A Sidebar Approach to Writing

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a "sidebar" is "a short news story or graphic accompanying and presenting sidelights of a major story" or "something incidental," such as a "sidelight (a sidebar to the essay's central theme)."

Many book-length commentaries and analyses of popular entertainment products offer, more or less as fillers, occasional sidebars that provide behind-the-scenes information, summaries, or little-known facts about the various topics that the commentaries routinely cover in their murder to dissect. Dusted: The Unauthorized Guide to Buffy the Vampire Slayer is no exception, offering, as it does, 22 such sidebars, among them speculations concerning “Spike’s Nature,” an account of “The Unaired Pilot,” and “Vampire History.”

From a writer’s perspective, perhaps some of the more interesting (and potentially valuable) sidebars are those that deal with characters’ back stories, histories regarding settings, and proposed plotlines. These items present a handy, dandy way of enriching one’s own narratives: pretend that you are a fan of your own work and that, as such, you buy a book (or a magazine) about the narrative of which you are an aficionado. Imagine, also, that you are the writer (or one of the writers) of the commentary and develop sidebars of the sort that you think fans of the narrative you’re writing your book about might enjoy, particularly ones associated with characters’ back stories, histories regarding settings, and proposed plotlines. Write them about your story, and, presto, you’ve developed some ideas for future chapters of your novel in progress or (should you be so lucky) your ongoing series of novels.

For example, let’s assume that your story takes place in ancient Rome and that you want to create a sense of horror mingled with terror. Perhaps you decide to have a present-day visitor to the catacombs get stranded in the underground burial chambers overnight. This situation (and setting) cries out for a sidebar treatment in which you summarize the history of the local catacombs and given a succinct, but ghastly, description of the place.

If your character is (or knows) a famous person of the period, a sidebar concerning the famous man or woman--perhaps he is an emperor of a visiting queen--will help keep your fictitious portrait of him or her both accurate and intriguing, provided that the sidebar contains not only pertinent facts but also a spicy anecdote or two concerning the historical figure.

An artifact could also deserve sidebar treatment. Again, the facts and anecdotes you include in your sidebar will help you to keep on track and be interesting as you describe and explain the significance of the relic or objet d’art.

Learning from the Masters: M. Night Shyamalan

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman



One hates to beat a dead horse, but M. Night Shyamalan isn’t dead--not yet, not quite: people with more money than they know what to do with continue to fund his “films.” Usually, Chillers and Thrillers’ “Learning From the Masters” series analyzes successful stories, whether in print or on film, but one can learn from artistic failures, too, of course--it’s generally just less pleasurable.

I saw Sixth Sense, which I think is a good thriller, and Signs, which I wasn’t as enthused about, whether it is regarded as a science fiction film, a horror film, or a monstrous hybrid spawned by both. Then, I watched the last film by this alleged filmmaker that I ever plan to see, whether on the screen or courtesy of a DVD: The Happening, in which, despite its title, nothing happens--at least nothing believable or meaningful.

What’s wrong with Shyamalan’s films? They are predictable (there will always be a more-or-less unbelievable “twist” to the plot at the end of the story, a supposedly surprise ending that most moviegoers see coming from the beginning, especially now that they’ve learned, as it were, to expect the unexpected: the child psychologist, Dr. Malcolm Crowe (in The Sixth Sense) is a ghost; security guard David Dunn (Unbreakable) is a superhero; water hurts aliens (Signs); the village (in The Village) is the laboratory, as it were, for a modern-day experiment; the lady trapped in the swimming pool returns to the Blue World (The Lady in the Water); plants become serial--or is that cereal--killers (The Happening).

The films are superficial. There’s nothing to them. Their themes are sophomoric--or maybe just moronic.

The characters, like the plots and themes, also lack depth. They’re cardboard cutouts mouthing annoyingly unrealistic and, at times, exceedingly tedious dialogue--and dialogue about either inconsequential matters or incredible ones. Some of them are even Shyamalan himself, poorly disguised.

Character’s motivations are sometimes unconvincing. In The Happening, the protagonist regards his wife as virtually unfaithful to him because she had lunch with one of her male coworkers once. That was it. That was all. Lunch. Only in a Shyamalan film does a shared meal equal adultery. However, it is this shameful incident--lunch with a colleague of the opposite sex--that has caused a bit of a rift between the main character and his better half and it is the overcoming of this rift in reunited love (if such a relationship can involve true love) is part of the thematic glue that bonds--or is supposed to bond--these two characters (who receive a child by way of informal adoption, after the child’s parents are killed) together so that, having recovered their respect and affection for one another after living through a hellish encounter with America’s flora, they can become, once again, a family. The sentimentality level sinks to new lows, even for Shyamalan.

Although Shyamalan bills himself as an auteur, he is really an amateur. Unfortunately, his first couple of movies were lucky forays into the world of mass entertainment, and he gathered, from them, a fan base of young bloods who are, well, too easily entertained. For them, the trite themes, the stilted and tiresome dialogue, the feckless characters, the false dilemmas, and the inevitable plot twists are enough--and more than enough--as long as the master’s movies contain some cool special effects and a wink and a nod to the moviegoers’ geekiness.

Shyamalan makes films for himself. If he were a good filmmaker, that would be fine. The problem is that, in modern America, there are too many like him or too many who are likeminded. As long as there are chills and thrills, the rest of the movie doesn’t have to amount to much in the way of art. The filmmaker’s box office receipts have proven that dreck, like sex, sells, and if there’s one thing Shyamalan has in abundance it’s dreck.

So, what lessons can be gleaned from Shyamalan’s failures?

Unless you’re Dean Koontz, be clear as to your genre.

Make sure something actually happens during your story’s action--and something important, not trivial.

Unless you’re O. Henry, resist the desire to employ a “twist” or “surprise” ending. (Brush up on Edgar Allan Poe’s masterpiece, “The Philosophy of Composition” to learn how to write a successful ending to a story.)

Develop satisfying, significant, or even multivalent themes.

Create sympathetic and compelling characters.

Provide credible motivations for characters’ conflicts.

Write credible, if not sparkling, dialogue.

Do not insult your audience! Respect their intelligence and their commitment to the art of fiction, filmed or printed.

Image and Imagination

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Like many who are interested in horror fiction, I occasionally indulge myself by perusing online images linked to such search terms as “horror,” “eerie,” “scary,” and so forth. For those of us who are twisted enough to enjoy such sights, viewing such images can be not only fun (I know, I know; I’ve already admitted I’m twisted!), but also informative, even educational.

One image is that of a young woman. She wears black (or, perhaps, she is naked--it’s hard to tell, because only her face, neck, and upper chest show; she is otherwise lost in, or swallowed up by, darkness--and her skin is not only pale, but also reflective: indeed, she seems to radiate the light that shines upon her, illuminating those portions of her body that I’ve mentioned, but leaving most of her figure invisible in the darkness.

Moreover, the flesh of her upper chest seems to be alive with internal light, as if she glows from within. Her eyes are dark, and she wears a slight, mysterious smile rather like that of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. A scar is etched down her forehead, from just above her eyebrow to midway down her cheek, but the scar is not red: it is black, like her hair, her eyes, and her dress (if, indeed, she is dressed), as if she bleeds black, rather than crimson, blood, a suggestion of her innate depravity, perhaps. She seems evil, despite her youth and beauty, as if she is inwardly corrupt. The image is suggestive, posing many questions that could lead to a plot, to other characters, to a conflict, to a setting, and to a theme--in short, to a story that is both horrible to read and to contemplate. The journalist’s questions should get the imaginative writer started: Who? What? When? Where? How? Why?

