Quick Tip: Writing Means Reading

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

It seems self-evident that writers must be (not should be, but must, be) readers. Every writer worth his or her salt will tell anyone who wants to write (or, more likely, thinks he or she wants to write), that, to be successful as a writer, he or she must also read.

Stephen King, for example, reads a couple of hundred books or more every year. In fact, his reading has caused him to discover, among others, Bentley Little, a horror writer of no small talent himself. As the many blurbs he has written to help sell other writers’ works indicate, King is as much a fan of other writer’s work as readers are of his oeuvre. His love of reading is shared by his wife and fellow writer Tabitha and their children, one of whom, Joe Hill, has followed in his father’s footsteps, writing horror novels himself.

Writers should read every novel or short story (or see every movie) at least twice (although several times more is actually recommended), the first time for pleasure and to get a sense of the story’s structure, of how it is put together, and of how it attains unity. The second time, readers who would also be writers should read for technique.

How does the writer describe persons, places, and things? How does he or she create and maintain suspense? How are transitions used to tie action and scenes together? Are flashbacks used? If so, why, and, again, how are transitions used to tie past and present together? What figures of speech (metaphors, allusions, irony, symbols, and so forth), either explicit or implicit, are used in the story, and how and why are they used? Why is the action narrated in this, rather than some other, sequence? What can be gleaned from the writer’s choices of words and images? How does he or she fully involve readers in the action of the story? Why is the setting important, if not essential, to the characters, plot, conflict, setting, and theme? What is spicy or memorable about the dialogue? If the novel is a murder mystery or a detective story, what clues does the writer drop, when, where, how, and why? Which are red herrings? If the novel is a horror story, what mythos, legend, historical fact, or scientific discovery or theory grounds the paranormal or supernatural incidents or characters in the everyday world of commonsense realism, and how does the protagonist learn the truth of the monster’s origin or nature so that he or she can banish or destroy it?

Almost every writer has weaknesses as well as strengths, and both aspiring and established writers can learn from both. One of King’s weaknesses is his inclusion of extraneous scenes and exposition in his overly long plots; one of his strengths is his characterization, especially of the young. One of Little’s weaknesses is his novels’ unsatisfying, tacked-on or inconclusive endings; one of his strengths is his ability to create, maintain, and heighten suspense, often through the powers of his descriptions of menacing places. As a reader, learn to avoid the mistakes of writers and to adopt their strengths.

Then, read the novel or the short story or watch the movie again to discover all the wonderful tricks of the trade that you missed the first couple of times you read or watched the story unfold.

Building Horror and Suspense Tobe Hooper’s Way, Part 2

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

In Eaten Alive at a Chainsaw Massacre: The Films of Tobe Hooper, John Kenneth Muir explains some of the narrative and symbolic devices that Hooper uses in his film, Invaders From Mars (1986) to build horror and suspense.

According to Muir, Hooper is “quite expert at using the background and foregrounds of shots to convey important, frightening information” (109). In support of his contention, Muir offers a couple of especially instructive examples, worth quoting in their entirety:

Tobe Hooper’s use of film language in Invaders From Mars is the most impressive it’s been since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. His always-on-the-prowl camera not only records David’s nightmare of alien invasion, [but] it [also] successfully expresses his situation, his mood, and his feelings of isolation. The opening shot of the movie, that of David and his Dad [sic] lying flat on their backs in the grass, stargazing, should be a peaceful, idyllic one. Instead, forecasting the horror to come, the high[-]angle perspective (always the harbinger of doom in the cinematic lexicon) grows increasingly disturbed. As the camera nears its objects, it commences a fast spin, rolling over and over as it nears David and his Dad [sic]. This spin reveals that David Gardner’s world is about to be turned upside down, and that below the surface of perfect suburbia, trouble exists.

