Quick Tip: Think BIG

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Imagine a confederation of banshees, demons, ghosts, monsters, vampires, werewolves, witches, and zombies with a single goal to unify them against a town, a region, a country, or even the world. Now, you’re thinking BIG. Your scope is large--huge, in fact--with regard both to the numbers (and types) of characters your story (or, more likely, your series of stories) and your setting will include.

You’re talking a novel here, at least, or a whole sequence of novels--chronicles, you might decide to call them. You need a title for them, though, which not only suggests the commonality among the books but also sounds cool, as in elevated or grand: The Chronicles of Mayhem might serve your purpose. Perhaps the federation of monsters could call themselves “Mayhem” as their collective name.

Now, you’re rolling! Or not. Maybe you think this idea, whether for a single, stand-alone novel or for a series of book-length stories, is lame. That’s okay. I wasn’t trying to sell you on the idea of The Chronicles of Mayhem per se; rather, I was showing you a way to think big, to enlarge the arena of your imagination so that it encompasses a whole town, or region, or country, or planet and any number of antagonists. You can people your novel or series with whatever characters tickle your fancy and set it wherever you like. It’s your story (or stories), after all.

The point is that, to think big, you have to, well, think BIG.

But once you have decided on your characters and your setting, you can enhance your plot by introducing intrigues among different characters or groups of characters, developing romantic interests and triangles, establishing allegiances and feuds, and so forth. You have enough characters and a setting big enough in scope, now that you have thought BIG, to encompass all these plot angles and twists and more. You can write on an epic scale.

Taking the Scenic Route

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Clayton Tunnel

Would it be more difficult to imagine horror when you are seated amid luxurious surroundings on a clear and sunny day than it might be if you were you crawling, knee deep, through a slime pit, in the fading dusk, with unknown animal noises all around you?

Mysterious settings are keys to creating narrative or dramatic suspense. When the actual surroundings in which one is writing are not only mysterious, but also eerie, they’re a pretty good inspiration for scary fiction.

Why not find someplace off the beaten track, go there, alone, and drink in (or absorb, as by osmosis) the bad vibes; let them chill you, thrill you, and become a part of you, as you let your imagination run wild.

If you don’t have a heart attack, you’ll probably come away with an idea (and maybe a dozen of them) for a spooky chiller or an uncanny thriller.

With the economy the way it is, getting away to, say, the catacombs or your favorite bat-filled cavern may be too dear a journey to make. That’s where your Internet service provider’s images browser can be of assistance. (I prefer Yahoo!, but several others are probably as good.)

Type in the would-be destination of your choice, and, with the click of your mouse button, you’re there. Describe what you see, as well as you can, but don’t merely describe it. See it. Hear it. Feel it. Smell it. If possible, taste it.

Let the scenes depicted in the photographs become one with you, as you become one with each of then in turn. Imagine that you are a character in a story. Why are you there, in the catacombs or the bat-filled cavern, by yourself? How did you get there? What happens to you? (Whatever it is, it has to be horrible or horrific, if you’re writing a horror story.) What happens next?

Stanley Hotel

Similarly, actual horrors sometimes become connected to a place, and the place to which these horrors are connected can itself inspire tales of terror. For example, Charles Dickens is believed to have based his eerie, supernatural short story “The Signalman” on the 1861 Clayton Tunnel crash, and a night as a guest in the Stanley Hotel near Estes Park, Colorado, gave Stephen King much of the material that he needed to write his novel The Shining. “It was like God had put me there to hear that and see those things. And by the time I went to bed that night, I had the whole book in my mind,” he said.

By taking the scenic route, as it were, and merging your consciousness with your surroundings (as they are depicted in the photographs and in your descriptions of them), and imagining that you are your protagonist, your antagonist, or another of your characters, you will create, for your reader, the same suspense and fear, the same horror and terror, the same panic and certainty of doom as you yourself feel.

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.

