Talking Pictures: Plotting through Image Analysis and Imaginative Elaboration

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Characters, incidents, settings, processes, and motives are among the persons, places, and things that inspire horror. Pretty much anything can, as long as it is eerie or lends itself to an eerie interpretation.

 

For moviemakers, images often suggest horror. (They also horror to many writers of other genre fiction as well, of course; C. S. Lewis, the author Christian and children's fantasy and science fiction, for example, said his stories often began with images.)

When examining a picture—never merely look at a picture, whether it's a drawing, a photograph, a painting, or some other visual representation; study it in detail; then, wait a while and study it again—ask yourself, Which question do I first ask myself about the picture: who? what? when? where? how? or why?

The right picture will speak to you. How can you be sure the picture you're studying is the “right picture?” Easy. If it is, it will let you know; it will speak to you.

Not literally, of course. Not out loud. But it will suggest questions, imply ideas, elicit emotions, show relationships between one of its elements—color, perhaps—and others—texture, maybe, or shape. One thought, one intuition, one feeling will lead to another and another.

Before you converse with pictures, it's helpful to know what sort of things to study. Remember, too, that, in the Western world, people are taught to read from left to right and from top to bottom. The most important part of the image will be positioned close to the center of the image.

Here are some basic elements to consider: contrasts, colors, distance, intensity, overlapping of objects, placement, position, shapes, sizes, structural pattern (e. g., horizontal, diagonal, vertical, sectional), text (if any), and textures.

On the figurative level, consider whether the image alludes to anything beyond itself, such as a work of art or an historical period; look for visual metaphors; consider symbolism; and determine whether personification is used. Often, if the picture has symbolic or metaphorical significance and text, the text will act as the key to unlocking the literal meaning suggested by the visual figure of speech.

If figures are included in the image, consider their sex, gender, age, financial status, social class, costume, facial expression, posture, pose, body language, and relationships to other figures, if any, and to the objects, or “props,” if any, and the landscape or interior space shown in the image.

Now, let's try a simple exercise, using this image:

What question first addresses itself to me is, Why is the doll crying? In other words, I am most interested in the question of motive. If I am uncertain, I may hazard a guess, indicating it as such by following the guess with a question mark in parentheses; if, as yet, I have no answer, I will indicate this by using just a question mark.

Now that I've determined my chief interest in the image, I should answer the other, related questions:

Who? = doll

What? = crying

When? and Where = In the darkness

How? = magic (?)

Why? = ?

Next, I will “read” the image from right to left and from top to bottom, making notes concerning questions, ideas, emotions, and relationships between one of its elements of the image:

• Right eye is half-closed; left eye, open
• Right eye is dark; right eye, blue
• A teardrop on the doll's left eye suggests the toy is crying
• In comparison to the nose and mouth, the doll's eyes are exceptionally large—why?
• There is no background, just a close-up of the doll's seemingly large, round face
• The face is cracked and worn

These are my initial observations. I should ask what each is intended to suggest or mean. (In studying an image, especially if it was produced by a professional artist, we should assume that every detail is carefully thought out and is present for a purpose.)

• The right eye suggests thought, reflection; it seems to look inward. The left eye is open; the doll sees, but it also cries: whatever the doll sees seems to make it sad.
• There is only a single, large teardrop, which seems to imply that either the doll is no longer crying or has only just begun to cry; either it has cried itself out or it is only now being moved to tears.
• The relatively large eyes focus the viewer's attention on them, rather than on its nose or mouth. Its vision, thought, and emotion and what it sees are the important things.
• The setting is unknown, other than by darkness; the time and place are irrelevant. However, the darkness could symbolize fear, ignorance, or death, since black is often associated with one or all of these emotions or states of existence. The large size of the face also focuses the viewer's attention on the doll's face. Its face, the symbol of identity, like the doll's behavior—crying—are the focal points of the image, suggesting that these are the most important features of the picture.
• The crack in the doll's right cheek and the wear on its face could symbolize its suffering; it seems careworn, tired, and slightly injured.

