WRITING THE
PARANORMAL
NOVEL
TECHNIQUES AND EXERCISES
FOR WEAVING SUPERNATURAL ELEMENTS
INTO YOUR STORY
STEVEN HARPER
Writing the Paranormal Novel. Copyright © 2011 by Steven Harper Piziks. Manufactured in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No other part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published by Writer's Digest Books, an imprint of F+W Media, Inc., 4700 East Galbraith Road, Cincinnati, Ohio 45236. (800) 289-0963. First edition.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Piziks, Steven.
Writing the paranormal novel: techniques and exercises for weaving supernatural elements into your story/by Steven Piziks. — 1st ed.
p.cm.
ISBN 978-1-59963-134-9 (alk. paper)
eISBN 13: 978-1-5996-3301-5
1. Occult fiction — Authorship. 2. Occult fiction — Technique. I. Title.
PN3377.5.O33P59 2011
808.3'873 — dc22
2010034603
Edited by Scott Francis
Designed by Claudean Wheeler
Cover photo by inhauscreative/iStockphoto.com
Production coordinated by Debbie Thomas
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steven Harper Piziks is the author of In the Company of Mind and Corporate Mentality, both science fiction books published by Baen Books. Writing as Steven Harper for Roc Books, he has produced The Silent Empire series for Roc and is currently writing The Brain Plague steampunk trilogy for DAW. He's also written books based on Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and The Ghost Whisperer, as well as the movie novelization Identity. When not writing, he plays the harp, wrestles with his three sons, and spends more time online than is probably good for him.
www.sff.net/people/spiziks
www.twitter.com/stevenpiziks
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART I: GATHERING THE ELEMENTS
CHAPTER 1: The Nature of the Paranormal
CHAPTER 2: Elements and Elementals
CHAPTER 3: The Paranormal at Large
CHAPTER 4: Seeking the Paranormal
CHAPTER 5: The Paradox of Clichés
PART II: SUMMONING THE CHARACTERS
CHAPTER 6: Supernatural Characters
CHAPTER 7: Magic and the Superhero
CHAPTER 8: Keeping It Real
PART III: CASTING THE WORDS
CHAPTER 9: Thinking Big and Small: Arc, Plot, and Subplot
CHAPTER 10: Fight Scenes and Flashbacks: How to Handle Paranormal Pacing
CHAPTER 11: Language and Dialogue
CHAPTER 12: Paranormal Polish
CHAPTER 13: The Real Challenges
PART IV: BANISHING THE BOOK
CHAPTER 14: The Reality
CHAPTER 15: Destruction and Creation
PART I: GATHERING THE ELEMENTS
CHAPTER 1: The Nature of the Paranormal
Welcome to a wonderful world of weird. You can find just about anything here: lovely bones, lightning thieves, graveyard books, wild swans, half magic. The list is as endless as imagination. And you've decided to write in it. Cool!
We do have a few rules. Sorry, but there it is. You can't do just anything. You only get three wishes. The magical gate closes at sunset. The handsome stranger doesn't drink … wine. Even the supernatural world has its little ways.
Don't fret. We'll walk you through, open all the doors, and reveal all the secrets. Please keep your arms and legs inside the tour bus at all times (lest they get bitten off) and remember to tip the driver (he gets testy if you don't). And at the end of it, you'll have your own paranormal manuscript.
JUST WHAT IS A PARANORMAL BOOK, ANYWAY?
If you want to write science fiction — bear with me here — you have to create a story with some piece of extrapolated science (such as dinosaur cloning or the ability to zap a corpse back to life) that's so integral to the plot, you can't remove it without destroying the story. Remove the cloned dinosaurs from Jurassic Park, and you have no story. Remove the reanimated dead from Frankenstein, and you have no story. Science is the element that makes these novels into science fiction instead of, say, adventure or romance or gothic.
Paranormal novels work the same way. You need some element of magic or the supernatural that's so deeply integral to the story that the entire novel would collapse if you removed it. Try removing the supernatural element from Dracula and see how far you get. The book has a romance, but without the vampire count to move things along, author Bram Stoker would have no story. On the other hand, if your protagonist's werewolf boyfriend could just as easily be a muscular guy who loses his temper once a month right around the time he needs a haircut, you aren't writing a paranormal novel, you're probably writing a romance with supernatural trappings — and your readers will see right through it.
