Category Archives: The Writing Life

The Many Facets of Intimacy

Evan Braun Horror Reflection Storyline No Comments

What makes romance interesting? If you don’t read romance novels (like me), then you might answer, “Nothing.” But such a pat answer would be a little disingenuous. Personal preference aside, romance is the best-selling fiction genre by far. By far. If you don’t believe me, then just take a quick jaunt over here. Seventy-five million people read at least one romance novel in 2008 and the genre generated nearly three billion dollars in sales in the last two years. Yikes. Anyway, who am I to argue with seventy-five million fellow readers? That’s a fight I can’t win.

You could argue that it’s almost impossible to write a compelling narrative with no trace of romance in it. Even if it were possible, though, you’d be missing out on a massive storehouse of dramatic potential. Interpersonal relationships drive stories, and that’s a fact; romantic interpersonal relationships, by virtue of being the most complicated and emotional type of relationship, drive the most complicated and emotional stories. I know those are some broad statements, but they’re generally true.

So again I’ll ask, what makes romance interesting? What makes it compelling? “The love,” you might say, reductively. That would be true. Kind of. The conflict—the fireworks—doesn’t come from love, per se, as feelings of love are symptomatic of the true root cause of all this interest: intimacy. People really get off on intimacy.

Now, bear in mind that love and intimacy aren’t quite the same thing, though they are certainly close cousins. Love comes from intimacy, as I just alluded to, and the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Which is why, to cite a popular example, you can have sex (highly intimate) without love. This is largely the difference, I suppose, between romance and a lot of erotica.

Intimacy is about closeness. When I fall in love with another person, I let them into my life, sharing aspects of myself with them; they, in turn, share aspects of themselves with me. Our lives merge, at first slowly, and then in more significant ways as the relationship develops. Two—or more, if you swing that way—become one. By absolutely zero coincidence, sex is a wonderful metaphor for this process, which is why it’s intimate.

If closeness generates intimacy, then outright control does the same. Instead of merging your life with another person, you allow another person to take over your life. To control you, to take over your decision-making process. That’s as intimate as it gets. Well-meaning fetishists engage in bondage play all the time, and hopefully they do it temporarily and with some imposed structures. Beyond that, intimacy can go to some really dark places. A lot of crimes revolve around the perverted need for intimate control—rape and kidnapping, to name two—and then finally, the most extreme intimacy of all: murder.

My curiosity was piqued last year, in the darkest and most horrible way, when I stumbled upon some disturbing research while working on a book. As a matter of course, I don’t know that much about various fetishes (and fear not, I’m not going to commit much ink to this), but did you know there is a fetish in which a person can deeply desire another person to murder them, for sexual fulfillment? I even heard of a case from Europe where a person contracted another person to murder them and then cannibalize them; if sex, as a means of physically merging oneself with another, is a metaphor for romantic intimacy, then surely cannibalism is the most extreme metaphor for the intimacy of control.

And thus horror and romance are inextricably linked. Perhaps I’m just naïve, but I’d never heard of any of this before, and frankly I wish I never had.

So yes, people crave intimacy. It’s no longer looking so strange that the romance genre sells so many books. I mean, people are looking for the fulfillment of deep drives and desires which are sometimes hard to fulfill in the real world. Romance in stories—whether in a full-blown romance novel or in the majority of stories which merely contain a romantic element—helps frustrated readers of all stripes come to terms with the state of their own mundane lives.

Horror works the same way, by giving cathartic rise to the dark places inside us all and letting us (or perhaps forcing us to) confront them. Murder specifically—and death in general—is powerful precisely because it touches us in horrifyingly intimate ways. It’s no shock that the best works of fiction combine all these emotions and feelings to get a rise out of us—and understanding these connections can make us all better writers and observers of the human condition.