Add any additional observations:

• The image makes use of personification and symbolism.
• None of my observations answers my original question: Why is the doll crying? In other words, what is its motive?

At this point, we are beyond the image. We are asking ourselves a question that the image itself does not, and cannot, answer. Therefore, we must use our imaginations, our knowledge of human nature, and our own experiences as human beings to guess why a doll, if it were capable of crying, might weep. In doing so, we should also be true to the questions, ideas, emotions, and the relationships between the focus feature of the image (in this case, the doll) and the image's other, related elements.

We can start by listing facts known about dolls:

• A doll usually belongs to a girl.
• A doll may be given to a girl as a gift, perhaps by her parents.
• A girl often invests her doll with a “personality” (personifies the doll).
• When a girl is not playing with her doll, the doll is often left by itself, perhaps in a dark place, such as a closet or a toy box.
• A girl may project her own emotions onto her doll.
• A girl may assign the role she plays in her present life to her doll.

Based on these thoughts, we might construct a scenario to explain our original question, Why is the doll crying?

Melinda Jackson abandons her doll, Bessie—not to a closet or to a toy box this time, but to the alley behind her house, beside the trash cans to be collected, along with the other trash, by the city's sanitation crew. Melinda is sad to say goodbye to Bessie, who's been her dearest companion, her confidante, her best friend for most of her life. They've been through a lot, good times and bad. But Melinda is older now—too old for Bessie—and, so, Melinda abandoned her doll. She imagines Bessie alone in the dark alley, frightened and in despair, crying, as Melinda herself is crying. But it is only a tear. She brushes it away. Besides, Bessie is just a doll. Bessie can't really cry.

The idea for the story suggests three parts:

1. Melinda becomes aware that she is “too old” for a doll. (Maybe she has a sleepover and her friends make fun of her for still having a doll.)
2. Melinda is sad to say goodbye to her doll, but, convinced the time has come to part with Bessie, Melinda places Bessie in the dark alley behind her house to be hauled away by the city's sanitation crew.
3. Twist ending

We need to surprise the reader with an unexpected outcome to the story. With Melinda's new awareness that she is “too old” for a doll (Part I) and Melinda's abandonment of her doll so that Bessie can be hauled away by the city's sanitation crew (Part II), we have set up the expectation, in the reader's mind, that Bessie will be discarded. There are several ways the story could end with a twist:

1. One of the sanitation crew could take Bessie home for his own daughter to “adopt.”
2. A dog could carry Bessie home, where another girl could “adopt” Bessie.
3. Bessie really could be magical, and she could return to Melinda, who decides to keep her, after all.

Adopt one of these twists or (or another possibility) and use it to write part three of the story's summary:

III. Recovering from her fright, Bessie walks          back to Melinda's house, returns to the girl's       bedroom, with muddy feet, and takes her          customary place of honor on Melinda's bed.       Shocked, Melinda decides Bessie is magic          and decides to keep her, regardless of her          the taunts of her "friends."

The fifteen basic needs identified by advertising executive Jib Fowles should also be considered in relation to the image: the need to achieve, the need for aesthetic sensations, the need for affiliation, the need to aggress, the need for attention, the need for autonomy, the need to satisfy curiosity, the need to dominate, the need to escape, the need to feel safe, the need to nurture, the need for sex, the need for prominence, and physiological needs (food, drink, sleep, etc.). For example, in the sample story, Madeline feels the need for affiliation (she has a sleepover), and Madeline feels the need for autonomy (she feels that it is time for her to say goodbye to her doll). By appealing to one or more of these basic needs, a story is likely to allow readers to develop empathy for the narrative's characters—in the case of the sample story, for both Madeline and Bessie.

