"Shadowed": An Amusing Vignette

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

 

Shadowed (2020), directed by David F. Sandberg, star his wife, Lotta Losten, and five shadow people. The plot is simple:

A woman (we'll call her Lotta) reads in bed. Her light goes out. She sits up quickly, on the edge of the bed. She hears a noise. Worried, she activates a small flashlight that she takes from the drawer of her bedside table. The beam illuminates a single, flat dish on the beside table. But two shadows show on the wall behind the table: the shadow of the dish and the shadow of a jar. As the shadow of the jar indicates, she picks up the invisible jar and then drops it back onto the table. She hears another noise. A shadowy woman sits in the chair near the foot of Lotta's bed. Lotta tosses a blanket on the bed over the shadow woman in the chair. The blanket falls onto the chair, assuming the shape of the chair's contours, suggesting the shadow woman has vacated her seat. Her bedroom door opens of its own accord, showing the hallway outside her bedroom. Lotta stands in the darkness of her bedroom. She approaches the bedroom's doorway. She enters the hallway. She follows the hallway to another part of the house, pausing near the foot of the stairs leading to the house's second story. A shadow of a man stands hunched over in front of a closed door. The shadow man twists, before turning quickly toward Lotta, and snarls, The shadow man continues to transform into a more clearly human shape. The shadow man rushes toward Lotta. She runs back down the hallway to her bedroom. Closed, her bedroom door is presumably locked. Trapped, Lotta turns when she hears a sound behind her. Five shadow figures—three women and two men, one of the which holds a shadow hatchet. Lotta mutters an unintelligible word or two—maybe “David” or “keep back.”

Some people believe that shadow people are spirits; others believe that they are beings from other dimensions. Some suggest that shadow people are evil; others think that shadow people are either friendly or neutral toward human beings. Scientists suggest that such figures may be hallucinations caused by sleep paralysis, and methamphetamine addicts have reported seeing shadow people as a result of sleep deprivation.

Sandberg's 1:48-second film doesn't provide many clues by which to decipher its message, if there is one. The view of the leaves of a tree through the small window in Lotta's bedroom indicates that it is nighttime. The bed is still made, and she is fully dressed, except for her shoes, and she is, we later learn, downstairs, possibly in the guestroom, which is sparsely furnished with a bed, a bedside table, a simple lamp, a fireplace, and a vaguely seen larger piece of furniture visible for a moment in the sweep of her flashlight beam as she turns toward the shadow woman in the chair. The only decorative items seem to the the dish on the bedside table. Such a sparsely furnished and relatively small room is obviously not the master bedroom. She wears no wedding ring, so, apparently, she is unmarried.

The bedroom door appears to open by itself. Later, it appears to have closed and possibly locked itself. We do not see any shadow people when these occurrences occur, and no other characters are present to provide us with a point of view other than Lotta's own. Therefore, it is possible that the shadow figures are nothing more than the products of her hallucinations, perhaps brought on by sleep deprivation: although it is night, she has neither undressed (except to remove her shoes) nor donned pajamas or a nightgown. She does not appear to be in her own bedroom, but in the guestroom. Instead of sleeping or trying to sleep, she reads.

At first, there is only one shadow person—a woman. Then, there is a shadow man. The first shadow person, the woman, does not behave in a threatening manner, but the shadow man rushes Lotta. Finally, there are five shadow people, three women and two men, one of the latter of whom holds a hatchet. The hatchet and the menacing manner of the five shadow people, as well as Lotta's fear of them and her attempt to flee from them and to return to the sanctuary of the guestroom suggest that they are hostile toward her and intend to harm her, although it is impossible to determine how they can do so, since they lack material substance. Their only means of attack seems to be to frighten Lotta to the extent that she injures herself by fleeing from them: she could run into a wall, into furniture, or trip and fall, as the narrator in H. G. Wells's short story “The Red Room” does.

 

Or are the shadow people immaterial?

They would seem to be, but the jar that Lotta picks up and then drops on the bedside table seems real enough and material enough. Although it appears to be invisible, its shadow rises on the wall as she lifts the object and “falls” on the wall when she returns the object to its original position on the tabletop. It is real enough and tangible enough to cast to block the light of the flashlight, real and tangible enough to cast a shadow. If the shadow jar is real, if it is tangible, the shadow people could be real and tangible as well. We do not see them exert force, but that does not mean that they are incapable of doing so, and Lotta certainly believes they are capable of harming her.

We must conclude that if the shadow people exist, they are definitely invisible and they could be tangible. However, we have no proof and no reason to believe that the shadow people are anything more than products of Lotta's hallucinations. They do not disturb anything. They do not move anything. They leave no trace of their presence, as far as we know—no footprints or fingerprints. They do not speak. True, the shadow man that Lotta sees as she stands at the foot of the stairs seems to undergo a transformation of sorts, as he twists and twitches and lifts his seemingly outsize head becomes more clearly human. But these apparent changes could be merely the effects of Lotta's imagination or results of hallucinations.

As we have seen in previous posts, Tzvetan Todorov categorizes fantastic literature, of which horror fiction is a type, into three varieties: the fantastic, the uncanny, and the marvelous. A story, he says, is uncanny if its incidents can be explained through scientific knowledge or through reason. It it remains inexplicable in such terms, it is marvelous. Only a story that cannot be resolved as being either uncanny (explicable) or marvelous (explicable) remains fantastic. For example, Wells's “The Red Room” is uncanny; Stephen King's short story “1408” is marvelous; and Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw is fantastic. Since science can explain the phenomena that trouble Lotta as effects of sleep paralysis or sleep deprivation (or, for that matter, a wild imagination), Sandberg's short must be reckoned an exercise in the uncanny.

