Category Archives: Genres

A guest post by Emily Godhand.

Oh sure, give Friday the 13th to the horror writer. I see how it is. Two can play this game.

I apologize for nothing.

It seems a bit blasphemous (Hi! I’m Godhand) to call out one of the first rules I ever heard when writing stories: Show, don’t tell.

This quickly became the only rule I ever heard, as it seemed the easiest way for anyone who had ever put pen to paper to become a critic and ‘help’ me with my story. (Even you, Ms. High School English Teacher! For shame.)

But the problem was, as well-intentioned as everyone was, there was never enough ‘showing’ and any sort of ‘telling’ was immediately reprimanded with that ‘rule’. They were taking it as an axiom, and weren’t looking at context, style, pacing or point of view. They weren’t listening to it as a story, as an oral narration passed from person to person.

Oh, no.

It was just “you’re directly telling me something and there’s a RULE against that and therefore that’s bad.”

Sure, they wanted to be helpful, but they didn’t have or didn’t know how to deliver constructive feedback, so by God, they were going to keep repeating that suggestion no matter how minutely I described every mundane detail of every person my protagonist encountered. It wasn’t enough to just say he was “fair, fit, and flawless”; they wanted every last detail of this man’s physical description until I had spent a page non-ironically devoted to the magnificence of his beard.

When really, there are no words.

I mean, it was a well-intentioned enough rule meant to draw out vivid descriptions and immersive, flavorful text that evoked cinematic images from the effective use of word-play. It was meant to avoid mundane descriptions and narrations. But…in the process, describing every last little thing in an attempt to ‘show and not tell’ creates mundane descriptions and narrations.

“Bob was happy. He drank his coffee. Then he went to work.”

Some have taken it so far as to be interpreted as “Don’t tell ANYTHING”, as if the story is some sort of well-kept secret only to be ascertained by the finest of reader-sleuths.
…After they dredge through a purple sea of descriptions, that is.

“The Writer’s Motto!” …wait…

The other extreme being, of course, is to show EVERYTHING. Which isn’t much better.

Let’s go back to Bob.

“Bob picked up his yellow mug with a bright smile. He took a sip then set it down. His lips puckered at the taste and twisted his face into a scowl. He took another sip. The metallic toaster popped up golden brown toast. His stomach growled. He left the toast in the toaster and took another sip….”

Do I care that the mug is yellow? Is there something special about the toaster that I need to describe it as ‘metallic’? Is toast anything but golden brown? Does all that description even matter? Bob’s having breakfast. Tell me he’s having breakfast and then Cut. End scene.

You could tell me he got ready for work “with his usual breakfast of black coffee laced with self-loathing”, but to tell me anything more implies there is something important within the context of the breakfast itself. If there isn’t, you’re just slowing down the pacing. Giving attention to something tells the reader ‘this is important!’

But you can mix showing with telling. You can do that. You’re the writer. You’re a God with a pen in your hand; there are no rules, only suggestions.

“Bob was happy.

At least, that’s what he told himself as he poured a large mug of black coffee. He had a good home, a good wife, a good job. He plastered on a smile and chugged down the burning liquid, still ignoring the toast that popped up behind him minutes ago.

What good was his home to him when he was never there?
What good was having a wife when she hated him?
What good was having a job if he couldn’t bring himself to go in?

He hung his head in utter shame.
No, Bob was miserable, and he knew it.”

Ask yourself:
Is this adding to the texture and flavor of the story?
Is it appropriate for the current pacing? (description slows things down)
Is this most effective way of delivering important (or at the very least, interesting) information in your style?

If not, get on with it already! There’s an antagonist to face and obstacles to overcome and you’re here writing something that could be summarized as “Bob had his normal breakfast of black coffee and self-hatred before heading into work.”

But that would be story-telling.

So what is a writer to do?

*Keep point of view in mind-
Who is telling this story and who are they telling it to?
Would you say it this way when telling the story to someone else?

