Category Archives: The Fictorians

Stow any loose belongings, settle in, buckle up, and hold on for a wild ride.

Great stories are emotional roller coasters that carry readers out of space and time to another place where they can be dropped into pits of despair or thrown high enough to taste glory. They hurl readers through dizzying loops and heart-stopping drops. The vicarious ride explores emotions that readers could never dare consider in real life, but that are necessary to understand nonetheless.

I am not a romance writer, nor am I a horror writer. However those genres prove so successful because they push the limits of opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. Just as people flock to the wildest rides at Disney to experience the thrills they can’t get anywhere else, readers flock to stories that push the uttermost limits of the emotional journey.

Great stories are the ones that tap into our emotions. The ones that make us feel the story are the ones we love, the ones that really affect us, the ones we can’t put down. So as a writer, I need to know how to craft a story to tap into emotions of love and romance while also understanding how to drag my readers down into the shadowy catacombs of terror. Without those emotions, stories feel weak, boring, uninspiring.

The best stories are the ones we can relate to, and therefore ones we feel the emotional impact of the greatest. Since we’re talking horror and romance this month, let’s look at a few examples.

Jaws. Brilliant. Even now, when I hear two simple notes played on the piano, it triggers memories of the movie. For years after watching Jaws as a kid, I couldn’t help but think of sharks every time I entered the water, any water. Even though I knew there was no way a shark could swim inland hundreds of miles to an isolated lake where my family was swimming, I’d still catch myself looking around for fins in the water. That movie touched on universal fear of being helpless in the water and prey to a creature of the deep. Who hasn’t ever felt that fear? Because it is so universal, everyone can relate to the characters in the movie, everyone can feel their fear.

That’s why horror movies use the dark so much. That fear of the darkness and monsters hiding just out of sight is another universal fear, one that we can tap into across the entire audience.

Great love stories are a little harder, I think. People love different qualities, and love is often very complicated. Then again, some love stories have proven successful through the ages. For example, Pride & Prejudice is one of the most popular love stories of all time. Jane Austen proved she could draw in her audience and tap into their emotions better than almost anyone. Her stories have spawned an entire industry of copycat stories, most of which are set in Victorian England, although other recent successes in that genre include Downton Abbey and North & South. What makes them work?

A few of the obvious components include:

– Protagonists that the audience can relate to, who have to overcome challenges that people still recognize today. It’s their struggle to overcome those difficulties that make the audience love them and root for them.

– These stories are accurate representations of human nature. The culture and times may be different, but human nature remains consistent. We see people we know in these stories, which allows the audience to connect better.

– Happy endings. People love to claim they don’t need a happy ending, but there’s a reason happy endings work.

The most powerful stories are the wildest of the vicarious emotional roller-coaster rides. The best love stories transport the audience to another time and place, tightly connect them to protagonists whose struggles are relatable and, after torturing those poor characters almost beyond the limits of endurance, return to a happy place that allows the audience to complete the emotional cycle and climb out of the story back to normal life in a good place, coming away refreshed and uplifted.

On the other hand, the best horror stories take the characters on rides that throw them into a pit of evil where they struggle to survive as most of their companions are killed. The emotional ride drags the audience down into powerful terrors they would never face any other way and, after driving them to the breaking point, bring them home safe. That’s why most horror stories end with the one survivor destroying the evil incarnate and limping out of the darkness into the dawn of a new day. The reader arrives home safe, emotionally spent, satisfied, and newly grounded to face their normal life.

The value of those emotional rides cannot be over stated. How much easier is it to deal with mundane challenges of our everyday lives after surviving the man-eating shark or the aliens or the zombies? How difficult are the challenges we face in relationships compared with the obstacles overcome by Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy?

So get emotional. It’s the only way to make it real.

Writing in Color

February 17, 2014

Jace Killan

Character Craft & Skills Jace Killan Storyline The Writing Life Writing Tools No Comments

My writing started to get good when I learned how to write in color.

As children we are concrete thinkers; we see the world in absolutes, black and white, good and bad, likes and dislikes, right and wrong. As we grow and develop we begin to comprehend abstract thought, such as, just because Jonny does something bad doesn’t necessarily mean he is bad, and just because Sally does something good doesn’t necessarily mean she is good. Abstract thought leads us into a new world of judgment and emotion. As we try to understand our existence and reality, abstract thought helps us wrap our head around those complicated, even contradictory themes life presents.

My early writing portrayed much of this concrete thought. My protagonists were all good, and my antagonists were all bad, right and wrong, loved and hated. I soon discovered that my stories lacked conflict. Oh, there was plenty of opposition between the good guys and the bad guys, but real life conflict isn’t so easily defined and identified. My writing in black and white created predictable plots, boring dialogue, and failed to solicit an emotional response. In short, my writing was forgettable.

As I struggled to understand why, I thought back to all of the stories (written and film) that I remembered from my youth. Stories like “The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs and “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury caused my mind to stretch, mainly because there wasn’t a happy ending, a resolution that I could forget. My mind continued to replay the plots, over and over, thinking of alternative actions, alternative endings in search of resolution.

Movies like “Old Yeller” and “Against a Crooked Sky” provoked me the same way. I found myself days, weeks, even months after watching the films, trying to rewrite the plots for better, happier endings. If only the protagonist could go back in time and do it right, then the ending could be different.

A couple of years ago, I attended a workshop where I read a short story I had written. I was complimented for my fine piece of horror. Shocked at the assertion, I argued that my story couldn’t possibly be considered part of that genre. The instructor smiled and said, “You are definitely a horror writer.”