Although Shadowed doesn't have a plot and is not, therefore, an example of flash fiction, it does achieve one of the tasks that Edgar Allan Poe sees as critical in horror fiction. It creates a single emotional effect (“The Philosophy of Composition”). Of course, Poe believes that a story must accomplish more than the creation of a single, unified effect. It must have a plot, for example, as all of his own tales certainly have. To produce an effect, of fear or disgust or horror or terror or any other emotion suitable to horror fiction, all the elements of the tale must work together to lead to and maximize the effect with which the story ends, and these other elements include, among them, a plot.

A couple of the criticisms that Mark Twain directed at James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales can be said of Shadowed: “A a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere, and “the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there” (“Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses”). Shadowed is a handsome, well-executed vignette, but it is not a short story, even of the length of a flash fiction narrative. It may entertain for a minute or two, but it cannot truly satisfy anyone who takes his or her horror—or his or her drama—seriously.

"The Cone": Style, Sentence by Sentence

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

As I mentioned in “H. G. Wells: The Art of 'The Cone,'” Wells is a master of style. He makes every word count toward the creation of the final effect he designs his stories to create. Style, as Jonathan Swift defines it, is “proper words in their proper places.” Mark Twain, like other writers, agrees that “the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” AlfredHitchcock says something similar concerning images, the lexicon of film. It is not any single image that matters, he says, but the way in which they are assembled to evoke thought and feeling. On the importance of style, a science fiction writer, a satirist, a humorist, and a master of suspense agree, as does any serious writer or producer. Style is not a small thing; it is everything, for it shapes and invigorates everything: character, including dialogue, action, plot, setting, theme.

With a single phrase or sentence, Wells often accomplishes several narrative or rhetorical purposes at once in his exemplary short story, “The Cone,” as he does in his other tales. The story is a true tour de force, the literary equivalent of expressionistic and surreal paintings, but, as I discuss this aspect of the story in “H. G. Wells: The Art of 'The Cone,'” there's no need to repeat it here. Instead, I will concentrate on the effects, literary and rhetorical, he achieves by several phrases and sentences in “The Cone.”

At the outset of the story, his omniscient narrator comments, “They [Mrs Horrocks and the artist Raut] sat at the open window, trying to fancy the air was fresher there.” This sentence accomplishes three things:

1. It suggests that the air is not “fresher” near the open window, because it is not “fresh” anywhere.
2. The fact that they are “trying to fancy” fresh air near the window means that they are not succeeding. The open window admits no fresh air; like their attempt to imagine fresher air, the open window is a mere prop and, therefore, a failure.
3. The illicit couple's attempt to “fancy the air was fresher” characterizes them. In the face of a reality they find unpleasant, they imagine their circumstances are different. They seek to impose their own preferences upon the world, adjusting what is to what is suitable to them. In this, the sentence's use of “attempt” suggests, they also fail.

Wells gets much out of other phrases, too. In the story's fifth paragraph, his narrator describes an approaching train: “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight black oblongs—eight trucks—passed” not only shows the passing of the cars, but also makes readers count them as they go past: “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight black oblongs—eight trucks.” The counting helps to make the paragraph active, but it also reinforces the number of cars in the train. The ironworks, we think, is a busy, productive place. In the same sentence, the narrator adds that the cars “were suddenly extinguished one by one in the throat of the tunnel,” causing readers to imagine each car being “extinguished” as it enters the tunnel's “throat.” This description includes one of the many personifications Wells uses to bring his ironworks to life as an active, vengeful, and menacing entity.

For Raut, the ironworks represents “Gehenna,” meaning “a place of burning, torment, or misery,” or, “(in Judaism and the New Testament, Hell).” The ironworks is impertinent, daring to belch “fire and dust into the face of heaven.” Raut's words suggest that the ironworks is an affront to God Himself, an impious, wicked hell the very existence of which is an insult to heaven. “Fire and dust,” the insults, as it were, which the hellish ironworks belch “into the face of heaven,” are later juxtaposed to the Biblical phrase “pillars of cloud” and “pillars of fire” in which God appears to Moses and the Israelites as He guides them across the desert after their escape from pharaoh: “And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night.” (Exodus 13:21). The substitution of “fire” for the more eloquent phrase “pillars of fire” and of sullying “dust” for the more elegant expression “a pillar of a cloud” degrades the poetic language of the Bible, substituting crass terminology for its elevated diction. While Raut accuses the ironworks of insulting God, it is he, through his paraphrases of scripture, who actually does so.

In two clever sentences, Wells creates a sort of reverse-personification. His omniscient narrator describes blast furnaces, which stand “heavy and threatening, full of an incessant turmoil of flames and seething molten iron,” as if they are hearts full of passion and rage; Horrocks himself, as their manager, is the mind, or soul, that controls these savage breasts. His “seething” passions and the “incessant turmoil of [the] flames” of his rage are the vengeful hearts that will burn Raut alive. 