The next image is full of eyes.  There are eleven of them, all feminine, with long, lustrous lashes and a glittering gaze, floating, as it seems, against a fiery background of yellow and orange, black and white. They stare, intensely, at the viewer, returning gaze for gaze. At the center of the picture, a pair of eyes, complete with the suggestion, at least, of knitted eyebrows, stares forth from the digital canvass, commanding the viewer’s attention; the presence of a strategically positioned diamond shape and of a ridge of material that resembles steel more than it does bone suggest the skeletal remnant of a nose. There is malevolence in her gaze. Filaments of light float and twist in the air, unifying the floating eyes, but there is no context for the vision, so that, collectively, the eyes seem to suggest madness. 

The subject, about whom nothing is knowable but that she is female and apparently beautiful, strikes one as mad; perhaps the multiplicity of eyes implies a fragmented consciousness, shattered perceptions of reality, and a distorted view of the world. If so, the true source of her horror is internal, not external (except insofar as she may confuse the objective with her own subjectivity). Again, this image raises more questions than it supplies answers, producing a wealth--or, at least, a welter--of possibilities for exploration and explication, and, as before, the journalist’s questions may lead the imaginative writer to a story based upon the ideas and feelings that this image may inspire.

Not all images are created equal, of course, and one must exercise discrimination in his or her perusal of the many pictures of horror that are available online. One, for example, although interesting in itself, perhaps, is too puerile to be suggestive of a situation greater than itself--and, therefore, great enough, it may be, for a story.  It shows a skull flanked by jack-o-lanterns; the eye sockets of the death’s-head glow red, as do the mesh strands that serve as the image’s backdrop. There is the suggestion that the skull and the pumpkins are caught in a web of some kind and that along may come a spider, but such intimations are not enough for a horror story and do not raise possibilities for anyone to pursue in fiction or otherwise; they are, at best, merely decorative.

The problem of the skull and pumpkins raises an important question: what must an image accomplish in order to be useful to a writer of horror fiction? What quality or qualities must it possess? What must it evoke in the writer’s imagination?

The journalist’s questions are clues. Who? refers to an agent (if an individual) or to an agency (if an institution), and, of course, to the agent’s or agency’s motive and, probably, to his, her, or its values, feelings, thoughts, and even world view. What? alludes to the situation and the series of incidents or events that have brought the agent or the agency to this point of the action and to the series of events or incidents that are likely to result from both this initial situation and the agent’s or the agency’s actions in response to it. When? and Where? point to time and place, or setting--the story’s physical location and its cultural milieu. How? addresses the behavior of the characters, especially insofar as they are the causes and effects of various situations, actions, and reactions. Why? relates to both the characters’ motives and to the story’s theme. These are the elements common to all fiction, horror stories included, and it is these, therefore, that a truly inspirational image of horror will pose to the thoughtful and imaginative viewer, especially if he or she is--or hopes to be--a writer of imaginative fiction, of the horror genre or otherwise. An image that is capable of suggesting such elements is an evocative--and useful--one, indeed.

Context and Conundrum

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Like all other types of fiction, the horror genre creates, maintains, and heightens suspense--in other words, keeps readers reading or viewers viewing--by withholding facts or other information that is vital to the perception, understanding, and appreciation of the narrative’s context. Because the reader or the viewer does not (yet) know enough to know what is happening (or, more commonly, why what is happening is happening), he or she is intrigued. He or she wants to know what will happen next and, ultimately, why the series of (usually bizarre) incidents is happening at all.

In fiction, context is created through the presence and unification of all narrative elements: characters, setting, action, dialogue, conflict, theme. By temporarily withholding information concerning one or more of these critical elements, providing details little by little, over a period of time, at predetermined, strategic intervals, a novelist (or, for that matter, a short story writer, a narrative poet, or a screenwriter or playwright) creates mystery. The mystery, if it is compelling--for example, it concerns an intriguing character, an important conflict, or an unusual theme (or, better yet, all three)--will cause the reader or the viewer to continue to invest his or her time in pursuing the story that he or she is reading or watching.

In horror fiction, after establishing a sense of everydayness and routine, the plot usually introduces a series of bizarre (often, increasingly bizarre) incidents that, at first, appear to have no bearing upon or association with one another. Finally, the protagonist learns the cause of these incidents and, using this newfound knowledge, and usually aided by friends, he or she sets things right, restoring the status quo. This is a simple storyline, but the withholding of key information, whether concerning characters, setting, action, dialogue, conflict, theme, or several of these elements, complicates the action, creating, maintaining, and heightening the suspense that keeps readers reading and viewers viewing. The plot might look like this:

Everyday Routine--> Bizarre Incident 1--> Withholding of Information Concerning Character--> Bizarre Incident 2--> Bizarre Incident 3--> Bizarre Incident 4--> Bizarre Incident 5--> Withholding of Information Concerning Setting--> Bizarre Incident 6--> Withholding of Information Concerning Conflict--> Bizarre Incident 7--> Bizarre Incident 8--> Bizarre Incident--> Bizarre Incident 10--> Discovery of Cause of Bizarre Series of Incidents--> Bizarre incident 11--> Bizarre Incident 12--> Use of Knowledge to Overcome Threat--> Restoration of Status Quo
 

From Story Idea to Story

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

A common question that aspiring writers ask the pros is "Where do you get your ideas?" Stephen King claims he gets his in a little shop in Utica, but the true answer to the question is that he gets his ideas from the same sources as every other writer, aspiring or pro: from dreams, mental images, newspaper headlines, reading, anecdotes told by others, personal observations, song lyrics, classroom lectures, history--the list is all but limitless.

But what one more than likely means, perhaps, to ask by this question is "How do you develop your ideas into stories?" The answer is simple, really: bring together person, place, and thing.

• The person is the story's main character, or protagonist.
• The story's place is its setting.
• The story's thing is its theme.

What brings the three of them together is the story's conflict and the main character's attempts to resolve this conflict, which includes both his reason, or motive for doing.

Another way of= saying the same thing is to say that a writer develops a story idea into a story by answering six questions: who? (protagonist), what? (conflict), when? and where? (setting), how? (resolution), and why? (motivation and theme). Here's an example:

Idea: A girl is possessed by the devil.

• Who? Father Damien Karras, a priest who doubts his faith (protagonist)
• What? fights the devil (conflict)
• When? and where? in a Georgetown townhouse (setting)
• How? using exorcism (resolution)
• Why? to save a possessed girl's soul and retain his own teetering faith in God (motivation and theme).

That's how it's done and why.

(There's a fill-in-the-blank way of developing the scenes of a story, too, which I explain in "The Fill-in-the-Blank Guide to Writing Fiction").

Ironic Settings

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

In my series concerning “How To Haunt a House” and my critical review of the movie The Descent, “A Descent into the Horrors of Extreme Feminism,”  I discuss the symbolic significance of setting as a means of conveying themes. A house can represent its resident’s soul or personality, with various rooms corresponding to aspects of the person: the attic, his or her mind; the kitchen, his or her instincts and appetites; the living room, his or her persona; the basement, his or her unconscious; and so forth. In the movie The Descent, the underground cavern in which the female spelunkers are attacked by subterranean monsters, the cave, I argue, represents the womb, and the monsters represent the fetuses that liberated women have aborted in favor of childless independence from their traditional and, indeed, biological, roles as mothers and wives.

As Nicholas Ruddick points out in Ultimate Island: On the Nature of British Science Fiction, a symbol can involve a long history of philosophical development. The idea of the island as a symbol of insular individual identity followed, he says, the loss first of the geocentric worldview and then of anthropomorphic notions which left each man and woman an isolated subjectivity, or island, as it were, cut off from the mainland, which is representative of the rest of humanity:

The idea of an individual island has become associated with that of the individual psyche, though the metaphor of the insular Self. The decline first of geocentrism and then [of] anthropomorphism as a result of scientific discovery has led to the rise of individualism, the philosophical privileging of existence over essence. . . and [the idea of] a universe in which the human domain seems an insignificant speck--at best an island--in the oceanic immensity of the spatiotemporal macrocosm (56-57).