If you'd care to try this approach for a story of your own, you might use the following (or some other) image:

Imaginary vs. Imaginative Worlds as They relate to Horror Fiction

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In C. S. Lewis: A Life, Alister McGrath points out the distinction that Lewis makes between imaginary and imaginative worlds. For Lewis, the former, McGrath says, depicts a landscape having “no counterpart in reality,” whereas the latter seeks to convey “images adequate to” the depiction of a transcendent “reality.” The worlds of mythology are examples of imaginative worlds, and “the more imaginative a mythology, the greater its ability, Lewis says, to “communicate more reality to us.”

McGrath makes it clear that, in discussing imaginative worlds, Lewis does not mean that such worlds—or the works devoted to them—are allegories. They may be interpreted allegorically, but that does not mean that they themselves are allegories. As Lewis explains, his own Chronicles of Narnia can be allegorized, but that “of itself is no proof that it is an allegory.” Instead, his Narnia series, which presents an imaginative world, is a “supposal,” by which he means fiction that supplies possible answers to questions of a transcendent nature. Using Narnia as an example, Lewis writes:

If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair [in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress] represents Despair, he [Aslan] would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, “What might Christ become if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as he actually has done in ours? This is not allegory at all.”

Lewis makes several points:

1. The writer's work asks or implies a question.
2. Although the question is posed in or by a work of fiction, the question relates to an actual event or events in the real world.
3. In the context of its imaginative world, the work poses an answer to the question.
   
   

Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz fails these tests and is, indeed, McGrath states, a work about an imaginary, rather than an imaginative, world. The world of Oz has no referent beyond itself. Narnia, by contrast, is shadow of another world which is itself the shadow of yet another world, just as, in Plato's thought, our sense perceptions of phenomena are shadows of the objects in the world and the world is itself a shadow of the transcendent world of perfect Forms.

An illustration of Plato's “Allegory of the Cave” pictures a man chained against a wall behind which men carry clay figures. The men hold the figures over their heads, and the upper portions of the figures are higher than the top of the wall against which the man on the other side is chained. A fire burning on a stone shelf of the cave, on the other side of the men, casts the shadows of the objects onto the wall in front of the chained man. Rather than seeing the actual objects—clay figures of a horse, a bull, and a pot—the chained man sees only their shadows. High on one of the cave's walls, a ladder ascends to the world above, where the sun shines in the sky. The objects the men carry are mere copies of the things in the world above—representations of the animals—and the shadows are copies, as it were, of these copies. Only in the unseen world above are the unseen, actual animals (representing, in the allegory, the Forms themselves).

Lewis's Narnia is somewhat like Plato's allegorical cave. The real world is Narnia, where Aslan dwells. Its copy is The Chronicles of Narnia, which recount the events in Narnia. The copy of the copy is our own world, a dim reflection of the imaginative world of the novels, which is, in turn, itself a faint likeness of Aslan's real world. The images that depict the world of the novels are the clay pots in Jung's cave, which represent, but do not truly reflect, the true objects themselves, any more than the objects truly reflect their transcendent Forms. As Lord Digory says, in The Last Battle, “It's all there in Plato.”

In attempting to envision Forms (i. e., in a Christian context, divine realities), Lewis depicts Christ as the lion Aslan, Satan as the White Witch, the fallen, unredeemed world as a frozen wasteland in which Christmas never arrives (until Aslan appears), and the Pevensie children are disciples. As McGrath points out,

Lewis's remarkable achievement in the Chronicles of Narnia is to allow his readers to inhabit this metanarrative—to get inside the story and feel what it was like to be part of it . . . . The Narnia stories allow us to step inside and experience the Christian story.

Do any horror stories accomplish something similar, creating imaginative worlds wherein the writer's work asks or implies and answers a question related to an actual event or events in the real world? Do any works of horror fiction shadow the true horrors of the real world in such a way that readers can enter their imaginative worlds and “experience” the stories depicting these landscapes? Do any of them give rise to myths? Are any horror stories mythopoeic?

The icons of horror that continue to resonate with readers and moviegoers may indicate which images have particular force in conveying feelings of terror and disgust (probably the two chief elements of horror). Often, these icons appear in literary works, but they are also present in the visual arts, especially painting and sculpture. Such icons include demons, ghosts, vampires, witches, and zombies, all of which have appeared in novels, short stories, or movies that meet Lewis's criteria, asking or implying a question related to what is (or is, at least, believed by some to be) related to an actual event or events in the real world, and pose answers to the question they pose.