People have been telling supernatural stories from the beginning of human civilization. Such stories form the basis of every mythology that ever existed. These tales explain how the world came to exist, why we have earthquakes, who stole fire from the gods, where people go when they die, or anything else that needed explaining. Other supernatural stories spin grand adventures of bold heroes: Odysseus and Gilgamesh and Lemminkäinen and Aladdin. And it wasn't just the stories themselves that endured — the concepts remained as well. Who doesn't want to be swept away from this dull, mundane world to a wondrous, magical land? Who hasn't fantasized about finding a magical object of great power and having fun with it? Who hasn't fervently wished for the perfect magical lover to tell us we're irresistible? These and other supernatural concepts have hung on for generations for one reason: They're fun to think about.
WHAT DO PARANORMAL NOVELS DO FOR US?
Supernatural stories feed the human desire for escape. We can pretend we're riding that magic carpet, making those three wishes, or swinging that sword because we know (deep sigh) it's never going to happen for real.
The idea of uncovering the supernatural in your own yard is irresistible. Supernatural stories originally took place Long Ago and Far Away. This lent the stories a certain amount of — believe it or not — realism. In a time when the average person never traveled more than four or five miles from home, it was easier to suspend disbelief if the story took place halfway around the globe. Anything can happen in a place you've never heard of! But eventually humans invented mass communication. The world shrank,
and the universe Out There became less mystical. As a result, storytellers started slipping supernatural elements into their own backyards. Bram Stoker horrified — and fascinated — the Victorians when he brought a Long Ago and Far Away vampire into modern London. (More on that in chapter two.) Stoker wasn't the first to bring an ancient monster into a modern setting, but he was the most famous, and many, many authors imitated him.
In supernatural stories, you don't need to look Long Ago or even Far Away to find adventure. You can stroll down the sidewalk or wander off the back porch. The contrast of the unknown magical with the well-worn mundane provides the charm. Winged horses and flying carpets are fun, sure, but when most people spend their time stuck in automobile traffic, a flying car sounds a lot more interesting. Heck, maybe you, the reader, will find one next.
On that note, I should let you know that this book will focus mostly on writing novels set primarily in our world, either past or present, or on novels that use characters from our world who travel to supernatural places. Although it's a supernatural genre, we'll only be making brief detours into high fantasy. If you want to write novels about armored warriors or powerful sorcerers who fight fantastic creatures in a society that never intersects with our own, you might want to check out Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction … Fantasy, also from Writer's Digest Books.
Meanwhile, we're going to look at the chance to use the paranormal to shake up the ordinary world — or an ordinary story.
HOW CAN THE PARANORMAL SHAKE IT UP?
I live about half my waking life in fantasy. By this, I mean I tell myself stories. I create them in my car on highway drives, I spin them while I'm jogging on that stupid treadmill, and I think about them at night to send myself to sleep. In other words, I never gave up the “Let's pretend” games most children play because the real world was never quite enough. I've wanted to explore other places — or see what might happen if something truly strange came to this place. Eventually I learned how to get these stories down on paper and sell them, which is how I became a novelist.
I'm not alone in this, of course. I only joined a long-standing tradition of storytellers stretching back over eons. There's something cool about adding a dash of magic to the normal world, and this coolness factor is why people write paranormal books. I'm assuming you're here for the same reason.
On the surface it looks easy — just add a supernatural element to an otherwise normal story. A detective who hunts down criminals is pretty cool. But how much cooler is it to create a detective who hunts down ghosts? Put together a group of siblings who flee the Blitzkrieg, leaving their familiar city for the strange, unfamiliar English countryside, and you have a great story. Even greater is the story of the same children fleeing through a magical wardrobe to another world entirely. The young woman who falls in love with a handsome, mysterious stranger on the run from a dark past is such a cliché that romance authors are hard-pressed to use that story line anymore. Make the handsome stranger into a werewolf on the run from his angry pack mates, and the story becomes interesting again.
But it's a little more complicated than that. (You knew it had to be, right?) Supernatural people and creatures don't just drop out of the sky, fully formed and realized, so they can step seamlessly into your story. Supernaturals need to be created, nurtured, and tended. They need to be examined, explored, and explained. Otherwise, they won't make sense.
Sense? I want a demon that breaks free from hell, falls in love with mortal women, and vows to stop the impending Apocalypse to make sense?
Absolutely. That's what this book is about. We're not only going to shake up a normal novel — we're going to shake it up in a way that makes people want to turn every page and stay up until three in the morning to do it.
And that's a supernatural element all by itself.
CHAPTER 2: Elements and Elementals
The most common question writers hear is, “Where do you get your ideas?” Some authors keep a pithy or smart-alecky answer ready, such as, “I belong to the Idea of the Month Club” or “I store a trunk of them in my attic.” More honest authors might answer, “I look at my bank account. It's amazing how many ideas a line of zeroes can generate.”
