Reading, Writing, and Plotting

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Other writers won’t write your stories for you, of course, any more than they’re apt to outline a plot for you. It’s challenging enough to do so for oneself, after all. However, a careful reading of a writer’s paragraphs and a little brainstorming can suggest storylines to readers which can then be developed into full-fledged plots.

 

Let me demonstrate, using paragraphs from the first chapter of Dean Koontz’s novel, Odd Hours, which, its flyleaf informs readers, is about “a fry cook named Odd” who’s “rumored to have the extraordinary ability to communicate with the dead.”

 

This paragraph, the fifth of the opening chapter, itself sounds like the opening paragraph of a novel’s first chapter:

Overnight, according to the radio, an airliner had crashed in Ohio. Hundreds perished. The sole survivor, a ten-month-old child, had been found upright and unscathed in a battered seat that stood in a field of scorched and twisted debris.

The dramatic situation described by this paragraph raises many questions, the answers to which could well start a reader on the way of becoming a writer of a story involving such a child.

 

Although some of the questions that this situation suggests are obvious, your answers to them need not be: Why was the airliner over Ohio? What had been its itinerary? What caused it to crash? How many “hundreds” actually “perished”? Who were these passengers? Were there any famous persons aboard? If so, why were they flying on this route? What business were they conducting? Whom were they meeting? Why did the child survive when “hundreds” of other passengers “perished”? Is the child a boy or a girl? Why was the child “unscathed” after being involved in such a horrendous crash? Was some power--perhaps God--looking out for the child? If so, why? Was the child to have been given a mission in his or her later life? Were aliens involved in the crash? Monsters? Demons? Psychotic killers? Terrorists? Government agents? Military personnel? (Incidentally, Koontz did write a psychological thriller called Sole Survivor.) 

 

This paragraph, number six in the first chapter of Odd Hours, could also start the first chapter of its own novel:

Throughout the morning, under the expectant sky, low sluggish waves exhausted themselves on the shore. The Pacific was gray and awash with inky shadows, as if sinuous sea beasts of fantastical form swam just below the surface.

Imagine that the “sea beasts” are more than the effects of odd shadows; imagine that they are real. Why do the “sea beasts” have a “fantastical form”? Did they suffer bizarre birth defects? Are the biologically engineered? Are they specimens from another planet? If so, how did they come to inhabit Earth’s oceans, and why? Where are they going, and why? Does anyone know of their existence? If so, who? If not, why not? Will they be discovered? If so, how, and by whom? If not, why not?

 

Paragraphs seven and eight of the same chapter could also open the first chapter in a separate novel:

During the night, I had twice awakened from a dream in which the tide flowed red and the sea throbbed with a terrible light.

As nightmares go, I’m sure you’ve had worse. The problem is that a few of my dreams have come true, and people have died.

The red tide seems to allude to the flood of blood in the story of Moses’ confrontation with Pharaoh, as told in the book of Exodus. Is this allusion intentional? If so, what is its significance to the current story? If not, what caused the red tide? What is the “terrible light” with which “the sea throbbed”? What is it origin? What is its purpose? Who is the narrator and why does he have prophetic dreams? In which ones did people die? Who were these people, how did they die, and why did they die?

 

The next paragraph could also head its own opening chapter in a completely different novel:

While I prepared breakfast for my employer, the kitchen radio brought news that the jihadists who had the previous day seized an ocean liner in the Mediterranean and were now beheading passengers.

Answers--especially unexpected ones--to similar questions could generate a storyline that could be developed into a full-scale plot for a novel about these jihadists and the forces which are assembled to defeat them. (Remember to use the journalists’ favorite questions: Who? What? When? Where? How? Why? You may also want to add How many? Or How much? Answers to these questions tend to cover the basic elements of any story and can, therefore, help you to devise a good basic storyline as a basis for a fully developed plot.)

There are several other paragraphs in the first chapter (and others) of Odd Hours, but the point has been made: a careful reading of a writer’s paragraphs and a little brainstorming can suggest storylines to readers which can then be developed into full-fledged plots.