To get just an intimation of the power these images of horror originally held for their audiences, we must try, to the best of our abilities, to envision the world as it was to them and to see, in this context, the supernatural beings they imagined as their enemies.

The world in which such creatures existed was a pre-scientific world wherein there was no well-established association of objective cause and effect. Demons, rather than bacteria, birth defects, viruses, radiation, or the like afflicted people with disease, blindness, or mental illness. They also animated human corpses, using dead bodies, as “vampires,” to drink blood. Demons also empowered witches to perform spectacular feats and wonders. The soul's survival of death enabled the existence of ghosts and zombies.

Today, we might call such a view of “reality” superstitious, but, for the ancients, it was simply the truth, the way things were, reality itself. Against such evils, such remedies as prayers, rituals, incantations were the only recourse which might prevail, and, only then, because God ruled over even the supernatural entities that afflicted humanity.

Horror is, like poetry, painting, sculpture, dance, and many other human enterprises, of religious, not secular, origin, and, despite the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and the Enlightenment, horror continues to tap the primeval aspects of our existence as human beings that religion once addressed and, indeed, continues, for many, to address.

Just as adults retain vestiges of their childhood experience, humanity retains traces of its primordial heritage. In our fiction and in the dark, dim recesses of our ancient selves, demons, ghosts, vampires, witches, and zombies continue to horrify us, just as, in times past, they possessed, haunted, stalked, hexed, and vexed our ancestors in the “real world” in which they lived. If you doubt this, spend a few minutes alone in a cemetery by yourself after dark or imagine spending a night alone in the catacombs, among centuries-old corpses and skeletons of the dead.

Then, you will begin to fathom the terrible terror felt by those who believed in things that go bump in the night, and reading Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, or Stephen King will take on a new intensity. In Platonic and mythopoeic terms, their works are, after all, shadows of the shadows of the Real Horrors awaiting us beyond this world.

Revisiting the Numinous

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Through images and emblems associated with a vanished craft or practice, a writer of fantasy or horror fiction can, as it were, visit another, mystical and magical world. Such a trip can help him or her to envision, and, therefore, to create an otherworldly setting in which to place historical, fantastic, or horrific characters who, as the mad scientists of their day, ply secret trades.There are several sources of such images and symbols, including alchemy, demonology, Gnosticism, heraldry, Masonry, Rosicrucianism, and various Tarot decks. Links to some of these sources are included at the end of this post, for those who are inclined to step, as it were, into a different time, when a vastly different, pre-scientific mindset held sway.

This article discusses alchemy’s imagery in general. However, much of what is said could apply to any other occult enterprise.

Images of alchemy capture the romance of a medieval enterprise, wherein adepts sought to transmute base metals into gold. Quaint laboratories, equipped with preposterous apparatuses of all kinds, including furnaces and forges, kilns and fireplaces, both with and without chimneys; stocked with flasks and beakers, bottles and vials; and operated by men in rich capes and robes, recreate a world--and a worldview--that is now long gone.

Woodcuts carved with figures and symbols similar to those of the Masons or those on Tarot decks also romanticize the practice: the hermaphrodite, the dragon, the bare-breasted Gorgon, the demon, the angel, the caduceus, the serpent, the lion, the microcosm and the macrocosm, Artemis with her tiers of supernumerary breasts, personified suns and moons, and hundreds of other images as bizarre and wonderful are catalogued in groups as fanciful as they are fascinating, suggesting secrets long forgotten if, indeed, they were ever really known. These emblems, like the fully equipped and functional laboratories, suggest the popularity of the craft and the devotion to which its practitioners practiced it.

