I learned this writing exercise from Tim Waggoner’s instructional book “Writing in the Dark.” It’s a fun way to explore the muscularity and flexibility of story ideas, and a great way to uncover unique ideas.
First, pick one of those story ideas you’ve stowed away in a notebook somewhere. Here’s one of mine: What if a man discovered a strange alien monolith buried in the middle of the desert and becomes possessed by alien entities as he dabbles with it? Initially, it seems to fall in the science fiction/creature horror subgenre. But…what other areas could the idea cross into?
Step two is just that: crossing over. What if this were a psychological horror story instead? Perhaps he’s a professor who finds some Native American artifact, becomes possessed by his obsession with it, and the alien entities are the symptom of his madness instead. What other places could we take it? If this is a supernatural possession, we can cross over into the realm of cosmic and body horror as well, overlapping subgenres.
I highly recommend Tim Waggoner’s book, especially if you write in the genre of horror. However, I think some of the writing exercises from his book are applicable in other genres as well.
Let me know what you come up with using this exercise.
Today I want to discuss a writer’s arch nemesis: writer’s block. Writer’s block has many minions of many shapes and sizes. Today I want to take on a few common reasons.
One common reason is lack of interest in what you’re writing. Perhaps you’re trying to chase the marketplace, hoping to catch a popularity wave. Or maybe you think friends and relatives will be pleased by what you’re writing (much of the time, I’m afraid, you’ll discover they aren’t pleased). However, every time you sit down to work on a project, your blood is cold. Every sentence, paragraph, plot point, and character seems stilted, trite, awkward, and lifeless. Sounds like you need to pick a new subject, something that excites you to sit down before the computer or notebook. Readers can tell when a writer doesn’t believe in or enjoy what they’re writing.
Another reason is becoming overwhelmed by the size of a project. It’s hard to sit down imagining the next several months to a year you will spend working on a novel. Such thoughts can overwhelm the writer. As Stephen King once said, I paraphrase, it can feel like floating along the ocean in a bathtub. Instead of looking at the full scope of the project, break it down into smaller tasks. Today you will write one scene, or you will write for one hour. Over time, that one hour per day will prove to be quite fruitful.
Perfectionism is another common cause for writer’s block. Do you find yourself reediting the same page over and over to the point that you and your test readers are ready to rip their hair out? Do you overthink an idea to the point it turns to mush? It’s time to calm down and quit being a control freak. Even some of the most popular movies and works of fiction exhibit imperfections. I started to make a rule for myself: four drafts, and then I’m done; it’s time to send it into the world, even if there is a wart or two. At least I’m being productive, which is more important to me than being perfect.
Over the past several months I was struggling with writer’s block. Everything I tried to write crumbled like wet paper. Recently, I came to realize the reason for my writer’s block, and the means of fixing it.
Writing a story can be quite a task, especially if it’s a novel. You could end up spending three months to a year writing a novel. The enormity of the task can be overwhelming. I found even the task of sitting down for a few hours to work on a story to be overwhelming at times.
Then I discovered the Pomodoro Technique, the method that turns time into your ally, breaking it down into manageable chunks. The technique is simple:
Step One: Pick a task (in this case it’d be writing).
Step Two: Write for twenty-five minutes straight.
Step Three: Take a five minute break.
Step Four: Repeat four times.
Step Five: Take a thirty minute break.
Keep in mind, you don’t have to follow the process stringently if you don’t want to. For instance, you could break your twenty-five minute sessions throughout the day in any way you want. Instead of sitting down before my notebook thinking to myself, “I’m going to write an entire story,” or “I’m going to write for four hours,” I said to myself, “Let’s go for twenty-five minutes and see what we can get down on paper.” Twenty-five minutes didn’t overwhelm me in the way four continuous hours would have. I could manage twenty-five minutes. After my five minute break, it was easy to say to myself, “Hey, I can do another twenty-five minutes, can’t I?” I sure could. It’s a simple psychological trick that gets you focusing on each tree one at a time as opposed to the enormity of the forest. If you’re stuck in the rut of writer’s block for similar reasons, I highly recommend the Pomodoro Technique. It’s a great way to build a writing routine for yourself, and the fun quotient increases as well.
