Incidentally, this exercise is not just for allies. Envisioning intimacy between enemies can be a useful tool as well. Do the hero and villainess hate one another because they are so different, or because they are more similar than they care to admit? What do the characters fear about one another? What do they want to punish or reward? All of this and more can be revealed by imagining them in an intimate setting.
EXERCISE
Choose two characters whose relationship you want to understand better and write an intimate scene between the two of them.
Whether you intend for your characters to have a sexual relationship in your story or not, going through the exercise of picturing them in an intimate setting puts meat on their bones. It allows you to envision their bodies, perfect or imperfect, as they are. It lets you flesh out their relationship in detail (sexual or asexual, playful or serious, bickering or tender, loving or hate-filled as it may be).
So, grab a pen and spend the next hour describing a close moment between these two, whether that moment is a date or something much more physical. Have fun with it. Delve deep into both characters’ psyches, watch them open up, and try to ask yourself the following questions as you are writing:
What do these characters like most about one another?
What do they hate most about one another?
What do they want from one another?
In what ways are they the same?
In what ways are they different?
Do they have any attractive physical characteristics? Any repulsive physical characteristics? Any unusual physical characteristics?
Do they feel very strongly about the other (for good or ill), or do they feel mostly indifferent?
Are they comfortable or uncomfortable being so intimate?
Do they have a lot to talk about?
Is either one aggressive? Passive?
Is there competition between them? Jealousy? Love?
Sit back, let your imagination run wild, and have fun with this one. This exercise can be quite revealing.
MARIO ACEVEDO
Love Between the Species
MARIO ACEVEDO is the author of the Felix Gomez detective-vampire series from HarperCollins and IDW Publishing. His short fiction is included in numerous anthologies that include Arte Público Press, and in Modern Drunkard Magazine. Acevedo lives and writes in Denver, Colorado.
Love between humans is complicated enough. Now try to sex it up between humans and nonhumans.
To start with, you’ve got two types of nonhumans. In column A, you have the type that look like us, more or less. Vampires. Angels. Demons. Vulcans. Klingons. Basically, two arms, two legs, one set of private bits connected in a very human-looking arrangement. You wouldn’t have trouble shopping for them at the Gap or L.L. Bean. Imagine sex with any of these creatures and you wouldn’t go, “Yew, gross!” In fact, what guy wouldn’t want to score an elf chick?
And what nonhuman dude wouldn’t want to hit it with human babes? It’s even in Scripture. The Book of Genesis tells of Nephilim (aka Giants or Angels, maybe even the Dodgers) looking down upon the daughters of men and finding them fair. Going my way, sweetheart?
Column B is a lot more diverse and problematic. Here you got all kinds of critters. Insect aliens. Unicorns. Dragons. Blobs. Zombies. Though zombies are undead humans, and you’d think should be considered in Column A, the whole rotting body parts and junk-becoming-detached-in-mid-copulation implies a huge gross-out factor. The Dumpster smell does little for the romantic ambience.
Not only does sex with anything from Column B conjure disgusting images, but it might even be illegal in some states.
One way around the bestiality implications is to depict a sensual rather than sexual experience. Melding of the minds. After all, we’re told by psychotherapists that the brain is the largest erogenous zone (for you maybe), so some inter-mind hanky-panky avoids the grinding of body parts in a particularly icky fashion.
For example, a male astronaut falls into a vat filled with female alien goo. It becomes love at first splash. She’s all like, “OMG! You understand me.”
He’s all like, “Oh baby, you’re so hot!”
Literally. The vat is 110ºF. He flails in the tank. She splishes. He flails. She splashes. And the next thing, he can’t help but cuddle in the afterglow, and because she’s liquid, there is no arguing over who sleeps in the wet spot.
Romance might be a little easier, because it’s more about how your lovebirds feel about one another on an emotional level, where the thrust—as it were—is not about thrusting, but love.
Writing fiction is all about emotional manipulation. Readers want the vicarious experience. Don’t let them down. Give the readers characters they care about, that they feel for. Make your readers laugh. Cry. Feel the angst. The anticipation. The heat of desire. Triumph. Loss. Regret.
If it’s all about the plumbing, your narrative will read like a chart about the human anatomy. Okay, there’s his outie. Her innie. Yawn.
But don’t let me discourage you from exploring graphic human-alien erotica. Picture this scenario: A female starship captain is marooned with a brainy professor squid. She has needs. He has needs. They have chemistry. She’s curious and horny. Same for him, plus he has numerous appendages. They’re both consenting adults. Write that story and you might just pen the next mommy-porn mega best seller. I’ll even give you the best line: She moaned, “Oh baby, you touch me in so many different ways.”
