, but on the way up in my car I don’t rehearse anymore or think much about what I’m heading to. I feel like my mind should be mostly focused on the incredibly complex and frighteningly random freeway experiences we have here in SoCal, but I also want to give my subconscious time to focus its insights and present them to my conscious mind when I walk through the doors of that meeting. It’s never failed me yet.
You must dream and then trust that the dream will come to you when you need it. TM helps (for me) but when I don’t have time to meditate, simply allowing my mind to run rampant on the field of creation is the best thing I can do.
Practice on a conscious level all your skill set like any good musician or athlete—actua
lly writing is the only way to make you a better writer—but at some point, you must also learn to trust your subconscious mind and build that trust to a point where you believe it will deliver when necessary.
Everyone’s process is necessarily different. If you want to try mine to find those dreams and tap into them, here’s an immersion exercise I call “Be the Killer.”
Too many times we horror writers settle for the quick and easy thumbnail of the killer. I need total immersion to write with veracity. In order to know I’m inside my killer’s head, I need to begin dreaming like him or her. To get to that point, I need to know the killer completely.
EXERCISE
Be the killer: I don’t advise this for everyone, but for those writing horror it helps to be inside the killer’s head. Smelling everything, seeing things that he or she (or it) sees. These types of villains ring false unless you have a more perfect understanding of them. Unless we’re totally insane, we (humans) typically have a rationale for what we do, including killing. Climbing inside the head of your slasher makes that slasher much more frightening, because you have a better understanding of that character.
1. How do you interact with neighbors? Are you shy, surly? Do you dislike the people around you? Is that barking dog going to be a victim of poison some dark night?
2. What is your job? How do you pay rent? What’s your car like? Are you capable of caring about anything besides yourself?
3. Go to a grocery store and buy groceries that your killer would like. Go late at night and pick out a victim.
4. Surf the Web with your killer’s mind—what would be interesting to him besides porn?
5. Sit quietly and imagine your victims and their surroundings and how you’re going to get into their house. Put yourself in the moment of break-in. Is it cold? Will your exhaled breath give you away?
6. What does the hammer feel like in your hand? Is the tape you bought as part of your rape kit sticky enough? Or because you bought it at the ninety-nine-cent store, is it melted and crap? How hard is it to carry an adult to a car? What does your victims’ fear smell like? How do you handle the bloody mess? Do you feel anything—excitement, disgust—when you shove a knife into a body, or are you numb?
7. Is your apartment clean or dirty? What does your toilet look like? Do you have a medical problem that you need to resolve? Are you meticulous with personal grooming or do you not care? Are your teeth disgusting or pristine? Do you have teeth?
8. What do you dream of . . . ?
Write. And dream. The answers are there inside you. All you have to do is learn to allow them to come freely to you.
BRAD SCHREIBER
Metamorphosis
BRAD SCHREIBER is author of six books. Schreiber adapted Ray Bradbury’s “The One Who Waits” for National Public Radio (NPR), winning an award from National Audio Theatre Festivals. His Philip K. Dick adaptation “Sales Pitch” also aired on NPR. He’s taught at the American Film Institute, the Directors Guild of America, CalArts, USC, and Pixar Animation.
The great Franz Kafka used to do readings of his dark, menacing, fantastical fiction in Prague, and it’s said that sometimes he would publicly involuntarily laugh at the most disturbing images or situations in his prose. Now, you can call him a freak if you must, but Kafka was a great writer, not because he thought up the weird idea of a man turning into an insect in The Metamorphosis, but because he explored the internal thoughts of a man who has turned into an insect, and because he made important observations about society when the other characters had to deal with the horribly transmogrified Gregor Samsa.
And while a strong and imaginative premise is most desirable in science fiction and fantasy, that is not the only thing the writer must provide. The strangeness or terror in these genres is amplified by recognizable human reactions to the given premise—whether in thought or action—that makes it all the more real for us.
Kafka made poor Gregor alternately pathetic, humorous, frightening, and philosophical, as he confronted the reality of his new form. It would be valuable to infuse your major characters with thoughts and actions that fully explore the ramifications of the wild and unnatural situations you conjure up for them. That is the intent of this exercise.