Standing before the mirror, she gazes into her reflection. Pale skin. Small prickles of hair emerging from her head. There’s a large oval -shaped scar on her neck. She focuses on her eyes–windows to the soul. Staring into them is like falling into a dark bottomless pit. She sees stains of guilt within them. She sees a mind like a grotesque dungeon, a place where thoughts wander blindly like prisoners, wailing at walls of misgiving and despair.
“Who am I?” she asks.
She gets the same answer as always. It comes to her as a hissing whisper in the back of her mind: not Meredith. Meredith is dead…
I was gripped the other day by a sudden jolt of nostalgia. You know the feeling. It’s when some sensory stimuli triggers an entrancing, meaningful memory. Maybe the smell of smoke in early winter reminds you of Christmas time and family fun from your childhood. Perhaps an old movie you loved to watch as a kid causes a glimmer of the same excitement you felt back when you couldn’t help but frolic throughout the living room pretending to be the hero of said movie. Well, I recently stumbled across something that reminded me of my undergraduate college days, a time when you’d often find me guzzling caffeinated beverages (writing fuel, I called them) while cramming to complete midterm papers a day before they were due. Ah, the good old days.
What is nostalgia? How does it really influence us? Is the nostalgic return a refusal to take responsibility for problems in the present by hiding in pleasures of the past, thus delaying progress? Or is it an effort to reacquire tools, solutions, or a renewed faith from successes in the past for the purpose of overcoming present problems? I guess, depending on the circumstance, it could be both. However, in my case, I would argue the latter applies. The object which triggered my nostalgic return was an old book I used for a college Creative Writing class. The book was titled, “Behind The Short Story: From First To Final Draft,” edited by Ryan G. Van Cleave and Todd James Pierce.
The Final Draft. That sounds like a wonderful place to be. Lately, I seem to have forgotten how to get there. I’m lost at sea, adrift. A faint flicker of hope warmed my heart while I brushed the dust off this book, remembering moments attending the class the book was assigned for. Back then I had confidence. Not just confidence. I was a little arrogant, and ignorant of my limitations. Nowadays I’ve become well acquainted with my weaknesses, especially the more I see time slipping away like the sand seeping from the hands of the narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “A Dream Within A Dream.” Writing is a lonely job. Stephen King once described it as like floating across the Atlantic ocean in a bathtub, and he’s right. You’re floating along a vast ocean of words hoping for meaning and much of the time all you’ve got for company are your weaknesses, glaring down at you mockingly as you stumble from word to word.
The book reminded me in the smallest way of what it felt like to be confident again. I remembered that first day of class when we so easily imagined we’d become the next Ernest Hemingway or Virginia Woolf, even if it was a bit arrogant. The book also made me realize I could try again, a little of that renewed faith. This time I could dig a little deeper into the book’s insights and utilize the suggestions with more sincerety. This time perhaps I could cross the treacherous Mariana Trench that stretches between the first and final draft. What if this time I even became a better writer on the other side? By the way, you’re welcome to join me on my journey if you like.
The nostalgic return isn’t just sappy escapism. Sometimes it can revitalize your life.
“Read a lot, write a lot.” That’s the number one rule for the aspiring writer. You just got to do it. Practice. Try different approaches. Try new things that challenge you.
Reading is invaluable to the writer. It’s sort of the stream of life for the writer’s imagination, the place he or she goes to fill their head with more words when their well has run dry. We read to be inspired by the work of others, to learn from their narrative strategies. Then we turn to our own work in progress and find new ways to utilize those strategies, to give them a unique spin with our own voice.
Horror is my mainstay, and when I came across this list in the revised addition of the On Writing Horror Handbook by the Horror Writers Association, I nearly shrieked in excitement like a giddy child. Some of these I’ve read before and certainly deserve a revisit. Some will be a new experience for me. Here we go:
1. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
2. Dracula by Bram Stoker
3. The Ghost Pirates by William Hope Hodgson
4. The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James
5. Burn, Witch, Burn! by A. Merritt
6. To Walk the Night by William Sloane
7. The Dunwich Horror and Others by H.P. Lovecraft
8. Fear by L. Ron Hubbard
9. Darker Than You Think by Jack Williamson
10. Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber
11. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
12. Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin
13. Richard Matheson: Collected Stories, Vol. I, II, III
14. Hell House by Richard Matheson
15. The October Country by Ray Bradbury
16. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
You’ve probably heard this writing metaphor before when it comes to characters: what is depicted on the page is just the tip of the iceberg, hinting at something more vast and complex beneath the surface. The vast structure beneath the surface of what you see depicted in a scene is the backstory of that character: what came before to make them who they are in the present. Even if those buried traits do not rise to manifest themselves directly in a scene of your novel, they still serve as an indirect influence in subtler ways.