Having the Self Awareness to Horrify Others

Craft & Skills Horror Nathan Barra Self-Awareness 1 Comment

I write short stories to experiment with new genres and techniques. Last August, I caught wind of an anthology that was opening for submissions. However, the genre, horror, was largely beyond my experience.  I had read a few books, watched a number of movies, and even written a piece or two, but I was still stepping outside my comfort zone. Perfect! I brainstormed, scanning my consciousness for an idea that was shiny enough to start with that I could polish it into a true gem.

My inner eye first turned to the bestiary, drudging up images inspired by the abominations of Lovecraft, the near satirical creatures of B-rated movies and creeping things that I had imagined living in the shadows as a child. I paired monsters with characters, with milieus and with plots, searching for tension and conflict. I worked my way through what felt like dozens of combinations, fleshing out a few, but discarding most. Everything still felt flat, unexciting and unoriginal.

Frustrated, I stood up from my computer and wandered, trying to figure out where I was going wrong. The monsters I was creating were as good as any I had ever read, seen or made up myself. There was nothing inherently wrong with any of the elements I had assembled, and yet, I was not having a strong emotional reaction. How could I expect anyone else to feel when I did not?

As I prefer my horror in the form of movies, I turned to my collection, flipping through the pages of disks, looking for the echo of emotion that the remembrance of a truly good horror inspires. Das Experiment. Mr. Brooks. Untracable. Pathology. Of all my movies, these four psychological thrillers inspired the strongest reactions of anticipation and fear, the same emotions I sought to evoke in my readers.

For me, it was the difference of conscious intent. The creatures I had imagined were beasts, acting on instinct or hunger. The villains I had admired and feared were rational and extremely intelligent, acting for a variety of motives but all with horrifying cruelty and viciousness. It was the actions of humans and the human mind that I feared more than the brutality of beasts.

I spent hours over the following weeks considering what horrified me, coming up with a number of story ideas that I feel are gems in need of polishing.  The difference for me was self-awareness. I found that I could not write something truly horrifying to others until I could first horrify myself.

What is Horror? Really?

Guest Posts Motivation The Writing Life 1 Comment

dan_wells[1]A guest post by Dan Wells.

I sold my first book about a year and a half ago, and I was bouncing off the walls more literally than you probably care to imagine. It the was the first step in the fulfillment of a life-long dream, and I was so happy I couldn’t stop telling pretty much everyone I knew or met or interacted with. I quickly learned there were only two basic versions of this conversation.

The Good One
Me: I just sold a book! I’m going to be published!
Other Person: That’s awesome!
Both of Us: Yay!

The Other One
Me: I just sold a book! I’m going to be published!
Other Person: That’s awesome! What kind of book is it?
Me: Horror.
Other Person: I don’t read horror.

This basic template held true in almost every situation, including–and this surprised me–dedicated genre fans. People who have read more fantasy and science fiction books than most people have ever read anything. The thing is, there’s a lot of crossover between the rest of the speculative genres: if you read fantasy, you probably also read a bit of SF, and a bit of paranormal, and a bit of historical, and so on and so on. There are exceptions, and most of us tend to group around one or two subgenres that really get our motor going, like hard SF or cyberpunk or urban fantasy or whatever, but horror, for most of us, is the odd one out. Except for a relatively small group of self-identified horror fans, nobody reads it.

Except that everybody reads it, they just don’t admit it, or maybe even know it.

Ask people what horror is and you’re likely to get one of two answers: “Stephen King” or “slasher movies.” Never mind that Stephen King hasn’t written a full-on horror novel in decades, or that slasher movies are in a medium so removed from novels as to make the comparison meaningless. These are what people think of when they hear the word “horror,” and that colors their entire perception of the genre. Our concept of horror is frozen in a single period of history, let’s call it 1973 (the publication of Carrie) to 1988 (when movies like Child’s Play represented the last hurrah of the slasher movie before they tipped fully into self-parody). Horror films have never truly left, because they’re cheap and profitable, but their quality and popularity have gone in waves; I count two horror film renaissances since the heyday of the 80s, maybe three depending on how you define them. But horror novels have never achieved anything like their 15-year peak, possibly because of the way the giants of that era (King, Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, James Herbert) so thoroughly dominated the genre.