 

Throughout descriptions of the ironworks, Wells's omniscent narrator uses phrases suggestive of violence, blood, death, and hell to depict the ironworks, the scene of Raut's eventual demise: “ghostly stunted beehive shapes,” “a ringing concussion and a rhythmic series of impacts,” “fitful flames,” “hammer beat heavily,” “palpating red stuff,” “blood-red reflections,” “succession of ghosts,” “blood-red vapour as red and hot as sun,” “white as death,” “fire writhing in the pit,” “sulphurous vapor,” “boil the blood,” and “hot suffocating flame.”

References to Gehenna, “the pit,” “pillars of cloud by day,” “pillars of fire by night,” “sin,” “sulphorous vapor” and “God” give the story a Biblical, if not an expressly Christian, context, as does Horrocks's horror at what he has done when “his sanity returned to him,” following his apparent crime of passion and he observes the effect of his vengeance, the sobbing, “inhuman, monstrous creature” that had been Raut. However, this context is undercut by Raut's reference to Jove and the omniscient narrator's allusion to “half-naked Titans.” Not only does the adulterous behavior of Raut and Mrs. Horrocks and Horrocks's seeking of vengeance against Raut suggest that religion is, for them, merely conventional, rather than sincere and devout, but Raut's use of the expression “by Jove,” like the omniscient narrator's employment of the phrase “half-naked Titans,” also implies that none of the characters is religious. Whether Horrocks' own plea to God at the end of the story is genuine or merely an expression of his horror at the sight of what he has done is open to question.

Through his conscious and deliberate selections of words and constructions of phrases throughout “The Cone,” Wells creates and maintains a style that is not only appropriate to his tale, but one which complements it at every turn, creating ironic contradictions; movement and pace; a religious context; complex characterization through allusions and personification; a sense of violence, blood, death, and hell; doubt concerning the characters' true devotion to the religious faith that is implied by the story's allusions to religious themes and theological concepts; and, overall, the unity of effect that produces a seemingly inevitable resolution of the story's central conflict. Wells' style delivers a great deal, largely thanks to his deliberate use of language—“proper words in their proper places”—a and to his own inimitable artistic genius.

Writing Dramatic Scenes Using the Locomotion, or Motive Power, Technique

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Movies have a distinct advantage over novels. The former dramatize, or show, the incidents of the plot as they occur. The latter describes them. Yes, yes, novelists are told to “show not tell,” and, for the most part, most try. Still, their medium is words, not pictures, and even images, or word-pictures, aren't really pictures; they're descriptions of images, written in words. The truth is plain and simple: novelists can't “show,” not really; they can only tell.

It may be argued that what is meant by “show, don't tell,” is not that novelists shouldn't describe action, but that they shouldn't explain things. Explanations, or exposition, as it's called in literary criticism, is the sort of telling novelists are told not to write. Readers don't want paragraphs or, worse yet, pages of exposition; they want action, they want immediacy, they want drama.

Fair enough. “Don't tell” refers to exposition, not description (although, novelists are also instructed, there should be no more description than necessary, either. Provide just enough detail—often a sentence or two will suffice—to convey a general idea of the setting, a character's looks, a building's appearance or whatever and move on. Readers are likely to have seen the very person, place, or thing the novelist is describing to envision it on their own, without seemingly endless descriptions.

Mark Twain

Again, fair enough. Mark Twain said “eschew surplusage,” and he's a writer whose work is esteemed both literary and entertaining, a sometimes rare combination.

Dean R. Koontz

Even with exposition avoided and description greatly curtailed, novelists can keep their writing interesting and entertaining by using a few techniques. Dean Koontz shares a few tips in an interview with The Rumpus. Page by page, sentence by sentence, and word by word, he strives for perfection:

I rewrite the page until it’s as perfect as I can get it, which will never be perfect. . . . The constant rewriting until the page really flows and the prose really excites me and I move on to the next 

page . . . .

Twain also reminded other writers that “there's a difference between lightning and the lightning bug,” suggesting that literary lightning results from using what Alexander Pope, in defining style, called “proper words in their proper places.” In an interview with Brad Crawford, Koontz said:

I like prose to have hidden rhythms; I like prose to have a music beneath the surface. It’s almost never recognized by the reader in a conscious way, but it is recognized unconsciously. It’s why readers feel the prose flow, why it speaks to them. A poet once reviewed one of my books and recognized that entire passages were written in iambic pentameter . . . .Different poetic meters affects us emotionally in different ways. It’s not anything anyone’s going to see, but it’s one of the great techniques to suck a reader right into the heart of the story.

Polished writing and cadence—there's no substitute for them in attracting and holding readers' interest, but there's a tip I'd add to the list of techniques novelists can use to maintain their readers' involvement as they move their stories forward. For want of a better term, I'll call it locomotion, or motive power.

To present a scene using motive power, envision it as images, chosen and arranged according to a specific purpose and a well-considered design, as if the sequence were being shown on a movie screen. Think of the written scene as a filmed shot. Before starting with your own story, watch a scene from movie. Then, transcribe what you see, so to speak, into words. I did this in a previous Chillers and Thrillers post, “Making Every Word (or Image) Count.” The scene I used is the opening sequence of Steven Spielberg's classic film Jaws, but my purpose in doing so, it the earlier post was to consider how “

Young and blonde, Chrissie Watkins runs along a ramshackle fence, pursued by a young man.

Tripping. He falls, but he's on his feet again in a second.

Continuing to run, she glances back, shedding her jacket. 

She pauses, removes a shoe, stumbles onward.  Behind her, the man doffs his sweatshirt.

As he tumbles down a hill at the side of the trail, Chrissie, now completely nude, runs toward the ocean.