Viewing such images, it is almost impossible not to see the appeal that alchemy had, promising gold, promising moral and spiritual perfection, promising the otherworldliness of both fabulous wealth and spiritual wellbeing, and promising a wonderful and magical, if laborious, time of it along the way. Alchemy promised a better world, both internally and externally, if one persevered, worked hard, and stayed dedicated to the task at hand. It did deliver, of course, on both its pledges, but not the way alchemists believed it would; it gave us chemistry, instead of lead’s magically becoming gold.

It also influenced literature, along the way. According to David Meakin’s Hermetic Fictions: Alchemy and Irony in the Novel, alchemy is featured in such novels as those by Emile Zola, Jules Verne, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, Gustav Meyrink, Lindsay Clarke, Marguerite Yourcenar, Umberto Eco, and Michel Butor. Some believe that L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz might also be predicated upon alchemy.

Familiarizing oneself with such an outmoded and, indeed, long abandoned, view of the world, both physical and metaphysical, renews one’s appreciation of the modern world, reminding us that our own systems of knowledge and belief have not been the only ones people have embraced and that, indeed, ours may, one day, seem quite as quaint as those we’ve left behind. If one can recreate a sense of the reality in which alchemists (or any other esoteric group) believed in his or her story, when it is appropriate to do so, he or she will, in doing so, have already escorted the reader into another, enchanted world.

But becoming acquainted with alchemy--or demonology, Gnosticism, heraldry, Masonry, Rosicrucianism, or various Tarot decks--also pays other dividends to writers of historical romances, fantasy, or horror. Mostly, these benefits are intangible, but they are no less genuine for that. Revisiting the past, to see the world as it was seen in a time antecedent to our own, helps us to get a sense of what Meakin calls “the sacredness of the living Mother-Earth, in whose womb minerals grow and mature like embryos” (15).

What’s more, according to Carl Jung, steeping oneself in the images and ideas, the attitudes and beliefs, the symbols and concerns of such an enterprise can help to generate a sense of the mysterious, or even the eerie and the sublime. “Any prolonged preoccupation with an unknown object,” Jung says, “acts as an almost irresistible bait for the unconscious to project itself into the unknown nature of the object” (quoted in Hermetic Fictions, 19). Meakin adds, “The alchemical penchant for contradictory images serves to intensify this sense of amazement” (19).

Surely, this is similar to what little girls do in investing their dolls with their own thoughts and emotions in order to give to these inanimate objects, as it were, a bit of personality and life. As children, we are adept at such projections of the self onto external objects, but, as adults, many of us tend to become less adept at doing so, or to forget altogether how to do so (unless, perhaps, we are alone on a dark road or in a cemetery at night). Moreover, such projection recreates the intent of the alchemist himself, for, as Meakin observes, “to project life into things is to invest them with magic” (19).

None of us is intelligible in and of ourselves, but we must seek to explain ourselves in terms of external things, by projecting ourselves onto the objects of the environment, and thereby incarnating the world, as it were, a process which would seem to be have been the origin of pantheism. We spiritualize the world, making it a fellow to ourselves. Then, we use it to explain our own thoughts, feelings, and actions. In doing so, the horror writer, seeing the monster within, projects his or her own, inner demons upon cloud, mountain, forest, plain, desert, or sea. These phantasms then, in turn, return, as it were, to haunt us. The horrors that haunt the dark roadway or the nighttime cemetery haunt these places only because they haunt us.

According to Meakin, alchemy is especially adept as a means by which we can project ourselves onto the cosmos, because it is open not only to the objective world, but it is also open to other “symbolic systems” of thought and belief; its “archetypal centrality,” he says, “is reflected in the breadth of diffusion, the adaptability of alchemical doctrine, and its power to annex other doctrines and symbolic systems: its essential syncretism, in short” (21).