*Keep pacing in mind-
What information do they need to know right now, and is it worth slowing the story down to show this information?

*Keep in mind this is a narrative medium, not a visual one-
You can hand over information freely in a narrative medium. You are conveying information; give the information the reader needs to, or should, know, in order to enjoy the experience.

Then again, there’s a lot to be said about straight up telling information to your readers without ever showing them anything.

As it is Friday 13th, there’s always the classic horror tactic of telling the reader just how indescribable something was, because, My God, it works.

Look at this lucky bastard with no eyes.

“My dearest reader,

I cannot even begin to describe the horror, the insanity, that this beast invoked within the depths of my jaded soul.

I cannot — WILL NOT — describe this evil nightmare, as you and this .45 are my only friends left, and I fear if I even began to describe a fraction of the terror I’ve witnessed, your eyes would burst within their sockets and your mind would shatter into a thousand pieces.

They would lock you away in a quiet room at the furthest reach of Arkham’s towers because you’d do nothing but scream,
and scream,
and scream.

The image of this grotesque monstrosity would be forever seared into your mind. Never again in your short, miserable life, (if God is merciful), would you ever know any rest or peace again.”
-Lovecraft possessing Godhand

And it’s like, well, Mr. Narrator- writing-in-second-person, you’ve done a lot of telling for sure, but, you’ve also shown me what this thing looks like as well, and …you know what, Man? Maybe…maybe I don’t wanna see it.

That’s how it’s done. Ladies? Call me.

My friend and mentor Bruce Elgin gave me only two rules for writing:
1) Be Clear
2) Don’t be boring

If you can do both these things, your writing works. You can do what you want.

So go on and tell me a story.

About Emily Godhand:

Emily Godhand is a cross-genre author who lives in a book fort in Denver, CO, with nine rats who revere her as their Queen.

As former psychiatric technician, she draws her inspirations from her work and the constant nightmares she’s had for 13 years. As such, her works tend to focus on an exploration of trauma, immortality, and human consciousness.

Read her latest work on Wattpad, where she is an Ambassador.

Examinations and Bindings

February 12, 2015

Travis Heermann

Character Horror Narrative Voice The Writing Life 2 Comments

“Examine love always, and binding,” was what Jack Ketchum told our Odyssey Writing Workshop class in the summer of 2009.

This may still be some of the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten.

If you don’t know Jack Ketchum, he’s best known as a horror writer, author of the The Girl Next Door (one of the most harrowing novels I’ve ever encountered). All of Ketchum’s monsters are the human kind, because they are more terrifying than any werewolf or vampire, for the simple fact that they could be living down the street.

The particular way that he made that statement above was intended to lodge in our brains. He had to explain a little so that we got the fullness of it.

In its quintessence, it means that love should be at the center of everything we write, but not necessarily in the romantic sense. Relationships coming together, coming apart. Love of life (or death, or some other obsession). Examining the bonds that hold us together, the bonds that come unraveled despite our best efforts, the bonds we cut. Pushing one’s characters to the limit, to see how far they will go to pursue, preserve, or shatter those bonds. Characters are driven by their connections to other characters.

In my own work, love is at the heart of my Ronin Trilogy, a historical fantasy story set in 13th-century Japan. A young, masterless samurai saves the life of a noble maiden, they fall in love, and their worlds are shattered again and again by this bond. She is betrothed to another. Our hero is cast out to wander again, penniless and bereft. When they encounter each other again in Book 3, the circumstances are as tragic and unavoidable as the love they share, a love that can never be consummated again–on pain of death.

Ketchum said something else that had a huge impact on me in his essay “Splat Goes the Hero: Visceral Horror,” published in the most excellent handbook On Writing Horror. He quoted one of my favorite film directors, Akira Kurosawa: “The role of the artist is to not look away.” In fact, we dare not flinch if we want our work to make an impact on the reader. When I read slush stories or critique stories from my writing group, what is often missing from mediocre stories is the deep-down pulsing heart, the passion, the pathos that really makes the reader care about what happens. The hard part about exploring this stuff is that to do so, we have to draw upon our own experiences, dredge up things that we don’t really want to feel again. We have to go there.