Entering the surf, she dives into the sea. By the time the man reaches the beach, she's nearing a buoy some distance off shore.

She sinks. For a moment, she's lost to sight.

Resurfacing, she gasps, water streaming down her face. Smiling, as she treads water, she looks west. The sun is low.

On the beach, the man is a silhouette against the wash of the surf. His outline, like a stretch of low land and scattered clouds, is lit, yellow and pink, by the setting sun. Struggling to remove a shoe, he falls drunk, perhaps.

In the distance, Chrissie resumes swimming, turning her head from side to side, smiling.

Sinking, she kicks and waves her arms.

She surfaces, smiles. Then, her head jerks backward; she's pulled violently downward. 

Her eyes widen. She turns her head slightly to her right, looking puzzled. Her head dips below the surface, then reappears. She looks panicked. In a splash, she vanishes beneath the waves. When her head bobs up, pierces the surface, her mouth is open, her eyes shut tightly, a grimace of terror and pain freezing her features.

A splash, and she is pulled across the water, past the buoy, only her head and shoulders visible above the water. She struggles. She's pulled to the right. She straightens, but, again, she's pulled to the right. Water churns about her.

On the beach, the man, her boyfriend, sleeps.

At sea, Chrissie struggles. Launched toward the buoy, she clings desperately to its platform. It turns. Cast off, she swims toward shore. A moment later, she's seized. Anguished, amid the roiling water, she cries out.

She is snatched underwater.

 

Her boyfriend continues to sleep, oblivious to the breaking waves washing over him.

 

The sky is nearly dark.

Even if we cast this passage in the simple past tense, as is conventional with novels, the sense of movement, of action, of drama that the locomotion technique produces remains intact:

Young and blonde, Chrissie Watkins ran along a ramshackle fence, pursued by a young man.

Tripping, he fell, but he was on his feet again in a second.

Continuing to run, she glanced back, shedding her jacket.

Pausing, she removed a shoe, stumbled onward. Behind her, the man doffed his sweatshirt.

As he tumbled down a hill at the side of the trail, Chrissie, now completely nude, rand toward the ocean.

Entering the surf, she dove into the sea. By the time the man reached the beach, she was nearing a buoy some distance off shore.

She sank. For a moment, she was lost to sight.

Resurfacing, she gasped, water streaming down her face. Smiling, as she tread water, she looked west. The sun was low.

On the beach, the man was a silhouette against the wash of the surf. His outline, like a stretch of low land and scattered clouds, was lit, yellow and pink, by the setting sun. Struggling to remove a shoe, he fell, drunk, perhaps.

In the distance, Chrissie resumed swimming, turning her head from side to side, smiling.

Sinking, she kicked and waved her arms.

She surfaced, smiled. Then, her head jerked backward; she was pulled violently downward. Her eyes widened. She turned her head slightly to her right, looking puzzled. Her head dipped below the surface, then reappeared. She looked panicked. In a splash, she vanished beneath the waves. When her head bobbed up, piercing the surface, her mouth opened and her eyes shut tightly, as a grimace of terror and pain froze her features.

A splash, and she was pulled across the water, past the buoy, only her head and shoulders visible above the water. As she struggled, she was pulled to the right. She straightened, but, again, she was pulled to the right. Water churned about her.

On the beach, the man, her boyfriend, slept.

At sea, Chrissie struggled. Launched toward the buoy, she clung desperately to its platform. It turned. Cast off, she swam toward shore. A moment later, she was seized. Anguished, amid the roiling water, she cried out.

She was snatched underwater.

 

Her boyfriend continued to sleep, oblivious to the breaking waves washing over him.

 

The sky was nearly dark.

This is not a story of our own, of course; it's a scene from a movie. By “transcribing” the scene, as it occurs on film, we mimic the way the film was shot, using short sentences, action verbs, few details, little characterization through description or interior monologue. The emphasis is on action, movement, drama. By writing our own scenes in the same manner, whenever possible (which is much more frequently than many novelists might imagine), we maintain readers' interest and entertain them. Trained by movies, readers will likely appreciate our style, even if only subconsciously. If they like our stories, they'll probably be back for more.

Edgar Allan Poe

One other tip, this one from Edgar Allan Poe (by way of an annotation in Kevin J. Hayes's The Annotated Poe). First, the passage from Poe's short story. “Metzengerstein”:

The career of the horseman was, indisputably, on his own part, uncontrollable. The agony of his countenance, the convulsive struggling of his frame gave no evidence of superhuman exertion; nut no sound, save a solitary shriek, escaped from his lacerated lips, which were bitten through and through, in the intensity of terror.

Sergei Eisenstein

Now, Hayes's note:

The cinema has much to offer when it comes to understanding Poe, partly because his work has contributed so much to its development. The great Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein found that Poe's writing anticipated visual techniques that would not be fully utilized until the invention of motion pictures. This paragraph provides a good example. Poe depicts Metzengerstein in close-up (the “agony of his convulsions”), pulls back to show him from a distance (“the convulsive struggling of his frame”), and then supplies an extreme close-up (“his lacerated lips, which were bitten through and through”). The rapid shifting of images quickens the narrative pace, which the ensuing cacophony of sound—the shriek of Metzengerstein, the clatter of hoofs, the roar of the flames, and the shriek of the wind—further intensifies, thus providing a narrative running start for the horse's final bound up the staircase.

Wow! Words in the hands of a master author who is both a short story writer and a poet can accomplish feats nothing short of amazing.