Horror Masters

Free of charge, at Horror Masters , such authors as Mary Shelley’s (Frankenstein), Bram Stoker’s (Dracula), Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, William Beckford, Horace Walpole, Hans Christian Andersen, Louisa May Alcott, Honoré De Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Charlotte Brontë, Lord Byron, George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wilkie Collins, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nikolai Gogol, Bret Harte, Leigh Hunt, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Washington Irving, Charles Lamb, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Matthew Gregory Monk, George Macdonald, Niccolò Machiavelli, Herman Melville, Charles Perrault, Thomas De Quincy, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Harriet Stowe, Jonathan Swift, William Makepeace Thackeray, Mark Twain, and many others.

On this same site, you will also find, absolutely free, works by L. Frank Baum, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Willa Cather, G. K. Chesterton, Sir Winston Churchill, Christabel Coleridge, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Lord Dunsany, Eugene Field, E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ellen Glasgow, Oliver Goldsmith, Maxim Gorky, H. Rider Haggard, Edward Everett Halle, Thomas Hardy, O. Henry, William Hope Hodgson, William Dean Howells, W. W. Jacobs, Henry James, M. R. James, Franz Kafka, Jerome K. Jerome, Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, Arthur Machen, Katherine Mansfield, Guy De Maupassant, Brander Matthews, A. Merritt, John Metcalf, Edith Nesbit, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Damon Runyon, Saki, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson, Frank R. Stockton, Leo Tolstoy, H. G. Wells, Edith Wharton, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and W. B. Yeats.

There are non-fiction stories, novels, novellas, short stories, poems, early and late Gothics, and such categories from which to choose as “Classic Horror,” “Dark Stuff,” “Ghost Stories,” “Horror History,” “Monsters,” “Occult,” “Psychos,” and “The X-treme,” which includes “Decadent Traditions in Horror,” including works by the Marquis de Sade, Giovanni Boccaccio, and others.
Stories are listed both by writer and by title. You’ll find names as familiar as your own and altogether unknown, but the creator Horror Masters has compiled a huge list of winners, and they’re absolutely free!

Formulating Horror Fiction

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

To formulate horror fiction, ask four simple questions:

Who or what is under attack?
Who or what is attacking it?
How is he, she, they, or it being attacked?
Why is he, she, they, or it being attacked?

Turn each question into one word:

Who or what is under attack = victim
Who or what is attacking it = antagonist
How he, she, they, or it is being attacked = technique
Why it is being attacked = motive (or cause)

Now, flesh out the sentence; for example, here is the storyline for The Exorcist:

To effect Father Karras’ damnation (motive), the devil (antagonist) possesses technique of attack) Regan MacNeil (victim).

Here is the storyline for A Nightmare on Elm Street:

To avenge his murder (motive), Freddy Krueger (antagonist) invades the nightmares of (technique of attack) the children of the parents who murdered him (victims).

The plot storyline for ‘Salem’s Lot:

To feed (motive), vampires (antagonists) bite (and kill) (technique of attack) the townspeople of ‘Salem‘s Lot (victims).

Notice that this formula describes the storyline from the antagonist’s point of view. This is good, because it identifies the villain’s purpose, or motive, in attacking his, her, or its intended victims and the technique that the villain uses to do so. However, stories are written from the protagonist’s point of view, not that of the antagonist. Therefore, once you’ve identified the antagonist’s motive, technique of attack, and intended victims, you need to turn the angle from which the storyline is being viewed around, so to speak, so that you are seeing it from the hero’s or the heroine’s point of view. In other words, the protagonist is now the doer of the deed (and, therefore, the subject of the sentence), the deed is the action of the story (and, therefore, the verb of the sentence), and the antagonist is the person or the thing upon which the action is performed (and, therefore, the direct object of the sentence). His or her motive can be supplied in an introductory infinitive phrase:

To rescue Regan MacNeil (motive), Father Karras (protagonist), exorcises (method of attack) the devil (antagonist).

You’ve identified the main character, his or her motive, the victim, and the villain, and you’ve related them through the action that the protagonist performs upon the antagonist. Applying the same technique, you can reorient other storylines from the antagonist’s to the protagonist’s point of view. Occasionally, when there is more than one motive, protagonist, action, or antagonist, you might have to extend the sentence to express the storyline more fully, as is done with regard to the storyline for ‘Salem‘s Lot.

To survive (motive), Nancy (protagonist) captures (method of attack) Freddy Krueger (antagonist).