Christianity has proven at least equally adaptable, if less syncretistic, as many have observed, including Camille Paglia, who writes, in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson: “Christianity has made adjustment after adjustment, ingeniously absorbing its opposition. . . and diluting its dogma to change with changing times” (25). Any great system, past or present, must have this capability, if it is to not only survive but also thrive. Paglia believes that Christianity is in peril, due to “the rebirth of the gods in the massive idolatries of popular culture,” so much so that it is “facing its most serious challenge since Europe’s confrontation with Islam in the Middle Ages” (25). Christianity seems likely to survive this “challenge,” as it survived that of its encounter with Islam (a “confrontation” that has arisen anew in our own time), in which case it will continue to inspire art, including horror fiction.

However, Christianity lacks the dynamic, numinous character that it had for the Swedes, Danes, Anglo-Saxons, and other Germanic and European worshipers of the Norse deities who were, in their time, as Beowulf suggests to us, themselves confronting the church’s faith during the early Middle Ages. To them, Christianity must have seemed as awesome and strange as alchemy might to modern men and women who acquaint themselves with alchemists’ strange and, indeed, astonishing beliefs, thoughts, hopes, fears, and feelings.

In other words, alchemy (or, again, any other esoteric tradition, especially if it is distanced by time as well as by doctrine) can help the writer of historical romances, fantasy, or horror regain a sense of the numinous, of the uncanny, of the eerie, of the sublime, thereby enriching his or her own bizarre, perhaps supernatural, fictional worlds, much as C. S. Lewis, in his coming to the Christian faith, like Beowulf’s readers, from the pagan world, saw, in the cold Northern wastes of Teutonic mythology, the shadow of joy he was to experience more fully in “mere Christianity,” enriched the world of Narnia or J. R. R. Tolkien enriched the world of Middle-earth.

For those who’d like to visit such a world, here are a few links that will take you there:

The Alchemy Web Site

The Fantastic in Art and Fiction
Gallery of Alchemy and Magic

History of Art: From Paleolithic Age to Contemporary Art
The Vessel of God

Bon voyage!

Sources

Meakin, David. Hermetic Fictions: Alchemy and Irony in the Novel. Bodmin, England: Keele University Press, 1995.

Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Print.

Famous Writers and Director’s Quotes, With More or Less Direct Application to the Theory and Practice of Writing Horror

Ambrose Bierce

• Edible--good to eat and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
• Impiety--your irreverence toward my deity.
• Mad--affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.
• Ocean--a body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man--who has no gills.
• Politeness--the most acceptable hypocrisy.
• Pray--to ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
• Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows.
• The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.
• There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.
• To apologize is to lay the foundation for a future offense.
• When you doubt, abstain.

Ray Bradbury

• Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We've been so busy damning ourselves for years. We've done it all, and yet we don't take credit for it. First you jump off the cliff and you build wings on the way down.
• The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance--the idea that anything is possible.
• Touch a scientist and you touch a child.
• We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.
• You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

John Carpenter

• Evil hiding among us is an ancient theme.
• To make Michael Myers frightening, I had him walk like a man, not a monster.
• What scares me is what scares you. We're all afraid of the same things. That's why horror is such a powerful genre. All you have to do is ask yourself what frightens you and you'll know what frightens me.

G. K. Chesterton

• A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
• A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.
• All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
• An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
• Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
• Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
• Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
• Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.
• Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.
• Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
• It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
• If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.
• Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
• Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a mustache.
• Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
• Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.
• Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
• The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.
• The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.
• The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
• The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
• The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
• The purpose of compulsory education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
• The simplification of anything is always sensational.
• The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
• The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
• The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.
• Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.
• There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
• There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
• Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
• When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.
• With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.

Wes Craven

• A lot of life is dealing with your curse, dealing with the cards you were given that aren't so nice. Does it make you into a monster, or can you temper it in some way, or accept it and go in some other direction?
• I have a lot of fans who are people of color. I think, if nothing else, I kind of understand that sense of being on the outside looking in, culturally.
• The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

• A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.
• All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests.
• Easy reading is damn hard writing.
• Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.
• Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
• The founders of a new colony, whatever utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
• We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.
• What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!

Alfred Hitchcock

• Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.
• Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.
• The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.
• The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.
• There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.