EXERCISE
1. Write a paragraph in which your protagonist first discovers an attraction to a future lover. Use internalizations.
2. Write an erotic encounter between two different creatures only by describing emotions.
3. Sadly, everything must end. Write a scene where one of your intra-species lovers decides to call it quits. You know: It’s not you—it’s me.
SCENE CONSTRUCTION AND STYLE
“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”
—EDGAR ALLAN POE
JACK KETCHUM
Economy
JACK KETCHUM is the author of thirteen novels, five of which have been filmed, and dozens of screenplays, novellas, and short stories. He is the four-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award and was elected Grand Master at the 2011 World Horror Convention. He lives with cats.
For me, economy is crucial to really good writing, particularly at the onset of your story, and particularly in writing suspense. To hell with exposition—you can sneak that in gradually, as the story goes along. Right now, at the onset, you want to keep ’em turning those pages. You want to make them leap right in.
As Elmore Leonard famously said when asked how he got his writing so tight, “I leave out the parts that people tend to skip.” Unless height, weight, hair color, or the size of his dick is crucial to your character, leave it the hell out. Unless the landscape is itself a major character, which it is in some books by James Lee Burke, Cormac McCarthy, and others, leave it for later.
I think it was the screenwriter and novelist William Goldman who advised writers to start a scene as close to the end of the thing as possible, and that Vonnegut had something to say about that too. Good idea. Skip the buildup and get to the guts of it. Here’s the opening paragraph to a story of mine called “Bully”:
“So it’s all pouring out of him now, he’s all over the place, we’re done with the weather and the small talk, it’s like I’ve set something loose inside him which he says he’s not spoken of in twenty-odd years and maybe it’s his own three scotches to my one but I think it runs much deeper than that. I think he’s speaking about who he is and why.”
This is a reporter doing an interview. We don’t need to know who he is just yet or even who his interview subject is. Don’t need to know where they’re sitting, how he got there, what he wants to learn from this man. That comes later. We
enter in the middle of something, and it seems important. Economy.
Note that this entire paragraph is two sentences, the first one long run-on. It’s meant to race you through the paragraph without a breather. Long run-ons and short, staccato sentences are the poetry of suspense writing, the stressed-unstressed-stressed, the meter. Compare the above to these lines from my novel with Lucky McKee, The Woman:
“There is pain. Pain that pulses through her body from shoulder to knee. That beats at her body as the waves beat the shore. But pain is to be borne. This is nothing to the pain of birthing. Pain says one thing only.
Alive.”
Short, choppy, nervous-making sentences. Partials. The literary equivalent of stuttering. Just like. What I’m. Writing. Now.
What do the two types of sentences have in common? Read the selections again.
Both are packed with information about the people involved.
Economy.
EXERCISE
1. Write an opening paragraph that starts in the middle of something. Make sure your first line is immediate and draws us right in, and that the paragraph that follows fulfills the promise of that line. This is not the time to go off on a tangent. This is the time to start singing your song.
2. Write an opening paragraph using short, staccato lines. Then write the same paragraph using run-ons. Reverse the process and write another.
RAINBOW REED
Using Your Senses
RAINBOW REED is the poet/writer in residence at The Wicked Come. She has had poetry published in many anthologies and enjoys exploring the darker side of existence. She is the author of the dark romantic/gothic horror poetry book The Wicked Come (Lost Tower Publications). She is now working on the dark fantasy novel “The Torcian Chronicles.”
I write dark fantasy novels and dark romantic/horror poetry. I use the following technique for both story writing and poetry as it is a very simple but vivid way of opening up your world to your audience and drawing them into the world that you have created.
When writing, you have to convey the story, set the scene, and build up believable characters in as short a time as possible and using few words, so as to immediately engage your reader’s attention and encourage them to carry on reading. Words are precious, so use them with care. Too many and your audience will drift away, too few and they will not understand your work.
One way to set the scene for your work but not overburden your audience with reams of descriptive narrative is to use the Five Senses Technique. The senses contain psychological feelings, memories, and emotions that you can exploit in your writing. You are inviting your audience into a new world so they should be able to feel, hear, see, taste, and smell it!
The Sense of Sight. This is the image your writing is creating in your audience’s mind. The readers should be able to imagine their own interpretations of your world and be able to connect emotionally and imaginatively with it, so your writing should offer signposts to your world but not dictate it.
For example, in my poem “Devotion” the first verse describes a wedding day photo of a happy bride . . .
Beside your bed,
The photo rests:
Happy Wedding Days,
Soft, loving eyes,
Seas of blue,
A sunshine smile,
On an Angel’s face.
Immediately, the audience is given a portal into the world I have created, that of a room with a photo of a happy bride, but they do not know exactly what she looks like, so can build up a picture in their mind’s eye, creating their own “dream girl,” but neither do they know who is observing the photo, even though most would imagine it to be her husband.
