Learning from the Masters: Louis L'amour

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

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

Louis L'Amour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discovering the Elements of Fear

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Would you be afraid if you were alone in an isolated cemetery at night? Perhaps, if there were also a full moon, you might be a little anxious? After all, you are alone. You are on your own. No help is available--no police, no rescue personnel, no paramedics. You are isolated. There is no one near. No one to come to your aid or even to hear you scream (should you scream). The full moon is bright, but it, too, is distant and its light, rather than comforting or reassuring, seems eerie. It illuminates shadows, but it is not bright enough to light up the night.

The preceding paragraph is not intended to set the mood of a scene. Instead, it is meant merely to identify elements of a setting which could be the bases of such a paragraph or passage and to suggest why these elements might be frightening. Notice the commonality among them: the external, natural object or phenomenon (an isolated cemetery, darkness, a full moon) are linked to emotional states (fear, anxiety, distress). With this in mind, this analysis might lead to a passage such as this:

The sun had set, and a slight breeze stirred the leaves on the few scraggly trees that stood sentinel over the headstones and crypts of the isolated rural cemetery. High in the darkness of the sky, a full moon leered down upon the graveyard. The darkness seemed to press down upon Kim as if it were a heavy, hostile thing, a force that meant to crush her, and the absolute silence of the distant city of the dead was unsettling.

Kim felt not merely alone; she felt lost, wraithlike, as if she were herself the ghost of one of the corpses interred within the neglected, overgrown grounds. There was nothing to fear. She knew that--and, yet, she was afraid. She was terribly afraid. Her isolation was total. There was nothing and no one for miles in any direction. If she should fall or lose her way, if thugs were to happen along and discover her--or, worse, if the dead were to rise; if revenants were to return; if--she laughed at the
absurdity of these ideas, born as they were of unreasoning emotion, of blind fear akin to panic.

She’d meant for her laughter to dispel the sense of panic that had risen within her, for no reason, but the sound of it seemed raucous and forced, strained somehow, and false. It was anything but heartening.

Nor was the light of the moon, for it was not bright enough to light the night; its radiance did nothing more than to show the shadows of furtive things darting and scurrying among the gravestones and crypts.

Rats? Wolves? Worse, nightmarish things? Kim’s imagination suggested several creatures possible, if at all, only in hell. It had been a mistake to come here alone, she thought, especially at night. It had been a mistake to come here at all.

Somewhere in the darkness, among the graves, a twig snapped. Or a bone. Or a spine. Kim froze, staring wide eyed, straining to see, to hear, to think.

Clouds obscured the moon, and the darkness of the night was complete.

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.

Quick Tip: Writing Means Reading

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

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

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

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

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

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

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

Developing Your Ability to Write Description

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Unlike scripts and screenplays, all short stories and novels depend upon their writer’s ability to write convincing descriptions. One might think of description as the equivalent of the writer’s motion picture camera. By describing what a character or narrator perceives, the writer shows his or her reader what is to be seen, just as he or she also provides whatever other sensations the reader perceives, whether sounds, smells, tastes, or tactile sensations. The world is delivered to us by our senses. Therefore, to deliver the fictional world to the reader, the writer must appeal to his or her senses. Description is visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile.

Description not only sets the scene, but it can create a mood. It can set the story’s tone. It can even suggest the story’s theme.

To develop your writing ability, study the masters of the art of descriptive writing. Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, and, of course, William Shakespeare can teach anyone a few hundred tricks of the trade, but one should study all the writers the read, especially, perhaps, those whose work--particularly whose descriptions--they most enjoy.

Nothing can replace a study of the masters of description, but a few principles for effective description can be offered:

1. Analyze the elements of perception. For example, what do we mean when we say that we “see” something? What are the elements of vision? Intensity, color, texture, distance, shape, size, contrast, density, perspective--all of these and more are elements of the visual experience.

2. Learn the principles of composition. You’re not a visual artist, you say? Oh, but you are! You may not sketch or paint or sculpt, but you create word pictures, or images, and, therefore, you should know about such elements of composition as line, shape, color, texture, direction, size, perspective, and space. You should also know how to use such principles of composition as proportion, balance, harmony, orientation, negative space, color, contrast, rhythm, geometry, lighting, repetition, perspective, viewpoint, unity, the rule of thirds, the rule of odds, the rule of space, simplification, the limiting of focus, symmetry, the centering of focus, the movement of the viewer’s eye, and others to their best advantage in achieving your narrative purpose.

