Category Archives: Mary Pletsch

I gave a copy of Fossil Lake: An Anthology of the Aberrant to my parents with a proviso attached: it’s not autobiographical.

The assumption would be easy enough to make. My contribution to Fossil Lake, the short story “Mishipishu: The Ghost Story of Penny Jaye Prufrock,” is set at a summer camp for kids. The name of the camp in the story, Camp Zaagaigan (the Algonquin word for “lake”) is fictional; so is Lake Mishipishu (I actually checked on the maps and found a Mishibishu Lake…) My parents, however, would be able to name the real camp and the real lake after they read the story: from the cabin line to that infamous H-dock, the layout of Camp Zaagaigan mirrors its real-world counterpart, and they drove me there often enough to recognize it.

From there it’s just one step further to wondering how much more of the story is real.

I’m often asked whether the characters in my story are “me,” or whether the events are “real,” and all I can ever say is that I write semi-true stories. Semi-true in that I’ve never been able to take a person, event, or revelation and transcribe it into fiction word-for-word. As a writer friend of mine says, real life doesn’t have to make sense, but fiction does. Even if I’m starting with something “inspired by a true story,” in order to make event or character coherent, I have to add things here, or take things away that might have happened in real life, but don’t add anything useful to the tale I’m telling. Sometimes changes to the story make it more dramatic, more compelling, or more satisfying; and so the events “inspired by a true story” move ever farther away from a faithful reflection of reality. After all, I’m writing fiction—I’m not required to report on reality. I’m required to tell an engaging and powerful tale.

And semi-true in that I do my best to write characters who feel real: who behave in realistic ways, who are recognizable and relatable, who are emotionally honest. When I write them, I put myself in their position and see the world through their eyes; and yes, to an extent, I feel what they feel, and try to express that emotion in the words I’m writing. Often this emotional connection is informed by my own real-world experiences. I do know what being bullied feels like. I do know what doing something I know is against the rules feels like. I don’t know what it feels like to drown, but I do know what it feels like to not be able to breathe, so I write about that…and imagine one step farther, based on research and my own ideas. These characters aren’t me, but they have pieces of my emotions inside them.

So no, I was never bullied at that summer camp you sent me to, Mom and Dad. No, I never snuck out of the cabin after hours. No, I was never a suicidal twelve-year-old, and no, I’ve never lost sight of the line between reality and imagination.

…or at least, I’ve always found it again in time.

About Mary:

Mary Pletsch is a glider pilot, toy collector and graduate of the University of Huron College, the Royal Military College of Canada and Dalhousie University. She is the author of several previously published short stories in a variety of genres, including science fiction, steampunk, fantasy and horror. She currently lives in New Brunswick with Dylan Blacquiere and their four cats.

“I Need Protection from the Things In My Head”

October 2, 2015

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Craft & Skills Horror Mary Pletsch Reader Investment & Empathy Suspension of Disbelief No Comments

Jimmy Buffett sang “I need protection from the things in my head” in his song “Vampires, Mummies and the Holy Ghost.” In the song, the character’s imagination proves to be far more frightening than any real-life horrors–even the murderer who lived on the character’s block!

The key to writing a great horror story isn’t buckets of gore or even necessarily a creepy new monster. It’s the ability to make the reader’s imagination your ally.

Few things are as terrifying as the unknown. When you leave gaps in your story for the reader’s imagination to fill in, they will almost always imagine something far creepier than you could describe, unless your phobias and reactions are identical to theirs. Over-familiarity breeds contempt, taking horror into camp. Sometimes this takes place because a description is too detailed, too unbelievable, and crosses the line between spooky and silly.

Use suggestion. Hint, rather than stating outright. Make your readers and your characters consider multiple possibilities. Which ones are true–if any? What if it’s something else entirely? Build suspense by describing sounds, shadows, scents, movements, and leave readers and characters wondering for a while what is causing them. Maybe it’s nothing. This time.

By leaving spaces like these for your readers to use their own imaginations to “fill in the gaps,” you’ll not only have readers flipping ahead to see if they were right, or to find out what happens to your characters–you’ll also give them the opportunity to project their own worst fears into those spaces, to imagine their greatest terror, or to struggle to conceive of a horror so great it defies description.

We all know what a vampire is, and a werewolf, and a zombie…these monsters are hard sells in certain markets, now, because they’ve been used so often and become so familiar to the general public that it’s a lot more challenging to make them fresh and scary. We’ve all seen movies where the “monster” is obviously a person in a suit, and instead of screaming, we laugh. Or when the topic of shapeshifters turns to were-bunnies and were-deer, we giggle.

Except.

Imagine the anxiety, the constant panic attacks, seizing you out of nowhere and causing your skin to twitch. You can feel the claws under your fingernails, the stretch in your tendons. You can smell your great-aunt cooking a pie that reeks to you of corpses. You are prey, constantly, and you can never relax, never calm down, even though you know that the mere act of being picked up off your feet can be enough to kill you. To keep it together, you chew. Constantly. It helps. A little.

…I think being a rabbit would be terrifying.