I like to imagine my character alone in their bedroom. Maybe this room is a small studio apartment, or one of many in a grand mansion. Perhaps your character is a drifter staying in motel rooms or sleeping on strangers’ couches. Whatever the scenario, how they interact with that room will tell you a lot about them. Are they extremely tidy? Do they carefully fold each piece of clothing and stack it in the same place every night? Do they feel near panic at the slightest sight of dust and must clean it immediately? Why? What influences them to be this way? Did a family member from their past exhibit this same behavior? Does your main character still hear this family member’s demanding voice echoing in their mind? If the room is tidy or messy it reveals a lot about the character’s personality and backstory. Explore it.
What else can you describe about his/her private room? Does abstract art hang on the walls? If so, what does that tell you about your character’s way of thinking? Perhaps instead they like to display pictures of family. This tells you family is special to them. Why? Is their a particular family member they value most? All kinds of character revealing pathways to explore in the art and decorations throughout the room.
There’s one important question I always ask myself when exploring a character’s private room. This question really penetrates the heart of them, the juicy center: what secrets do they conceal in their room? It may be an object hidden in the closet or under the bed. What does that object mean to them? Why is it kept hidden? This question can lead to some fascinating answers about your character, and sometimes the answer is the course of a plot, which happened to me while writing a short story called “The Butterfly Girl” (unpublished). I discovered that a hat belonging to her father was very special to her, because it triggered precious memories to her mind about fishing with her deceased father when she was a child. Later she uses the hat as part of a conjuration ritual in an effort to contact her deceased father’s spirit.
The secret doesn’t have to be an object. It could also be an activity they practice alone that nobody knows about. Either way, exploring your character’s bedroom is an invaluable tool for character development and backstory.
My writing process has definitely changed in small ways over time. Some tools I’ve held onto, while others I’ve completely discarded or modified to befit my own personal needs.
Back in my early teen years I was sure I wanted to be a screenwriter. A brother in-law supported my interest and photocopied a book for me all about filmmaking. The first section of the book focused on building the script, providing examples of different ways a screenwriter will present their work to a producer: it starts with the simple “concept,” a short paragraph summary of the movie’s basic premise; the “scene outline” follows, which is a shallow summary of what occurs in each scene; the “treatment” looks a lot like a novelization of the scene outline with detailed descriptions of what happens in each scene. Finally, the “master script,” including all the key details and character dialogue. I followed these illustrations like they were a step by step process on how to write a screenplay. My school buddies and I spent hours pretending to be the next Steven Spielberg or George Lucas with the little video camera I got for Christmas one year.
Years later someone gave me the idea I could skip the production pains of filmmaking and write a novel instead. During this time someone else gave me a copy of Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft.I took a very different approach to writing my first novel, diving right into composition, putting down my thousand words a day like Mr. King suggested. It was a start. Stephen King’s book definitely inspired the work ethic I hoped to one day achieve.
Throughout my college years I became somewhat obsessed with learning about how different writers approach the craft, trying a variety of methods and tools. One of the most bizarre revision tools I discovered involved making a list of the most repeated word in your story, and then sort of creating a revised spine for your second draft using the themes you derive from this word collage. It was interesting, but I’ve never used it again.
The most helpful tool came from David Morrell’s book The Successful Novelist: A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing. I love this method for its simple ingenuity. Mr. Morrell suggests that while you’re spending all that time contemplating and focusing your idea, why not record it on paper as a conversation with yourself? Many would argue this is just like an outline, and it is technically an outline. The difference is you can sprawl. A conversation with myself on paper is informal; I’m not boxing myself in with all those carefully aligned Roman numerals and strict lists. A conversation is loose, allowing me to pick up and test ideas and easily discard what I don’t like. This sprawling freedom allows for depth and detail as well, which in my opinion is more conducive to creativity.
