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

by Harper, Steven

  RECIPE REQUIRED

  There's no quick magic. Everything requires long preparation and ritual, with exotic ingredients and much chanting in weird languages. Even a small interruption will ruin the spell, or cause a catastrophe.

  This is a huge limit on power. Magic tends to be for special occasions. You can't have a supernatural face-off or do quick spells. On the other hand, you don't have to worry about cleaning up after people who can fling lightning bolts down Madison Avenue.

  HOW TOUCHING

  Mind powers or magic only work on people the character can touch. Forget long-distance telepathy. And the character will have to be creative in order to find ways to make physical contact with people he needs to “read.” Antagonists who are aware of this limitation will go out of their way to avoid touching people, making the protagonist's job even harder.

  There are a number of variations on this. The power might work only as long as the “reader” is touching the other person (requiring him to think fast), or the character might need to touch the person once to establish contact and not need to do it again thereafter, or touching other people might send the reader an overload of information that's difficult to sort out, or the character reads other people every time he touches them, making some social situations (including sex) awkward, embarrassing, or painful.

  GET OUT OF MY HEAD!

  This one's generally for supernatural mental powers: The character's abilities switch on unexpectedly, or are always working on some level. She's always reading the surface thoughts of the people around her, and it's driving her crazy.

  This is a facet of the Yikes! category. The character may or may not learn to rein in her telepathy, but meanwhile she'll certainly have a difficult time of it.

  BLOCKED!

  Every power has its opposite. Every strength has its weakness. Your main character has developed a long-range telepathic link with her boyfriend? Big deal. Your antagonist has a way to block it, or temporarily sever the link, or — better still — has found a way to use the protagonist's new telepathy as a two-way street, attacking her through the link and bludgeoning her into unconsciousness. And that new insta-healing power? Turns out if you use it too often, it causes unexpected mutations. We can restore that severed arm, but it might turn out to be a little rubbery, with suckers on. So heal carefully.

  YOU WANT IT WHEN?

  The character's power works when only it wants to. There's no pattern to it, no rhyme, no reason. The character lives with an ability that shows itself at odd moments, oft en inconveniently.

  This limitation is one to use sparingly, since it's obviously an author dodge. The power shows up whenever the writer wants it to, which removes suspense, and it can become a major cheat if it appears just in time to pull the character out of a difficult spot. The ability to see the future is usually coupled with limitation — someone with the power to control his precognition completely would ruin almost any story. Readers know that and are willing to accept it in this particular case, even though they know it's kind of a cheat.

  SYSTEMS OF MAGIC

  The major advantage of writing a paranormal novel is the freedom it grants you. You're dealing with magic and the paranormal. Some of it — telepathy, psychokinesis, etc. — might technically be more science fictional, but for all intents and purposes it's still magic. This means you can do anything you want, and you have no special-effects budget. Create impossible monsters; have characters do impossible things. Tear a hole in the fabric of the universe, suck something through, and mend the rip, all in one scene.

  But you still need to know how it all works.

  The trouble with being able to do anything is that you can do anything. When something troubles your magician main character, why can't he just chant the right spell, reconfigure the nature of causality, and make everything The Way It Should Be? This gets back to the need for limitations, of course, but it also points out the need to have a system for magic.

  Before you start writing the actual book, you need to know how magic works. Like science, it has to have rules, and those rules must remain consistent throughout the book — or books. If you decide that werewolves must remain human in sunlight during chapter one, you can't suddenly have William the Were shape-shift at noon in chapter ten to rescue his girlfriend. When unexpected magic saves the day instead of the character, the readers feel cheated.

  The Greeks had a name for this: deus ex machina. It means “god out of the machine.” When ancient playwrights realized they'd written themselves into a corner and there was no way for the characters to resolve their various problems, some of them got out of it by lowering a god character on a pulley (the machine) onto the stage. The god would do some handwaving and poof! All problems vanished. Such endings were immensely unpopular with audiences back then, and they remain so today.

  Keep in mind that your readers live in a world that works with logic and consistency. Your readers can't break the laws of physics or the laws of causality in the readers' world — levers and light switches always follow the rules, and a consequence can't precede its cause. (In other words, your car can't be crushed before the accident, and you can't fail a test before you take it.)

  The same applies to rules of magic. Readers need logic and coherence in fantasy because their world also has logic and coherence. You can set up whatever rules you want, but once you've created them, you have to stick with them. When your magic works the same way all the time, it's called internal consistency. Maintaining internal consistency develops your world and makes it feel real. Internal consistency keeps up that illusion of reality I mentioned earlier.

  You're already dealing with magic, a chaotic force in fiction that does what you, the author, tell it to. When you invite the reader into your paranormal story, you're also telling the reader to trust that your world will make a certain amount of sense. Violate that trust, and the reader walks away.

  So let's look at ways to make some magic.