To protect humanity (motive), Ben Mears (protagonist) returns to ’Salem’s Lot and kills (methods of attack) vampires (antagonist).

By first starting with the plot as it appears from the antagonist’s point of view, you will be clear as to the villain’s motive, method of attack, and intended victim. By then switching the perspective from which you view the story’s events, you are clear as to the protagonist’s motive, method of attack, and antagonist

You can now combine these two perspectives into a single, comprehensive depiction of the storyline:

To effect Father Karras’ damnation, the devil possesses Regan MacNeil, but Father Karras rescues her by exorcising the fiend.

To avenge his murder, Freddy Krueger invades the nightmares of the children of the parents who murdered him, but Nancy survives by capturing him.

To feed, vampires bite (and kill) the townspeople of ‘Salem’s Lot, but Ben Mears returns to save humanity by killing the vampires.

Of course, these storylines are but the bare bones of a fully developed plot. However, they do give you a framework--a skeleton--upon which to build by asking pertinent questions related to each element (the protagonist’s and the antagonist’s respective motive, method of attack, and intended victim):

Protagonist

Who is he? Father Karras. Who old is he? Middle age. What is he (occupation)? Catholic priest. What are his strengths of character? He is compassionate, honest, humble, or teachable, and persistent. What are the flaws in his character? He doubts his faith. Why does he want to rescue Regan? Obviously, it is the right thing to do. However, Karras’ protective impulse would be likely to be activated by Regan’s plight, as an innocent child abused by an evil power. In addition, by exorcising the devil, Karras might be able to silence, or even eliminate, the doubts that plague him concerning his faith in an all-powerful and loving God.

The same sort of questions can be asked regarding the antagonist of your story. Concerning the antagonist of The Exorcist, questions might include:

Antagonist

Who is he? Is he Satan? Some other demon or group of demons? What are his strengths of character? He is intelligent, strong-willed, and persistent. What are the flaws in his character? He is full of hatred, dishonest, unscrupulous, treacherous, cruel, and unredeemable evil. Why does he possess Regan? Primarily, by giving evil a face--and that of an innocent young girl--and tormenting her cruelly so that she suffers horribly, the devil hopes to get Father Karras to renounce his faith in God so that he will be damned to hell. His possession of the girl is primarily a means to this end, although he enjoys corrupting and degrading her and causing the girl‘s mother grief and emotional anguish as well simply because he is evil and sadistic.
Why does the devil select Regan as his victim?

Victim

What makes Regan attractive to the devil as a victim? Her youth? Her innocence? Why is the victim a girl, rather than a boy? Is a girl a more sympathetic character? She is physically weaker and, perhaps, more emotionally vulnerable (or is likely to be perceived to be such, at least, by much of the audience), and the devil’s deep, masculine voice, speaking through her, will seem more perverse and unnatural, heightening the effect of horror. Also, Father Karras feels guilty for having (he feels) abandoned his mother, a female. Regan is also a helpless female, even more vulnerable than the priest’s aged mother, because she is a child.

In this manner, you build up your plot and characters. You could use the same method to develop the plots and characters in the other stories, A Nightmare on Elm Street and ‘Salem’s Lot, or any other novel or motion picture. (victims).

Notice that this formula describes the storyline from the antagonist’s point of view. This is good, because it identifies the villain’s purpose, or motive, in attacking his, her, or its intended victims and the technique that the villain uses to do so. However, stories are written from the protagonist’s point of view, not that of the antagonist. Therefore, once you’ve identified the antagonist’s motive, technique of attack, and intended victims, you need to turn the angle from which the storyline is being viewed around, so to speak, so that you are seeing it from the hero’s or the heroine’s point of view. In other words, the protagonist is now the doer of the deed (and, therefore, the subject of the sentence), the deed is the action of the story (and, therefore, the verb of the sentence), and the antagonist is the person or the thing upon which the action is performed (and, therefore, the direct object of the sentence). His or her motive can be supplied in an introductory infinitive phrase:

To rescue Regan MacNeil (motive) Father Karras (protagonist), exorcises (method of attack) the devil (antagonist).

