Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story.

by Harper, Steven

  First, remember that fascinating doesn't necessarily mean unusual. Regular people can end up on the fascinating end of the scale. Cinderella and Aladdin start out as perfectly ordinary people, but their stories have lasted for generations. Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals relies on Glenda, a relentlessly ordinary baker. The people who buy the country home in Raymond E. Feist's Faerie Tale are a perfectly ordinary blended family. Charlie Asher of A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore is dreadfully ordinary. It's part of the point of his character.

  SO WHAT ABOUT MY WEREWOLF?

  I'm not saying you can't write about extraordinary people. Quite the contrary. It's just that handling intrinsically extraordinary protagonists like vampires and werewolves and wizards is a big topic that deserves its own chapter. We'll look at them more closely in chapter eight.

  Two factors make ordinary people worth reading about.

  ONE: FULL DEVELOPMENT WITH UNUSUAL BITS

  You need to develop your protagonist, fully and completely. On one level, this means she should have a fully documented life, from birth to the present — where the character was born, where she went to school, who her childhood friends were, what her family was like back then and what it's like now, the first time she fell in love, and more. As the author, you need to know nearly everything that has happened to her. I say nearly because more ideas and possibilities will crop up as you write the book. Old lovers, forgotten cousins, photographs from long-ago vacations, and other detritus from the past can show up at any time to create conflict — or help the character in a moment of crisis.

  All of the above are merely facts, however. You also need to develop the character's attitudes. Two kids survive Mrs. Futz's awful third grade class. One shrugs the whole thing off, and the other comes away hating school for the rest of his life. Which attitude would your main character have?

  Glenda from Unseen Academicals leads an ordinary life doing an ordinary job. A homely, slightly overweight woman just this side of thirty, she runs the night kitchen at a university, reads piles of romance novels when no one's looking, and still has a teddy bear named Mr. Wobble. Except for the teddy bear, there's nothing extraordinary, or even interesting, about her. Pratchett makes her interesting through her attitudes. Glenda is eminently practical. She runs the night kitchen with an iron fist because she knows in her heart there is One Right Way to make pies, and that's how it shall be done. The practicality extends to keeping a close eye on her assistant Juliet, who is beautiful and therefore not quite trustworthy in practical or romantic matters, in Glenda's estimation. Glenda also sees to it that the elderly people in her neighborhood are checked on, fed, and aired out from time to time because someone has to do it, and if she doesn't, who will? All this endears her to the reader and makes her interesting to read about long before a hungry goblin shows up in her kitchen and things get a little strange.

  Your own characters need to have the same sort of depth. This extends beyond work and hobbies. How does your main character see the world? What does she expect when something good happens? When something bad happens? How does she react to a challenge? To a loss? How does she fit into her neighborhood or other community? Knowing all this and more will allow you to write a three-dimensional character who will draw readers into a story, regardless of supernatural setup.

  Take a look at the following checklist. You don't need to know everything on it, but you should be aware of most of them.

  THE ORDINARY PERSON'S CHECKLIST

  EARLY LIFE

  Conception circumstances

  Birth circumstances

  Babyhood anomalies, if any

  CLOSE FAMILY

  Mother's bio

  Father's bio

  Parents' relationship at time of conception

  Parents' current relationship

  Siblings (bio for each)

  Relationship with sibling

  Has it changed?

  EXTENDED FAMILY

  List family members

  Relationship with each

  FRIENDS

  Current best friend (bio)

  Former best friend(s)

  Other current friends

  ROMANCE

  First crush

  First dating relationship

  First sexual encounter

  First long-term relationship

  Important romantic relationship(s)

  Currently involved with someone?

  Nature of relationship

  History of relationship

  Impact of relationship on character

  EDUCATION

  Elementary

  Junior high

  High school

  College/grad school

  Attitude toward school

  ENTERTAINMENT AND HOBBIES

  Loves to …

  When bored, likes to …

  TALENTS AND INABILITIES

  Good at

  Not so good at

  Terrible at

  NO ONE'S THAT ORDINARY

  I teach a media studies class in high school. During the unit on the tricks and traps of TV advertising, I always ask my students, “How many of you live in a normal, ordinary family?”

  No one ever raises a hand.

  Almost nobody thinks of themselves or their family as completely ordinary. Everyone comes from something that they feel is at least a little odd or weird or different. It might be as small as having parents who were born in another country or as big as surviving two cancer operations. It might be a desire to be a dancer in a family of factory workers or a secret talent for knitting when your brothers all play football. It might be a sister who lives in a mental hospital or a father whose job takes him out of town three days out of five. Almost no one in the real world feels truly normal.

  Fictional characters feel the same way. In the above example from Unseen Academicals, Glenda doesn't see herself as normal. She makes the best shepherd's pie in the world, works a night job instead of a day one, and keeps a level head in a place where everyone around her seems to go bonkers on a regular basis. Charlie from A Dirty Job doesn't see himself as normal either. He's a single father with an infant daughter. Nothing weird in that, except he's in this position not because of a divorce, but due to his wife's death. The otherwise normal children in Edward Eager's Half Magic also feel they're unusual because their father died years ago.