So by using the sight sense, the audience has their first glimpse into your world, creating their own images about it as it has not been fully explored, and they are left with questions, to encourage them to read on for more information about your world.
The Sense of Touch. As humans we touch our environment all the time. I am sure you are touching something now. We remember and identify with the objects and environments we interact with, so when writing you can use your readers’ own memories to make your world feel real and draw your audience deeper into your world. Again it’s better to be short and descriptive. For example, in the second verse of “Devotion,” touch is introduced very simply with the pillows on her bed being, “Sprinkled with rose petals.”
Readers can immediately identify with their own experiences of feeling the soft but moist petals of flowers, so they are given another way into exploring your world. However, they are still left with questions: Who is scattering petals on the pillow? What has happened to the girl in the photo? Is this a beautiful, romantic gesture? By writing less your readers will imagine more.
The Sense of Smell. Smell is one of the most emotionally evocative senses. Your audience has experienced a lifetime of smells, which you can use to draw them into your world. The smell of death is an immediate indication that something bad has happened while the smell of scented candles will evoke more sensual memories. Smells can quickly set the mood for your story. In “Devotion” I introduced smell in the second verse, while describing an unmade bed with twisted sheets:
Your perfume lingers
Loiters on soft pillows.
Your readers can identify with the smell of roses, perhaps triggering a memory in their brain but still the story is yet to unfold. In the case of “Devotion” the readers have been given a hint through the smell of roses, and maybe their own experiences with being given roses, that perhaps they are reading a love story.
The Sense of Taste. Taste always provokes a personal, emotional response and is deeply associated with people’s own memories and experiences, which can therefore be used as a valuable tool for getting your reader emotionally involved in your story. A good taste such as eating chocolate can be linked to a happy experience and evoke feelings of pleasure in your reader, while a bitter taste will create feelings of anger, resentment, or tension. For example, in “Devotion” in the third verse the story unfolds that the observer finds the girl’s lip gloss:
Strawberry lip gloss,
Our favorite taste,
I must have.
The audience can immediately understand and imagine the taste of the strawberry lip gloss as they sensually taste the plot unfold. However, there are questions left unanswered. Why does the observer have to have the lip gloss? Is this the action of a husband, boyfriend, or someone more sinister? Suddenly, through strawberry lip gloss, doubt is introduced.
The Sense of Hearing. Noise can promote all sorts of reactions from your audience. Some great iconic movie moments have been created using sound such as the theme from JAWS, the “Here’s Johnny” call from Jack Nicholson in THE SHINING, and the shower scene music from PSYCHO. People remember sounds and they produce an emotional response. You can use this in your writing to promote positive or negative feelings in your audience. Bird songs, gurgling streams, and giggling babies will have your audience smiling, while footsteps approaching on an empty staircase should promote fear. All your readers will have heard noises that made them happy or scared, so you can exploit this in your writing. In “Devotion” I used sound to indicate a darker twist to the story:
You stir; waking.
And through the skylight
I leave alone.
Now the reader’s senses should be tingling, aware that something is not right as this is not the action of a romantic husband but someone a lot more sinister.
EXERCISE
It is very easy to use the Five Senses Technique in your writing to create your world.
At the start of any writing I write down the five senses: taste, touch, sight, hearing, and smell. Then I cross them out as they are included in the work.
The order the senses are introduced to your reader should occur naturally in your story, so use whatever
order makes sense to your writing. But always make sure that you keep your descriptions clear and to the point.
Simply by using the five senses you can emotionally engage your reader in your work, using their own experiences and memories to draw them into your world, getting your readers to feel your work through all their senses, evoking feelings of fear, happiness, or foreboding . . . the choice is yours.
J. MICHELLE NEWMAN
Make It Real
J. MICHELLE NEWMAN is completing her first historical fantasy novel, “Mistaken Knights,” while trying to save the world one kilowatt hour at a time: She moonlights for a company that creates green energy solutions for small and medium-sized businesses.
I believed that I was writing historical fiction until an agent categorized my novel as fantasy. To me the world of the novel was grounded in history, or at least the historical facts about the type of food, clothing, animals, buildings, and weapons known to have existed during the sixth century. I built my world from the elements of this very real sixth-century foundation by adding blocks of fantasy: time travel, characters based on a legend, magical and mythical beasts. The world of my novel became real to me with characters and landscapes that were three-dimensional. I could see clearly the landscape in each scene in my mind’s eye and I could experience what the characters were feeling. I write what I love to read and I love to get lost in fiction and escape to another reality, so I never questioned whether a dragon really could exist!
The craft is to create a world where dragons do exist, and your readers become so immersed in that world that they believe anything the writer tells them, even though it may be pure fantasy. To truly get lost in fiction, the reader must be able to experience the action of the novel along with the characters, to get inside their bodies and feel what they feel and see the world through their eyes.
Now Write! Page 25