Using their techniques, we lesser mortals can still improve our own writing—dramatically.

Page and Stage

Writers who want to incorporate cinematic techniques into their fiction need, first, to translate the latter into their literary equivalents. I use the word “equivalents” loosely, of course, as there is not precise equivalence between the techniques of the soundstage and the page.

So, what are these “equivalents”?

The camera = description. Everything the camera “sees” can be communicated, in writing, only by way of description. The camera has the advantage of showing everything at once, if it chooses, or of focusing exclusively, and in minute detail, on only one person or object, close up, leaving it to the viewer to perceive that which is displayed and to sort for him- or herself those people (actors) or objects included in the scene upon whom or which he or she chooses to concentrate attention. Of course, through a variety of other techniques—camera angle, intensity, contrast, special effects, and so forth—the director, the cinematographer, and others involved in shooting the scene—can direct the viewer's attention and direct the audience's focus, but, ultimately, it is up to those who watch the movie to see what they will. novelists have a different advantage. Unlike filmmakers, they can appeal to the senses of touch, smell, and taste, as well s to the two senses available for moviemakers' exploitation—sight and hearing. Literary authors can also take their readers inside the minds of their characters, describing their thoughts and feelings about the sights, sounds, tactile sensations, tastes, and sounds they experience during a scene. (A word of caution: novelists should be careful not to overuse description. Unless a picture, or word-picture, is central to a scene or some other narrative element, such as theme, it should be spare, rather than florid. Because filming a movie is enormously expensive, screenwriters have learned to make every image and word count, and most directors plan every second of the filming of each scene. Economy is the filmmaker's watchword, as it should be that of the novelist. As Mark Twain advised, writers should be careful to “eschew surplusage.”)

The camera = point of view. In film, the movie is shown from the camera's point of view, whether the perspective is that of an omniscient, a first-person, or a limited third-person “narrator.” In literary fiction, the point of view can be more complex and experimental and can more easily involve the shifting or alternating perspectives of two or more characters.

Actor = character. It's only partly true that the actor = the literary character, because the screenwriter also creates the movie character. The writer puts the words into the characters' mouths, and, through such dialogue, the character's personality becomes apparent, as does his or her attitude, emotions, values, principles, beliefs, and so forth. By interpreting and projecting these words on the page, actors bring these qualities to life on the screen, making these intangibles tangible.

Audio bridge = transition. In cinema, there are more techniques to indicate a transition from one time to another or from one place to another than there in literary fiction. In the latter, space breaks on thee page or a phrase, or a sentence is all a writer can use to indicate such a shift in time or place. Filmmakers, on the other hand, can use an audio bridge, defined, in Filmsite's “Film Terms Glossary,” as “an outgoing sound (either dialogue or sound effects) in one scene that continues over into a new image or shot [that] connects the two shots or scenes.” As an example of an audio bridge, the Filmsite's article cites Apocalypse Now's use of “the sound of helicopter blades are linked to the next scene of the spinning blades of an overhead fan.” Films also use a number of visual transitions to indicate a change in scene, including the “cut, fade, dissolve, and wipe” (“Film terms Glossary”).

Cut – transition. A cut is “an abrupt or sudden change or jump in camera angle, location, placement, or time, from one shot to another” and may be accomplished in numerous ways.

Fade = transition. A fade can also be accomplished in a number of ways:

[A fade is] a transitional device consisting of a gradual change in the intensity of an image or sound, such as from a normally-lit scene to darkness (fade out, fade-to-black) or vice versa, from complete black to full exposure (fade in), or from silence to sound or vice versa; a 'fade in' is often at the beginning of a sequence, and a 'fade out' at the end of a sequence; a cross-fade means fading out from one scene and into another (often with a slight dissolve or interruption) (“Film Terms Glossary).

Dissolve = transition. A dissolve is “the visible image of one shot or scene is gradually replaced, superimposed or blended (by an overlapping fade out or fade in and dissolve) with the image from another shot or scene.” For example, in Metropolis, this technique “dissolves that transform the face of the heroine Maria into the face of an evil robot.” (“Film Terms Glossary”).

Wipe = transition. A wipe occurs when “one shot appears to be "pushed off" or "wiped off" the screen by another shot replacing it and moving across the existing image.”

There are other film techniques that correspond, roughly, with literary techniques, which is not surprising, since filmmakers, limited to sight and sound, have had to devise ways, using these two methods of storytelling to communicate what novelists accomplish through linguistic means. Now that the stage has largely replaced the page as the storytelling medium of choice for the general public, at least, novelists, in telling their tales, might want to adopt, as far as possible, some of the techniques their cinematographic friends have developed. That mean, first of all, thinking in terms of showing, rather than telling. Thinking as a screenwriter, rather than as a novelist, should facilitate this objective. Again, there is no precise match between the techniques of filmmaking and those of writing novels, but these media's approaches to storytelling are close enough to allow an approximation on the part of the novelist. For example, a novelist cannot use an audio bridge (unless, perhaps, in an audiobook). However, he or she can simulate the use of this technique. Here's an example, using the audio bridge in Apocalypse Now (mentioned above):

The helicopter's whirling rotors were louder and much faster than the leisurely turning blades of the softly humming ceiling fan.

By using sights and sound to appeal the senses of vision and hearing, this transitional sentence imitates an audio bridge, indicating a shift in time and place, as the story's scene changes.

Similar approaches can be taken to suggest many of the other cinematographic techniques motion picture crews use to tell—or show—their stories.