 

Koontz’s opening chapter also demonstrates another technique for creating an interesting situation, through characterization, via action, narration, and dialogue, that becomes a springboard to producing interesting storylines. Initially, the novel’s protagonist (who also happens to be its first-person narrator) seems like a likeable, if rather pedestrian, run-of-the-mill kind of guys whom everyone knows as an acquaintance, friend, neighbor, brother, nephew, or son, the male equivalent of the girl next door: wholesome, shy, perhaps a bit naïve. He has a sense of humor and an engaging manner, and he sounds altogether rational and sane--at first. However, as he continues to chat, readers soon discover that he is not as he seems. There is something not quite right about his patter, something a little off about his chitchat, something a bit eerie, in fact, about his conversation. Here’s an example of this technique:

My experience at the Pico Mundo Grill served me well. If you can make hash browns that wring a flood from salivary glands, fry bacon to the crispness of a cracker without parching it, and make pancakes as rich as pudding yet so fluffy they seem to be at risk of floating off the plate, you will always find work. At four-thirty that afternoon in late January, when I stepped into the parlor with Boo, my dog, Hutch was in his favorite armchair, scowling at the television, which he had muted. . . .

I left by the front door, through which Boo had already passed. The dog waited for me in the fenced yard. An arched trellis framed the gate. Through white lattice twined with bougainvillea that produced a few flowers even in winter. I closed the gate behind me and Boo passed through it as for a moment I stood drawing breaths of the crisp salted air. Boo and I followed the concrete boardwalk. He was a German shepherd mix, entirely white. The moon traveling horizon to horizon moved no more quietly than did Boo.

Everything seems perfectly ordinary, even idyllic, and the reader is likely to like Odd, thinking him the very epitome of normality--until he informs the reader that

Only I was aware of him, because he was a ghost dog.

The everyday topics about which Odd has been chatting, his demeanor, and the reaction of his employer, to whom he’d been speaking before going for a walk with his dog, like the physical description that he offers of his canine companion’s breed, coloration, and quiet walk, all make the reader think of Odd as being quite as sane as Boo is real. It’s something of a shock, then, to discover that he believes not only in ghosts but in a “ghost dog” that accompanies him everywhere he goes! An even greater shock is in store for the reader, however, as Odd now divulges a secret that may cause his confidant, the reader, to suppose Odd to be not merely eccentric, but mad:

I see the spirits of dead people who are reluctant to move on from this world. In my experience, however, animals are always eager to proceed to what comes next. Boo was unique.

His failure to depart was a mystery. The dead don’t talk, and neither do dogs, so my canine companion obeyed two vows of silence.

The shock is almost and eerie as powerful as the one that results from reading Theodore Kaczynski’s treatise, “Industrialism Society and Its Future,” in which the Unabomber demonstrates impeccable logic, despite his dubious assumptions, until the moment that he writes, in as matter of fact a tone as he has used throughout his essay and continues to employ after his astonishing confession, in laying out his arguments as to why industrialism is destroying American independence and individual freedom: “In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we've had to kill people.” This technique--having a narrator of apparently sound mind abruptly say something that leaves no doubt that he is insane after speaking in a normal manner at some length about everyday topics--could launch an entire novel. In Odd Hours, however, Koontz chooses literally to mean what Odd Thomas says: the short-order cook isn’t mad; he really does see dead people.

 

The next time you pick up a horror novel, by Koontz or anyone else, apply the principle we’ve outlined in this article. Carefully, read the writer’s paragraphs and do a little brainstorming to imagine storylines that you can then develop into full-fledged plots.

Modern Monsters

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

“We have seen the enemy, and he is us.” -- Pogo

Before Christianity, paganism supplied humanity’s monsters. Initially, many were hybrids of wild animals and humans, among which were the centaur, the harpy, the lamia, the mermaid, the minotaur, the satyr, and the Sphinx. Most of them represented natural forces.
Christianity contributed the devil and his legions of lesser evil spirits, the demons.

Now that Christianity and other worldwide religions are in eclipse--in agricultural and progressive nations, at least--writers of horror fiction have had to find their monsters elsewhere.

