Category Archives: Mary Pletsch

When I was a kid, I didn’t like the way so many movies and books portrayed romantic love as the ideal be-all and end-all of human existence. I wasn’t interested in romantic love; if anything, I was kind of disgusted by it. I remember feeling disappointed that there were so few heroines who would turn down romantic love in favour of remaining free and unattached, able to take off on another exiting adventure with no need to give notice to a boyfriend or husband. I remember the medieval festival in school, where I was the only girl who chose to be a knight instead of a princess (even though everyone was given the choice between knight and royal), and how I wanted nothing to do with the passive role where traditional romance made the woman into a prize to be won.

I decided that I was going to tell stories about characters I wanted to be. Stories without mushy stuff. Stories without love.

Only that wasn’t what actually happened.

As it turned out, my characters did experience love, even if they weren’t big on romance. Most of them had friends. Some of them had children, adopted or biological. Some of them cared for parents or grandparents or other family members. The most devoted warrior cared for her comrades and her country. The most daring adventurer cherished her belief in knowledge and discovery, and risked her life for that belief. The most dashing pilot loved his aircraft like a child. These characters might not have experienced romantic love, but they felt love all the same.

A character who doesn’t love anything or anyone rarely cares about anything. Love is the strongest form of caring that there is, and strong emotions mean high stakes and dramatic potential. Who wants to read about a character who feels no passion, experiences no attachment, has nothing to lose, and can’t summon any feelings about it? An utterly apathetic character is hard for readers to be interested in, because if the character himself cares about nothing, why should we care about him?

So let your characters love. Let them develop friendships. Let them have families, if the story allows for it. Let them care passionately about a cause. Let them believe in something: a goal, a religion, a duty, another person.

What happens when a character is torn between two things they love? This need not be a romantic love triangle. What if a character has to choose between tending a sick relative and following their dreams? Between their religion and their new friends? Between their two children? Between serving their country and raising their family? These conflicts can create all kinds of tension without involving romance.

Sometimes I think it’s a little ironic that I’ve actually written some romance stories. But even when I’m writing romantic elements in stories, I try to stay away from that old, abhorred idea that “falling in love” meant a heroine giving up her life of adventure for the sake of a man.

Sometimes romantic love means a bittersweet annual liason between a pacifist doctor and a female revolutionary.

Sometimes romantic love means the dashing gentleman pilot and the young man who fixes his airplane falling in love with one another.

Sometimes romantic love means sacrificing everything to save your partner…and failing, and your story is about what you do after that.

Sometimes romantic love means a turncoat and a pirate setting off together to found a new colony in the depths of uncharted space.

Romantic love is appealing to many readers. It’s also an important part of many people’s lives. These are only two reasons why so many stories contain romantic elements, and why romance as a genre is so successful.

I also, though, want to remember the readers who have been burned by romantic love, and want a story about a character who picks himself up and learns to live again. I want to remember the readers who don’t experience romantic attraction and who are looking for characters who represent them and speak to them. I want to remember the readers who, like me, are tired of forumlas and stereotypes and narrow definitions of what romance can (and by implication, should) be.

So let your characters love. Let them love strongly and deeply: family, friends, hobbies, careers, beliefs, and ideas. Let the things they love create conflict for them. If they experience romantic love, let it be as challenging and complex as any other form of human attachment.

Let love in fiction represent the multi-faceted presence of love in real people’s lives.

Beyond the Nightlight

January 27, 2015

mary

Horror Marketing Mary Pletsch No Comments

There’s nothing to be afraid of. Childhood fears fade as the years pass. They are never as real as they were when you were a child.

Unless they are.

“Beyond the Nightlight” is an anthology for adult readers about the terrors of childhood boogeymen. My contribution, “Big Boy,” is based on the earliest childhood fear I can remember. I wasn’t afraid of monsters under the bed, creatures in my closet or the dark shadows in the corners of my room. I was afraid…of the light.

More specifically, I was afraid of the light cast by trucks going by on the highway outside. Their powerful headlights reflected through my window and created an illuminated square that crawled over my wall and disappeared right above my headboard.

My goal, in writing this scary story, was to show readers, firsthand, what’s so scary about light on a wall. Most people are familiar with common tropes like boogey men and monsters under the bed. And, because those tropes are common, writing a story about them demands a fresh twist or some new insight into the reasons those concepts became tropes in the first place. I decided I’d rather take my uncommon fear and show readers why that moving light kept me awake late into the night, watching it come creeping towards me.

To do that, one of the things I had to do was put myself in the mindset of a three-year-old. I remember arguing with my dad that headlights shone straight ahead on the road, not sideways and up into people’s windows, so how could a truck cause that scary moving square? The square, of course, was caused by the shape of my window, and the light moved as the truck moved on the highway, appearing when the vehicle came into range and disappearing when it passed by. My father tried very patiently to explain this to me, but my child’s logic didn’t think it made sense. Moving patches of light aren’t scary to adults. I had to describe this scene through a child’s eyes.