Revisiting all those old heartbreaks can be fodder for some truly visceral writing. It does give me a modicum of satisfaction when I draw upon personal experience for my fiction and I get to turn what might have been really negative experiences into a published story. I can rewrite bits and pieces of my own history, perhaps by saying the right thing this time, or finding closure with a woman who broke my heart into a million pieces, or just harnessing some unrequited love and floating it out into the universe on a bed of fiction. But again, I have to be willing to go there. I have to constantly ask myself in every story, have I flinched? Have I looked away at the last moment to avoid the deepest, darkest heart of the story?

Examining love always, and binding, is the heart of being an artist, of creating authentically.

All of us here at the Fictorians are independent artists and we hope that you will support our efforts by buying our work. The way publishing is changing, it is more important than ever that people directly support the artists and authors they enjoy.

This month, I am asking for help in bringing a story fifteen years in the making to an exciting, epic conclusion. I am running a Kickstarter campaign from now until February 24, 2015, to fund the publication of Book 3 in my Ronin Trilogy, Spirit of the Ronin. Please visit the campaign on Kickstarter here and consider supporting it.

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.

Write a Short Story? I’d Rather Floss a Chicken’s Teeth!

January 6, 2015

Ace Jordyn

Ace Jordyn Craft & Skills Genres Storyline No Comments

Write a short story? I’d rather floss a chicken’s teeth! That’d be much easier.

I found myself facing that problem after writing six novels. I couldn’t wrap my head around a shorter piece of work. Everything I tried I sounded like an outline for a novel.

Books on outlining didn’t help. Workshops provided little insight. Critique groups, well, I could help someone to better tell their story, heck, I’d even edited an acclaimed anthology, but I couldn’t tell one myself.

How could I overcome this block?

The problem was, I needed a break from novel writing and I really wanted to know what eluded me about this form. I followed this four step process and I learned how to write a short story:

1) Read short stories, not novels. By reading short stories I learned what forms and genres I really liked and disliked. There’s no point in trying to write in a genre or with a style that doesn’t speak to you.

2) Choose a genre which speaks to you. For example, I love some literary style authors and I love science fiction stories. Literary style I can read but I can’t figure out the voice. With science fiction I understand the voice and the genre, but I’m not as adept as I’d like to be with the science. Hence, I don’t have the confidence to write it. How did I learn this about myself? Check out point number three …

3) Retell the stories that interest you. Be aware of style, plot, character and tropes common to the genre. That’s how I figured out if I had the desire, the passion to write certain stories. When I retold a story, I paid close attention to the plot and how it unfolded. I had to be aware of the tropes. Most importantly, I had to feel the voice and I had to feel the passion for the genre. Once you’ve discovered what stories energize and excite you, the final step is easy.

4) Now, write an original story in the genre and voice that excites you.

That’s it. It’s that easy.

Should you publish or submit a retold story? That’s another matter. Issues of public domain arise and rightly so. Some stories I deleted because my intent was only to learn from them. Others, even if there are no public domain issues, may be published in the future but with full disclosure as to the source of inspiration.

Where did I finally find my voice? With fables and fairy tales and people’s stories of old. I love it. The most curious thing I learned was that it wasn’t about setting for me for I’ve set my stories in worlds of fantasy, science fiction, and yes, there’s even a literary one or two! My real journey was to find my story telling voice.

The cheat of the matter was this: later on, I recognized that my writing voice had always been with me. I had heard it, felt it even and I had tried to squeeze it into forms and stories that didn’t suit it. That was the heart of the problem. That is the heart of this journey – to hear the voice within you and to find the form that fits it.