Again, your reader’s imagination is your ally. If your readers can identify with your characters, see through their eyes, feel what they feel, then suddenly were-bunnies aren’t humorous at all, not next to the horror of constant panic attacks and the feeling of being an animal underneath your skin…a skin that threatens to shed itself without warning….

Buckets of gore and gruesome-looking beasties will never be as frightening as wondering what it might be like if something scary happened to you. Wondering what might be lurking out there in the dark, or worse, what might be lurking inside your own skull, waiting for some unknowable cue to activate and change your life forever. What could be the cause? And what might happen to you next?

You don’t know. You have to imagine. And often, the things your own mind comes up with are the scariest things of all.

About Mary:

Anthologies, Editing, and Wrestling with Gods

September 26, 2015

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Editing Mary Pletsch Science Fiction No Comments

Liana K and Jerome Stueart are the editors of Tesseracts 18: Wrestling with Gods and the people I have to thank for selecting my story “Burnt Offerings” for publication in the anthology. I’ve written previously (link) about my contribution, but recently I had a chance to ask a few questions of the editors themselves. I asked about how editors select stories out of the slush, what an editor’s job is like and what it means to Wrestle with Gods in speculative fiction stories.

Of all the possible themes for an anthology, why did you pick religion, faith and speculative fiction? What do you think speculative fiction can tell us about faith (and perhaps vice versa)?

LK: The great thing about speculative fiction is that it can create distance between our reality and a fictional one. This allows us to examine things like religion without everyone involved freaking out.

What can it tell us about faith? I think the book shows it can tell us many things. Too numerous to list here!

JS: Personal beliefs make great strong characters, and cultural beliefs that may clash with personal beliefs–that’s good prime tension. Religions ask big questions too— is there more than this life? Are there others out in the universe? How did we get here? What’s our purpose? Science Fiction asks those same big questions–and their answers are often just as profound and interesting–but I think there’s a special intersection that religion and science fiction has where you can stand and look down both streets. Spec fiction lets us talk about faith in a very non-confrontational way, too–certainly a more interesting way. We don’t have to get caught up in the trappings of our own faiths and religions here to talk about “belief” and about “faith”. We don’t have to say Rabbi or cross or bodhisattva–or Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism–but we can use a parable, of sorts, to talk about the ideas behind faith. Sneak behind our biases and prejudices. The alternate world allows us to examine faith in a way that doesn’t feel like we’re breaking any vows or betraying any of our gods.

Many of our readers at The Fictorians are hopeful authors or new authors. Could you tell us about your process for choosing which stories you want to select for an anthology such as Wrestling with Gods? I’m sure those readers would appreciate some advice as they edit their work for submission. What makes a story “stand out” to you?

LK: For this anthology, there had to be something about it that felt alive to me. We were really lucky in that there was a lot of overlap in what Jerome and I thought had that indescribable quality. Many authors haven’t found their unique voice yet, so they copy styles and concepts. That’s great for a spec script, but not for something like this.

In the case of this book, we were also looking for an insider perspective, not some outsiders saying “what a strange people”.

Some stories didn’t get selected just because they didn’t follow the guidelines. Simple things like word count, or the submission deadline. If you’re a hundred words over, no biggie. If you submit something that’s double the word count, that’s really pushing your luck.

JS: When I pick up a good story, I am with a great character doing something interesting immediately, absorbed in his or her world, seeing specific things that lead me to a dilemma quickly–usually within the first paragraph, certainly within the first page. Confident, vivid language and a unique character I can know and empathize with quickly are also telltale signs that I can sit back comfortably and go where the author wants me to go. On the other hand, characters that are not actors in their worlds, who make me have to follow long monologues in their heads, who give me nothing to see, who talk vaguely about their lives, or who drive endlessly while they think—these are stories that I can lay aside. That’s just me. But every one of the stories in Wrestling With Gods fought for their space and earned it with me.

I’ve had readers tell me that they were pleasantly surprised to discover that Wrestling with Gods wasn’t biased for or against religion, or favouring any one faith in particular. The previous question was about how to make an individual story stronger, so for this question, can you tell our readers more about how you “craft” an anthology–the skill set of being an editor and selecting the right stories from the slush? It’s something I’ve not yet done. What do you do to make an anthology the strongest it can possibly be?

LK: Well again, we had it easy in that there are so many religions that deserved representation. And the poetry was so strong!

Once we had our choices, I tried to divide the book into acts, using those poems as breaths. Long stories were separated by shorter ones for pace as well.

We started with the Christian stories because they’d be the most familiar faith to most people. And Mecha-Jesus is just so fun that we thought it was a good introduction, especially since it contained Shintoism as well. Rob Sawyer’s story then provided a balance, because it’s so haunting at the end.

That was our basic step. That pattern replicates throughout the book. I tried to arrange the stories so that there’s a journey for the reader with a crossover to something greater as the final act.