You’ve identified the main character, his or her motive, the victim, and the villain, and you’ve related them through the action that the protagonist performs upon the antagonist. Applying the same technique, you can reorient other storylines from the antagonist’s to the protagonist’s point of view. Occasionally, when there is more than one motive, protagonist, action, or antagonist, you might have to extend the sentence to express the storyline more fully, as is done with regard to the storyline for ‘Salem‘s Lot.

To survive (motive), Nancy (protagonist) captures (method of attack) Freddy Krueger (antagonist).

To protect humanity (motive), Ben Mears (protagonist) returns to ’Salem’s Lot and kills (methods of attack) vampires (antagonist).

By first starting with the plot as it appears from the antagonist’s point of view, you will be clear as to the villain’s motive, method of attack, and intended victim. By then switching the perspective from which you view the story’s events, you are clear as to the protagonist’s motive, method of attack, and antagonist

You can now combine these two perspectives into a single, comprehensive depiction of the storyline:

To effect Father Karras’ damnation, the devil possesses Regan MacNeil, but Father Karras rescues her by exorcising the fiend.

To avenge his murder, Freddy Krueger invades the nightmares of the children of the parents who murdered him, but Nancy survives by capturing him.

To feed, vampires bite (and kill) the townspeople of ‘Salem’s Lot, but Ben Mears returns to save humanity by killing the vampires.

Of course, these storylines are but the bare bones of a fully developed plot. However, they do give you a framework--a skeleton--upon which to build by asking pertinent questions related to each element (the protagonist’s and the antagonist’s respective motive, method of attack, and intended victim):

Protagonist

Who is he? Father Karras. Who old is he? Middle age. What is he (occupation)? Catholic priest. What are his strengths of character? He is compassionate, honest, humble, or teachable, and persistent. What are the flaws in his character? He doubts his faith. Why does he want to rescue Regan? Obviously, it is the right thing to do. However, Karras’ protective impulse would be likely to be activated by Regan’s plight, as an innocent child abused by an evil power. In addition, by exorcising the devil, Karras might be able to silence, or even eliminate, the doubts that plague him concerning his faith in an all-powerful and loving God.

The same sort of questions can be asked regarding the antagonist of your story. Concerning the antagonist of the Exorcist, questions might include:

Antagonist

Who is he? Is he Satan? Some other demon or group of demons? What are his strengths of character? He is intelligent, strong-willed, and persistent. What are the flaws in his character? He is full of hatred, dishonest, unscrupulous, treacherous, cruel, and unredeemable evil. Why does he possess Regan? Primarily, by giving evil a face--and that of an innocent young girl--and tormenting her cruelly so that she suffers horribly, the devil hopes to get Father Karras to renounce his faith in God so that he will be damned to hell. His possession of the girl is primarily a means to this end, although he enjoys corrupting and degrading her and causing the girl‘s mother grief and emotional anguish as well simply because he is evil and sadistic.
Why does the devil select Regan as his victim?

Victim

What makes Regan attractive to the devil as a victim? Her youth? Her innocence? Why is the victim a girl, rather than a boy? Is a girl a more sympathetic character? She is physically weaker and, perhaps, more emotionally vulnerable (or is likely to be perceived to be such, at least, by much of the audience), and the devil’s deep, masculine voice, speaking through her, will seem more perverse and unnatural, heightening the effect of horror. Also, Father Karras feels guilty for having (he feels) abandoned his mother, a female. Regan is also a helpless female, even more vulnerable than the priest’s aged mother, because she is a child.

In this manner, you build up your plot and characters. You could use the same method to develop the plots and characters in the other stories, A Nightmare on Elm Street and ‘Salem’s Lot, or any other novel or motion picture.

Imagining the End

Copryright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

This is the end, my friend,
Of all our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
I’ll never look into your eyes again, the end. . . .

-- The Doors

In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Edgar Allan Poe argues that the end of a story so important that it should be imagined before any of the story is actually written and that all incidents of the plot and other narrative details should drive inexorably toward this predetermined ending (without it being obvious, of course, to the reader).

Hollywood directors apparently believe that the means must justify the ends, too, as it were, and, to this end, more than a few have devised alternate endings to the same story. Wild, wooly Wikipedia, which seems to have an article on virtually everything, although some articles are more reliable than others, and some are fairly unreliable altogether, features an essay concerning these endings, including a list of many of the films that include them.