  Lots of people in the world are levelheaded and work the night shift. Lots of people have lost wives or husbands. Lots of children have lost parents. Nothing unusual in any of this. But that's not how the characters see it. The characters see their situations as unusual, perhaps even unique.

  This is human nature. Sometimes we want to believe that we're so different, so special, that no one else in the whole world is going through what we're going through, and neither can they understand it. (This is one reason why people turn to books, by the way — to see their lives reflected in fiction.) We want to be unique.

  Other times we're sure no one else is going through what we are, so we don't bother talking about it, even though we'd secretly like to discuss the situation with someone who knows what it's like. When I adopted my sons from Ukraine, I talked about it quite openly among my co-workers and was surprised to discover a large number of people whose families had been touched by adoption. They had either adopted a child themselves or someone in their family had done so or they themselves had been adopted. Adoption isn't the rare event everyone thinks. It's certainly not unique, or even vaguely strange, but almost everyone I've talked to thought it was because they felt like it was. What's more, the people I talked to were quite happy, even relieved, to talk about it. Conversation broke the isolation.

  Your characters need the same notion, some part of their lives that takes them off the beaten path as they see it. It'll make them like everyone else.

  BUT HALF THIS STUFF WON'T MAKE IT INTO THE BOOK!

  Actually, everything will make it into the book. Your character may never mention that her parents divorced messi
ly when she was eight and that her mother dated a string of men thereafter, leaving her with a subconscious uncertainty about relationships. But you'll know, and this knowledge will tell you exactly what to do when Victor Vampire sweeps into Norma Normal's life, all handsome and delicious — and completely transient, from her perspective. Norma herself may not be aware why she keeps breaking it off with Victor even when it's clear she loves him, but you, the author, will know because you worked it out. Her reactions will come across as more consistent and therefore more realistic. So get that background together.

  TWO: THE ADDITION OF THE EXTRAORDINARY

  The other factor that makes ordinary people worth reading about is watching them cope with extraordinary situations. Seeing ordinary people deal with weird situations is, in fact, the core of a whole lot of stories, but paranormal stories have the chance to get really extra ordinary. So once you have your regular character fully developed and breathing nicely, you add the supernatural.

  This is where the fun begins. How will your protagonist react when the magic shows up? See, the readers are regular people with (as observed above) one or two things that make them feel a little different, and if you've done your job, they're empathizing with the protagonist. On one level or another, they're pretending to be — or wanting to be — your main character. The only thing they're missing is honest-to-goodness magic, and it's your duty to supply it so they can face it right along with your protagonist.

  So once you establish your character's normal life, you introduce the supernatural element(s) you chose from chapter two.

  How soon? Depends, really. Some authors introduce it on the first page. Lucienne Diver's protagonist wakes up as a new vampire in her underground coffin in the opening paragraph of Vamped. Other authors take a little longer. Stephen King and Peter Straub barely hint at supernatural events when a seagull seems to stare at young Jack early on, but don't really get going on the magic until chapter three, when Jack talks to Speedy Parkway about the supernatural world known as the Territories. More in the middle is Christopher Moore's A Dirty Job, which hints at magic when Charlie's wife dies in chapter one and becomes much more supernatural when various objects in Charlie's shop acquire a magical red glow in chapter two. Chapter three starts with the wonderful line, “It was two weeks before Charlie left the apartment and walked down to the auto-teller on Columbus Avenue where he first killed a guy. His weapon of choice was the number forty-one bus.” From then on, a supernatural blizzard of demons, death goddesses, and hellhounds tears through nearly every page.

  As a general rule, you'll want to introduce the supernatural element as early as possible. Otherwise your readers will start to wonder when the magic's going to show up, and they rightfully get upset if you hold back. Edward Eager sums it up very well through one of his characters in Seven-Day Magic:

  [Barnaby] shut the cover with a disgusted bang.

  “I thought so,” he said. “Of all the gyps! It calls itself The Magic Door, but there's not a speck of real magic in it anywhere! It's just about this boy that learns to get along with these other people by being friendly and stuff. And the magic door's just the door of good fellowship or something. Man, do I despise a book like that!”

  And the others could not have agreed with him more.

  So get moving on the magic.

  Once it shows up, show us how the character reacts. That's most of the fun. We want to see your main character's surprise, shock, elation, desire, fear, curiosity, or whatever other strong emotions smack him upside the head when he first realizes that selkies really do exist and he's just met one, or that the rusty old sword left to him by his great-uncle is an artifact of great power and a circle of sorcerers intends to kill him for it. It's what Bilbo Baggins felt when he picked up a ring that would turn him invisible, what Lucy Pevensie felt when she first crossed into Narnia, and what Charlie Asher felt when he realized he'd been recruited to take a job as Death. This “holy cow” response is called the sense of wonder and is practically a requirement of paranormal novels. We'll get into details of how to make your readers feel the character's emotions in chapter eight.