Novelists who want to emulate screenwriters should familiarize themselves with the terms associated with moviemaking and adapt them to the process of writing novels to develop their own set of similar approaches to storytelling. Filmsite's “Film Terms Glossary” is a good resource for this purpose. Novelists who seek cinematographers' techniques for characterization, plot development, story structure, narration, setting, and theme and then, with these (and some actual examples from films) in mind, devise their own similar approaches, are likely to write “cinematographic” novels, which show more than tell. General audiences everywhere will thank them.

Note: Read “The Exorcist: A Marriage of Spirit and Matter in the Style of William Peter Blatty,” my post about William Peter Blatty's use of in his novel The Exorcist for a sense of how a novelist (who was also a screenwriter) uses cinematographic techniques to write a compelling “cinematographic” novel. Novelists can also learn to write this hybrid type of story by reading novels by other screenwriters. Stephen J. Cannel's book, TheProstitutes' Ball, is not only a novel, but, in a sense, a how-to book about writing screenplays and novels!

Learning from the Masters: Louis L'amour

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Aspiring horror writers can learn from both popular and mainstream writers, whether they write horror fiction, stories of other genres, or literature of unusually high quality. In other words, both Louis L’Amour and Mark Twain have much to teach any horror fiction author, which brings us to the topic of today’s post.

Louis L'Amour

L’Amour wrote 89 novels and 250 short stories, most about cowboys, lawmen, gunfighters, and other heroic figures of the American Wild West. His first, Hondo, was published in 1953; his last, The Haunted Mesa, in 1987 (although other of his works have appeared posthumously). Anyone with such a long career and such a prolific quantity of bestsellers is someone who has learned how to tell a tale that appeals to a large and loyal audience and is worth studying.

Many of his novels include hand-drawn maps that bring the territories that his stories cover to life for his readers, showing them the towns, drawn in three dimensions, or the hills and mountains or deserts, complete with sagebrush and cacti, through which his intrepid lawmen, outlaws, Indians, posses, and others ride or through which trains, covered wagons, buckboards, or stagecoaches wend their wary ways. By showing only certain towns or terrains in three dimensions, with care given to individual and unique elements and features, and leaving the rest of the maps in two dimensions that include relatively few details, L’Amour heightens readers’ interest in the towns and terrains he does show more realistically on the charts, mythologizing them, as it were, cartographically as well as through his storytelling. (A couple of horror writers who have used maps well to enhance the mystique of their own terrains of terror are Frank Peretti, author of Monster [2005] and Stephen King, author of Under the Dome [2009]. Others horror writers have also included maps of their novel’s terrain--H. P. Lovecraft springs to mind. My Chillers and Thrillers article “Mapping the Monstrous” suggests some of the ways that Peretti’s novel benefits from his decision to may its horrors.)

But let’s return to the topic at hand: L’Amour’s adept use of the opening sentences (“hookers,” as King calls them) of several of his novels and short stories. In the process, we can learn a thing or two concerning how to keep our plights tight, our monsters few, our settings apparent, our suspense high, and our identifications of our genres simple and straightforward.

Rather like an impressionistic painter, L’Amour indicates the scenes of his novels in a few, deft brushstrokes--or pen strokes--or keystrokes: “rocks,” “the Mohaves,” “sky,” and “buzzards,” in the opening sentence of his novel Callahan, paint an image of the desert: “Behind the rocks the Mohaves lay waiting and in the sky, the buzzards.” He accomplishes the same feat, setting his scene (and indicating the genre of his story) in the few choice words of his first sentence of The Burning Hills: “On a ridge above Texas Flat upon a rock shaped like a flame, a hand moved upon the lava.” His descriptions, even when actually static, reporting past deeds, seem active, recalling the past as if it is happening as his narrator speaks: “We came up the trail from Texas in the spring of ‘74, and bedded our herd on the short grass beyond the railroad” (“End of the Drive,” End of the Drive). Likewise, by including active meteorological conditions, L’Amour can, again, make otherwise static scenes seem active, even intense: “Heavy clouds hung above the iron-colored peaks, and lancets of lightning flashed and probed” (“The Skull and the Arrow,” End of the Drive).

He is just as adept at setting scenes, creating suspense, characterizing characters, and hooking his readers when he describes towns and townspeople as when he pictures solitary heroes in isolated or desolate landscapes far from civilization: “He lay sprawled upon the concrete pavement of the alley in the darkening stain of his own blood, a man I had never seen before, a man with the face of an Apache warrior, struck down from behind and stabbed repeatedly in the back as he lay there” (The Broken Gun).

L’Amour knows when to add a simile, a metaphor, a personification, an allusion, a rhetorical question, or another figure of speech to spice up writing about mundane things when the writing itself might, otherwise, be mundane: “The night brought a soft wind” (Brionne). “Dawn came like a ghost to the silent street, a gray, dusty street lined with boardwalks and several short lengths of water trough (Borden Chantry). “When it came to Griselda Popley, I was down to bedrock and showing no color” (“The Courting of Griselda,” End of the Drive). “Who can say that the desert does not live?” (“The Lonesome Gods,” End of the Drive). “The land lay empty around them, lonely and still” (Conagher).