Symbolism can be far richer than one imagines!

According to the teleological argument, which is also known as the argument from design, the existence of the universe, as a created artifact, implies the existence of a Creator. Natural theology suggests that we can learn of the nature of God, the Creator, from His creation, nature. This theology, unlike that which is based upon divine revelation that includes the doctrine of humanity’s (and the cosmos’) fall from grace, doesn’t explain (or, some might argue, explain away) the existence of evil, but accepts it as part and parcel of God’s creation and as, therefore, in some way, indicative of God’s own nature as well. As Herman Melville’s Queequeg declares, in Moby Dick, “de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin.”

Whether one accepts the portrait (or, possibly, the caricature) of God that natural theology paints, one may apply its insight to the artifacts of human technology: whether microscopes or atomic bombs, the things that we create suggest something about us, their creators. Writers, especially of horror, do well to remember this lesson--and to apply it in their work by consciously and deliberately suggesting the symbolic nature of their central properties, or props, and settings by using them as thematic motifs.

As usual, contemporary writers can take a lesson in doing so from Edgar Allan Poe. The house of Usher (in “The Fall of the House of Usher”) is identifiable with its resident, protagonist Roderick Usher; the fall of the former is also the fall of the latter. Indeed, even physically, the house resembles its resident. According to Walter Evans, the windows of the house are Usher’s eyes, the sedges his mustache, and the white tree trunks his teeth (“‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and Poe’s Theory of the Tale” in Studies in Short Fiction, 14.2).

Poe also uses the wine cellar in “The Cask of Amontillado” to great symbolic effect. Wine is the drink of camaraderie and friendship; indeed, in Christianity, wine is an element of communion, representing the sacrificial blood of Jesus Christ. In Poe’s story, the significance of wine, as represented by the titular cask of Amontillado, is subverted through irony. The libation of friendship becomes the means by which a mad and vengeful Montresor lures his victim Fortunato to his doom.

Appealing to Fortunate’s friendship as much as to his expertise in wine, Montresor succeeds in getting him to follow him through catacombs, where, after expressing concern for Fortunato’s health while plying him with wine (the catacombs are damp, Montresor says, and Fortunato is coughing), the villain walls up his victim alive, leaving him to die. Half a century later, Montresor, in recounting his tale, brags that he has never been caught.

Wine, which normally cements relationships, here helps to destroy a man who was once at least ostensibly a friend. In the story, the Amontillado, it may be argued, thus represents friendship itself, albeit, in this story, friendship more feigned, on the part of the protagonist, anyway, than real.

Poe’s masterful use of irony to undercut symbolic images and motifs enriches his narratives and, indeed, adds a subtle subtext to the story's overt horror. In learning from the masters, contemporary writers of horror can accomplish similar wonders in their own works of fiction.

Theme as the Springboard to a Story's Plot

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Dorothy Gale discovers she's not in Kansas anymore

I usually start my stories with an inciting moment, the point in the action that launches the rest of the narrative forward. (In The Wizard of Oz, the film version of L. Frank Baum’s novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, for example, the story begins when the protagonist, Dorothy Gale, runs away from home, because, had she not done so, she’d have been with Aunt Em, Uncle Henry, and the farmhands in the storm cellar and would have avoided the cyclone that carried her off to her adventures in faraway Oz.)

A story’s inciting moment can be virtually anything. I once had a list of a couple hundred potential inciting moments. A few on this list might have been:

• The protagonist receives a strange package.
• The protagonist makes a spontaneous (and, as it turns out, a poor) decision.
• The protagonist is abducted by strangers.
• The protagonist buys his girlfriend a present different than the one he’d intended to buy for her birthday.
• The protagonist awakens in a strange place, not knowing how he or she got there.

In a previous post, I explain how Edgar Allan Poe wrote his famous narrative poem The Raven backward, by first determining the effect that he wanted to produce (horror) and then determining the details, of plot, tone, setting, and so forth, that would best help him to produce this predetermined effect. This morning, in the wee hours, as I lay half-asleep and half--awake, which is usually when the muse puts in her appearances--I hit upon another way to accomplish this same feat: One can write backward, so to speak, by first determining how the main character will change by the end of the story!

The change doesn’t have to be drastic, although it should be significant. The change may involve in alteration in the protagonist’s aspirations, attitude, beliefs, decisions, emotions, perceptions, reasoning, thoughts, understanding, or values. Whatever type of change occurs, however, it will derive from the experiences that he or she undergoes during the course of the story, and his or her change will constitute a lesson of sorts for him or her. In fact, I often think of the theme of a story as the lesson that the main character learns as a result of his or her experiences.

Looked at backward, so to speak, the story’s theme (the lesson learned, as reflected in the protagonist’s change of behavior) can be the springboard for the narrative’s entire action, a kind of inciting moment in reverse, as it were. In other words, by determining beforehand how the main character will change, a writer can then plot the story’s action in reverse, determining what will make him or her change and what lesson he or she will learn as the result of the experiences that he or she thus undergoes.

Job, in better days

Let’s take the Biblical story of Job (a horror story, if ever there was one) as an example. At the end of the story, Job’s understanding of God increases: Before the story, Job has a simple idea of God as One who rewards good behavior and punishes bad behavior; by the conclusion of the narrative, Job learns that God’s will is inscrutable, or unknowable, and that He must be trusted despite human beings’ ignorance of His ultimate character, or, as Job phrases his newfound knowledge (the story’s theme), “The just shall live by faith.”

Job has not learned the lesson that bad things sometime happen to good people and not just to the bad guys. Therefore, he is puzzled when things go from good to bad for him, and his faith (trust) in God is severely tested. By knowing in advance that Job’s understanding of the nature of God is what will change as he learns his lesson (“The just shall live by faith”), the writer would be able to select the incidents of the plot, including those of the exposition (God points out Job’s faithfulness to Satan during an assembly of the heavenly host which the devil also attends); the inciting moment (Satan is allowed to test Job’s faith); the rising action (the increasingly horrific torments that Job must endure during the testing of his faith); the turning point (Job’s refusal both to curse God and to himself accept blame for the catastrophes that befall his fortune, his family, and himself); the falling action (God’s interrogation of Job out of the whirlwind); and the denouement (Job’s confession of both his ignorance of, and his faith in, God and God’s restoration of Job’s fortune, Job’s family, and Job himself).

By plotting backward, so to speak, from the story’s theme and using it as a sort of reverse inciting moment, the narrative’s sequence of action, including the elements of its plot, can be determined in such a way that this sequence of action will result in the protagonist’s change of behavior and the learning of his or her lesson. In addition, this approach allows the writer to connect plot to character much more closely, perhaps, than he or she might have been able to do had his or her story begun not with the final outcome (the theme of the story, which accompanies or leads to the protagonist’s change in behavior), but with a simple change in the routine of the protagonist’s normal, everyday life. Moreover, this approach helps the writer to ensure that everything that happens in the story is related to the character’s development and change and to his or her recognition of a new truth (the lesson that he or she learns).

Adolescent and Adult Themes

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

In any television series, a few (sometimes, many) episodes will be dedicated to establishing and developing the season’s arc, or the plot’s tangent. The other episodes in the season are often one- or two-part stories. As such, they suggest the types of themes, or topics, that a series of a particular type, directed toward a specific audience, may address. For example, Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, directed at middle-class American teenagers and young adults, deals with themes of interest to such an audience. The series deals with unbridled ambition (“The Witch”), inappropriate adult-teen romance (“Teacher’s Pet”), the demands of duty and their conflict with personal desire (“Never Kill a Boy on the First Date”), the perils of negative peer pressure (“The Pack”), the dangers of young romance (“Angel”), the dangers of Internet dating (“I Robot, You Jane”), child abuse (“Nightmares”), the callous disregard for one who doesn’t measure up to the superficial standards of the clique (“Out of Sight, Out of Mind”)--and these all in the show’s first, shorter-than-normal season!