JS: Pick good stories first. I think we both made a pact to do that. I don’t think about “anthology” or “balance” or ANYTHING at the beginning. I’m in the greatest store on earth and I get to pick up anything I like–and so I choose what I enjoy and what I love first. (I’ll mark a maybe, or a “come-back-to-it-later”, but sometimes you go with the stories that grab you.) So, first Pick What You Love. If I fill an anthology with stories I feel passionate about, then I can defend my choices. I don’t add in a story for a fictionalized reader in my head who might like paranormal romances…. if I don’t like the story, I don’t feel like I can put it in.

Once you get the sixty or so short stories that are rockin’ this world, then you have to make some tough choices and, if you are working with a brilliant co-editor who is on your wave-length (and I was lucky, very lucky), she will validate your passions and will also help you discern the ones that are good stories but that may not be AS good as others.

Then when you get the 25-30 selections, you balance them in a readable pattern. I think Liana did a great job of creating for the anthology a reading experience where stories may have opposite effects on you, but have some link next to each other. Each story and poem was linked to the ones beside them so it would seem, perhaps, that you were deep in a conversation about faith (or about heavy metal tattoo artists, or about space exploration…)

Is there anything else you’d like to tell our readers, either about writing in general or Wrestling with Gods in particular?

LK: Just because a story isn’t good for a particular book doesn’t mean it’s not good. Write to write. If you’re willing to constantly hone your craft, your time will come.

About Wrestling With Gods, obviously I want people to read the book!

JS: Don’t be shy about dealing with faith or religion in science fiction or fantasy. I think it leads to some greater character depth. You design characters with inner tension, right? Well, there’s no tension like cultural or societal tension rooted in a belief system that the character has either bought into and believes, or has felt abandoned by, or has abandoned. His/her worldview can emerge from this lost/deeply held belief system—and it is never, never, never a clunky cut-and-paste stereotype of “faith”. Faith is the amalgam of our experiences and our beliefs together–and we trim our memories of experiences to match our beliefs (Uncle John would never have done that–so I’m not going to think he did) or trim our faiths to match our experiences (Uncle John sold his son to the Traders. I thought our family had morals.) Every person is unique; every belief emphasizes a bit more of this and a bit less of this because that worked for me and this didn’t. So cool characters can emerge from turning points and disappointments and miracles in their spiritual journey that is lockstep with their physical journey. We craft our faiths, just as we are crafted by them.

You can get your own copy of Wrestling with Gods in digital or print format from Amazon or Indigo/Chapters.

Your Support Net (Work)

August 25, 2015

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Life Philosophies Mary Pletsch Self-Awareness Work-Life Balance 1 Comment

A writing community is made up of lots of different people with different life experiences, different skills, and different connections. If we were all the same, maybe community wouldn’t be so important. If writers were all interchangeable, we might only need community for social time.

But because we’re all different, our community can offer so much more. Nobody can be an expert on everything, and sometimes hours of research can’t make a character or plot point as realistic as a conversation with someone who’s been there.

I’m a pilot. I’ve been contacted by writers wanting to know how airplanes work, whether the maneuvers they were describing would be possible, whether their story “felt real.”

I’m not a doctor, but my husband is. If I’ve got a character with a brain injury or a medical student who wants to date his former patient without breaking professional boundaries, I’m going to run my story by him. And he’s not only my personal resource, either. He’s had a long conversation over coffee with another friend of mine, discussing the physiology of werewolves for her novel-in-progress.

These connections aren’t limited to stories, either. When I said I wanted to do a launch party for some of the anthologies I had stories in, I’d never done a launch before. But Marie Bilodeau had. And using her contacts in the Ottawa sci-fi community, my desire for a launch party turned into On the Brink, a series (that’s right, more than one) of launches for up and coming new authors in the Ottawa area.

When I first started submitting my stories for publication, I felt a little nervous. Much to my surprise, an editor I knew from my fandom days was taking submissions for an anthology. Had I not submitted a story that was of equal quality to the others she selected, I wouldn’t have gotten in. But if I hadn’t known the editor–if I hadn’t kept in contact with her via Facebook–I would never have known that she was taking submissions. (I discovered the Open Call facebook groups, Duotrope, and other market listings, later on!)

In fact, the only reason I went to Superstars–and met the Tribe, became a Fictorian, and appeared in the Purple Unicorn anthology (and upcoming Red Unicorn anthology) was because another writer friend of mine–not a Superstars instructor–posted about it on her blog.

And what goes around comes around–when the same person really needed to talk to a police department in Maine to get correct information for her recent novel, I was able to use my personal contacts to make that introduction happen.

Writers share information. Opportunities. Feedback. Advice. Maybe you don’t know how to do something, but someone else you know does. Or maybe someone else has a main character who’s about to climb Mount Everest, but he doesn’t know a lot about mountain climbing. If that’s what your mom does for a living, you can help that person out.

As with all things, moderation is key. You won’t win yourself long-term support if you’re the person who’s always demanding help without ever giving anything in return. Equally, you won’t build yourself a career as a writer if you spend all your writing time helping other writers instead of writing your own stuff. But when everyone contributes fairly, the writing community becomes a big support net(work), and it lifts us all up.