Science has been a major source of modern horror fiction’s nightmarish creatures. Other worlds have supplied writers with menacing demons, extraterrestrial diseases, and a variety of paranormal threats including clairvoyants, telekinetic travelers, time travelers, homicidal cyborgs, and rampaging robots.

Psychology has also been a source for many of the inner demons that haunt the world of the self. Sigmund Freud contends that modern monsters are aspects of ourselves which we have, as it were, cut off and cast out. They are embodiments, in other words, of those elements of ourselves that we repress.

As a species, we have gone from the Other as a duality of the bestial and the human to the Other as a supernatural seducer, tempter, and deceiver to the Other as the rejected elements of a would-be self--from natural to supernatural to psychological. In the process, the monster has gone from the general to the specific.


Edgar Allan Poe showed us the way, substituting the madman for the demon, ghost, vampire, werewolf, or other paranormal or supernatural threat. However, there is another source for the modern monster: the Self--or, rather--the wannabe Self which we repress. At first, such a source might seem too finite for the task we have set it, which is nothing less than that of being the maker of all things destructive, menacing, destructive, evil, and lethal. We need not worry, however, about whether our supply of monsters will peter out. There are as many inner demons as there are individual men, women, and children.

Just the list of inner demons which have found expression as objective Others in the work of Stephen King suggests the breadth of the range of possibilities for such embodiments of iniquity. His novels have depicted demons of child abuse and religious fanaticism (Carrie), narcissistic self-indulgence and hypocrisy (Needful Things), alcoholism and psychosis (The Shining), spousal abuse (Rose Madder), adultery (Cujo), government abuse of its citizenry (Firestarter), and a host of other Others.

To develop the modern monster, one must become adept at seeing the repressed Other in oneself and in other people, for, today, the repressed is the monstrous.

Two clues are rationalization and hypocrisy. We want to be perfect, even though we know that we are not, and cannot be, without fault. Therefore, we tend to deny what is obviously true to others about behaviors which we may do but certainly not want to admit that we do them.

Instead, we lie to ourselves about our behavior, make excuses for our conduct, and deny that we have acted in anything but an admirable and proper manner. What we would condemn in others, we accept, or even celebrate, in ourselves. By identifying behaviors which we rationalize or would condemn in others but approve in ourselves, we can identify the inner demons both of ourselves and others.

Ghosts: An Endangered Species?

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Figure 1. Double exposure

Source: The Skeptic's Dictionary

For various reasons, from humanity’s earliest days, the spirits of the dead, or ghosts, are alleged to have visited the living. Some return to avenge the murder, other to warn loved ones of impending catastrophes, and still others to assuage guilt so powerful that it has survived the grave. If one can believe the stories associated with ghosts, they have haunted everything from ancient graveyards and medieval castles to modern mansions and hotels. Short story writers, novelists, and screenwriters would have their readers and audiences believe that some ghosts have a sense of humor while others are somber, indeed. They have appeared in literary works as diverse as William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, H. G. Wells’ “The Red Room,” Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, Mark Twain’s “A Ghost Story,” Stephen King’s The Shining and Bag of Bones, and Dean Koontz’s Odd Thomas. Ghosts have appeared as guest stars, so to speak, in such movies as Topper, Poltergeist, Beetlejuice, Ghost Busters, The Sixth Sense, The Others, An American Haunting, and many others, and in episodes such television shows as The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Bewitched, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Ghost Hunters. There’s no doubt about it: ghosts have not only been reported throughout history, but they have also enjoyed plenty of airtime. The virtual omnipresence of ghosts is curious when one considers that such entities may not actually exist. Although men and women who believe in the existence of ghosts offer such evidence for their existence as eye-witness reports, photographs, electronic voice phenomena, abrupt temperature drops, and sudden increases in electromagnetic radiation, this evidence can be explained without reference to the entities that are supposed to cause them, which makes the actual existence of ghosts questionable at best.