3. Learn the elements and principle of mise en scene, which term refers to the placement and treatment of all the elements which are to appear before the motion picture camera, including the elements of the setting, properties (props), actors, costumes, and lighting. Although, as a writer of short stories or novels, you won’t be filming a movie, the more you know about how other artists, whether they are set decorators, directors, illustrators, painters, photographers, advertising artists, or sculptors, create, the better you will be able to develop your ability to write descriptions.

4. Use non-verbal communication to communicate; in other words, learn how to communicate through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch as well as language. There’s a great scene in the “Bad Girls” episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which the slayers Buffy and Faith enter a dark alley splashed with crimson. Darkness suggests death, and crimson, blood. On a nearby construction sawhorse, an amber caution light flashes. There is no need for dialogue, music, or sound at all, and if these elements re present, I certainly don‘t remember them. However, the viewer understands immediately that something dangerous is about to happen, and, sure enough, within moments, Buffy and Faith are attacked by a band of vampires. The symbolic use of color communicates on an unconscious, almost subliminal level, thereby enhancing the effect of fear that the scene evokes. For a masterful use of non-verbal communication in a short story, read Chillers and Thrillers’ article concerning Bran Stoker’s masterpiece of terror, “Dracula’s Guest.”

5. Use metaphor, simile, symbolism, allusion, and other rhetorical devices to suggest figurative meanings and to enrich your narrative by supplying psychological, philosophical, sociological, or theological associations and themes. A story that has depth is likely to be both more rewarding and more memorable than one that does not. In fact, it is such depth that makes classic stories classics. There are reasons that Hamlet and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are likely to outlast the popular plays and novels of the moment, and one of those reasons is narrative and thematic depth.

6. Determine your scene’s purpose before you write it, and use your purpose as a means of evaluating and revising your description. Descriptive writing makes fiction immediate and emotional, but its should also help to advance your narrative purpose. Is the scene meant to evoke a powerful emotion? Is its intention to present a conflict? To introduce a new character? To provide an explanation or to supply background information? Is the purpose of the scene to plant a clue or a red herring? Is the scene meant to introduce or develop a subplot?

7. Revise, revise, revise. A functional scene isn’t good enough. It should be the most interesting and best written scene of which you are capable. Consider how rewriting the scene could improve it. What detracts from the effectiveness of the description? Would a different perspective add interest? Could the characters do something more exciting while they’re getting the point across? Again, study the masters and see how and why their scenes and descriptions are interesting and dynamic.

8. Use your web browser’s image search engine to access online images or visit actual physical locations, and then describe them. A picture of an eerie cemetery will help you to describe an eerie cemetery. Painters and illustrators paint and draw from life; the least a writer can do is to describe what he or she sees on a computer screen or, for that matter, in the real world. Charles Dickens’ short story of horror and terror, “The Signal-Man” may have been inspired by the Clayton tunnel crash of 1861; its setting resembles the actual location of the crash. Motion picture directors usually take full advantage of natural settings, too, dispatching location scouts to find appropriate and dramatically effective filming locations. Short story writers and novelists can do the same, and many have.

9. Study great descriptive writers and learn from their techniques; make sure you include poets among the writers you study. Yes, we mentioned this a couple of times already; we’re mentioning it again. That’s how important it is. Some critics and instructors advise writers to avoid the use of adjectives and adverbs in writing descriptions, but even a cursory study of great writers, whether classical or popular, shows that successful authors have used, and do use, such modifiers in their descriptions (check the examples below). While it’s probably a good idea to be judicious in selecting and employing adjectives and adverbs, there’s certainly no reason to avoid them altogether. When a critic’s or an instructor’s advice runs counter to the actual practice of established writers, go with the writers’ practice, over the critic’s or the instructor’s recommendations, every time.

10. Practice, practice, practice!

We promised you a couple of examples.