Although the episodes of horror or fantasy series that are written with an adult audience in mind may take the “monster of the week” approach, featuring a specific type of antagonist weekly or periodically, the episodes of such shows typically don’t deal with a specific concern that their viewers share They are not, in this sense, as didactic as shows oriented toward younger viewers. Instead, the more “adult” shows may seek to unsettle their audiences by suggesting that the world may be quite different than it seems and is generally understood to be and that, beyond the ordinary and the everyday, there may exist extraordinary and mysterious persons, places, and things.

The “Squeeze” episode of The X-Files is a good example, as is the series’ use of the skeptical, empirical Dana Scully as a foil to her more open-minded, experiential partner, Fox Mulder. Although both are Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), each has his or her own investigatory methods.

Scully develops a profile of a suspect in a murder and the cannibalism that followed it (the killer ate the victim‘s liver), and, when, during a stakeout, she captures a suspect, Eugene Victor Tooms, he is subjected to a lie-detector test. Her investigatory methods are typical and routine.

Mulder, however, finds a fingerprint at the scene of a murder, and, using a computer program, matches the print to those that were found at several other murder scenes, and, during Tooms’ polygraph test, he asks several questions that makes his fellow agents doubt the validity of the test, and the suspect is released. The fingerprint that Mulder found is stretched out, which makes Mulder believe that Tooms may be a mutant who is able to elongate his body and who has a longer-than-human lifespan, sustained by his diet of human livers between his thirty-year periods of hibernation. Tooms, Mulder believes, committed not only the current murders but those in 1903, 1933, and 1963 as well.

Mulder’s investigatory methods are both routine (at times) and unusual, to say the least. He helps Scully to research Tooms. They can find neither a birth certificate nor a marriage certificate for the suspect, and the agents meet with a former detective, Frank Briggs, who tells them where Tooms resided in 1903. When Scully and Mulder visit the suspect’s apartment, they find it abandoned. However, Tooms manages to snare Scully’s necklace to add it to his collection of his murder victims’ possessions, which he keeps as souvenirs. Adopting another routine investigatory method, Mulder asks Scully to join him in another stakeout, this time of Tooms’ address, but they are instructed to abandon the surveillance.

Tooms enters Scully’s apartment through the ventilation system, but Mulder arrives in the proverbial nick of time, preventing Tooms from killing his partner, and the agents handcuff the killer. Tooms is subjected to medical tests that show that the killer has abnormal skeletal and muscular systems and an unusual metabolism. The jailed killer smiles when his guard delivers a meal, sliding the tray through the narrow slot in the prisoner’s barred door. Tooms has seen his escape route.

Scully represents the no-nonsense, realistic, down-to-earth, sensible, empirical, and skeptical adult, Mulder the open-minded, curious, even enthusiastic investigator of paranormal and supernatural phenomena who, by his own admission, wants “to believe.” The plots of the episodes play out between the extremes represented by Scully’s relative skeptical empiricism and Mulder’s relative faith and experiential approach to investigating the bizarre cases that seem to fall into his and his partner’s laps. Most adults would tend to side with Scully, seeing the world as largely understood and ordinary. The oddities, aliens, and monsters that appear, week after week, in one guise or another, on the show, however, suggest that Scully’s view may not be altogether effective in explaining some of the more mysterious experiences that he and Scully have or the stranger beings they meet. As Shakespeare’s open-minded Hamlet tells the skeptical Horatio, “There are more things in heaven and earth. . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5, Lines 159-167).

That the world may not be what it seems frightens many adults, the same way that the monsters and villains of Buffy frighten younger audiences. Both series exemplify the uneasiness with which younger and older alike live their lives in stifled fear and trembling, looking, always over their shoulders and toward the ends of shadows, to see who--or what--is casting them.

Horror Comics

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Not only Stephen King, but also Joss Whedon and many other writers of horror fiction cite horror comic books as inspirational to their own work, especially during such writers’ earlier years.

As a youngster, I must confess that I, too, enjoyed these tawdry, garish periodicals. Sold alongside comics devoted to “funny animals,” superheroes, crime detection, Western heroes, romance, and even classic literature, horror comics were the bad boys of juvenilia, the ones that even kids knew weren’t all that respectable and tended to keep separate from their collections of DC and Marvel.

Horror comics were popular, though, no doubt about it, and with millions of others besides King and Whedon. What made them so were blood and gore and monsters, depicted in all their ghastly glory, of course, and the bizarre and macabre stories they told, but, more than anything else, it was the reader’s own imagination that chilled and thrilled him or her (mostly him; girls seemed to prefer romance and comedy titles).

The titles suggested the appeal of these comics: Adventures into Weird Worlds, Astonishing Tales of the Night, Baffling Mysteries, Terror Tales, Weird Monsters Unleashed, Monster Hunters, Tales of Terror, Chamber of Chills, The Haunt of Fear, Stories to Hold You Spellbound, Startling Terror, Weird Chills, Worlds of Fear: these narratives, told as much, maybe more, in pictures than in words, promised to transport the reader into new “worlds” that were “weird,” “astonishing,” “baffling,” and full of horror, suspense, and fear. Gone would be the mundane world of school, chores, church, sibling nuisances and rivals, bullies, and parents telling one what to do, to be replaced with wonder, mystery, adventure, chills, and thrills.

Like many others, horror writers have developed rationales for why people enjoy being scared out of their wits, probably in response to challenges from literary critics and others, demanding a justification for such fare beyond the “art for art’s sake” line. King offers an Aristotelian argument, contending that horror fiction exorcises the demons within the reader by letting him or her (mostly him) play the role of the monster or, at least, seeing the effects of the monstrosity that he himself often feels within, when it is permitted to go unrestrained. They are pleasant, perhaps, all that blood and all those guts, but they are cathartic as well. There is some truth, perhaps, in this Aristotelian explanation.

Whedon also offers a justification for his work, which, more often than not, is steeped in horror. His rationale for horror is along the lines of the argument that Bruno Bettelheim advances in The Uses of Enchantment:

I think there’s a lot of people. . . who say we must not have horror in any form, we must not say scary things to children because it will make them evil and disturbed. . . . . That offends me deeply because the world is a scary and terrifying place, and everyone is going to get old and die, if they’re that lucky. To set children up to think that everything is sunshine and roses is doing them a great disservice. Children need horror because there are things they don’t understand. It helps them to codify it if it is mythologized, if it’s put into the context of a story, whether the story has a happy ending or not. If it scares them and shows them a bit of the dark side of the world that is there and always will be, it’s helping them out when they have to face it as adults (The Monster Book, viii).

There is some truth, too, perhaps, in this explanation.

In previous posts, I have offered my own ideas concerning the reasons for the appeal of horror fiction, so I won’t repeat them here. For those who may be interested, these essays are available in Chillers and Thrillers' massive, ever-growing archives.

Back to the topic at hand, though: horror comics.

As anyone who has ever seen a tyke cowering behind the leg of his or her mother knows, for children, strangers are threatening. This is interesting, I think, because the same toddler who shrinks from a stranger will pick up a snake without the qualms that many an adult shows in handling serpents. As boys, my brothers and I frequently carried box turtles, garter snakes, and frogs with us in our pockets and sought to snare salamanders near a neighbor’s creek, although strangers were regarded as likely demons in human guise. Although, in more recent times, xenophobia has become increasingly politically incorrect, the fear of strangers seems innate, or inborn. Can nature or God be wrong?