And the truth is, this shifting definition is kind of correct, in its way: if we define “horror” as “the kind of stuff King and Herbert wrote in the 70s,” then you’re right, most people don’t read horror anymore, and that’s fine because most people don’t write that kind of horror anymore. The genre has moved on, and King and Koontz and Barker and a giant host of others are still writing it, but the genre label is still stuck in the past. Today we hide our horror in a jumbled pile of other labels, secretly infecting almost every shelf in the bookstore. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro writes “vampire historicals,” but they’re really horror. Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books are “urban fantasy,” but they’re really horror. Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville books are “paranormal romance,” but surprise, they’re really horror. F. Paul Wilson writes “thrillers” that are obviously horror. These books and more are incredibly popular–Dresden got it’s own TV show and roleplaying game, for goodness sake–and the odds are incredibly good that the same people who claim they never read horror will, when pressed, admit that they’ve read a lot of these other things. They just don’t call them horror, and the bookstores don’t call them horror, and thus horror doesn’t sell and thus the myth perpetuates.

Trying to tie horror down to a single genre or representation is missing the point. Some say that horror is defined by its supernatural elements, but I think horror goes beyond the trappings and the props to get at something much deeper and more meaningful; it’s less of a genre, in my mind, than a style or a perspective. Let’s go back to the roots of modern horror and steal a definition from H.P. Lovecraft: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” So we could say that horror is about fear, and in that sense we can find horror everywhere. In military fiction much of the plots are driven by the uncertainty of who will live and who will die; they’re about the fear of death and the loss of honor; they’re horror. Espionage novels are about the fear that an enemy nation will subvert or conquer your own, literally stealing your way of life; that’s horror. Romance, at it’s heart, is about the fear that the person you love doesn’t love you back; that’s one of the most horrific things I can think of.

So what separates these genres from “real” horror, whether we label it as such or not? Let’s go back even further to Anne Radcliffe, the original godmother of gothic horror; roughly paraphrased, she separated terror and horror in a fascinating way, saying that terror is the emotion we feel while waiting for something bad, and horror is the emotion we feel while facing it. Terror is about dread, but horror is about confronting the thing that we dread–it’s about our revulsion, our shock, our struggle to understand and adapt. In a thriller we race the clock and stop the bad guy, but in a horror, the bad guy wins: the bomb goes off, or the protector dies, or the true love marries someone else. We have to pick up the pieces and survive. Horror is about facing our losses head on, and being either crushed or strengthened by your reaction to it.

In light of this definition, we can see the rise of horror in all our media, from The Hunger Games to Man of Steel. We are a society that has faced true horror (9/11 is the obvious one, plus any number of other terrorist attacks, military actions, mass shootings, and so on), and we’re dealing with those emotions and repercussions in our art. We are primed for horror, because we are searching for stories about survival. This, in turn, makes us a culture primed for heroism: we’ll face the horror, and we’ll live through it, and even if the characters die the readers will still be there at the end, breathless and alive and shaking our head in relief. Horror gives us a chance to overcome the things that try to break us.

Horror is everywhere. Go out and make some more of it.

Guest Writer Bio: Dan Wells writes in many different genres, including supernatural thriller (I Am Not A Serial Killer), psychological horror (The Hollow City), and science fiction (Partials). He has won two Parsecs and a Hugo for his work on Writing Excuses, a podcast for aspiring writers. Visit him online at www.thedanwells.com, or say hello on Twitter: @thedanwells. His newest book, called RUINS, is the climax of the post-apocalyptic Partials Sequence, and launches on March 11.

Writing in Color

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

Black and White Rainbow

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.