Here’s one, from Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”:

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me--upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain--upon the bleak walls--upon the vacant eye-like windows--upon a few rank sedges--and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees--with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium--the bitter lapse into every-day life--the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart--an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it--I paused to think--what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion,
that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down--but with a shudder even more thrilling than before--upon the re-modelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

Here’s a second, from Bradbury’s “The Sound of Thunder”: notice, in particular, his masterful use of metaphors and similes:

It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker's claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory, and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body those two delicate arms dangled out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys, while the snake neck coiled. And the head itself, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted easily upon the sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like daggers. Its eyes rolled, ostrich eggs, empty of all expression save hunger. It closed its mouth in a death grin. It ran, its pelvic bones crushing aside trees and bushes, its taloned feet clawing damp earth,
leaving prints six inches deep wherever it settled its weight. It ran with a gliding ballet step, far too poised and balanced for its ten tons. It moved into a sunlit arena warily, its beautifully reptile hands feeling the air.

Making a Scene

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

The scene is the building block of the short story, the novel, or the screenplay. It features one or more characters; a conflict; dialogue, interior monologue, stream of consciousness, or some other representation of the character’s or characters’ thoughts and feelings; and, like the full-fledged story of which it is a part, a scene has a beginning, a middle, and an end that is developed climactically; and the scene advances a larger, specific purpose, such as developing the narrative’s overall plot, introducing an important character, intensifying suspense, complicating the story’s basic conflict, introducing or developing a related subplot, characterizing an important character, delineating the setting, and so forth.

In horror stories, whether in print or on film, the scene also usually (but not always) communicates something terrifying, horrific, or repulsive. What Edgar Allan Poe advises, in “The Philosophy of Composition,” concerning the short story (or narrative poem) as a whole applies also to the scene: it must be carefully plotted, with the single, unifying effect that is to be created in mind from the start, and everything in the scene should lead to the development of this effect. In short, one must know one’s purpose in writing the scene--what he or she means to accomplish by it--before putting pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard. One must remember to connect one scene with the next through a series of cause-and-effect relationships. One scene, in other words, must logically lead to the next, and it, in turn, must lead to the one after it, and so forth, throughout the story. There mist be a reason, or purpose, for each scene. Otherwise, irrelevancies and confusion will be introduced into what, otherwise, might have been a meaningful and intelligible, perhaps even gripping, story.

In fact, whether the writer also happens to be an illustrator or not, he or she can make some rough pictures, similar to the sketches that make up a film’s storyboard, to indicate the scene’s basic purpose, structure, and Storyboards: What Are They? offers tips for storyboard construction that could aid writers in developing story scenes. The website’s article reduces the process to six steps:

1. Think of your story as a video.
2. In your first frame show an overview of your primary setting. Let the setting help communicate the point you want to get across or the mood you want to set.
3. Make frames that show the 5 W’s. [These elements are identified as the scene’s “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” and “why” elements.]
4. Identify the characters. [These characters are identified as the protagonist and the antagonist.]
5. Plot. [Specify the problem, the climax, and the resolution, or the means by which the “problem is solved--which can lead directly to your message.”]
6. Message. [This is the “moral, perspective on life or observation about life,” the theme, that the scene is intended to convey.]

Here is an example of Saul Bass’ storyboarding of the famous shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho:


Although it is not a horror story, the original Karate Kid movie offers a good model of the construction and use of scenes, as does It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, The Wizard of Oz, and The Sound of Music, to name but a few of many well-made stories.

In horror, Poe is a superb storyteller. Each of his scenes is deliberate and purposeful and leads plausibly to the next. Other master craftsmen and artists who are especially adept at the construction and sequencing of horror story scenes include Alfred Hitchcock, Ridley Scott, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Wes Craven, Christian Nyby, H. P. Lovecraft, H. G. Wells, Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson, Bram Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury. By studying how they create and use scenes, others may benefit, improving their own fiction by dissecting the work of the accomplished others who have gone before them.

Purposeful, Frightening Scenes

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

The largest part of a story is an act. Acts are made up of scenes. Scenes, in turn, are made up of incidents.

A good analogy is to think of an act as a chapter, a scene as a paragraph, and an incident as a sentence. Using this analogy, we can say that the first act of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film, Psycho, is comprised of the following scenes (our designation of the scenes is our own; the transcript of the screenplay we consulted as the basis for the summary does not divide the action into scenes):

1. In a Phoenix, Arizona, hotel room, during her lunch break, Marion Crane and Sam Loomis discuss their frustration at wanting to marry one another but being unable to do so because of the heavy financial drain caused by Sam’s alimony payments to his ex-wife and his payment of his deceased father’s outstanding debts.