Next, I asked myself what I remembered the most about this childhood fear. Why do I still remember being scared of the light over three decades later, when I’ve long forgotten why I was ever afraid of other childhood boogeys? (I remember the Sphynx and sprouty potatoes being other terrors of mine). I thought back, and realized that my other fears could be easily escaped: I just closed the book on Ancient Egypt, or put the lid back on the potato barrel. With that light, though, all I could do was lie very still and hope it didn’t notice me. I remember calling for my parents, not knowing if they’d come or not, knowing the light would reappear sooner or later after they left. That feeling of being alone, possibly abandoned, holding very still in the dark and watching the light come crawling my way…that feeling lasted. That was the feeling I wanted to convey to my readers: the feeling of being there with the three-year-old protagonist, small and young and all alone in the dark, wondering if your parent would come…or if the light would get you first.

Thankfully for me (and unfortunately for my main character), “Beyond the Nightlight” falls into the horror component of speculative fiction. That means that I wasn’t bound to write a story that conformed to my reality (which always involved the illuminated square of light vanishing harmlessly once the truck moved out of range). No, in fiction I’m free to describe exactly what three-year-old me was so afraid might happen if I fell asleep with that light on my wall.

Are you scared yet? No? Are you….curious?

You can order your own copy of “Beyond the Nightlight” in paperback or ebook here.

Shine your light on twenty-four terrifying stories for grown-up readers about the horrors that lurk in a child’s imagination.

Who’s holding the camera? Choosing the Point of View Character

January 2, 2015

mary

Character Craft & Skills Mary Pletsch Narrative Voice POV 1 Comment

I like to write tight third person point of view. Briefly, that means that the story is seen “through the eyes” of one or more characters. The descriptions of events, the value placed on those events, the decision making process, and the interpretation of actions and gestures is all coloured by that particular person’s experience. Readers see how this character thinks and analyzes.

One of the most fun things to do with tight third person is to drop hints in the narrative that the point of view character might be misinterpreting events, misunderstanding other characters, selectively perceiving some factors while overlooking others, or missing some of what’s going on. Different people can experience the same event in very different ways depending on their histories, values and beliefs. Writing in tight third person challenges readers to question the point of view character’s interpretation.

What character the writer chooses to “hold the camera” can change the entire story.

Two examples stand out to me. The first is when editorial feedback convinced me to change the point of view character; the second is when I chose not to, despite my beta reader’s advice.

Later this year I have a short horror story called “Red Ochre” appearing in Fossil Lake 2: The Refossiling. In the initial draft, the story was told from the point of view of a white male student named Perry. As the story went on, clues in the narrative indicated that Perry’s fascination with, and actions toward, his friend Meesha were twisted and dangerous, even though Perry’s narration showed that he considered his behaviour to be normal and unremarkable. I liked the idea that readers, like Meesha, might be taken in by Perry’s charm at the beginning of the story. The scare factor was to come in when readers realized that Perry had deceived them as well as her.

I gave the story to a beta reader, and he told me that in his opinion, the story was a failure.

Initially, I thought he’d missed the “creepy” cues given by Perry throughout the narrative. No, he said. His problem was that Meesha, a Native American student, appeared as an enigmatic, romanticized object of infatuation rather than as a person in her own right.

That wasn’t what I’d wanted the story to do at all. I tried to rewrite it, but given that Perry didn’t really know much about Meesha as a person, nor did he care to know, I couldn’t fix that problem while telling the story from Perry’s point of view.

I scrapped that draft and started again from the top, using Meesha as the point of view character.

Perry’s object of fascination became a fully developed human being, with her own reasons for disregarding the “creepy” cues Perry gives off as the story progresses. Better yet, I realized that the stakes were higher for Meesha, and the story would be more intense because of it. Perry has only his life to lose. Meesha has her trust in her friend, her understanding of the world around her, and ultimately something even greater than her life on the line: she is risking both her identity and her soul.

Changing the point of view character made “Red Ochre” a much stronger and ultimately more unsettling horror story, and I’m very pleased with the results.

The other example is from the first story I ever sold: “Blood Runs Thicker” in the e-book edition of When the Hero Comes Home 2.

In this story, a woman becomes a reluctant war hero. When her childhood best friend attends her homecoming, he realizes that she has been maneuvered into playing this role, even though she did what she did for her own reasons, and without succeeding at her intended goals.

My beta reader for my first draft told me that she didn’t think that the stakes in the story were high enough, and perhaps I should reconsider telling the story from the hero’s point of view, instead of from her friend’s. After all, she was the one forced into this situation against her will.

I began re-drafting and two thousand words in, I realized it would never work–but more importantly, why not. The core of the story was not about war. The core of the story was about how much a person would sacrifice for a loved one. The focus of my narrative was not the hero’s actions in combat, but that her friend was willing to sacrifice the future he’d planned for himself in order to protect her. He was the active character, and he was the one with something left to lose: she had already lost everything that mattered to her.

I re-wrote the initial story, emphasizing how much the point of view character stood to lose if he acted to protect the war hero. I focused the narrative on the point of view character’s internal conflict, emotions, and doubts. During my rewrite, I kept foremost in mind that the core of the story was about sacrifice.

The story sold. You can check it out for yourself here.

In this case, trying to tell the story from someone else’s point of view helped me understand the theme of the story. I used this knowledge to give the story a tight focus on the crucial concepts and tell a better tale.

If your story’s not working, consider how the plot might look from another character’s point of view. The lenses through which each character filters the events can make all the difference.