  THE SOURCE

  First, you need to know where magic power comes from. A number of alternatives present themselves. Magic could be intrinsic in living things — everything alive has a certain amount of magic power in it, and magicians can draw off that power. Maybe magic power can be recharged through rest or other means, or maybe the drain is permanent. Or magic could be associated with a place, with power piling up in some places and other places remaining virtually dead. The idea of ley lines puts magic into rivers flowing around the globe, and magicians tap into that power. The limitation is that a magician caught more than a few yards away from a ley line can't do much — no power.

  You should also know if magic has a “flavor.” Is there good magic and evil magic, or is magic a neutral force like electricity? Or perhaps magicians are divided up by the elements, able to control air, or earth, or fire, or water, and they can't control any other substance. Or whatever else you want to come up with.

  Divine and infernal sources are another place to get magic, though such effects are more properly called miracles. Angels and demons, of course, can perform a number of miracles, but often humans with sufficient faith can pull them off as well.

  Sometimes magic leaks in from other worlds, with gates or rift s allowing power to stream through. Or it's all alchemy, with specially brewed potions and teas that give magical effects. Or all magic must come through supernatural objects that are fiendishly difficult to create. Or it's a combination of the above.

  Your magic-wielding characters may not be aware of the exact source and nature of magic, but as the all-knowing author, you should be. Your knowledge will give the world that internal consistency we mentioned above.

  THE WHO VS. THE WHAT

  You'll also need to know who can do magic. In a world of so-called “cookbook magic,” anyone can cast spells if he knows the right words and has the right ingredients, which makes books of magic very valuable indeed. Another way to go about it is to allow only certain people to cast spells, people born with a special spark or talen
t for magic. Or perhaps magic is restricted to members of a certain gender or certain family lines. Maybe this is further divided so certain families have access only to certain types of magic. Gender-based magic has been around for a long time as well, though the female healer/seer has been done an awful lot, so you'll have to work a lot harder to make that sort of character interesting, and you might be better off doing something else with her altogether.

  There's also the question of what can do magic. In some settings, magic is restricted to magical beings. Only fairies, elves, demons, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and similar creatures have intrinsic magical powers. Humans can't cast spells — against the supernatural they have only folkloric weapons such as garlic and silver for defense. However, there's no reason not to have a world of magicians and magical creatures, if you want! As always, just make sure you have the rules laid out in advance so you can keep your magic consistent.

  THE COST

  Magic rarely comes free. Otherwise magicians and magical creatures would rule the world. Be sure you've chosen appropriate, consistent limits, as we've discussed above.

  THE IMPACT

  One final consideration is the overall impact of magic. Sure, there might be (should be) a cost to the individual, but what about the impact on the big picture? If a magician uses a lot of magic in one place, can she drain the magic permanently? What will that do to future magicians who want to use that place? If these little “dead zones” don't heal themselves, what's the impact of thousands of years of magicians creating thousands of little dead spots all over the planet? Is there a supernatural version of global warming?

  Are there long-term costs to the magician herself? Some paranormal stories give magicians longer — or shorter — lives. Other systems of magic give sorcerers physical effects, like odd hair color or cumulative skin markings or even animal like characteristics. Perhaps using a lot of magic attracts the attention of Other Powers, or lets other magicians track the position of the caster like a supernatural GPS, something you wouldn't want an enemy to be doing.

  What about magical fallout? In a big battle, what happens to deflected power or failed spells? This could be the supernatural version of nuclear waste, creating unintended side effects ranging from small mutations in local plant life to accidental tears in the space—time continuum.

  Taking a step back and looking at the overall impact of magic creates an opportunity to explore your world on a whole new level — and possibly create new story ideas.

  CHAPTER 8: Keeping It Real

  No matter how wild and weird your paranormals get, you're always writing about humans. Even when you're writing about elves, vampires, werewolves, and wicked little pixies, you're writing about humans.

  This isn't a bad thing.

  First of all, you can't avoid writing about humans because you're a human. (Your eventual editor probably won't be — mine's a lava-snorting demon — and with any luck your agent will be a vampire, but you — you're human.) No one can completely step outside his own humanity far enough to write a completely inhuman character.

  Nor should you want to do so. Your readers are humans, too, and won't be able to empathize or identify with a being who thinks and reacts in a completely inhuman manner. Vampires started out as bad guys because they were inhuman monsters, with needs and desires humans couldn't understand — and neither did they wish to. Later authors began to give vampires their humanity back. Vampires began to obsess over love partners, yearn for the past, and fight to control the inner beast. These are difficulties we humans understand because we go through them, too. The delicious and dark paranormal twist added to the struggle made the story even more compelling. As vampires became more and more human, they drifted away from being antagonistic and some even became full-blown protagonists. Nowadays, you're hard-pressed to find a vampire book in which the bloodsuckers are all bad to the blood. They became likable once they became human.