Stephen King

• I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.
• It's better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost.
• No, it's not a very good story--its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.
• We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

Dean Koontz

• A fanatic is a nut who has something to believe in.
• Because people see violence on the movie screen, they're not going to go out and hold up a liquor store and kill somebody. It really doesn't correlate.
• Civilization rests on the fact that most people do the right thing most of the time.
• Each reader needs to bring his or her own mind and heart to the text.
• I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and polishing.
• I have been reading Stephen King since Carrie and hope to read him for many years to come.
• I have to admit that when I watch a movie in which there is no moral context for the violence--I find that offensive. I think that's potentially damaging to society.
• I think it's the people who have no doubt that every word they put down is gold that probably don't write very well.
• If I drive myself to the brink of my ability, then I don't get stale or bored.
• Never, never try to scope the market.
• Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.
• Some days I'm lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.
• The only reason I would write a sequel is if I were struck by an idea that I felt to be equal to the original. Too many sequels diminish the original.
• Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.
• We are coming out of a century that was taught that one way of looking at the world, that one form of behavior, is as valid as another.
• The idea of true evil has been blown away.
• What we do as a society is seek simple answers.
• When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks.

C. S. Lewis

• An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
• Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
• Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
• Humans are amphibians--half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
• If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
• If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
• Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
• Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
• Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
• The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
• The safest road to hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
• The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
• We are what we believe we are.
• What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

Joyce Carol Oates

• If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
• Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.
• Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.
• Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Flannery O’Connor

• All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.
• Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
• I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.
• I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.
• It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
• Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.
• The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
• The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.
• To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.
• When in Rome, do as you have done in Milledgeville.

Edgar Allan Poe

• Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.
• I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.
• I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
• It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
• The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
• The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
• They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
• Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

Anne Rice

• Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty.
• First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.
• I feel like an outsider, and I always will feel like one. I've always felt that I wasn't a member of any particular group.
• I'm always asking questions.
• I'm fascinated by almost any mythology that I can get my hands on.
• Re-telling the Christian story is the essence of my vocation. That has been going on since the Evangelists in one form or another.
• The thing should have plot and character, beginning, middle and end. Arouse pity and then have a catharsis. Those were the best principles I was ever taught.
• The world doesn't need any more mediocrity or hedged bets.
• Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds.
• We're frightened of what makes us different.

Steven Spielberg

• All of us every single year, we're a different person. I don't think we're the same person all our lives.
• I interviewed survivors, I went to Poland, saw the cities and spent time with the people and spoke to the Jews who had come back to Poland after the war and talked about why they had come back.
• I never felt comfortable with myself, because I was never part of the majority. I always felt awkward and shy and on the outside of the momentum of my friends' lives.
• You know, I don't really do that much looking inside me when I'm working on a project.
• Whatever I am becomes what that film is. But I change; you change.

H. G. Wells

• Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.
• Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise.I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.Some people bear three kinds of trouble--the ones they've had, the ones they have, and the ones they expect to have.
• The past is but the past of a beginning.
• There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.
• What really matters is what you do with what you have.
• You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

Plot, Character, Setting and Theme as Narrative Starting Points

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

The four primary elements of fiction are plot, character, setting, and theme. Associated with most of these is a cluster of related components: plot is divisible into exposition, inciting moment, rising action, turning point, falling action, moment of final suspense, and (depending upon whether the narrative is a comedy or a tragedy) resolution or catastrophe.

Of course, all plots are also derived from, and developed upon, conflict. Likewise, setting is not merely a matter of a specific time and place, but it also entails the particular cultural milieu that exists in this particular time and place. Victorian London, for example, is quite different than nineteenth-century Tombstone, Arizona.

Similarly, character involves motivation, various personality traits, and, usually, interrelationships among several fictional persons. Only theme is simple, rather than complex, having no subordinate constituents.

Since any of these four elements is a potential starting point for a story, a writer may generate an idea for a story by considering plot, character, setting, or theme. Some writers, among them both C. S. Lewis and Stephen King, have been inspired by mental images of characters in specific situations or settings.