According to Wikipedia, an alternate ending is one “that was planned or debated but ultimately unused in favor of the actual ending.”

Some of the examples of these endings, courtesy of the same source, are:

1408: . . . Mike Enslin dies in the fire he causes. At his burial, his wife is approached by the hotel manager, offering his personal belongings. She refuses, and he lets her know that her husband did not die in vain. Back in his vehicle he listens to the tape recorder, and screams in fear as he sees Enslin’s burned deformed body in his back seat for only a moment. The film closes with an apparition of Mike Enslin still in 1408, muttering to himself, and finally exiting the room, hearing his daughter's voice. . . .

The Astronaut's Wife: When Spencer is killed, Jillian is not possessed by the alien. Instead, she moves out to the country. Sitting beneath a tree, looking up at the stars, she tunes her radio to the same signals Spencer was receiving while possessed by the alien--her twin babies controlling her movements from inside the womb, listening--and waiting. . . .

The Butterfly Effect: Evan watches a home video of his mother pregnant with him and returns to the memory of himself as a fetus. Convinced that his very existence has ruined the lives of those around him, he strangles himself with his umbilical cord and dies, stillborn. This “Director’s Cut” ending is much darker than the theatrical ending, where he simply stops himself from becoming friends with Kayleigh.

I could go on (and on), but it’s not my purpose, really, to discuss alternate endings per se or to give an exhaustive list of examples of them. My purpose is to discuss such endings as a means of devising plots that are not predictable.

For an alternate ending to serve the purpose I suggest, though, it would have to be more of a departure than the ones exemplified in Wikipedia.

Quick Tip: Vilifying Villains

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

In popular fiction, including horror, it is to the writer’s advantage to make his or her villains despicable so that readers will despise them. In other words, it behooves writers to vilify their villains.

Normally, this feat is accomplished fairly easily. One need only show the antagonist, monster or otherwise, do something that is so utterly atrocious that readers refuse to sympathize with him, her, or it.

As human beings, we want to sympathize with others. We would prefer to like them, but, if we are unable to do so, we would, at least, like to understand them, for understanding others, even those who are cruel and evil, humanizes them.

That which is inhuman is more than merely frightening; he, she, or it is terrifying, largely because he, she, or it is altogether alien. What is totally strange and unknown is also unpredictable, and the unpredictable is terrifying.

Some deeds, by their very nature, put those who do them in the Totally Other, or Alien, category. We cannot sympathize with them, and we refuse to identify with them; they are inhuman. They are monsters. Their despicable deeds make them so.

Genres other than horror also sometimes make their antagonists inhuman and, therefore, monstrous. The Western Tombstone begins by depicting a band of outlaws’ slaughter of a wedding party, including the bride and groom--and the priest who was to marry them. From the outset, audience members regard them as fiends in human form and are rooting for Wyatt Earp to destroy them.

Usually, stalking, harming, and, especially, killing an innocent, such as a faithful canine or feline companion or, worse, a child will automatically put the perpetrator of such a crime on the readers’ most wanted list. Stephen King adopts this tactic in many of his novels; IT and Desperation are good examples. William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist is another.

The brutal beating or rape of a woman also suffices to render a villain beyond contempt. King employs this stratagem in Rose Madder, and Dean Koontz favors it in many of his novels. Likewise, in the Clint Eastwood film Sudden Impact, even Dirty Harry lets the killer of her sister’s rapists off the hook when she takes the rapists to task with a bullet to the groin, followed by a second to the brain.

Vilifying the villain has another benefit for writers, too. After an antagonist’s inhuman deeds has rendered him, her, or it monstrous, readers will support virtually anything the hero or heroine does to the villain, including torture, for such a fiend, they will believe, deserves whatever befalls him, her, or it. Some deeds bring not only retribution, but also vengeance with a vengeance, so to speak. Think of Hitler. What punishment would have been too harsh in repayment for the horrors he inflicted upon millions? Or Ted Bundy. Was electrocution too light a penalty for what he did to all the women he tormented and killed?

Vilifying the villain allows writers to up the intensity of the action and, when payday finally comes, the price that he, she, or it is forced to pay at the hands of the protagonist-become-avenger.