A more useful answer is that you simply keep your eyes open. Fantasy author Mercedes Lackey once saw a small animal skitter across the road in front of her car. A split-second later, she realized her eyes were playing tricks — it was nothing but a piece of paper blown by the wind. Most people would think nothing of this and continue on their way, but Lackey is a writer. She played with the incident in her mind, asking herself why an animal might disguise itself as a piece of paper and what might happen if someone found such an animal. Eventually she wrote a story about it.
The easiest way to find ideas is to play the “What If?” game. What if that piece of paper really were an animal? What if time ran backward when I turned my watch backward? What if a vampire needed to travel quickly from New York to Los Angeles? Could he send himself by FedEx?
Another way to get novel-length ideas is to take two unrelated concepts and smoosh them together. If one of those elements is supernatural, you have a paranormal book. Neil Gaiman took the all-too-common idea of an abandoned child needing a family and combined it with the concept of supernatural creatures inhabiting a cemetery. Out of this, he got The Graveyard Book. Bram Stoker combined vampires with (then) modern-day London and got Dracula. Naomi Novik tossed dragons into the Napoleonic Wars and got His Majesty's Dragon. Who would ever have thought of that?
A writer who kept her eyes and mind open, that's who.
It's great fun to take an ordinary situation and inject a supernatural element. That's what a paranormal book is all about. So let's examine how to use some supernatural elements.
SUPERNATURAL ELEMENTS
I'm going to repeat from chapter one: You can't simply drop a bit of magic into your book and expect to claim the whole thing is supernatural. In order to qualify as a true paranormal book, your novel must contain at least one supernatural element without which the entire story would fall apart. The paranormal must be integral to the story. There is simply no way, for example, to remove the dragons from His Majesty's Dragon and preserve the book. Laurell K. Hamilton can't take vampires and werewolves out of her Anita Blake novels and replace them with ordinary people. The books simply wouldn't work. If you can replace your main character's broomstick with a fast car and her crystal ball with a cell phone and get away with it, you don't really have a paranormal book — you have a book with supernatural decorations.
Some books pretend to be paranormal but aren't. All the supernatural elements in Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia appear nowhere except in Jess and Leslie's imaginations. Edward Eager's Magic or Not? and its sequel The Well-Wishers use a well that may or may not actually be granting wishes. Peg Kerr uses parallel retellings of the folktale “The Wild Swans” — one modern, one fantasy historical — in her wonderful novel of the same title, and leaves the reader wondering if her two stories are truly connected. Some readers appreciate the magical realism and others feel cheated by it, so tread carefully if you want to go this route.
An idea for a supernatural element can hit you out of nowhere. You might be walking the dog or shopping for groceries when you realize that a magic trunk filled with an infinite number of costumes from bygone eras would make a great basis for a novel. Or, more likely, you'll be doing some reading on supernatural subjects and something will catch your eye. I always maintain that learning something new is a great way to generate story ideas. (More on that in chapter four.)
Supernatural elements tend to fall into certain categories. This is by no means a complete list, but it's pretty good. Pick one and run with it.
THE SUPERNATURAL OBJECT
This is a widget with magical powers. The classic example here is the magic sword. Excalibur springs to mind. Stories abound with people who find, inherit, receive, or even create magic rings, magic carpets, magic books, magic broo
ms, magic cauldrons — the list goes on. Look around your house. Any object can be made magical.
You might discover supernatural objects for your book by simply looking at the world around you and wondering what it might be like if a particular object had supernatural powers. Or an idea for an object might simply hit you over the head and demand to be used. In any case, you have to keep your eyes and mind open to receive the idea.
Supernatural objects tends to fall into two categories:
The Obvious Object
The Obvious Object's supernatural power is related to its normal function. A doll is fun to play with, but when it comes to life, it's even more fun. A motorcycle provides quick transportation, but a flying motorcycle will take you to the ends of the earth. A book contains interesting information, but a witch's book lets you cast spells.
A setting that uses a lot of casual magic might have any number of little Obvious Objects lying around. They add color to the background. J.K. Rowling makes extensive use of these in her Harry Potter books. Photographs and portraits have lives of their own. The figures in Ron Weasley's chess game move at the command of the players. A music box in Sirius Black's home plays a tune that will lull the listener into an enchanted sleep. These objects can be fun or sinister, but in either case, they provide contrast between the paranormal world and the “normal” world.
Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story. Page 1