Throughout the film, Hooper’s well-placed camera continues to express the plight of the film’s dreaming protagonist. On the school playground, David is farmed inside a metal jungle jim [sic], a surrogate jail cell of sorts, and the message is clear: he’s trapped like a caged animal. Of all the children on the playground, only Davis is “trapped” in this fashion, simultaneously indicating his special status (as the star of his own dream) as well as his knowledge of his isolation. Later, David is literally surrounded by cages, by stuffed, mounted animals in miniature cages in his teacher’s van, and the blocking is very much the same, expressing the identical point: this is a nightmare David cannot escape from. Instead of relying on art design, [William Cameron] Menzies [the director of the original film of which Hooper’s version is a remake] staged many shots, nay entire sequences, in minimalist oversized sets to achieve similar results: feelings of entrapment and isolation. Instead of relying on art design, Hooper falls back on his thorough understanding of film grammar, mise en scene and cutting (108-109).

Writers of short stories and novels, it may be argued, do not have the resources at hand that filmmakers do, and, even if they had, their medium is pen, ink, and paper (or, more likely, a computerized word processor and printer). What good, therefore, does it do the short story writer or the novelist to examine the narrative techniques of movie directors and cameramen? The short answer is that it’s not only possible, but desirable, to learn artistic techniques from as many artists as possible, without undue concern as to their form or genre, always with an eye as to how to adapt their methods to one’s own work. After all, filmmakers have certainly helped themselves generously to quite a few literary techniques as well as to the methods of other artists, visual, plastic, musical, and otherwise.

Instead of a camera, the writer has description. Description, it may be truly be said, is the writer’s camera. Using its powers, he or she can create symbolic images, just as Hooper does, with his spinning camera and high-angle camera perspective, and images of the Jungle Jim and the caged animals. (A literary master of such technique is Stephen Crane; consider his use of symbolic imagery in The Red Badge of Courage, for example, in which he describes the clearing in a forest near a battlefield in terms of a cathedral.) What a writer can learn, more specifically than merely the use of symbolic imagery, created through description, to express theme, convey a character’s emotion, suggest the narrative‘s tone, or to effect foreshadowing, perhaps, is what Muir points out concerning Hooper’s employment of mise en scene’s blocking out of the critical elements of a scene so as to exploit the background and the foreground of each separate shot. Before writing a scene, an author should write out, in a few sentences, as specifically as possible, the answers to such questions as:

1. What is the purpose of this scene?
2. Can a special perspective (camera angle, as it were) be used to heighten the reader’s interest and to emphasize key information (or maybe to shift the reader’s focus away from a bit of information--a clue, for example, in a murder mystery) in the scene?
3. What should the scene’s lighting be? Should it be direct, indirect, partial, full, from above, below, from one side or the other, from behind? (Anyone who has ever held a flashlight below his or her chin in an otherwise dark room knows what valuable tricks light can play in creating horror, fear, or suspense.)
4. What properties (“props”) should the scene include, and why? To what use should they be put?
5. What link is there between this scene and its predecessor, and what link is there between it and the next scene?
6. What colors will be used to describe the characters’ hair, eyes, clothes, the “props,” and other items contained in the scene?

In other words, start to think off scenes not as so many words on a page, sandwiched between other segments of words on other pages, but as an image (or a series of connected images) within the continuous flow of many other, related images which, together, tell a unified, coherent, and meaningful story. At the same time, though, consider how the scene can best perform its function, or purpose, within the whole of which it is a part, using symbolism, irony, composition, and other elements, both narrative and visual.

The result will be a more artistically told story, and a story that is apt to be taken more seriously. At times, it is enough, perhaps, to tell a story, but it is always better to tell a story well.