The men in L’Amour’s fiction tend to be lean, mean fighting machines, as quick and effective with their fists as they are with their hands. They have hard-edged, flinty names like Hondo, Callahan, Brionne, Bowdrie, Borden Chantry, Malcolm Fallon, Orrin Sackett, Jim Colburn, and Conagher. Sometimes, they straddle the law, living by the code of the West or a code of their own, more antiheroes than heroes, as is the case, it seems, with regard to Malcolm Fallon, whom L’Amour introduces as “a stranger to the town of Seven Pines” who is fortunate enough to be “a stranger with fast horse,” especially since a drunken band of townsmen have invited him to a necktie party (i. e., a lynching). Out-and-out villains, however, may be violent men of action, but they are also passive products of their circumstances and environments: “They were four desperate men, made hard by life, cruel by nature, and driven to desperation by imprisonment” (“Desperate Men,” End of the Drive). It seems that, in L’Amour’s fiction, desperate men are made, not born; in other words, it is not their fault that they are desperate men; their past experiences have made them so. By contrast, L’Amour’s heroic protagonists defy their environments, take charge of themselves, and become the masters of their own fates, embodying free will.

Although no academic would ever mistake L’Amour for a literary author, he is a literate writer of popular fiction who has learned, of himself, many techniques for accomplishing narrative objectives in ways as interesting as they are succinct, and any aspiring writer, whether of horror or another genre, can learn much from the way that he uses carefully chosen words, phrases, clauses, and sentences to set his scenes, suggest action (even when there is none presently taking place), introducing his protagonists, identifying the time of the day and the season of the year, creating suspense, generating a sense of mystery, stating mundane facts in intriguing ways, describing weather, and spotlighting particular characters among other literary personae. He also shows an adept use of similes, metaphors, allusions, personifications, the rhetorical question, and the tall tale (“My Brother [sic] Orrin Sackett, was big enough to fight bears with a switch,” the narrator of The Daybreakers claims). Adapting L’Amour’s techniques and strategies to his or her own genre and work, the aspiring horror writer can do the same.

Story Ideas Journal

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Like many other writers, Mark Twain kept a notebook--or a series of the, actually--I which, among other entries, he jotted down story ideas. I find that the USA Today’s “Across the USA: News From Every State” column, quite unintentionally, I’m sure, provides fruit for me (and for others), on a daily basis, for story ideas, ripe for the plucking. Notebooks and notebooks of the, in fact. By applying a bit of Gahan Wilson logic or Gary Larson perspective to the news items reported in this column, I find that I can transform at least a few of the straightforward reports into ideas for potential horror stories. For example, five of the fifty reports, or a full ten percent of the, in the September 27, 2010 issue of the newspaper show promise, which is to say, with a little revision., could become the bases of stories from the dark side of the soul. Courtesy of the great states of Louisiana, Montana, Texas, Virginia, and Washington, here they are, followed by my revisions to them and the bases of the revisions.

[Original:] Louisiana: Leesville--Work on a new veterans cemetery begins this week next to Fort Polk. Mike Sewell, project manager for Pat Williams Construction, said a survey crew should be preparing for timber clearing in about two weeks. He said the $6.1 million project should be completed late next year.

Revision: Louisiana: Leesville--Work on a new veterans cemetery begins this week next to Fort Polk. The $6.1 million project, the project manager for the contractor said, will kick off the U. S. military’s combined forces’ Operation Alpha, which is expected to ignite a theater-wide war in the Middle East, requiring at least 100,00 graves by the end of the anticipated five-year conflict. (Story Idea)

Basis of Revision: The revision is based on a reversal of cause and effect, assuming that cemeteries occasion casualty-producing wars rather than answering the need for burial sites that is caused by wars--in other words, that the cemeteries are completed prior to the wars that are fought to fill the cemeteries.

[Original:] Montana: Missoula--The art work of a former war prisoner who created drawings of atrocities he witnessed while the Japanese held him during World War II has found a home at the Montana Museum of Art and Culture. The museum announced that it has acquired 11 oil paintings and nearly 80 drawings by Ben Steele, 92. The Montana native was taken prisoner when he was 23.

Revision: Montana: Missoula--The art work of a former war prisoner who created drawings of atrocities he witnessed while the Japanese held him during World War II has found a home at the Montana Museum of Magical Realism. The museum curator announced that the 11 oil paintings and nearly 80 drawings by Ben Steele, 92, represent “performance art,” that is capable of magically recreating the actual experience that the artist underwent so that whoever views his work will actually live through the same atrocities that the artist experienced when he was taken prisoner at age 23. (Story Idea)

Basis of Revision: By transforming drawings and paintings into items of magical “performance art” that recreate the artists’ experiences as a prisoner of war so faithfully and completely that viewers actually undergo the atrocities that the art depicts, this story idea plays with the idea of art as a representation of human experience, taking the concept to fantastic extremes.

[Original:] Texas: Houston--Area residents turned over more than 3,000 pounds of expired, unused and unwanted prescription medications to federal authorities. The Saturday collection was the U. S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s first effort to round up unused prescription medications at 3,400 locations nationwide as part of its campaign.

Revision: Texas: Houston--Area residents turned over more than 3,000 unwanted infants and toddlers to federal authorities. The Saturday collection was the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services’ first effort to round up unwanted children at 3,400 locations nationwide for use in cloning and bioengineering research. (Story Idea) This story idea obviously lends itself well to satirical treatment of the federal government’s heavy-handed intrusions into citizens’ lives. (Other horrific ideas might stem from the substitution of “virgins” or “spouses” for “prescription drugs.”)