Since the beginning of time, people have claimed to have seen ghosts, and believers in the existence of spirits of the dead declare that so many people couldn’t be deceived or lying in providing eye-witness testimony. It does seem likely that some--perhaps many--such eyewitnesses really do believe that they have seen ghosts. Seeing isn’t believing, though, or shouldn’t be. Scientists regard eyewitness testimony, or anecdotal or testimonial evidence, as they prefer to call it, as being notoriously unreliable. In “anecdotal (testimonial) evidence,” an Internet article concerning such evidence, Robert T. Carroll points out that “anecdotes are unreliable for various reasons,” including the distortion that occurs as accounts are told and retold, exaggeration, confusion regarding “time sequences,” “selective” memory, misrepresented “experiences,” and a variety of other conditions, including the affect upon their testimony that “biases, memories, and beliefs” have. Carroll also suggests that gullibility, “delusions,” and even deliberate deceit also make such testimony “inherently problematic and usually. . . impossible to test for accuracy.”

Most people who investigate reports concerning the presence or appearances of ghosts also seek to photograph them. It has been said that cameras do not lie, but the problem with photographic evidence is that it is easy for photographers to doctor film. In his Internet article concerning “spirit photography,” James Randi gives an example of a rather crude attempt by some spiritualists to fool folks into believing they’d captured the apparition of the deceased author of the Sherlock Holmes short stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, as himself a spiritualist, was a frequent focus of “spook-snappers” who “claimed to summon him up after his death in 1930.” The problem, Randi says, with their evidence is that it is “apparently a cut-out of a reversed photo placed in what appears to be cotton wool”; otherwise, the spirit photograph “agrees in detail, lighting, and expression with the original” photograph of the Doyle which was taken in the author’s “prime” (“spirit photography”). In other words, the photograph is a fake. A favorite technique among those who create fake spirit photographs, Carroll points out, is the “double exposure,” an example of which appears on the article’s webpage (see Figure 1). A double exposure occurs when the same film is exposed to first one, and then another, object, with the result that the image of the second object overlays or overlaps the image of the first object; both images appear to have been photographed together, at the same time and in the same place. However, pictures of supposed ghosts sometimes result from the photographer’s own incompetence or “natural events,” rather than deliberate deceitfulness, Carroll concedes, including

various flaws in camera or film, effects due to various exposures, film-processing errors, lens flares (caused by interreflection between lens surfaces), the camera or lens strap hanging over the lens, effects of the flash reflecting off of mirrors, jewelry. . . light patterns, polarization, [or] chemical reactions.

When deliberate deceit occurs, photographers may also use graphic art software or computer graphics software to deliberately manipulate photographs that are uploaded from the camera, into a computer.

If neither eyewitness testimony nor photographs prove the existence of ghosts, perhaps electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, do so. A sophisticated term for tape-recorded voices, EVP demonstrate the presence of ghosts, some contend, since sensitive instruments have recorded the disembodied voices of apparitions. However, as Carroll indicates, in his Internet article, “electric voice phenomenon,” skeptics point out that such sounds may not be voices at all, but may be nothing more than the results of “interference from a nearby CB [citizen’s band radio] operator or cross modulation”--one radio station transmitting over another station’s broadcast. Likewise, EVP may be nothing more than a listener’s interpreting “random noise” as the statements of a disembodied voice or voices. In the same Internet article, Carroll cites the explanation for this tendency by Jim Alcock, a psychologist: “When our brains try to find patterns, they are guided in part by what we expect to hear. . . . People can clearly ‘hear’ voices and words not just in the context of muddled voices, but in a pattern of white noise in which there are no words at all.” It seems that, for these reasons, EVP is just as problematic as the proof of ghosts’ existence as eyewitness reports and photographs have been shown to be.

Perhaps the abrupt drop in temperature that some ghost hunters have both felt and recorded will prove more convincing evidence of the existence of the spirits of the dead. According to an anonymous “paranormal researcher,” who writes, in answer to a question posted on Yahoo! Answers, it is believed that such “cold spots” result from ghosts’ draining of energy sources, such as electricity, as a means to produce sounds or to speak. Supposedly, the energy they draw from the environment heats their own energy, but this heat is then dissipated by the sound effect the ghost produces with this borrowed energy. Neither this researcher nor any other seems able to explain how a disembodied spirit--that is, an entity that has no lips, teeth, tongue, vocal cords, or lungs--can speak, even if it does help itself to ambient energy sources. Once again, Carroll finds such evidence to be less than persuasive. In his Internet article, “ghost,” he notes that “many people report physical changes in haunted places, especially a feeling of a presence accompanied by temperature drop and hearing unaccountable sounds” and agreeing that such people “are not imagining things,” he, nevertheless, discounts the notion that ghosts are responsible for these phenomena. Instead, he says,