Certainly not from the viewpoint of the cowering toddler--or of horror comics. The monster, especially when it is reptilian, insect (the word is both a noun and an adjective, for those who haven’t studied entomology or, for that matter, etymology), or alien (as in extraterrestrial), frequently represents the other who is not only “other” but who is also foreign and, therefore, unknown. Those about whom we have little, if any, knowledge are regarded as threats (it’s better to be safe than sorry) until we learn their intentions and their hearts. This may be a politically incorrect stance, but it’s helped us to survive for millennia and isn’t likely to go away any time soon. Besides, whether the monster in horror comics is equipped with tentacles, a seaweed mustache and beard, bony plates, horns, claws, insect parts, wings, or all of the above or is more human, but repulsive (an animated skeleton, for example, or a rotting, but somehow still living, corpse), it’s apt to be just as terrifying, unpredictable, and dangerous as the children within us have imagined strangers may be.

Like most subjects, horror fiction is divisible into stories about persons places, and things.

If the monster is the person, the setting is the place, and unfamiliar places are regarded with the same wary mistrust as strangers. Who knows what may lie waiting to ambush us in the dark recesses of an underground cave; among the thick, tall trees of an ancient forest; at the bottom of the murky sea; on far-flung, alien planets; or in any of the other fantastic and mysterious worlds promised in the titles of many horror comics and suggested in the artwork that adorns these periodicals’ covers and the pages within?

Things (or artifacts) also appear in horror comics. As anyone who’s watched the hit Syfy TV series Warehouse 13 knows, such artifacts are everywhere, and many are dangerous in the extreme--and Secret Service agents Myka Bering and Peter Lattimer haven’t located and stored them all for safekeeping yet. There are more, maybe many more, out there, waiting, as it were, to injure and maybe even kill the unsuspecting and the uniformed.

The themes of horror comics are often as simple and straightforward as the tales themselves that these publications tell: bad things happen to those who are in the wrong place at the wrong time, a little beauty of the feminine kind can be a dangerous thing (it tends to attract actual monsters as well as human wolves), a little beauty of the feminine kind can be a dangerous thing (it can get a guy killed), beauty (feminine or otherwise) can be seductive in a bad way, curiosity can kill more than just the cat, there’s no age restriction on potential victims as far as homicidal maniacs are concerned, a trusted and seemingly harmless friend (such as a toy) can turn on one, isolating oneself from the rest of the group is dangerous unless one is a lone wolf, religious faith (often in the shape of a cross) can deliver a believer from evil (and otherwise certain death), there are “more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy” (dear Horatio), and creatures of the night are often in need of dental care and a good manicure. Horror comics tell cautionary tales, and there are quite a few to be told. Both King and Whedon admit that just about everything scared or scares them; the same is true of children (and many adults), as horror comic writers and illustrators were fully aware.

A few covers surprise the reader with visual allusions to the occult or classic literature (or, at least, classics of horror). Doorway to Nightmare 2, for example, includes the tarot deck’s Devil card, which features an image of a demon that looks suspiciously like Baphomet, and Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula., and even Cthulhu are frequent guest stars in horror comics.

As mentioned, boys more than girls, read horror comics, and the creators of these publications were aware of the demographics of their readers, which explains not only the sexism of the femme fatale and the seductive siren characters that frequent the pages of horror comics’ storylines but also the scantily clad beauties who grace their covers (usually in the company of a menacing monster). Even when climate or weather or atmospheric conditions do not warrant her doing so, the damsel in distress is likely to be clad in nothing more than a short, clinging dress with a low, low, low-cut neckline; a bikini; or, in some cases, only her birthday suit. Monsters had good taste in (and a hearty appetite for) women, and the imperiled ladies, no doubt, aroused the chivalry (among other things) in the boys who read such fare.

Moreover, the covers seem to issue a challenge to their adolescent male readers: Here is a lady in distress; are you man enough to rescue her? By introducing just a hint of sexuality, horror comics also seemed to prepare boys for a role that they would play as men that has nothing to do with slaying monsters, except that, for boys, women are monsters, an alien species with cooties that may be glamorous and alluring but one that is also something strange and unknown and, therefore, to be feared, until, that is, the humanity beneath the imagined scales and behind the make-believe glowing eyes and razor fangs can be rescued, accepted, known, and, finally, cherished, not only as human but as, indeed, one’s better half.

Team Spirit “Under the Dome”

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Following the riot at Food Town, in which most of the injured are the police themselves, including several of the special deputies who raped Samantha Bushey, Brenda Perkins tries to put into effect the plan to blackmail Big Jim Rennie so as to thwart the selectman’s attempt to jail Colonel Dale (“Barbie”) Barbara on one trumped-up charge or another.

Unfortunately, since neither Julia Shumway, the owner and editor of the local newspaper nor Romeo Burpie, the owner of the largest independent department store in America, are home when she comes to call upon them to hide the incriminating documents that her late husband, former police chief Howard (“Duke”) Perkins had compiled against Big Jim, she entrusts them to Third Selectman Andrea Grinnell. Attempting to kick her addiction to pain pills cold turkey, Andrea is in no shape to deal with such a responsibility. Soon after accepting the documents and agreeing to conceal them, Andrea passes out; when she awakens, she doesn’t remember Andrea’s visiting her.

For her own part, Brenda has hidden the laptop computer upon which her late husband had saved the original, electronic files inside her home safe, and, against the advice of Barbie, she decides to confront Big Jim by herself, accusing him of manufacturing and distributing methamphetamine. For her trouble, she receives death at the murderous hands of Big Jim.

Her belief that “Big Jim would” not “actually hurt her” is, the omniscient narrator points out, in a bit of the foreshadowing with which King’s novel is replete, “a dreadful miscalculation on her part, but understandable; she wasn’t the only one who clung to the notion that the world was as it had been before the Dome came down,” (488) a sentiment that echoes politicians’ own insistence that post-9/11 America is forever different than pre-9/11 America and that, as a result, changes have to be made and personal freedoms must be lost--for the good of the country, of course, just as everything that Big Jim does is (according to him) for the good of the town he governs.

Such a “miscalculation” has dire consequences for Brenda, as it may for Americans in general who, it appears, live “under the dome” of environmental terrorism (and political terrorism): “Brenda Perkins heard a bitter crack, like the breaking of a branch overloaded with ice, and followed the sound into a great darkness, trying to call her husband’s name as she went” (495). She is a damsel in distress, to be sure, but she is one without a rescuer or a defender.

The reader hopes that her fate doesn’t parallel Americans’ own, especially given the numerous parallels that King’s novel draws between current events in the United States (and around the world) and the incidents that occur in his massive story. As always, King’s work is something of a cautionary tale concerning real-world situations and events, many of the latest ones of our own devise. “It may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma,” Edgar Allan Poe, in a technologically and politically less complicated time declared, “which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve.” Let’s hope that the master of the macabre was right.

Under the Dome appears to offer a turning point in King’s understanding of politics, morality, and group dynamics. It seems to be a watershed novel, in which the author deepens and broadens his understanding of the complexities of civilization, culture, and society, no longer assuming the existence of simplistic dualities of Democrat vs. Republican, adult vs. child, or other forms of us vs. them. Watching current events from the relative safety of the Florida Keys seems to have taught him quite a bit about life during the time, “November 22, 2007-March 14, 2009,” that he wrote his latest novel. He’s a better storyteller because of his maturation, because he offers a more balanced perspective concerning the themes he takes up in this volume.

One of the themes of Under the Dome, common to many of King’s novels, is that it takes a village (or at least a group) to defeat the monster. In fact, one of the sections of Under the Dome has as its title “We All Support the Team.” Of course, in a contest, athletic or otherwise, one team must compete against another. In his early novels, the two teams were often heroic children (teens or preteens) and either corrupt, indifferent, or incompetent, usually unaware, adults. It was, consequently, the children who led the way and, usually, the children who defeated the monster.