2. Marion returns to work at Lowery Real Estate and learns that her employer, Mr. Lowery, is also late returning from lunch. As she chats with Caroline, a clerk, Mr. Lowery enters with a client, Mr. Cassidy, who’s had one drink too many. Mr. Lowery asks Marion to bring a deed into his office. Showing Marion a picture of his daughter, who’s to marry tomorrow, Cassidy makes a pass at Marion, but she deflects his flirtation. Then, he shows her the $40,000 in cash he’s brought to buy a house as his daughter’s wedding present. After Mr. Cassidy goes into his office, Mr. Lowery tells Marion to deposit the cash in the bank; he will get his client to write him a check for the money instead on Monday, when Mr. Cassidy is sober. Marion takes the deed into Mr. Lowery’s office and, complaining of a headache, asks permission to go home after depositing the money at the bank.


3. Instead of depositing the money, Marion has gone home, where, having packed a suitcase, she dresses. She steals the bank deposit.


4. As she drives through the city, she hears Sam’s voice greeting her upon her arrival and sees Mr. Lowery and Mr. Cassidy, exchanging waves with her befuddled employer.


5. She continues to drive until night falls. Tired, she pulls off the road to sleep. She is awakened by a highway patrolman, who makes note of her license plate number. After she returns to the road, the patrolman follows her.


6. Because the patrolman has her license plate number, she fears that he will connect her car with the money she’s stolen, once the theft is reported, so she trades in her car for a different model with different license plates.


7. As she drives away, Marion imagines the highway patrolman talking to California Charlie, the car salesman, about her. Because she has acted suspiciously, the patrolman is likely to want to examine the sales papers, she thinks. She then imagines conversations between Mr. Lowery and Caroline, between him and Marion’s sister, and between him and Mr. Lowery, in which they figure out that she has absconded with the bank deposit.


8. As a downpour begins, Marion sees a neon sign announcing “Bate’s Motel, Vacancy.” She stops to rent a room, but no one is tending the office. She sees a Victorian house atop a hill, in the front of an upstairs window of which the silhouette of a female figure moves past an illuminated window shade.


9. Returning to her car, she honks, and, a little later, a young man joins her. As they exchange small talk, Norman telling her that all the rooms are vacant, the new interstate having bypassed the motel. The motel is relatively isolated, the nearest town, Fairvale, being 15 miles away. Norman returns to the house atop the hill to prepare a dinner for them.


10. Marion hides the stolen money in a newspaper cradled in a magazine rack in her room. From the house on the hill, she hears Norman arguing with an elderly woman, who says, “I won’t have you bringing strange young girls in here for supper--by candlelight, I suppose, in the cheap erotic fashion of young men with cheap erotic minds!”


11. Norman brings a tray of food, suggesting that he and Marion share it in his office. The office is decorated with stuffed birds, a result of Norman’s hobby as a taxidermist. Norman tells Marion that he’s trapped by having to care for his aged mother, who’s mentally ill after her husband died when Norman was five and a lover (before suffering a violent death) talked her into building the motel. Marion’s suggestion that Norman commit his mother to an asylum angers him. After he calms down, Marion returns to her room, saying she’s driving back to Phoenix the next day to try to extract herself from “a private trap” she’d “stepped into” there. In parting, Marion slips, telling Norman her real name, and he sees that, on the register, she’s signed under the assumed name of “Marie Samuels.”


12. Norman peeps through a hole in the wall and sees Marion undressing in the bathroom.


13. He retreats to the house atop the hill, sulking in the kitchen.


14. In her room, Marion calculates the money she’s spent and will have to repay, flushes this potentially incriminating evidence down the toilet, and takes a shower. As she showers, a woman wielding a knife stabs her repeatedly, killing her.

According to our analysis, each of the above sentences is an incident of the story’s plot. Together, one or more of these incidents make up a scene. (Note: a scene involves conflict regarding at least one character--and usually two or more characters--and, often, dialogue, and it moves the story forward in a specific way, according to a predetermine purpose). In regard to horror stories, we might add that a scene also should scare the audience whenever possible.) Several scenes, in turn, make up an act.


