Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman
For most of us, home is
_________________. We can fill in the blank with a variety of
thoughts and feelings:
where the heart iswhere one hangs one's hatwhere one can be oneselfa refugea retreatone's castle
We'd be likely to agree
with most of these sentiments. That's one reason they've become
cliches. A lot of people believe them, and a lot of people repeat
them.
Being a cliché doesn't
make an idea false, but it does make it common. When it comes to
fiction, that's the problem. When it comes to fiction, we want
something new, something different, something that's not commonplace.
We want a new perspective, a new orientation, a new sense of
ourselves and of other people and of our surroundings.
That's where quotations
about “home” can help writers. By searching a website, such as
BrainyQuote, we
can look for uncommon, surprising, even astounding thoughts about
home (or whatever other topic we happen to make the theme of a short
story, a novel, a screenplay, or a poem.
Along the way, among the
more ordinary thoughts we encounter on the topic, we can also get a
sense of what “home” represents for individuals and what, in
particular, they appreciate it. For example, Irina Shayk states,
“Nothing is better than going home to family and eating good food
and relaxing.” These interests can come in handy, too, in writing
horror—or any other type of fiction.
In reading such
quotations, we may find that people define “home” as being much
greater than the house in which they live at present; some see “home”
as their city or their country, some as the world, and still others
as the “universe” or “heaven.” For some, it's a base of
operations, for others a starting point, and for still others a point
on a circle to which one always returns. Some says their homes, or
their, families who live in them, “ground” them, while others
believe their children inspire and improve them. For some, “home”
is the soul's body or a temple of God. Rather than a retreat or a
refuge, some find “home” a prison from which they escape, for
intervals, to the city or the country.
When we contemplate the
statements others have made about the topic, we should consider them
from the perspective of a horror writer interested in developing a
plot that centers upon the topic—home, in our example. For example,
perhaps our antagonist will invade our protagonist's home, disrupting
his or her home life and injuring or even killing one or more family
members. (Despicable, I know, but at least, in a story, it's
make-believe.)
This is one of the
quotations about home on BrainyQuote that I found to be not only
insightful and “different,” but also useful as the basis of a
possible horror story plot:
I
like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about
besides homework. —Lily Tomlin
In the film After
Midnight, college students visit
a professor's house for lessons in fear, learning, as the movie
poster puts it, “Terror has no curfew.”
Had Stephen King been
responding to this quotation, as a writing prompt, the result may
well have been his novella Apt Pupil, in which a schoolboy
blackmails his teacher, whom the pupil discovers is a Nazi war
criminal, into educating him about the nature of human evil. As the
story's title suggests, he is an eager and adept student, eventually
becoming a serial killer, just as his tutor resumes his killing
victims.
What if the “something”
the teacher gives our student isn't information or ideology, as in
King's story, but something physical? What might such an object be,
and what might the teacher expect our student, his or her charge to
discover about the artifact? How is the object related to the
student's home life, if, in fact, it is at all? For that matter, what
is the student's life at home like? (Stephen King wondered this about
a classmate of his whose mother was fanatical about her religious
faith; the result was CarrieWhite.) And what about the teacher? Should the teacher be a man,
a woman, or, perhaps something entirely different, such as an demon
(old school) or an alien or a robot (new school)? The possibilities
are as unlimited as our imaginations.
A quotation can suggest a
lot, if we consider it from the proper perspective, as a man or woman
with bad intentions regarding our characters, and apply to it the
power of our own minds, hearts, and imaginations. Think of how many
topics there are and of how many quotations exist about those topics.
There's an inexhaustible supply, and no need, ever, to experience
“writer's block”!