Scientists who have investigated haunted places account for both the temperature changes and the sounds by finding physical sources of the drafts, such as empty spaces behind walls or currents set in motion by low frequency sound waves (infrasound) produced by such mundane objects as extraction fans.

Sudden increases in electromagnetic radiation is “produced by such things as power lines, electric appliances, radio waves, and microwaves,” Carroll observes, in his Internet article “EMF (EMT).” Therefore, he adds, the idea that ghosts somehow cause such radiation seems unlikely, and, indeed, “some think that electromagnetic fields are inducing the haunting experience” (“ghost”).

Occasionally, as a Halloween feature, some newspapers or television shows spotlight a supposedly haunted house. The ghostly phenomena are described, and then a natural explanation is provided for each of the supposedly supernatural elements of the tale. One such account, by Cathy Lubenski, appeared under the title “When your house has spooks, who are you going to call” in The San Diego Union-Tribune. Her story included reports of slime oozing from walls, cold spots, lights flashing on and off, doors opening by themselves, knocking inside walls, foul odors, and howling. Were one living in a house in which such phenomena were occurring, it might well seem that the residence was indeed haunted. Instead, each of these phenomena had a natural cause, not a supernatural origin. The slime was from a bee’s nest in the attic; the cold spots resulted from an air-conditioner unit’s return airflow; the stench was an effect of dead rats in the wall and trapped sewer gas; the howling was the wind, blowing down a vent. Philosophers advise people to adopt the principle of Occam’s razor, which says, essentially, that one should never consider more possible causes than the number that are necessary to explain why something happens. As Carroll points out, “Occam’s razor is also called the principle of parsimony,” and “it is usually interpreted to mean something like ‘the simpler the explanation, the better’” or “as most people would put it today, ‘don’t make any more assumptions than you have to.’” To demonstrate the principle, Carroll offers this example: “[Erik] Von Däniken could be right: maybe extraterrestrials did teach ancient people art and engineering, but we don't need to posit alien visitations in order to explain the feats of ancient people.” Therefore, according to Occam’s razor, one should not attribute “art and engineering” to the human intelligence and ingenuity that men and women develop as the result of their evolutionary, genetic and environmental inheritance. The same applies, of course, with respect to ghosts. The fact that eye-witness reports, photographs, electronic voice phenomena, abrupt temperature drops, and sudden increases in electromagnetic radiation that have been cited as evidence for the existence of ghosts can be explained without reference to these supernatural entities, making which are supposed to cause them makes the actual existence of ghosts questionable at best. Therefore, one can conclude that it is more likely that ghosts do not exist than to suppose that they do. Nevertheless, some are likely to believe in them because they add mystery to the everydayness of ordinary life, they suggest that there is some sort of existence after death, and they make interesting literary and dramatic characters that enliven short stories, novels, and movies. Likewise, they are convenient symbols of such emotional and psychological states and experiences as guilt, the memory of traumatic past experiences, and of actual historical events. In the sense that human beings are, to some extent, products of their own previous experiences and of historical affairs, they are haunted, after all--by the ghosts of their pasts.

Works Cited

Carroll, Robert. "anecdotal (testimonial) evidence." The Skeptic's Dictionary. 23 Feb 2009. 22 May 2009 http://www.skepdic.com/testimon.html.

---. "electronic voice phenomenon (EVP)." The Skeptic's Dictionary. 23 Feb 2009. http://www.skepdic.com/evp.html.

---. "EMF (EMR)." The Skeptic's Dictionary. 23 Feb 2009. 22 May 2009 http://www.skepdic.com/emf.html.

---. "ghost." The Skeptic’s Dictionary. 23 Feb 2009. 22 May 2009 http://www.skepdic.com/ghosts.html.