Building Horror and Suspense Tobe Hooper’s Way

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

In Eaten Alive at a Chainsaw Massacre: The Films of Tobe Hooper, John Kenneth Muir explains some of the narrative and symbolic devices that Hooper uses in his film, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), to build horror and suspense. First, Muir says, Hooper sets the tone of the film by using symbolic images that suggest that the world exists within an indifferent, or even hostile, universe in which human life is not only meaningless but also endangered. A corpse is shown, posed as if it were a work of art (55). Then, Hooper shows “close-ups of violent eruptions on the surface of our sun,” the red shade of which “belies a kind of anger,” the whole image implying, again, that “the universe is disordered, anarchic, even cruel.” Indeed, the sun and the moon may represent the eyes of the “cosmos,” suggesting that the cosmos is “watching from a distance” (56). One might even wonder if the heavenly orbs might suggest that God is observing the bizarre and hideous actions that transpire in the film. If so, the God who watches such horrors is obviously not a loving God, but a voyeur who is something along the lines of a sadist. A third image is that of armadillo road kill. It is important to observe that the armadillo “is overturned, upside down,” because such a position, Muir points out, “is a long-time signifier of death in the language of the cinema” (56). This image accomplishes a double task, Muir says. First, it reinforces the idea that “the ordered universe has become topsy-turvy” because although “the highway is a symbol of man’s intelligence and his need to connect one place to another,” the presence of the dead armadillo suggests that “above and beyond man’s sense of self-imposed order (the road), is the overriding chaos of the universe” (56). Second, the image of the dead armadillo heralds a similar image of a homeless man, “signifying. . . the death and horror to come”:

Not long after the shot of the armadillo, a drink is seen in the cemetery to be lying in the same position as the road kill. . . . In fact, this is the film’s second “armadillo” shot: the drunk’s face is upside down in the frame too, out of order, signifying again the death and horror to come (56).

So far, three images have conspired, so to speak, to indicate that the world exists within an indifferent, or even hostile, universe in which human life is not only meaningless but also endangered. Next, sound--or, more specifically--music is used to further underscore the universe’s cosmic indifference to humanity:

The music in the film. . . is distinctly unpleasant, all cymbal crashes and echoes; highly discordant and jarring. There is no lyrical theme running through the music, no recognizable leitmotif, only a jumble of ugly, seemingly random sounds strung together. Like the eruptions on the surface of the sun, the music reflects the absence of equilibrium, sanity, reason, and order in the universe” (56).

This sense of an unintelligible, meaningless, and possibly hostile universe comes across even more clearly when there is, as it were, a “theme” or “leitmotif” to man-made sounds, such as, for example, the news report to which one of the film’s characters is listening at the moment that he is struck and killed by a passing truck while he is busy reliving himself into a cup while standing at the edge of the road. The report is full of seemingly random events of a “discomforting” character, which, taken together, indicate “a disordered, uncaring universe” (57). Having used both images and sound to symbolize such cosmic indifference to humanity, Hooper now turns his film’s attention to its characters, eliminating, from the very outset, first the group of victims’ “alpha male,” followed, in short order, by the elimination of the second male, which leads the female character on her own, with “no ‘male’ figure to cling to at all” (57-58). Hooper ratchets up the film’s horror and suspense by refusing to grant the character’s experiences any meaning; what happens to them--and, vicariously, to the audience, has no cognitive or epistemological significance; they learn nothing from it. Therefore, their experience is without value:

He denies his viewers the critical act of learning. . . . an audience usually learns important facts from the story’s structure or through the expositional dialogue of the main characters. . . . Knowledge does not pass from one protagonist to the next and no acts are explained or even rationalized. . . . They are killed without learning anything. . . and so the audience doesn’t learn anything either (58).