There is a bit of this thinking in Under the Dome as well, as this exchange between Norrie Calvert, Joe McClatchey, and Benny Drake, who are smoking stolen cigarettes under Peace Bridge, when Norrie spots Brenda Perkins (whose death was recounted ea a couple of pages back but who is, courtesy of the miracle of the flashback, alive and well at the moment and approaching the children’s hideaway):

“Let’s get going,” Benny said.

“We can’t get going until she’s gone,” Norrie said.

Benny shrugged. “What’s the big deal? If she sees us, we’re just some kids goofing around the town common. And know what? She probably wouldn’t see us if she looked right at us. Adults never see kids.” He considered this. “Unless they’re on skateboards.”

“Or smoking,” Norrie added (502).

However, some adults are not only aware of children but also entrust them to accomplish vitally important tasks. Julia Shumway has convinced Joe’s mother to allow him and his friends to deliver a “gadget” that Barbie considers vital to their cause.

In general, in this matter, King appears to have matured as both a thinker and a writer, no longer dividing his fictional worlds into an “us“ against “them,” black-or-white dichotomy of innocence and experience, righteousness and evil, heroes and villains. Instead of an us-children against them-adults, he posits two teams of adults (or four, if one takes Big Jim’s view that “ants,” “grasshoppers,” and “locusts” make up the population of Chester’s Mill: on one side, the team of Dale Barbara, Julia Shumway, the late police chief Howard Perkins and his recently murdered widow Brenda, Romeo Burpie, and others, standing against the team of Big Jim Rennie, Andy Sanders, Pete Randolph, Junior Rennie, the late Lester Coggins, and their followers.

Big Jim explains the situation to Lester, just before killing him:

“Every town has its ants--which is good--and its grasshoppers, which aren’t so good but we can live with them because we understand them and we can make them do what’s in their own best interests, even if we have to squeeze em a little. But every town also has its locusts, just like in the Bible, and that’s what people like the Busheys are. On them we’ve got to bring the hammer down. . . “ (260).

The reader must take Big Jim’s analysis with a grain of salt, perhaps, because, obviously, he is the most corrupt of all the characters in Chester’s Mill. The context of the novel allows one to identify the groups named by Big Jim: the ants are the productive citizens, the hardworking blue-collar folks who produce the goods and provide the services that keeps the town’s economy humming; the grasshoppers are the merchants, entrepreneurs, and financiers who control and regulate the means of production, including human resources, profiting from the goods and services that the working class create; and the locusts are the poor and needy, often emotionally damaged, sometimes drug-addicted or alcoholic citizens who deplete the town’s treasury. In Machiavelli’s terms, the ants and the locusts are the masses; the business owners, the aristocrats; and the governing party (unmentioned by Big Jim except as “we”) are the monarch and his royal “family” and patrons.

Jimi Hendrix, or King’s quotation of the late musician, provides the perspective of Barbie’s team: “When the power of love becomes stronger than the love of power, the earth will know peace.” Barbie, Julia, and Romeo, like Howard and Brenda Perkins, act out of a true concern for justice, liberty, and respect for one’s fellow, all of which values stem, ultimately, from love (for if one has not love for oneself and one’s neighbor, neither justice, liberty, nor respect is likely to be considered of any importance; rather, one is more likely to operate according to the principles of Big Jim and his cronies.)

Big Jim’s understanding of the motivation of high school girls’ basketball clarifies the values he and his team members hold even more than his brief speech to Lester Coggins concerning ants, grasshoppers, and locusts. Big Jim is attracted to girls’ basketball because “young female players are invested in a team ethic that the boys,” being more interested in showing off their skills as individual players, “rarely match” (445). Because of this devotion, “The girls took the sport personally, and that made them better haters,” the omniscient narrator asserts, explaining that they “loathed losing. They took loss back to the locker room and brooded over it. More importantly, they loathed and hated it as a team. Big Jim often saw that hare rear its head. . . .” (446). (One need only recall Georgia Roux cheering on the town’s special deputies as they beat and raped Samantha Bushey to understand what King is describing; bullies often delight in their power to inflict pain and suffering on others and tend to band together as a pack, or “team,” against lone individuals. Corrupt politicians, King seems to suggest, are no different.)
A season-ticket holder, Big Jim frequently attends these games, and, in the process, he has chosen a champion worthy of his admiration:

Before 2004, the Lady Wildcats had made the state tournament only once in twenty years, that appearance a one-and-done affair against Buckfield. Then had come Hanna Compton. The greatest hater of all time, in Big Jim’s opinion. . . .

. . . Hanna had taken the game over with the single-minded brutality of Joseph Stalin taking over Russia, her black eyes glittering (and seemingly fixed upon some basketball Nirvana beyond the sight of normal mortals), her face locked in that eternal sneer that said, I’m better than you, I’m the best, get out of my way or I’ll run you. . . down. . . ( 446-447).

In his portrait of Hanna, whom Big Jim admires as the athlete par excellence, because of the girl’s “out-of-my face ‘tude” no less than for her amazing athletic prowess, King highlights the girl’s arrogance (“I’m better than you, I’m the best, get out of my way or I’ll run you. . . down”) as the key energizing element in her personality; it is this arrogance, or pride, that fuels both her hatred and her drive, and it is one that, sharing with her, Big Jim recognizes and respects. However, as a self-avowed Christian (a confession open to serious doubt), Big Jim should heed the Bible’s declaration that “pride goeth before a fall.”
　

Dust Jacket Plotting

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

If you’re like most people, you find plotting a novel difficult, even with such helps as those I have identified and explained in many previous posts. There can never be enough tips or techniques, it seems, when it comes to making (or trying to make) plotting E-Z. So, here’s another tip: write your synopsis as if it’s the blurb inside the dust jacket of the finished book. Doing so is apt to help you to envision your novel as a finished product. It may also help you to emphasize the promotional aspects of your story, those features which are likely to sell your story to the reader (and, indeed, an editor). In preparation for doing so, you might read a couple of existing blurbs. These will get you into the spirit of things and indicate how to ignite your prospective readers’ interest in your story. Here are a couple, to get you started, followed by one concerning one of my own novels. The first sample is from the book jacket of Stephen King’s Needful Things (1991); the second is from the just jacket of Dean Koontz’s Breathless (2009). Each is superbly written.

Needful Things: The Last Castle Rock Story

With a demonic blend of malice and affection, Stephen King says goodbye to the town he put on the map--Castle Rock, Maine. . . where Polly Chalmers runs You Sew and Sew and Sheriff Alan Pangborn is in charge of keeping the peace. It’s a small town, and Stephen King fans might think they know its secrets pretty well: they’ve been here before. Leland Grant is a stranger--and he calls his shop Needful Things. Eleven-year-old Brian Rusk is his first customer, and Brian finds just what he wants most in all the world: a ‘56 Sandy Koufax baseball card. By the end of the week, Mr. Gaunt’s business is fairly booming, and why not? At Needful Things, there’s something for everyone. And, of course, there is always a price. For Leland Gaunt, the pleasure of doing business lies chiefly in seeing how much people will pay for their most secret dreams and desires. And as Leland Gaunt always points out, at Needful Things, the prices are high in deed. Does that stop people from buying? Has it ever?

For Allan and Polly, this one week in autumn will be an awful test--a test of will, desire, and pain. Above all, it will be a test of their ability to grasp the true nature of their enemy. They may have a chance. . . But maybe not, because, as Mr. Gaunt knows, almost everything is for sale: love, hope, even the human soul. With the potent storytelling authority that millions of readers have come to prize, Stephen King delivers an Our Town with a vengeance, an inimitable farewell to a place his fiction has often and long called home.