As we indicated in a previous post, dramas (and other types of narratives, such as novels), often consist of five acts: (1) exposition, ending with an inciting moment that sets the (2) rising action in motion, leading to a (3) turning point, or climax, which gives way to the (4) falling action, which leads to (5) a resolution (if the story is a comedy) or to a catastrophe (if the story is a tragedy). (We won’t repeat our discussion of dramatic structure in detail in this post, but if you haven’t read it or don’t remember the details, you should refresh your memory by rereading “XXX.”)


As we have summarized the first act of Psycho, the first scene of this act consists of one incident:

In a Phoenix, Arizona, hotel room, during her lunch break, Marion Crane and Sam Loomis discuss their frustration at wanting to marry one another but being unable to do so because of the heavy financial drain caused by Sam’s alimony payments to his ex-wife and his payment of his deceased father’s outstanding debts.

The second scene of this act also consists of seven incidents:

Marion returns to work at Lowery Real Estate and learns that her employer, Mr. Lowery, is also late returning from lunch. As she chats with Caroline, a clerk, Mr. Lowery enters with a client, Mr. Cassidy, who’s had one drink too many. Mr. Lowery asks Marion to bring a deed into his office. Showing Marion a picture of his daughter, who’s to marry tomorrow, Cassidy makes a pass at Marion, but she deflects his flirtation. Then, he shows her the $40,000 in cash he’s brought to buy a house as his daughter’s wedding present. After Mr. Cassidy goes into his office, Mr. Lowery tells Marion to deposit the cash in the bank; he will get his client to write him a check for the money instead on Monday, when Mr. Cassidy is sober. Marion takes the deed into Mr. Lowery’s office and, complaining of a headache, asks permission to go home after depositing the money at the bank.

The third scene of this act is made up of one incident:

Instead of depositing the money, Marion has gone home, where, having packed a suitcase, she dresses. She steals the bank deposit.

Two incidents make up the fourth scene (each is underlined in its own color to better distinguish the two):

As she drives through the city, she hears Sam’s voice greeting her upon her arrival in California. She sees Mr. Lowery and Mr. Cassidy, exchanging waves with her befuddled employer.

The fifth scene is comprised of four incidents (each shown in a different color for emphasis):

She continues to drive until night falls. Tired, she pulls off the road to sleep. She is awakened by a highway patrolman, who makes note of her license plate number. After she returns to the road, the patrolman follows her.

Scene six consists of one incident:

Because the patrolman has her license plate number, she fears that he will connect her car with the money she’s stolen, once the theft is reported, so she trades in her car for a different model with different license plates.

The seventh scene is comprised of three incidents (each of which is underlined in a different color for emphasis):

As she drives away, Marion imagines the highway patrolman talking to California Charlie, the car salesman, about her. Because she has acted suspiciously, the patrolman is likely to want to examine the sales papers, she thinks. She then imagines conversations between Mr. Lowery and Caroline, between him and Marion’s sister, and between him and Mr. Lowery, in which they figure out that she has absconded with the bank deposit.

Three incidents make up scene eight (and are underlined in different colors to better distinguish each of them:

As a downpour begins, Marion sees a neon sign announcing “Bate’s Motel, Vacancy.” She stops to rent a room, but no one is tending the office. She sees a Victorian house atop a hill, in the front of an upstairs window of which the silhouette of a female figure moves past an illuminated window shade.

The ninth scene? Four incidents (again, each in its own color):

Returning to her car, she honks, and, a little later, a young man joins her. As they exchange small talk, Norman telling her that all the rooms are vacant, the new interstate having bypassed the motel. The motel is relatively isolated, the nearest town, Fairvale, being 15 miles away. Norman returns to the house atop the hill to prepare a dinner for them.

Scene 10 is made up of two incidents (colored individually):

Marion hides the stolen money in a newspaper cradled in a magazine rack in her room. From the house on the hill, she hears Norman arguing with an elderly woman, who says, “I won’t have you bringing strange young girls in here for supper--by candlelight, I suppose, in the cheap erotic fashion of young men with cheap erotic minds!”