The failure to explain the bizarre, violent incidents lends the film verisimilitude, Muir suggests, because, in moviegoers’ own lives, similar events transpire, without readymade answers (58). By setting up a series of expectations on the parts of both his characters and the audience and then frustrating or “overturning” them, Hooper maintains the horror, the randomness, and the suspense of his movie’s action, Muir adds: “They go to the gas station expecting gas, but it’s out of gas. They go to the swimming hole expecting water, but it’s dry. They go to the friendly looking farmhouse down the lane expecting help but find only insanity and death” (58). Likewise, the characters are dwarfed by their surroundings, which suggests that they are of comparatively little significance whose lives are often on the verge of extinction, whether they are aware of their danger or not:

Hooper takes special pains to accentuate the vastness of the universe around his young characters. . . . Hooper sees [them] much as those very characters view the spiders in the web or the cows locked away in the slaughterhouses. They’re little, meaningless creatures, running around in their lives with a sort of tunnel vision, unable to see that they inhabit a much larger and terribly frightening domain. As human beings, we. . . do a hundred “normal” and “routine” things . . . while unaware that a tornado could be approaching, or that a serial killer could be roaming the very neighborhood where we live. But we impose a false sense of order (and hence security) in our everyday existence and Tobe Hooper’s modus operandi is to strip all that away. . . . We‘re victims of a universe that unfolds randomly (59-60).

According to Muir, Hooper is not necessarily an atheist. It could be that “the universe has a plan”; it’s just that “humans don’t know what it is, or even if they’re important to it” (60), a point that Hooper underscores through imagery, camera angles, and his characters’ dialogue:

Under the uncaring eye of the distant sun, Jerry’s van picks up the Hitchhiker. . . . Under a giant blue sky, the Hitchhiker [one of the film’s antagonists] and the van itself might as well be ants on a hill or cows in the slaughterhouse. . . . Hooper and cinematographer [Daniel] Pearl make inventive use of the low angle perspective. . . . [to reveal] the inherent hierarchy (or disorder) of the universe. High above his oblivious characters stand outer space, suns, and galaxies. And those cosmic entities could not care less that five teens are about to meet their makers in a backwater corner of some place called Texas.

The film’s dialogue reinforces many of these themes (60).

The film’s central antagonist, the cannibalistic, transvestite, serial killer name Leatherface, is himself an embodiment of Hooper’s view of the universe as an uncaring, hostile place: “Ultimately, the very nature of Leatherface’s villainy is a prominent part of Hooper’s thesis about the universe, too.” For example, “he doesn’t want to have sex with the lovely Sally.” Instead, as if she were nothing more than a cow in a slaughterhouse, “where her grandfather once worked,” Leatherface would rather slaughter and eat Sally and wear her face as a mask (60).

The sole survivor, Sally survives merely by chance: she “happens to get a break, to escape the crazies and make it to the road beyond the farmhouse but none of that is part of a design or intentional strategy on her part. It’s just the law of averages” (66); the universe remains impartial in its indifference to all humanity. Moreover, as Muir points out, Sally’s escape may not have left her unscathed emotionally: “her sanity is in serious question at the end of Chain Saw” (66). Finally, Hooper uses even seemingly random business and road signs to reinforce his movie’s horror and suspense:

Also interesting is Hooper’s appropriate use of signage at just the right times to provide the audience with subconscious clues about the horror to come. At the gas station, there is a sign reading “Gulf,” quite an appropriate brand for a half-way place between two regions, in this case the normal and the insane. Shortly thereafter, another sign reads “STOP” as the protagonists near the old Franklin place, a visual warning that is ultimately ignored (67).

It should be obvious that Hooper is a consummate director of horror films, adept in the use of symbolic imagery, instrumental music, the denial of thematic meaning to his characters’ experiences, frustrated expectations, irony, size discrepancies between characters and their vast surroundings, dialogue, business and road signs, and other forms of non-verbal communication to suggest both horror and suspense. Any storyteller, whether of film or literary fiction, interested in the horror genre would do well to study the techniques of such a master. Fortunately, Muir’s study of precisely this topic, in Eaten Alive at a Chainsaw Massacre, helps one to do just this.