This blurb consists of 285 words. Notice that each of its first four paragraphs are of approximately the same length: 63 words, 58 words, 57 words, and 64 words, respectively. At 36 words, the concluding paragraph is a bit shorter. In this short space, the blurb’s author has accomplished a good deal, suggesting the tone (a mixture of “malice and affection”); introducing several characters, including protagonist Sheriff Pangborn and antagonist Leland Gaunt; identifying the setting as Castle Rock, Maine; and establishing the basic conflict, which examines, as its theme, the price that people are willing to pay for the things they want most in all the world. The blurb’s writer has, in the allusion to a famous play, also suggested a comparison between King’s novel and Thornton Wilder’s dark drama of small-town horror. Not bad for 285 words! The blurb suggests the elements that appeal most to prospective readers: intriguing characters involved in an intriguing situation in a familiar location that involves an important theme and is told with flair. Adjectives further indicate what readers will encounter in the novel’s pages: “malice,” “affection,” humor (Chalmer’s shop is named “You Sew and Sew”), the “secrets” of a small town, a mysterious “stranger,” the question of “how much people will pay for their most secret dreams and desires,” and a severe testing of characters.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz delivers a thrilling novel of suspense and adventure, as the lives of strangers converge around a mystery unfolding high in the Colorado mountains--and the balance of the world begins to tilt. . . .

Breathless

In the stillness of a golden September afternoon, deep in the wilderness of the Rockies, a solitary craftsman, Grady Adams, and his magnificent Irish wolfhound, Merlin, step from shadow into light. . . and into an encounter with enchantment. That night, through the trees, under the moon, a pair of singular animals will watch Grady’s isolated home, waiting to make their approach. A few miles away, Camilla Rivers, a local veterinarian, begins to unravel the threads of a puzzle that will bring to her door all the forces of a government in peril. At a nearby farm, long-estranged identical twins come together to begin a descent into darkness. . . . In Las Vegas, a specialist in chaos theory probes the boundaries of the unknowable. . .. On a Seattle golf course, two men make matter-of-fact arrangements for murder. . . . Along a highway by the sea, a vagrant scarred by the past begins a trek toward his destiny. In a novel that is at once wholly of our time and timeless, fearless and funny, Dean Koontz takes readers into the moment between one turn of the world and the next, across the border between knowing and mystery. It is a journey that will leave all who take it Breathless.

At a total of 254 words, the blurb for Koontz’s novel is 31 words shorter than the one for King’s, but Breathless, at 337 pages, is quite a bit shorter than the 690-page Needful Things. In fact, King’s novel is a little more than twice the length of Koontz’s book. The paragraphs of the blurb for Koontz’s novel number 42 words, 62 words, 31 words, 67 words, and 51 words each, respectively. They are not nearly as symmetrical as the paragraphs in the blurb for King’s novel, nor is the information that they impart as specific or clear.

What does the Koontz book blurb accomplish? It identifies the setting, introduces the protagonist and other major characters, suggests a situation of national importance that involves “the forces of a government in peril,” mentions a conspiracy to commit murder, alludes to a movement of mysterious forces, and indicates the narrative’s tone (“fearless and funny”). A bit vague about the details of the novel’s plot, the blurb’s elusiveness underscores the mystery of the forces at work, suggesting that fate may be operating behind the scenes, as it were. As with the King book blurb, the Koontz book blurb also uses adjectives to pinpoint the elements to which readers are known to respond: “mysterious,” “singular,” “isolated,” “unknowable,” “scarred,” “timeless,” “fearless,” and “funny.”

These blurbs are not the full-fledged synopses that editors will want to see when they are deciding whether to green light publication, of course. Their objective isn’t to summarize the entire plot of the novels they represent, but to pitch the basic storylines to prospective readers who are willing to read two or three hundred words to get an idea of what the book they hold in their hands may offer. A full-fledged synopsis will run 15 pages or more. Nevertheless, these blurbs are good starting places for writers faced with the task of plotting the basic idea for their latest (or, for that matter, first) novel. They supply such prerequisites of plotting as protagonist, antagonist, setting, conflict, tone, and theme. They seek an appealing means of orienting the writer’s storyline to readers’ interests.

Here is a blurb for my own first novel Saturday's Child:

Although Crystal Fall, her not-so-secret admirer David Lewis, and their friends Fran Newell and Dee Dee Dawkins crack jokes and behave in the silly manner characteristic of teens across America, what’s happening at their alma mater, Edgar Allan Poe High School, in southern California is no laughing matter. Their new principal, Dr. Snyder, has introduced changes, both to the school’s curriculum and to the way things are done at Poe, none of them good. For example, he not only lengthens the school days to twelve hours, but he also institutes Saturday school. Once open, the campus is now closed. In fact, it has become more like a prison than a school, with the patrol officers, or “trolls,” as the students call them, guarding the campus and surveillance cameras everywhere--even in the locker rooms and restrooms. An odd dress code is imposed, governing even students’ choice of underwear. Strange, whispered messages are repeated all day in the music piped through the school’s public address system. Students are compelled to eat in the school cafeteria, and a secret ingredient has been added to their food. A student health clinic is planned, wherein hypnotized students will receive mental health evaluations--and brain implants. If the new administration wins, personal freedom will be lost forever, and Crystal and her friends will become the first of an army of brain-dead public servants in a new world order. And the odds seem stacked against the teens, for Principal Snyder is backed by top government officials with unlimited resources, including an endless supply of funds and military forces. But the teens are willing, even at the cost of great personal sacrifice, or even death, to take back their school, and Crystal and her friends have a secret ally: God is on their side!

My blurb numbers 295 words: 48 (paragraph one), 87 (paragraph two), 64 (paragraph three), and 96 (paragraph 4), so the lengths are a bit uneven. Perhaps the text can be shortened a bit without losing the hoped-for appeal of the blurb to prospective readers. The relative lengths, in words, indicate where chopping may best take place: the second and last paragraphs are rather longwinded in comparison to the other two. As a rough draft, though, my novel’s blurb accomplishes the same sorts of things as those for King’s and Koontz’s books. Like their books’ blurbs, mine sets the tone; introduces the major players, including both the protagonist and the antagonist; identifies the basic conflict, implying that it is significant; establishes the setting; and suggests the story’s theme. As a means of getting the novel’s basic outline down on paper in a compelling fashion, it’s a pretty good way to kick-start one’s imagination and get the creative juices flowing. Such a synopsis, although far from the level of detail that a publisher would require, also allows one to expand upon the basic storyline, adding details to fill out the plot, develop the characters, describe the setting, maintain the tone, expand the conflict, and convey the theme. Not bad for fewer than 300 words.

Quick Tip: Connect the Nouns

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

In school, we’re taught that a noun is a word that names a person, place, thing, quality, or idea. In a scene, a writer should connect each of these types of nouns to one another so that, together, they create a unified effect: Person = Character Place = Setting Thing = Property (“Prop”) or Figure of Speech Quality = Atmosphere or Emotion Idea = Theme. Here’s an example, courtesy of Bentley Little’s novel The Vanishing:

It was a muggy day in Manhattan [place], and Kirk [person] spent most of it in his apartment [place], sitting in his desk chair listening to the stack of CDs [thing] he’d bought the day before. But, by late afternoon, even he was tired of sitting on his ass. His mom had just returned from a two-week trip to France, and he’d promised to stop by and see her, so he took a shower, put on some clothes his parents wouldn’t find too offensive and made his way uptown to their building. He was happy [quality] to see his mother again. It was embarrassing [quality] to admit, but he’d missed her. Mama’s boy, he chided himself [idea].

This approach makes even a short paragraph seem as if it is telling a story. Little uses this technique frequently in the course of his novels, the scenes reading like anecdotes, or miniature stories, which serve other such purposes as characterizing his characters, developing atmosphere, expressing mood, developing conflict, locating action, and expressing themes, while, at the same time, both individually and collectively, they move the greater narrative forward. It’s a sound approach, built upon connecting words that refer to persons, places, things, qualities, and ideas.