Different colors indicate that scene 11 contains incidents:

Norman brings a tray of food, suggesting that he and Marion share it in his office. The office is decorated with stuffed birds, a result of Norman’s hobby as a taxidermist. Norman tells Marion that he’s trapped by having to care for his aged mother, who’s mentally ill after her husband died when Norman was five and a lover (before suffering a violent death) talked her into building the motel. Marion’s suggestion that Norman commit his mother to an asylum angers him. After he calms down, Marion returns to her room, saying she’s driving back to Phoenix the next day to try to extract herself from “a private trap” she’d “stepped into” there. In parting, Marion slips, telling Norman her real name, and he sees that, on the register, she’s signed under the assumed name of “Marie Samuels.”

Scene 12 = one incident:

Norman peeps through a hole in the wall and sees Marion undressing in the bathroom.

Scene 13 = one incident:

He retreats to the house atop the hill, sulking in the kitchen.

Scene 14 is made up of two incidents (shown, again, in distinguishing colors):

In her room, Marion calculates the money she’s spent and will have to repay, flushes this potentially incriminating evidence down the toilet, and takes a shower. As she
showers, a woman wielding a knife stabs her repeatedly, killing her.

We said that each scene should advance the story in some way, so let's see how each of the four opening scenes of Psycho do so:

1. In a Phoenix, Arizona, hotel room, during her lunch break, Marion Crane and Sam Loomis discuss their frustration at wanting to marry one another but being unable to do so because of the heavy financial drain caused by Sam’s alimony payments to his ex-wife and his payment of his deceased father’s outstanding debts. (This scene provides the antagonist’s motivation.)


2. Marion returns to work at Lowery Real Estate and learns that her employer, Mr. Lowery, is also late returning from lunch. As she chats with Caroline, a clerk, Mr. Lowery enters with a client, Mr. Cassidy, who’s had one drink too many. Mr. Lowery asks Marion to bring a deed into his office. Showing Marion a picture of his daughter, who’s to marry tomorrow, Cassidy makes a pass at Marion, but she deflects his flirtation. Then, he shows her the $40,000 in cash he’s brought to buy a house as his daughter’s wedding present. After Mr. Cassidy goes into his office, Mr. Lowery tells Marion to deposit the cash in the bank; he will get his client to write him a check for the money instead on Monday, when Mr. Cassidy is sober. Marion takes the deed into Mr. Lowery’s office and, complaining of a headache, asks permission to go home after depositing the money at the bank. (This scene sets up the next one, creating the situation that allows Marion to commit a crime.)


3. Instead of depositing the money, Marion has gone home, where, having packed a suitcase, she dresses. She steals the bank deposit. (This scene shows the antagonist perform an action--commit a crime; she forces herself, by her own behavior, to leave her job and her home, and to leave town, never to return; her crime makes her less sympathetic, or entirely unsympathetic, to audience.)


4. As she drives through the city, she hears Sam’s voice greeting her upon her arrival and sees Mr. Lowery and Mr. Cassidy, exchanging waves with her befuddled employer. (This scene restores some sympathy for Marion, showing her to have a conscience, but it also allows her a chance to reconsider her scheme and to forego stealing the money. When she goes through with the crime, the audience may feel that she is weak, rather than evil.)


5. Scenes 5, 6, and 7 force Marion’s hand, and her attempts to thwart justice also makes her even more unsympathetic to the audience: She continues to drive until night falls. Tired, she pulls off the road to sleep. She is awakened by a highway patrolman, who makes note of her license plate number. After she returns to the road, the patrolman follows her.


6. Because the patrolman has her license plate number, she fears that he will connect her car with the money she’s stolen, once the theft is reported, so she trades in her car for a different model with different license plates.


7. As she drives away, Marion imagines the highway patrolman talking to California Charlie, the car salesman, about her. Because she has acted suspiciously, the patrolman is likely to want to examine the sales papers, she thinks. She then imagines conversations between Mr. Lowery and Caroline, between him and Marion’s sister, and between him and Mr. Lowery, in which they figure out that she as absconded with the bank deposit.


8. As a downpour begins, Marion sees a neon sign announcing “Bate’s Motel, Vacancy.” She stops to rent a room, but no one is tending the office. She sees a Victorian house atop a hill, in the front of an upstairs window of which the silhouette of a female figure moves past an illuminated window shade. (This scene offers Marion a respite from the physical storm and from the storm of her emotions--the guilt and fear she feels--and introduces the idea that a woman lives in the house at the top of the hill that overlooks Bates Motel.)