Leftover Plots: Part II

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

 

As a result of considering “leftover plots” or plot-seeds or springboards or whatever we choose to call narrative motifs that occur in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we identified several additional storylines that could have been used in the series or (better yet, for us) that we ourselves, with some revision regarding characters, setting, and other narrative elements, could employ to write horror stories (or even novels) ourselves:

• An imprisoned character can escape, causing more mischief or even a little death and destruction before being killed or imprisoned again.
• Things that give rise to new organisms or liberate forces or entities, such as eggs, seeds, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, melting icebergs, shifting tectonic plates, earthbound meteors, and the like, can introduce new characters, including such worthy adversaries as hideous, horrible monsters.
• Problematic characters, such as a naïve, incompetent, or foolish follower or sidekick can create havoc and endanger lives.
• Physical objects, or artifacts, can function as inciting moments that spark a chain of narrative incidents, setting the rest of the story in motion.

We also learned some important factual matters pertaining to this technique:

• Ideas cannot be copyrighted, so they are fair game as inspirations for plots.
• The specific and unique ways in which ideas are developed can, and often are, copyrighted.
• Using the characters, settings, and other elements of such treatments could constitute plagiarism and/or copyright infringement.
• Ideas must be given an original treatment in which characters, settings, and other elements are new, not derivative.

They’re lots more we can learn from considering other Buffy episodes, so let’s get started. In “Angel” (episode 7, season 1), viewers are introduced to a mysterious stranger who comes to Buffy’s aid, helping her to defeat three vampires who attack her in the proverbial dark alley. Viewers wonder who this stranger is, what his interest in Buffy may be, and how he got the strength, agility, stamina, and fighting prowess to take on vampires alongside the supernaturally gifted slayer. Later, when, sharing a passionate kiss with Buffy, the stranger transforms into a vampire himself, one of these questions is answered, but the answer raises further, even more intriguing questions, one of which is why a vampire would be interested in (and apparently smitten with) his mortal enemy. Willow Rosenberg, Buffy’s nerdy computer geek friend, starts an online romance with a stranger in “I Robot, You Jane” (episode 8, season 1). Buffy is concerned about the possible dangers of Internet dating, and, as it turns out, she has good cause to be concerned, for Willow’s newfound boyfriend turns out to be a demon that, once imprisoned in the text of a book, was liberated into cyberspace when the book was scanned into Sunnydale High School’s library database. “The Puppet Show” (episode 9, season 1), which is one of the lamer stories in the series, is a takeoff upon the Chucky movies about a demon-possessed doll, except that this toy is a human who was cursed by having his soul confined to a ventriloquist’s dummy by the same brain-eating demon who’s been killing Sunnydale High School students and lunching upon their brains. (See! High school kids do have brains.) Nightmares come true in “Nightmares” (episode 10, season 1). The bad dreams are products of an abused boy whose Little League baseball coach believed in making an example of him after blaming the boy for the team’s loss of a big game. Some of the dreams, although nightmares, are amusing--Xander’s fear of going to school in his underwear, his fear of the clown that performed at one of his childhood birthday parties, and Willow’s fear of theatrical performance--but others are truly terrifying, as when Buffy’s mentor, Rupert Giles, dreams that she has been killed or Buffy’s own dream that she has been transformed into a vampire. Interesting because of one of the more transparent metaphors upon which Buffy plots are typically based, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” (episode 11, season 1) equates being neglected and ignored with becoming invisible. In this episode, an invisible girl, Marcie Ross, uses her invisibility to gain revenge against Cordelia Chase and other Sunnydale students and, indeed, teachers who mistreated, neglected, ignored, and otherwise abused her before becoming a spy for the federal government. “Prophecy Girl” (episode 12, season 1) is the two-part finale of Buffy’s first season. The slayer learns that a prophecy foretells her death at the hands of an ancient vampire king known as The Master. She tries to quit, but, when The Master’s minions attack and kill several of her fellow students, traumatizing Willow, Buffy reluctantly accepts her destiny and is first bitten and then, unconscious, cast into a pool of water, in which she drowns--only to be resuscitated by her friend Xander, who arrives in the nick of time with Buffy’s vampire lover, Angel. Revived, Buffy finds that she has taken on some of The Master’s strength--and darkness--becoming stronger and is now immune from his mesmerizing gaze. A fight, to The Master’s death--ensues. Okay, so what have we learned? Most of these episodes deal with xenophobia, an irrational fear of strangers, except that, as it turns out in most cases, the fear doesn’t seem all that unwarranted when one is residing atop a Hellmouth. The introduction of a stranger who is mysterious in some ways is a universal and well-used plot device. When used adroitly, the mysterious stranger creates and maintains suspense because his or her sudden introduction into the setting and circumstances of the larger story naturally arouses curiosity on the reader’s (or viewer’s) part, especially when the entrance is a grand one, dramatic and--in the case of the horror genre, at least--unsettling. In Buffy, to enhance the mystique of the stranger, the series’ writers used such techniques--okay, they can be called “tricks,” if one prefers to think of them in this way--as these:

• A possible threat. (Is the mysterious Angel stalking Buffy?)
• Romantic intrigue AND star-crossed love. (Buffy no sooner meets Angel than they’ve become a couple, but, since he is, as she soon learns, a vampire, and she’s the slayer, theirs will be star-crossed, to say the least.)
• Juxtapositions. The past (as represented by print-bound books) and the present (as represented by computers and cyberspace) meet, and they don’t get along all that well. Good (Buffy) and evil (Angel and the other vampires) represent two moral extremes. The natural, everyday world of Sunnydale and its citizens’ mundane lives are set against the supernatural world of their vampire foes. Life, as it is lived by Buffy and her friends, is contrasted with the life-in-death state in which the vampires exist, a hedonistic world of the senses and of passions that are cut off from such roots as love and compassion.
• Similarity of themes. Buffy often explores a theme from several perspectives. For example, Willow, whose love for Xander remains unrequited because of his love for Buffy, which is also unrequited because Buffy loves Angel, leaves Willow lonely, as does Marcie’s neglect by her peers. In each instance, the characters’ loneliness leads them to foolish actions. In Willow’s case, she is saved by her friends, to whose circle she returns. Marcie, having no friends, becomes a ward of the state, so to speak, after Buffy rescues Cordelia and defeats Marcie. Although it may not cure one’s loneliness altogether, friendship, such thematic treatments suggest, is the tie that not only binds but also saves one from a perfunctory, institutional existence as a ward of, and a servant to, the state.
• Animation of inanimate objects. This is a motif that is popular in fantasy fiction, including the horror and the science fiction genres. The animation of inanimate objects, whether through magical or technological means, is a subtype of the artifact plot device, in which an object, whether a ring (Lord of the Rings), a crystal (The Dark Crystal), or even a spaceship (Rendezvous with Rama) or some other object is the artifact.
• Trauma’s consequences. As child abuse, spousal abuse, torture, combat and other mistreatment or crisis situations have shown, trauma has long-, if not life-long, consequences and can cause recurring nightmares, acts of violence, and other disturbed behavior.
• Duty’s duty. Blaise Pascal wrote, “The heart has reasons which reason does not know.” So has duty. Even when there is no logically defensible reason to do so, the claim of duty often holds, especially when altruism, or even self-sacrifice, are directed at protecting others, more helpless than oneself, about whom one cares. Buffy dies that others may live, and, in doing so, she underscores the supreme values of brotherly love, courage, and that pesky pest, duty.

So, these episodes provide quite a bit of fodder for horror story writers, with regard to characters’ usefulness to plot, popular narrative motifs and techniques, and popular themes. With modification to suit one’s own interests and the demands of one’s own story, they can enrich and enhance a narrative. As such, they are useful tools--or tricks--to have in one’s authorial kit.

Having considered only a few of the lessons to be learned from a consideration of Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes, we’ll revisit the topic of “Leftover Plots” in future installments.