"I believe spirits use energy to communicate with us. But which energy sources?." Yahoo! Answers. 2009. Yahoo!. 22 May 2009 http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080819160007AAjvMQ7.

Lubenski, Cathy. "When your house has spooks, who are you going to call." The San Diego Union-Tribune 29 Oct 2000: C6. Print.

Randi, James. "spirit photography." An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural . 2007. James Randi Education Foundation. 22 May 2009 http://www.randi.org/encyclopedia/spirit%20photography.html

Characterization via Emotion

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Characterization operates by means of depicting emotion. Literary characters are, in fact, embodiments of emotion. Some emotions may be negative, either in the sense that they are unpleasant or in the sense that they cause problems, personal, social, or otherwise. Emotions can also be positive because they are pleasant or because they alleviate or resolve problems, personal, social, or otherwise.

Characters’ responses to incidents--that is, their feelings concerning events--motivate their actions. In other words, characters are often reactive: they respond to internal or external stimuli. Internal stimuli are their own attitudes, beliefs, desires, fantasies, hopes, thoughts, and, of course, emotions, such as fear, love, and self-respect. External stimuli are persons, places, things, qualities, and ideas that elicit characters’ passions, and can include threats, money, beauty, and death.

The overall, consistent pattern which underlies and is discerned in an individual’s behavior over an extended period of time suggests his or her basic personality traits and causes him or her to be regarded as just, wise, kind, ruthless, arrogant, vain, or whatever. However, many lesser, secondary traits also comprise most fictional people at any time of his or her literary life.

Hamlet is driven by his sense of duty to avenge his murdered father, but he is also hesitant, wanting to make sure that he acts justly in killing his father’s true killer--if, indeed, his father was killed, as the spirit who alleges to be the ghost of his father contends the late king was. These traits are the primary ones that motivate Hamlet, both to act and to refrain from acting. Therefore, he can be said to be a dutiful and just, but hesitant, character. In short, we might regard him as being a man of valor.

His antagonist, who is also his uncle and his step-father, King Claudius, is shown to be cold, calculating, and unrepentant, and he is driven by lust, both for power and for sex, having married Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, shortly after Hamlet’s father died. Therefore, Hamlet can be read as a dramatization of a conflict between these two sets of emotions: Hamlet’s dutifulness, justice, and hesitation collide with Claudius’ coldness, calculation, unwillingness to repent, and lust for power and sex.

Horror fiction is primarily about fear, but its characters are motivated by other emotions as well. Beowulf’s hero wants to prove his mettle as a warrior. Although The Exorcist’s Father Damian Karras has begin to doubt and, perhaps, to lose his faith, he remains a man of God who loves humanity, as it is represented in the possessed soul of young Regan MacNeil, enough to risk his own life in an attempt to exorcise the devil’s victim. Many of Stephen King’s characters are motivated by their need to bond and by their need to belong to a community, or by brotherly love, one might say.

Not only the protagonists of horror fiction are motivated by their emotions; their antagonists are as well. In Beowulf, the monstrous outcast, Grendel, attacks the Danes because he envies their camaraderie. In The Exorcist, the devil possesses Regan in an attempt to get Father Karras to renounce his faith and thus be damned. Many of King’s villains (‘Salem’s Lot’s Barlow, Andre Linoge in Storm of the Century, and the protean monster of It, for example) prey upon the weaknesses of small communities and their residents, motivated by their narcissistic desire to perpetuate themselves. The emotional conflicts in Beowulf, The Exorcist, and ‘Salem’s Lot can be represented this way:

Valor vs. Envy
Love vs. Condemnation
Brotherly Love vs. Narcissistic self-perpetuation

By motivating your characters to act according to their passions, you will make your fiction seem more realistic, and you will show what’s at stake, on a personal level, as it were, in the struggle between the story’s protagonist and antagonist. The nature of the struggle, in turn, may suggest your stories’ themes. For example, The Exorcist suggests that love casts out condemnation, just as Beowulf implies that valor vanquishes envy and King's novels indicate that brotherly love is more important than narcissistic self-perpetuation.