  Your supernatural characters need to follow the same rule, so let's go through some ways to keep your paranormals human, even when they're not.

  THE INNER BEAST

  All humans fight the Inner Beast. It's that interior voice that tells us to lie, steal, cheat, hit, kick, punch, yell, shout, threaten, smash, crush, and kill. Some of us are better at ignoring it than others, and some days even the best of us give in to it, but everyone knows what it's like to fight it.

  Many supernatural characters fight the Inner Beast, too, but with a thousand-volt boost, and human characters who are transformed into supernatural characters (as opposed to characters who are supernatural from birth) tend to get zapped the most. This only makes sense. People generally fear the unfamiliar and cling to the familiar. Humanity is familiar, and a human who is changed into a vampire or werewolf or ghost most likely wouldn't want to let go of that familiar humanity to embrace this weird new existence, and certainly not if becoming a vamp/were/ghost requires the character to do something that, as a human, he would have found repugnant, like behead puppies or snack on friends, no matter how alluring the new activity may have become.

  Supernatural beings such as vampires and werewolves continually deal with new hungers that are far more powerful than the normal ones we humans live with. (It's puberty all over again.) As humans, we've all dealt with being surrounded by food and feeling hungry but knowing we mustn't eat, either because Mom said we'd spoil supper or because we're dieting or because the food belongs to someone else. It sucks. Sometimes we just deal with being hungry. Sometimes we eat anyway and damn the consequences.

  Victor Vampire deals with this problem on a whole new level. He's surrounded by delicious food every moment he's awake, the most wonderful, ambrosial food imaginable, food he could pluck from the street as easily as a child picks an apple. But he mustn't. Either because he'd attract the attention of the authorities (and strong as the vampire may be, enough determined humans could eventually bring him down), because the prey he wants is someone he shouldn't kill for other reasons, or because the vampire is trying to hold on to his fast-eroding humanity, and drinking human blood Would Be Wrong. The conflict between Victor's hunger for blood and his need to avoid fulfilling it creates a powerful paranormal situation — and it's one human readers can still relate to.

  The only trouble with this particular conflict is that it's been explored quite a lot, and you'll need to present it in a new way. You can use a new type of character, like Anne Rice does in her vampire books. (Back when she first did it, the idea of a gay vampire as a protagonist was a new one, and Claudia, the little girl vampire, is a perfect example of a vampire who is ruled by the Inner Beast.) Or you can use a new voice, like Lucienne Diver does in her Vamped series. (Editors love this approach, and we'll talk about voice in chapter twelve.) Or you can try new relationship structures, like Tanya Huff does in her Blood books. (The Inner Beast forces her vampires to snipe at and fight with each other in death, even if they were lovers in life, and her werewolf families, as I've pointed out elsewhere, have to split up sibling sets when the sisters go into heat so they don't try to mate with their own brothers.) Or you can explore some other facet of the struggle.

  FADING HUMANITY

  Some “converted” paranormals feel their humanity slipping away. They succumb to the power of the vampire or the werewolf or the spiritual world.

  Every time they use their new powers, a piece of their former life slips away, and they find themselves less worried about their former friends, relatives, and lovers. For some paranormals, this creates conflict. They don't want to lose their humanity, but keeping it seems to be mutually exclusive with their new state; they can't be both human and supernatural. What to do? Terry Pratchett explores this idea in Unseen Academicals, although his human character is actually a goblin named Mr. Nutt who discovers, much to his dismay, that he's turning into an orc — or that he's always been one. Still, Mr. Nutt is a very human goblin, and we're with him all the way as he deals with the fear and difficulty of his transformation.

 
Believe it or not, this is a very human conflict. Change is forced on all of us throughout our lives, even if we don't want it. A big one is puberty, which changes our bodies, the way we see other people, and the way we see the entire damn world. It's scary, it's freaky, and it's glorious all at once, and there's no way to stop it. Other breathtaking, scary changes explode into our lives — falling in love, falling out of it, finding a job, getting married, having a child, getting divorced, dealing with a death in the family, moving to a new town and swearing we won't lose contact with old friends even though we know it'll happen — and every one of these changes us in unexpected ways. Sometimes we become more powerful, sometimes less so, sometimes we grow up, and sometimes we learn things we'd rather have stayed ignorant about. In any case, we deal and keep moving.

  Forcing your paranormals to deal with their own magical changes (loss of humanity) makes them feel more human to the readers because the readers have gone through their own version of it, and it makes such characters more sympathetic. So don't hesitate to force it on them.

  COMMENTING ON HUMANITY

  Not all supernatural characters were once human. Elves, dwarves, selkies, angels, demons, and others may have partially human form, but they don't think or act like humans. As I've pointed out above, nonhuman protagonists do have to be human enough for readers to identify with them and like them. However, nonhuman characters also need to explore their nonhuman side. One way to do that is to use them as contrast between humans and nonhumans.