C. S. Lewis specified the image of a fawn, or satyr, carrying an armload of parcels, as the mental picture that launched The Chronicles of Narnia, and Storm of the Century, King says, began with his imagining a strange man incarcerated in a jail cell.

The placement of a character in a particular situation or setting is not a story, of course, but it is (possibly) the beginning of a story that could start by considering an interesting character. It is the starting point from which a series of questions can begin to be asked. The choice of a protagonist or an antagonist can also suggest, or even determine, the story’s counterpart as well. Once William Peter Blatty decided upon a demon—maybe Satan himself—as his story’s antagonist, an exorcist became the most logical choice of a protagonist. (Although The Exorcist is said to be based upon a true story, Blatty, as an author of fiction was free to select a character other than a priest as his protagonist, had he wished to do so; fact does not determine fiction, even when the latter is based upon the former.)

Dean Koontz says he begins many of his stories by involving a character in a bizarre situation that compels him or her to react to the incidents that ensue therefrom.

Many of Jesus’ parables begin as answers to his disciples’ questions concerning the meaning of the law or of right conduct in regard to particular situations. They are stories told, in other words, to impart wisdom. Their purpose is not primarily to entertain, but to instruct. Therefore, they originate as a means for expressing, in concrete terms, abstract ideas or values. They are theme-driven.

The Parable of the Prodigal Son illustrates the meaning of forgiveness. The Parable of the Good Samaritan shows the meaning of loving one’s neighbor. The Parable of the Mustard Seed shows the meaning of faith.

Horror stories, as cautionary tales, also often drive home a theme. Beowulf teaches the destructive and deadly effects of intertribal vengeance. The Shining shows the terrible consequences of self-absorption, self-indulgence, and child and spousal abuse. Cujo is not only about a rabid dog, but also about the devastating effects of adultery upon one’s marriage and family.

Sometimes, a setting will suggest a story. It is no accident that many horror stories take place in isolated environments, total institutions, or confining spaces. What other monster but the strange troglodytes could have inhabited the cavern into which, as if into Satan’s maw, the female spelunkers enter in The Descent? What better foe could beachgoers encounter in the finny deep than the gargantuan white shark with which Peter Benchley confronts his readers in Jaws? Likewise, the rain forest in which Special Forces soldiers first encounter the camouflaged extraterrestrial in Predator fairly cries out for such a monster as its antagonist.

Edgar Allan Poe’s essay, "The Philosophy of Composition," is the quintessential document, perhaps, alongside Aristotle’s Poetics, for the point of view that it is the plot that matters more than other elements (a point not always conceded by other authorities).

Poe argued that a writer should commence not at the beginning of his or her story but, on the contrary, with its end, working backward in determining the sequence of actions and other details that will best lead, inevitably, toward the narrative’s climactic finale, using his own narrative poem The Raven as an example of the process.

Many writers share Aristotle’s and Poe’s respect for plotting, so much so that they find themselves at a loss to put pen to paper (or, more commonly, finger to keyboard) until they have plotted the whole tale, from “A” to “Z.” (Others, such as Mark Twain, write the same way that the Who’s “Pinball Wizard” plays his game, blindly, as it were, purely “by inspiration.”)

The fact that a writer can generate a story from any of the four primary elements of fiction quadruples his or her opportunities for inspiration. It does more than this, however: it also provides the writer with a way of considering, and deciding, which element he or she wants to emphasize.

The author must consider whether the story highlights an individual’s actions in the face of fate (plot); personal limitations, abilities, and will (character); the effects of time, place, and culture on the understanding and development of character and the limitations imposed upon one by his or her environment (setting); or the lesson that the main character learns as a result of his or her experience, as recounted in the story (theme).

The choice that the writer makes at this initial point will affect the story as a whole and how the reader understands the tale. In this sense, four possible stories confront the writer, and he or she must choose which of the four to tell.

For horror story writers, Poe suggests a solution to this dilemma: pick the element that will best sustain and heighten fear and trembling. After all, that’s what horror is all about.