  GIVING GOALS

  One of the simplest ways to develop a protagonist, supernatural or not, is to ask yourself two questions:

  What does he want?

  What is standing in the way?

  You should have at least two answers for number 1. And neither of them can be “Survive repeated attacks from the antagonist,” thank you. Readers want real goals, ones with depth and power. In a Magical Gateway book, the goal might be to find a way home before time runs out, for example. Several smaller goals might be wrapped within that larger one: to repair the magic ring that will open the gate, to rescue the boy who knows where the magic ring is, and so on, but everything should lead back to this larger goal. The second goal may be an emotional one. Perhaps it's to find real love, or a need to overcome a character flaw. Bonus points if you can tie the second goal into the first one, forcing the protagonist to deal with two conflicts at the same time.

  The answer to number 2 is probably tied to the antagonist. The ring that will open the magic gate and send the hero back home is the same one that will allow the antagonist to bring his Dark Mistress into this world, and the antagonist already possesses half of it. Or the antagonist needs the blood of an Outlander to complete the spell and has set out to capture the protagonist before he can leave. In any case, you need to throw something into the protagonist's way. This creates conflict for your book.

  If you can't state at least two goals for your protagonist, chances are the character is underdeveloped, and you need to add more information about him.

  SOME SUPERNATURAL PROTAGONISTS

  There are many types of supernatural protagonists — archetypes, if you will. Without proper development, they can fall into cliché, but you read the previous chapter and won't allow them to do that. Let's take a look at a few.

  THE REGULAR JOE/JOSEPHINE

  The Regular Joe (or Josephine) starts off very much the ordinary person as outlined above, but early on in the book, he encounters the paranormal and is forced to deal with it. One caveat, however — the Regular Joe never develops supernatural abilities or powers. Ever. And he deals with the magical world using resources available only to ordinary people. The Regular Joe isn't especially strong or smart, but he knows his place in his own world, and that makes him powerful in his own way. The fun with reading Regular Joe is watching him cope with — and eventually win against — the more powerful supernatural, which is way outside of his normal worldview.

  The Regular Joe is a tremendous draw for readers because it's easy to empathize with him — he's so much like us — and paranormal novels abound with examples of him. Writers like this type of character for exactly this reason, and because he's easy to hurt physically, which creates yet more conflict. We've already talked about Jack Sawyer in The Talisman, the children in The Chronicles of Narnia, and the family in Faerie Tale. Yet another is young Lewis Barnavelt from John Bellairs's The House With a Clock in Its Walls. There are plenty of others.

  THE RELUCTANT

  The Reluctant doesn't want anything to do with this supernatural stuff, doesn't want to be a hero, and certainly doesn't want to risk his life to save the world. He already has a life — a very nice one, in fact — and nothing you can do will make him jeopardize it. Let someone else handle the heroics.

  Hold on. Who's in danger? They're going to do what? Well, maybe he could help a little. Just this once. And then he expects to be left alone, got it?

  This appeal of this character comes from the “will he/won't he” conflict. Even though the reader knows he'll end up pitching in to save the world or fight the monsters or whatever's going on, the fun lies in seeing how he's persuaded. Moist von Lipwig is the quintessential reluctant hero in Terry Pratchett's Going Postal and again in Making Money.

  THE HUNTER /WARRIOR

  She hunts down supernatural blech and deals with it. She kicks bu
tt and doesn't bother to take names — that's for lesser warriors. She might even be a little Reluctant (see above), but in the end, she'll find her way into the thick of the battle, beheading vampires, shooting werewolves, and destroying demons. (And yeah — this character might be a guy, too.)

  The kick-butt Warrior started off as a guys-only thing and got a little stale. Then women edged into the club, and the archetype took on new life. Initially, writers used female Hunter/Warriors for shock value: “Look at how we're breaking stereotypes! Girls can fight, too! Aren't you amazed that a girl can fight?” As time passed, the character became more accepted, and now readers see it as normal.

  A major plus for this type of character is that the writer always has a reason to get the character involved in the action — as the Hunter, she's supposed to seek out supernatural messes, and there's no need to invent reasons to force her participation. Diana Tregarde from Mercedes Lackey's Burning Water and its sequels is such a heroine, as is Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake.

  THE NEWBIE

  The Newbie doesn't know anything about magic or the paranormal. He doesn't watch vampire movies or read ghost stories. He can't name a single Greek god, and his only experience with leprechauns is through a box of breakfast cereal. He certainly doesn't believe in any of this otherworldly crap. So naturally, he's the one who gets yanked into the supernatural world.

  There's a sense of “Why him?” that combines with a feeling of superiority from the reader that combine to make this character appealing. The reader can agonize over why this person, who knows nothing about the paranormal and doesn't really care about it, gets to take part in a supernatural adventure while the reader, who probably knows quite a lot about magic and would happily climb over his own grandmother for the chance to see it for real, misses the chance entirely. And once the story gets underway, the reader can have the satisfaction of trying to figure out various supernatural motifs ahead of the ignorant Newbie. Some Newbies learn quickly, and others continue to stumble.