EXERCISE
Create a scene in which a character has been radically altered in physical appearance. It might involve a change that resembles another living person, a historical or literary figure, partial mechanization, or an appearance that resembles a living animal, plant, or even an inanimate object. The transformation can be partial or complete.
First, write the scene for this changed person with a high level of danger.
Explore this same physically transformed character in scenes that are alternately philosophical, humorous, pathetic, melancholy, transcendent, contemplative, or self-destructive.
COMMUNICATION AND RELATIONSHIPS
“I was very much interested in the way people behaved, the human dance, how they seemed to move around each other. I wanted to play around with that.”
—OCTAVIA BUTLER
REGGIE OLIVER
“He Do the Police in Different Voices”
REGGIE OLIVER is the author of five collections of supernatural terror stories—the latest is Mrs. Midnight and Other Tails (Tartarus Press, 2011). His novel, The Dracula Papers, Book I: The Scholar’s Tale (Chomu Press, 2011), is the first of a projected four. An omnibus edition of his stories was published by Centipede Press as part of its Masters of the Weird Tale series.
“He do the Police in different voices.”
—Betty Higden, in Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens (also the alternative title to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land)
I am always astonished by the confidence with which some writers instruct other would-be writers in their art. A couple of publications and they see themselves as having acquired the status of “author,” and possibly they have, in a way. Personally I have never seen myself as a “writer” at all, let alone an “author,” though I do seem to have had a surprising amount of stuff published; I am simply someone, like you, who writes. I have no cunning expertise to hand down from the exalted heights of Mount Parnassus. And neither have these other writers, really, but there you are.
The fact is, I write, not because I have acquired some mystical skill, and certainly not because I ever wanted to be a writer. I’d much rather not be. The world is far too full of them as it is, and they are far too full of themselves. I write because I have a story that simply must be told. That is the only possible excuse that any of us have for occupying bookshelves and the attention of others. I have always rather admired the attitude of Lord Foppington in The Relapse, a comedy of 1697 by Sir John Vanbrugh:
“To my mind, Madam, the inside of a book is to entertain oneself with the forced product of another man’s brain. Now I think a man of quality and breeding may be much better diverted with the natural sprauts of his own.”
Lord Foppington is of course a monster of arrogance and affectation and is a great comic creation, but, as Leigh Hunt pointed out in his perceptive essay on the play, he has a point. (“An idiotic one, but a point,” as Addison DeWitt [George Sanders] says of Claudia Casswell [Marilyn Monroe] in ALL ABOUT EVE.)
And this is my point, perhaps my only one: Vanbrugh (a brilliant architect by the way) wrote only one really good play, The Relapse, and even this play only comes fully alive when Lord Foppington is on the stage. You can’t get enough of him. His talk reaches the heights of absurdity but yet, on his own bizarre terms, as in that extract, he is eminently reasonable. Vanbrugh had somehow managed to get inside Lord Foppington, had found his voice, and the stuff just came pouring out in glorious Technicolor. He couldn’t help himself.
T. S. Eliot’s great poem The Waste Land, perhaps the greatest poem of the twentieth century, is only understandable as a collage of different voices, hence the alternative title. Those seem to have come well
ing out of him, all of them somehow echoing, in their own way, the neuroses of the modern age.
My feeling is that writing is only worthwhile if you can find these voices: your own voice, certainly, but, just as importantly, perhaps more importantly, the voices of others. Because, let’s face it, the only good writer is the one who can somehow make other human beings come alive in his or her imagination. All the rest is window dressing. That’s my view anyway, but don’t take my word for it. You’re just as much a “writer” as I am.
But if you do agree, try this. It’s something I often do:
EXERCISE
1. Find a character, not your own, based partly on the recollection of someone you know, but enhanced by imagination. Start trying to talk in his or her voice. Imitate the accent if you can, but above all the mannerisms of speech, obsessions, and preoccupations. Walk around as you do so. I find that helps. It’s hard at first, but very soon you won’t be able to stop the character. When anything he or she says particularly strikes you, jot it down.
2. Now create another character, as different as possible from the first. Develop in a similar way, by talking out his or her stream of consciousness. Make notes again, but only once you have really got going with your character.
Now Write! Page 23