My writing process these days has become focused to four drafts. Before starting each draft I begin by using Mr. Morrell’s method of a written conversation, discussing plot, character, research (if necessary), structure, and viewpoint. Subsequent written conversations analyze and revise these elements in each draft. The final fourth draft is typically a line edit.
I’ve heard it said that we dream every night, but we usually don’t remember our dreams. Seldom do I remember mine. Only a handful of times can I recall the details of my dreams vividly, and the few fragments I do remember seem like they would serve as inspiration for a really good horror novel, or collection of shorter stories. I’ll tell you about them, and perhaps in my examination, further inspiration will germinate.
Back in high school much of my writing consisted of emotional ejaculations all over numerous notebook pages–free verse entries I claimed to be heavy metal lyrics. Me and a group of school chums started a power metal band called Codessa. I took on bass playing duties and lead vocals. Day in and day out, while I should have been taking notes and completing homework, I spent most of my time indulging in my teenage angst, writing songs with titles like, “Internal Bleeding”, “A Demons Crucifixion”, and “Can’t Deal With Myself When I’m Dealing With You”, and composing nauseating doggerel with lines like this, “Your hypnotizing scream. What does it mean? The confusion of this is making me insane. In this world of the mentally ill. All souls I’d kill. Kill the will to feel.” So on and so forth. Stilted bursts of trivial vexation.
No surprise, the band didn’t make it. We all graduated high school and went our separate ways, as the story always goes. Then one night I had the dream. I know what partly inspired it. Having seen the movie The Ring not too long before my nightmare, I’m sure the wretched figure crawling out of the screen in the movie played an influencing role.
I found myself in a derelict church. Cobwebs festooned the corners of the ceiling and draped over the abandoned pews. I stood at the end of the aisle, near the pulpit. Waiting. A storm raged outside. Rain and wind pummeled the building. Thunder rumbled. I saw her, a woman in a white wedding dress, face covered with a veil, slowly walking toward me, hands behind her back. I waited as the lightning flashed, highlighting the scene with flickers of electric blue. Soon she stood before me, removing the veil with one emaciated hand, revealing a desolate gray face that hissed at me with horrid anguish. No eyes in that gaunt skull, just pits of darkness. She then revealed a dagger with her other hand and stabbed me repeatedly. The last thing I saw before waking up was the sight of my bleeding body curled up on the ground.
I was stunned. I remember every detail with near perfect clarity. The dream is responsible for my renewed efforts at writing fiction. I abandoned my efforts of writing lyrics for heavy metal music after experiencing this dream. I wanted to complete the story the nightmare image suggested. I’m still seeking the answers.
Years later, another nightmare hit me like a high velocity bullet. I woke up feeling like I had been physically indented by the dream, as if something had entered me. Again I wandered about a nearby church. There was a small graveyard just behind the church building. A sickening feeling of terror overwhelmed me as I walked amongst the gravestones. All of them were marked with strange graffiti (by golly, I think I just discovered the title for this story–strange graffiti), alien symbols of crosses, swirling circles, and bizarre shapes covered each grave marker. I wanted to scream, but for some reason I couldn’t. It was too overwhelming for me. I wanted to run away, but the nightmare held me in that unholy, desecrated place. I awoke gasping, as though I had escaped a room filling with poisonous gases.
Nightmare shards, fragments of what could be. In time, my friends, these tormenting visions will be made whole.
In a previous post I discussed what attracted other horror writers to the haunted pathway. Today, I’m going to try to understand why I write horror.
It’s hard to explain why, exactly. I don’t remember a moment in my life when I stood at a crossroads, one path designating a sunnier atmosphere of flower blossoms and butterflies fluttering over green grasses–the non-horror path. Whilst the other path designated withered flowers and dead grass, most of it eerily shrouded in mist–the path of horror. It’s kind of always been with me, lingering like a shadow companion.
I remember the first story I ever wrote. This was twenty-eight years ago, when I was seven years of age. I scrawled it out on folded sheets of blank paper, even supplying crude stick-figure illustrations to aid my storytelling. The story was about my little sister and I battling a strange monster. The monster gobbles us up and traps us in its belly like Jonah in the whale. No worries, though. We discover the power of transformation and change into fire, burning our way free of the monster and destroying it in the process.
As you can see, the first story I ever wrote was a horror tale, a battle with a fierce beast from the unknown wastes clashing with my ordinary world. The horror tale has always called out to me.