Discerning Meaning, or The Theme of the Story

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

One of the skills that we learn fairly early in our academic careers is how to spot the key idea of a passage such as a paragraph, an essay, or a book. Often, these passages are of non-fiction prose. We learn to look at the beginning of the paragraph, the chapter, or the book for a topic sentence, an introductory paragraph, or a foreword or preface. In shorter passages, we learn that the main idea may also be presented at the end of the paragraph. Seldom will we find it in the middle of the paragraph, however, because what is written first and last are emphatic, and what is presented between these two parts of the whole tends to get somewhat lost in the shuffle, as it were.

We also learn, eventually, to decipher such literary texts as short stories, novels, and poems. But, in doing so, we are taught to consider not any particular sentence or even any specific part of the work so much as the whole of the story, the novel, or the poem, for in the literature of the imagination, we learn, the meaning is in the whole, and not the parts. Fiction (and drama) ask us to fathom the meaning of an entire experience. Therefore, before we can interpret the significance of such a work, we must first summarize it. Then, we must consider the cause and effect of the experience, which is represented, in the literary work, as action or what we sometimes call the storyline.

Ask yourself what are the cause and the effect of each of the following storylines?

Father Damien, a priest, exorcises a preadolescent girl named Reagan MacNeil (The Exorcist).

Beowulf, a Geatish warrior, slays Grendel, a troll that has been terrorizing Danes (Beowulf).

Carrie White, an abused telekinetic girl, avenges herself against her mother, high school bullies, and her hometown (Carrie).

If you can answer this question, you will not only be able to understand what you read but there’s a good chance that you will also be able to write intelligible fiction.

To damn Father Damien, a doubting priest (cause), the devil possesses Reagan; the priest’s recovery of his faith, borne of his desire to deliver the girl, results in Reagan’s deliverance and Father Damien’s victory (effect). Theme: Love conquers doubt.

A man of valor, Beowulf slays Grendel (and his mother) (effect) to gain immortality through fame and to establish a bond with a foreign king (cause). Theme: Great deeds bring lasting fame.

Carrie’s mother, a religious fanatic, does a poor job in preparing Carrie for life in the
real world (cause), and, when her high school’s bullies take their harassment too far, Carrie is unable to cope and seeks vengeance through violence (effect). Theme: As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.

Stock Situations Useful to Horror Fiction

Copyright 2010 by Gary L.Pullman

Oral storytellers invented stock situations--sets of circumstances that could be used over and over again, perhaps with some tweaking, throughout a story or among different stories of the same cycle or genre. Many of these situations continue to be used by today’s storytellers. Some are especially fruitful for horror writers. In this post, I identify a few.

One of the earliest of these stock situations might be called the taming of the brute. The early part of The Epic of Gilgamesh recounts how a prostitute tamed the wild man Enkidu, who, after he was bested in single combat by Gilgamesh, became friends with the epic poem’s protagonist, accompanying him, much as Iolaus accompanied Hercules, on his feats of derring-do. The taming of the beast is the main plot of Beauty and the Beast, as it is of King Kong. More often, this storyline makes up only a part of the greater story, and it may be treated ironically. The scientist’s attempt to befriend the alien plant in The Thing, for example, not only endangers the other researchers at the arctic outpost that the creature attacks but is, as it turns out, the death of the scientist himself. (As I point out in a previous article, fairy tales, in general, form the basis of many horror stories; Stephen King himself points to Cinderella as having been, in part, the inspiration for his first novel, Carrie.)

The locked box (or locked room) situation is as old as the ancient Greek myth about Pandora and the story of Blackbeard the pirate. It was used recently in the movie Skeleton Key, starring Kate Hudson. Stories in which other objects--or, for that matter, persons or places--are forbidden are also examples of this stock situation.

The invaded community situation is as old as Beowulf, in which the Danes’ Heorot hall is invaded by the maraudering Grendel and Peter Benchley’s Jaws, in which a great white shark attacks swimmers off the coast of the beachfront town of Amity or even The Exorcist, in which the devil invades the MacNeil’s Georgetown residence and, indeed, Regan’s body. (Of course, the prototype of the invasion plot is Satan's invasion of Eden!)

In the ancient Greek myth that bears his name, Pygmalion attempted to create what he regarded as the perfect woman, an idea that Mary Shelley revised in her novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, in which Victor von Frankenstein attempts to create, if not the perfect man, at least a male human being fashioned of the body parts of various corpses, a stock situation put to a different use in the campy flick The Rocky Horror Picture Show. This same situation occurs, but with a female resuming the place of honor as the creation, in the movie Bride of Frankenstein, in which the scientist tries to honor his monster’s desire for a main squeeze and again in “Some Assembly Required,” an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which a younger brother tries to assemble a girlfriend for his once-dead older brother, whom he pieced together earlier. Likewise, the Buffy episode in which Warren Mears creates a robotic girlfriend, April, for himself. It might even be argued that the Arnold Schwarzenegger series of Terminator films make use of the man-made man or man-made woman stock situation that was introduced, perhaps, in the ancient Pandora myth.

The taming of the brute, the lost box or room, the invaded community, the man-made man or woman, and the man-made beast are all examples of stock situations which continue to be used (and reused) in horror fiction. By identifying the situations that recur in short stories, novels, and movies, you can add others to your list and, as a result, have a readymade source of storylines to adapt to your own storytelling purposes.

Quick Tip: Narrative Reversals

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

 

Most readers and writers know about plot twists, which usually result from situational irony--setting up an expectation that is later resolved in a manner different from that which one is led to believe is likely. However, writers can, and sometimes do, also upset expectations regarding other elements of fiction, such as character, conflict, setting, and theme. A character who is established as self-centered and self-serving can turn out to be capable of being altruistic and humane, as Han Solo, of Star Wars, turns out to be. A conflict that seems likely to end in only one way can end in an unexpected manner, as the conflict between Gone With the Wind's Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler does; all the way to the end of the novel, Rhett is interested in winning the heartless Scarlett’s heart, and, when he finally seems to get his own heart’s desire, well, “frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” he tells her. A setting that appears to be dangerous can turn out to be a refuge, as Spike’s crypt is for Dawn when she is being hunted by the goddess Glory (Buffy the Vampire Slayer). The opposite can be true, too: a character who seeks sanctuary in a church can find that the holy place is a place of danger, as Nightcrawler does in the X2: X-Men United movie, only to be tracked down and captured by Jean Grey and Storm. A theme can also be inverted through irony. The apparent theme of a story can be provided, perhaps through the dialogue or the habitual behavior of a character, only to be reversed at the end of the narrative or drama. At the outset of Gran Torino, Walt Kowalski, a racist war hero, avoids young people, members of ethnic and racial groups, religious people, and anyone else who does not measure up to his narrow standards of propriety until he rescues a young Hmong woman from black gang members who seem intent upon raping her. The movie’s theme, which seems to be that it is best to mind one’s own business, adopting an everyone-for-himself philosophy, turns out to be one that affirms the importance of brotherly love and self-sacrifice.

Quick Tip: Theme As Lesson

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

The theme of a story is frequently defined as the point, meaning, or moral of the story, the lesson that the story imparts, explicitly or (more often) implicitly. This definition is true enough, and helpful, but I prefer to think of the story’s theme as the lesson that the main character, or protagonist, learns as the result of his or her experience as this experience is related in the story.

For example, the theme of The Wizard of Oz, which Dorothy Gale learns as a result of her being whisked off to Oz, encountering the enchanted land’s various residents, and defeating the Wicked Witch of the West, is “There’s no place like home.” The theme of The Exorcist is similar to that of the book of Job, that true faith in God persists despite the existence of evil and human suffering. The theme of ‘Salem’s Lot is that, by banding together, a community can defeat a force far greater than any single individual.