Basis of Revision: The substitution of babies for prescription drugs is an interesting revision to the original news report, to be sure, and one that calls for explanation; the explanation is as monstrous as the federal bureaucracies that involve themselves in such “health” concerns as abortion, fetal stem cell research and similar matters, replaced, in my revision with “cloning and bioengineering research.”

[Original:] Virginia: Lexington--Washington and Lee University is stepping up efforts to recruit Jewish students as part of efforts to create a more diverse campus. Jewish students currently make up 4.5% of about 1,760 undergraduate students. Recruitment efforts include attending college fairs and visiting Jewish schools, community centers, and teen groups.

Revision: Virginia: Lexington--Washington and Lee University is stepping up efforts to recruit human oddities as part of efforts to create a more diverse campus. Human oddities, or “freaks,” as they were once know currently make up 4.5% of about 1,760 undergraduate students. Recruitment efforts include attending county fairs and visiting circuses and carnival sideshows. (Story Idea) This politically incorrect storyline is certainly insensitive and bigoted, but it is one that pokes fun at political correctness and, as such, could lend itself to a satirical send-up of social and collegiate concerns for “diversity.”

Basis of Revision: Again, by simply substituting one group of people (“human oddities”) for another (“Jewish” students), an unlikely and, in this case, offensive, storyline suggests itself that could have horrific possibilities.

[Original:] Washington: Bellingham--State officials said they stopped a boat that was contaminated by zebra mussels before the invasive species could spread in the state’s waters. Officers with the Department of Fish and Wildlife and Washington State Patrol in Cle Elum inspected the boat being hauled from Michigan to British Columbia.

Revision: Washington: Bellingham--State officials said they stopped a boat that was contaminated by extraterrestrial spores that could have fertilized animal ova, resulting in a hybridized alien-animal life form such as the world has never seen. (Story Idea) The original report could also have changed by substituting an alien virus for the “zebra mussels,” causing a potential pandemic or by replacing “zebra mussels” with a reference to an extraterrestrial germ or other agent that causes a reverse-terraforming of the Earth that makes it inhabitable to humans but livable for the aliens who will soon arrive to replace the humans they’ve killed in advance of their arrival.

Basis of Revision: Substitution of terms.

Every day, USA Today provides writers with another column featuring “news from every state.” If only two items per day result in potential ideas for horror stories, a year will provide 730 entries to one’s journal of story ideas. Very likely, the column will suggest many more. If one generates as many as five each day, as I gleaned from among today’s news items, a year’s yield will provide a whopping 1,825 entries--way more than even the most prolific writer could hope to use in a lifetime!

Cunning Devices: Plot as Invention

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

In “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences,” Mark Twain observes that the author of the Leatherstocking series lacks inventiveness:

Cooper’s gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment; but such as it as he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box of stage-properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go.

(For Twain‘s own “rules governing literary art,” refer to “Mark Twain’s ’Rules For Governing Literary Art”). The analogy in which a narrative plot is compared to an invention is fruitful as an aid in understanding the plotting of fiction. Many patents are issued not for original inventions but for improvements to them. For example, the original mousetrap could be patented, but so could a better mousetrap. This fact suggests something analogous in regard to fiction. To devise an original plot for oneself, a writer can adapt the plot of another writer. But, wait! Isn't that plagiarism? It could, but need not, be. Huh? Let me explain. To steal another writer’s plot is definitely plagiarism, but ideas cannot be patented. Therefore, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, and Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, among many others, which all feature dinosaurs, are acceptable (that is, legal). If more than one writer has succeeded with a particular type of monster (dinosaurs, for instance), you might do likewise, provided that you use only the idea of dinosaurs as your monsters and not the specific treatments of dinosaurs that others have employed. Here’s a way to go about the business of “improving” upon (or tinkering with) the plots of others so as to produce a story idea of one’s own. Consider the original in terms of its categories or elements: character, setting, theme, conflict, plot. Can you think of a twist on any (or more) of them? In the 1932 film version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a scientist, Henry Frankenstein, creates a monster from parts of human cadavers which he electrifies in his laboratory. (In the novel, it is unclear how the protagonist, medical student Victor Frankenstein, animates his monster, although a chemical [or alchemical] means is suggested.) The film version departs from the novel in these, and other, ways, but Shelley’s novel could also have suggested H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau. Wells’ setting is an island laboratory. Instead of human cadavers, human-animal hybrids are the mad scientist’s raw materials, and Dr. Moreau uses vivisection, rather than chemistry or electricity, to accomplish his wonders. Although it is debatable whether Shelley’s novel suggested The Island of Dr. Moreau, these sorts of innovations do represent the kind of adaptations to the plot of another, earlier work of which I speak. Thinking of plots as inventions also suggests a caution. Twain was a great writer, but a poor investor, and he lost a fortune in his investments in the James W. Paige’s “compositor,” a typesetting machine which boasted 18,000 parts! Sadder but much wiser, the author gave up “speculating” as a means of getting rich (or richer) quick and recouped his fortune by returning to what he did best: writing and reading his literary works to paying audiences. The moral of the story? To a degree, complexity in a story, especially a novel-length narrative, is a good thing. Readers want twists and turns in their stories. However, a plot that is more labyrinth than zigzag is apt to lose the reader. After all, one typically has only so many hours or days that he or she is willing to devote to the reading of a novel. If readers complain of, rather than praise, the length of a story, as even Stephen King’s most ardent “constant readers” are wont to do on occasion, their grievances may suggest more maze than meander.