But why? I get asked this question fairly often, most often by relatives who are worried about me, believing us horror writers go into maniacal fugue states in the middle of the night or something. Sometimes a joke is the best answer the horror writer can provide, as the late and great Robert Bloch did, stating that “Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a little boy. I keep it in a jar on his desk.”
I’ve referenced Stephen King’s nonfiction book Danse Macabre on this subject before, and dammit, here I go again, but King supplies another answer to the “why I write horror?” question that’s frequently crossed my mind. Back in 1979 Stephen King attended a panel discussing horror with other authors of the genre. One of the questioners asked, “Can you recall anything from your childhood that was particularly terrible?” (another concern some of my fretting friends and relatives express to me). None of the other authors on the panel supplied an answer to this, but Mr. King didn’t want them to be totally disappointed. He told a story of a time in his youth when he witnessed one of his friends being run over by a train. King was so traumatized by the event he didn’t retain any memory of it. All he knows is what his mother told him. She even supplied the grisly detail that they picked up the deceased boy’s pieces in a wicker basket. After telling this story, Janet Jeppson, a fellow author on the panel who was also a psychiatrist, responded with, “But you’ve been writing about it ever since.”
When I was only months old, my mother suffered a stroke and died. Of course, I have no memory of the incident, only the fragments of memories some of my siblings have been able to supply. I was told she was holding me at the time she suffered the stroke and set me on the counter before she collapsed. One of my older brothers attempted to give her CPR. My grandma said at one point after the funeral that, “I was the saddest baby she’d ever seen.”
Have my stories about monstrous possession and transformation been disguised dreams of this traumatic moment from my youth?
King’s response to Janet Jeppson’s statement: “There was an approving murmur from the audience. Here was a pigeonhole where I could be filed…here was a by-God motive. I wrote ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, and destroyed the world by plague in The Stand because I saw this kid run over by a slow freight in the days of my impressionable youth. I believe this is a totally specious idea–such shoot-from-the-hip psychological judgments are little more than jumped-up astrology. Not that the past doesn’t supply grist for the writer’s mill; of course it does. (Danse Macabre, 84).
Specious indeed. I think we’re attracted to this idea because it exhibits a clear logic: writer writes x (horror) because y (trauma) occurred. However, logic does not mean truth. One can carefully craft logical lies. I agree that past events can serve as an indirect influence to a writer’s imagination. My short story “Lights Out” is about a boy who kills his parents inadvertently by a power inside him he doesn’t know how to control. My mother’s stroke was caused by a blood clot resulting from the pangs of my birth. I was an indirect cause to her death. Could my short story be an expression of grief and culpability through the character of Tommy? Maybe. And what’s wrong with that? Nothing. One thing I do know–I certainly didn’t consciously plan or realize this expression when I wrote the story. The realization came later, revisiting the story.
Trauma is part of the human experience. We can’t escape it. We live in a fallen world, susceptible to failure, disease, betrayal, and all kinds of suffering. The stories we tell reflect this reality, and the horror tale is a useful vehicle for it. I guess there’s a part of me that’s either more susceptible to noticing these hardships–relating to Richard Laymon’s explanation that the horror writer is a “worst case scenario specialist”–or I cope with the suffering of life more effectively when I confront it through symbolic form in the horror story.
Before I close, another experience comes to mind from my impressionable youth. This might have been around Halloween, because my sisters and I were enjoying the fun play of building spook alleys. We dressed up in spooky costumes, creating eerie scenarios for them, acting out horror tales, in other words. At the end of our fun, we sat down in the dark and by the dim glow of a flashlight took turns telling scary stories to one another. Who could create the scariest tale? It was a contest. I can’t remember any of our stories ( vaguely I remember my older sister telling one about a possessed doll), but I do remember ending our session feeling frustrated. My story was the unscariest of them all. My sisters laughed at it; they told me it was boring. So badly I wanted to scare them. Talk about the past haunting us. Perhaps all this time I’ve been writing horror tales in reaction to that evening with my sisters. Each horror tale I write today is my symbolic attempt to win that contest and scare the living daylights out of them. Considering the fact that none of my sisters dare read any of my horror tales, I must have finally won.
“… horror stories aren’t so much about making the world a better place as they’re about trying to get out alive, with as many shreds of your soul as you can steal back from the darkness.”
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