9. Returning to her car, she honks, and, a little later, a young man joins her. As they exchange small talk, shy, awkward Norman telling her that all the rooms are vacant, the new interstate having bypassed the motel. The motel is relatively isolated, the nearest town, Fairvale, being 15 miles away. Norman returns to the house atop the hill to prepare a dinner for them. (This scene brings the movie’s antagonist face to face with its protagonist and shows Norman to be a shy and awkward young man who, although attracted to the opposite sex, is uncomfortable in the presence of women.)


10. Marion hides the stolen money in a newspaper cradled in a magazine rack in her room. From the house on the hill, she hears Norman arguing with an elderly woman, who says, “I won’t have you bringing strange young girls in here for supper--by candlelight, I suppose, in the cheap erotic fashion of young men with cheap erotic minds!” (This scene shows the conflict between Norman and his mother--up to this point, the audience has only heard of it, not overheard it.)


11. Norman brings a tray of food, suggesting that he and Marion share it in his office. The office is decorated with stuffed birds, a result of Norman’s hobby as a taxidermist. Norman tells Marion that he’s trapped by having to care for his aged mother, who’s mentally ill after her husband died when Norman was five and a lover (before suffering a violent death) talked her into building the motel. Marion’s suggestion that Norman commit his mother to an asylum angers him. After he calms down, Marion returns to her room, saying she’s driving back to Phoenix the next day to try to extract herself from “a private trap” she’d “stepped into” there. In parting, Marion slips, telling Norman her real name, and he sees that, on the register, she’s signed under the assumed name of “Marie Samuels.” (This scene provides the background information that Norman knows how to stuff dead bodies, further develops the conflict between Norman and his mother, further characterizes Norman--the audience sees him as strange, understands that he feels “trapped” by his circumstances, shows he’s quick to anger, suggests he has a psychologically unhealthy relationship with his mother--intimates that violence has occurred in the past--in the death of Norman’s mother’s lover--makes Marion somewhat more sympathetic--because she has decided to try to make matters right concerning her theft of the money--and allows Norman to see that his suspicion that Marion is running from something is accurate, since she has signed in under an assumed name.)


12. Norman peeps through a hole in the wall and sees Marion undressing in the bathroom. (This scene shows that Norman is a voyeur.)


13. He retreats to the house atop the hill, sulking in the kitchen. (This scene shows that Marion is conflicted concerning Marion and the sexuality that her nudity represents.)


14. In her room, Marion calculates the money she’s spent and will have to repay, flushes this potentially incriminating evidence down the toilet, and takes a shower. As she showers, a woman wielding a knife stabs her repeatedly, killing her. (This scene restores a large measure of the audience’s sympathy for Marion, showing her as repentant, but ends with the story’s inciting moment as the protagonist, Norman Bates, commits a crime that will result in his ultimate undoing.)

We said that, in a horror movie, scenes must also frighten whenever possible. What’s frightening about the four scenes we identified as making up the first act of this film?

Even when a scene accomplishes a definite, predetermined purpose--motivating a character, for example--it can, and should, in horror stories, frighten the audience. Therefore, a horror story writer must discern what is horrific, implicitly or explicitly, about each of our plot’s incidents. Not every scene, especially of the earlier ones, frightens viewers, but several do, the types of fears varying, as do their intensities, building toward the shower scene’s climactic terror:

• We fear that Marion may do something rash.
• When she does so, we fear that Marion may get caught.
• When she does not, we fear that Marion may get arrested.
• We fear that Norman may not be trustworthy and, in fact, may be mentally unstable.
• We fear that Marion may be raped.
• We fear that Marion will be killed (which, of course, she is).

Since this has been a fairly long post, let’s summarize its key points:

• The largest part of a story is an act. Acts are made up of scenes. Scenes, in turn, are made up of incidents.
• A scene involves conflict regarding at least one character--and usually two or more characters--and, often, dialogue, and it moves the story forward in a specific way, according to a predetermine purpose. In regard to horror stories, we might add that a scene also should scare the audience whenever possible.
• Various ways in which the scenes in Psycho move the story forward are to motivate characters; to set up subsequent scenes; to establish points of no return that force a character to continue to behave according to a specific course of action; to characterize the protagonist, the antagonist, or another character; to establish or heighten conflict within or between characters; and to provide background (expository) information about the story’s characters or situations.
• A drama often consists of five acts: (1) exposition, ending with an inciting moment that sets the (2) rising action in motion, leading to a (3) turning point, or climax, which gives way to the (4) falling action, which leads to (5) a resolution (if the story is a comedy) or to a catastrophe (if the story is a tragedy).