I decided to read some horror to prove her wrong, and sure enough, I am a horror writer. I enjoy reading it, and love to create it.

As a horror writer, I take the reader to an uncomfortable place. Instead of forgettable, happy-ever-after-type endings, my writing allows me to dwell in the horrific, the sad, the hard, the pain, and the unthinkable. Through that experience, I invite the reader to return to the story in search of a better resolution.

Character development is a crucial part of unforgettable writing for it is their choices that often create the dire circumstances in which we find ourselves. Nathan Barra wrote something to the effect that a good character is someone that you’d like to sit down and have a drink with but you’d also like to punch in the face. Great characters like Javert and Gollum won’t fit into good and bad molds, they do good things for the wrong reasons, and bad things for righteous reasons, and do terrible things for terrible reasons. To err is human. I love experiencing such characters and their choices as they create worlds of desperation, loneliness, bitterness, and fear allowing me as the reader to feel, empathize, pity, and relate, all along searching for resolution whether it comes or not.

For a story to truly be unforgettable, it needs to be written in color.

Writing for Love and Murder

February 14, 2014

fictorians

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My Bloody Valentine - Box Set A guest post by Tiffinie Helmer.

Love and murder have a lot in common. Passion. It takes passion to love someone, and it takes passion to kill someone. That tightrope of love and hate we all balance on. Love and murder are my two favorite things to write about. Interesting enough, love is the harder of the two (no pun intended). I could kill every day of the week. I don’t want to know what that says about me. My favorite writing days are the days I get to kill someone. And my least favorite writing days are when I have to pen a love scene. I agonize over the love scenes. Every sentence, every word is painstakingly written. Whereas I can kill without a thought or a plan and happily carry on, and have, check out DEATH CACHE. Some of the deaths in that book surprised even me. One in particular that I almost deleted because I had fallen in love with my character, but alas I left him dead because it amped up the tension in the story.

In the anthology, MY BLOODY VALENTINE, we all start our stories with the first line, “Love hurts.” In my story HEARTLESS, I have a heroine who is angry. Really angry and she is one of my favorite kind of heroine to write about. So much conflict and angst. There isn’t anything she isn’t willing to do since she is so angry. That makes her exciting. She’s moonlighting as a dominatrix because she’s been ordered to pay her deadbeat ex-husband alimony. Turns out whipping men for money is more therapeutic than therapy. To make matters worse, (because I can and will) her clients start turning up dead. Now the cops are investigating her with suspicion of murder. Maybe her anger got the best of her and she truly is heartless.

This was a very fun story to write. Lots of passion. I explore many different levels of love from the first innocent crush to the more deadly obsession. Oh, yeah and of course I killed people.

Oh how I love my job!

Guest Writer Bio: USA Today Bestselling Author Tiffinie Helmer is always up for a gripping adventure. Raised in Alaska, she was dragged ‘Outside’ by her husband, but escapes the lower forty-eight to spend her summers commercial fishing on the Bering Sea.

A mother of four, Tiffinie divides her time between enjoying her family, throwing her acclaimed pottery, and writing of flawed characters in unique and severe situations.

You can find her new anthology, MY BLOODY VALENTINE on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. You can find out more about her at her website www.tiffiniehelmer.com.

How Much Blood is Right for You?

February 13, 2014

Gregory D. Little

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“This is a horror story: the mandate is to present a malefic universe.” That quote is from science fiction and fantasy (and occasional horror) author Daniel Abraham and I agree that this is where all horror stories begin. Once past that initial point, of course, there are a lot of different directions you can go. It’s a gross oversimplification, but horror is often divided into two categories: psychological and visceral. There are many degrees between the two extremes, not to mention all the various genre qualifiers that can be appended to any form of horror. but if you are beginning a horror story, it helps if you can decide roughly what kind of horror you are going for.

Is this story all blood and guts, tapping into the primal fear of being killed and/or eaten by a creature or entity you are incapable of fighting back against? Or is this a story of shifting shadows and fleeting glimpses of something insubstantial but terrifying, something that causes you to question the laws by which our world works? In short, are you trying to tap into the primal terror in the animal portion of the brain, or the existential terror that is our consciousness’s most dubious gift to us?

Since I’d wager that more people watch horror movies than read horror books, I’ll look there for examples. Movies actually adhere pretty rigorously to this stylistic split. If you’re watching a slasher flick like a Friday the Thirteenth or a Halloween, you’re trending more towards visceral horror. If you’re watching something more like 2013’s The Conjuring, you’re in more psychological horror territory.

When you get into the written word, however, an interesting thing happens. Movies, after all, have one distinct advantage over books. As a species sight is our primary sense. Graphic novels aside, we generally can’t show readers actual pictures. We have to hijack their imaginations to tell the visual parts of stories for us. But a movie, provided you keep your eyes open, can force you to look at whatever horrifying image the filmmakers want you to. With a book the the reader’s mind is free to imagine the story in as vivid or as vague detail as it wants. For this reason, I think that visceral horror stories have to work a lot harder to have the same impact on the page as they do on the screen. By the same token, psychological scares on the page can prey upon already-primed imaginations, giving them a short cut to terror.

This is not to say that visceral horror in book form can’t be done. I challenge anyone to read Scott Sigler’s Infected or Scott Smith’s The Ruins and not be terrified (and nauseated)by the extremely visceral body horror elements present.

Ultimately the most effective horror stories make at least some use of both methods to achieve maximum impact. This is really more of a continuum than it is a set of polar opposites. You’ll have to determine what effect you are going for and utilize the correct techniques to scare your readers silly.