Note: The summary of Psycho is based upon the screenplay, available at Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Describing Horrific Scenes

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror stories call for horrific scenes. In literary works, description is the chief (usually, the only) means of delivering the goods (although some novels and short stories are illustrated--Stephen King’s The Silver Bullet, illustrated by Bernie Wrightson, comes to mind). In movies, photographs, usually, nowadays, enhanced by special effects, illustrate the plot.

“I paint what I see,” Charles Addams once said, tongue in cheek, concerning his cartoons of the bizarre antics of The Addams Family, which, appearing in The New Yorker and elsewhere, launched a television series and several movies. One of Norman Rockwell’s own tongue-in-cheek paintings shows him at his easel, painting a self-portrait from his likeness in a mirror, with photographs for reference pinned to the edge of his canvas. The horror writer has only to toggle from his or her word processor screen to an open Internet browser or consult a book beside the computer to accomplish the same feat.

In fact, most artists, if not all, do sketch or paint from live models or props, and, especially with the availability of cameras, digital and otherwise, stock photographs, and millions of Internet image galleries, there’s no reason that the writer cannot create descriptions the same way, basing them upon what he or she sees in such photographs.

Consulting a visual image in creating a written description won’t worsen one’s verbal imagery; doing so will enhance the result. Likewise, since no two people are the same, even in what they perceive or how they convey their perceptions, no two descriptions will be identical, either. Originality remains intact.

Let’s try our hand at this approach. Here’s an example of a description that’s based upon a photograph:

The young woman would have been pretty, even beautiful, except for one thing. Her full head of luxuriant, curly black hair framed her face like a halo, and, although her eyebrows were thicker than the current fashion dictated, they seemed appropriate, arching her eyes. Her face, roughly an oval, was smooth, the skin flawless and pale as marble, except for the deep dimple that ran the length of each cheek. Her neck was long and graceful. The upside-down crosses she wore as earrings were disconcerting, but one didn’t notice them immediately. The focal point was her mouth. Her rather thin red lips were stretched wide, showing gums as well as teeth-- and the blood that overflowed her mouth, streaming over her chin.

Here’s the photograph, which appears as part of the film Night of the Demons:

Here’s another example:

The blonde could have been pretty. Perhaps she was once. She was not pretty now, though, not with the disheveled hair, not with the deep frown lines in her brow and around her mouth, not with the yellow eyes and the elliptical pupils, and, most of all, not with the impossibly large, open mouth in which appeared a ring of jagged fangs instead of teeth.

Here is the image upon which the description is based, which appears as part of the same film, Night of the Demons:

Even when a photograph doesn’t shock with blood and gore or bizarre imagery, it is more immediate and dramatic than words. For example, this description does the job; it’s interesting, and it sets the mood:

Her head was back, looking as if she’d retracted it, turtle-like, and the reason for her abrupt retreat was clear: her arched eyebrows, wide, staring eyes, and gaping, yet down-turned mouth and compressed chin signaled her terror.

And, now, the image, again from Night of the Demons:

For filmmakers, the reverse process can, and does, work, too. They often create visual images from verbal descriptions. We don’t have a picture of the blood and gore that Shakespeare puts into words in Titus Andronicus, his ghastliest and goriest play, but we can imagine how such a description would translate to the screen, helped along with special effects and, possibly, computer-generated imagery. There’s this, for example:

Away with him, and make a fire straight,
And with our swords upon a pile of wood
Let's hew his limbs till they be clean consumed.

And this:

See, lord and father, how we have performed
Our Roman rites, Alarbus' limbs are lopped,
And entrails feed the sacrificing fire,
Whose smoke like incense doth perfume the sky.

Ours is a multimedia world, and there’s no reason that we shouldn’t make the most of it. Models and props have enhanced painters’ and illustrators’ work for centuries, and many writers have long based their descriptions on landscapes and people they’ve seen and heard in person. There’s no reason that authors shouldn’t use the work of artists and photographers, in all their media, electronic and otherwise, to enhance their descriptions. The result will be a richer, more realistic, and detailed representation of the life about which they are writing and the horrors that they are recounting.