Zombie Fun!

K.D. Alexander The Writing Life 2 Comments

The first appearance of the concept of the “zombi” was in 1916’s The Magic Island by W.B. Seabrook.

In the Vault published by HP Lovecraft in 1925 has the first appearance of a character being bitten by a zombie. It was rejected by Weird Tales for being too “gruesome”.

White Zombie, starring Bella Lugosi and directed by Victor Halperin is credited as being the first zombie film. It’s based on the same voodoo cult style zombies that appeared in Seabrook’s novel.

Things to Come by H.G. Wells was made into a movie in 1936. It was the first appearance of the zombie plague, seen later in books like Jonathan Maberry’s Dead of Night and the Resident Evil movie and videogame series.

Night of the Living Dead, written/directed by George Romero is often credited as the creation of the modern zombie.

Thriller, Michael Jackson’s 1983 music video, is one of the most famous depictions of zombies. Seriously. Everyone knows Thriller.

Zombies Ate my Neighbors is the first zombie video-game I ever played.

Happy Halloween!

 

Boo!

K.D. Alexander The Writing Life 3 Comments

So, it’s Halloween. I’m actually kind of excited that I ended up with the Halloween post because it’s right up my alley. And I was looking forward to the leaves changing and the crisp chill in the air as laughter and screams fill the otherwise silent night.

But I’ve got a more important topic to talk about. Specifically, college football.

Actually no. We’ll stick with blood, guts, and gore.

I’m not going to lie, I love horror. But not the crap that’s filling our cineplexes nowadays. My favorite kind of horror doesn’t jump out and say BOO! It’s the sneaking, creeping blackness that twists your insides and makes you feel the fear.

My favorite horror movie of all time isn’t a slasher. It’s a little independent film called Session 9. Check it out, it has that redheaded guy from CSI.

The movie starts with a simple premise: A waste removal team goes into an abandoned mental asylum to clean the asbestos out of the building to render it safe for some government office or something. There’s nothing that jumps out at the characters, there’s no creepy little girl ready to eat your face. No, it’s a pure psychotic meltdown in the best kind of horror. As the team works diligently to meet their deadlines and put supper on their family’s tables, they uncover some of the patient’s files. And what happens after is the best education in true horror.

Are monsters scary? Sure. I still sleep with the covers over my head every night because I’m afraid Freddy’s coming to get me in my dreams. Don’t blame me, blame the babysitter. Who lets a 9 year old watch Nightmare on Elm Street anyway!?

What do Session 9 and Nightmare on Elm Street have in common? And what are they doing on a writing blog?

In Session 9, we have a prime example of horror, the CHARACTER.

In Nightmare on Elm Street, we have a prime example of horror, the ACTOR.

But wait, don’t actors play characters? Yeah. Sorta. Anything more would be an elementary lesson in literature. And I don’t have the patience to teach. 🙂

Freddy Krueger terrorizes children in their dreams, slitting their throats, chasing them around, throwing them in furnaces…It’s gratuitous. Do I have a problem with it? Absolutely not. I’m human. Heck, our whole race’s history is mostly based on sex and violence.

Here, the horror of the story isn’t the character of the fear, it’s the actor of the horror. If that makes sense, then you’ve been eating just as much candy as me.

The Elm Street movies rely on the slash/bang shock and awe of what sort of violence is going to befall the next victim. Movies and books like this are a dime a dozen.

In Session 9, we have the creeping characterization of pure horror as the cleaning crew learns what sort of pseudo-science went on behind closed doors. The influence the asylum has on its new occupants is characterized by the shifting tone as the actors interact and go on their own individual story arcs.

It’s a more satisfying horror that sounds boring on paper. But big on screen.

Which is easier to write? Neither. Which is more satisfying to write? Both.

The issue is everyone that reads your book has a completely different concept of what frightens them. You can’t win every battle. And you can’t save everyone. As long as you don’t trip over the corpse sticking out from under your bed though, you just might be okay.

Providing it doesn’t get you first.

Happy Halloween!

The Balancing Act – Specificity in Action Scenes

Action & Adventure Conflict Craft & Skills Fantasy Horror Ideas & Plotting Leigh Galbreath Science Fiction 2 Comments

Very recently, I took part in a workshop with twenty or so other aspiring novelists in the SF and Fantasy genres, and one of the most common problems I ran across was in writing action scenes. Often the scenes came out jumbled and confusing, or the writer simply skipped it. Writing action can be intimidating. It was for me. My first action scene, I confess, was first written by a friend of mine. He did the draft, and I had to fiddle with it until I figured out how it worked.

For me, action scenes have myriad issues that make it difficult to navigate. Here I’m going to focus on one of those issues – the difficult balancing act of how much detail to include. Too much description is much the same as too little; both will leave the reader confused.

The lack of description, I think, is at least partially based on the fact that we hear, again and again, how too much description slows the pacing down. In most cases this is correct, most description is unnecessary because the reader can assume certain things.

Example: He parked and went into the building.

I don’t put in the step by step detail about navigating the parking lot or getting out of the car- putting his foot on the break, turning off the ignition, unlatching his seat belt, opening the door, getting out, and closing the door behind him. Most people know how to get out of a car, so the detail is unnecessary.

Let’s look at the same idea put into an action scene. Take this example I saw recently: I lunged. He landed on the ground with a heavy thud, and I got back to my feet.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I have no idea what just happened. What made the other guy fall? When did the narrator end up on the floor and why? The detail is now a true necessity for the reader to experience what they are reading.

That’s the irony. While, in another type of scene, description can be problematic, it’s necessary for action scenes. Quite simply, most people don’t know what it’s like to be in a gun or sword fight, a space battle, a horse charge, or a kung fu brawl. They don’t have the experience to fill in the gaps, and so the writer has to do the heavy lifting.

The problem comes when the writer moves too far in the other direction. As I said above, too much is just as bad as too little. Get too detailed, and the reader might lose the focus of the scene in all the minutia and become confused anyway.

The way out of this is to be specific rather than wordy. Slamming to the ground, for instance, implies something very different from hitting the ground or slipping to the ground. Also, words that mimic what’s going on can help cut down the word count while still keeping the pacing going. Hard consonants can help a reader hear a gun fight in their heads. Short, concise words echo the pace of a fast moving chase.

Another good thing to remember is the use of paragraphing – shorter paragraphs that describe only one character’s actions can keep what’s going on clear to the reader. Get too long, or put more than one character’s actions in a paragraph, and things start getting muddled again.

So, while finding the right balance can be difficult, it’s by no means impossible. There are plenty of ways to counteract the need for the additional description an action scene requires. The key is to keep the action simple and clear.

An Idea is Never Truly ‘Finished’

Kevin Cioffi The Writing Life 3 Comments

I am guessing this has happened to many of you:

I began work on a novel about two years ago.  The process began with the spark of an idea, nurturing it through plenty of world-building into the semblance of a flame.  After a couple months of kicking this idea around in my head, November was coming around, and with it NaNoWriMo.  I decided to go to town on this new idea, working with some pretty robust world building and a very loose outline, and managed to hit the 50,000 words, but was only about halfway through the story as I envisioned it in my head.

After November, work on the novel inevitably slowed, and that passionate month of writing began to resemble the opening act of a romantic relationship; I was enamored with the idea in November, it was lovely and infallible.  Afterwards, glaring imperfections began to surface and the idea wasn’t so flawless anymore.  It needed work.  I put it on the back burner to simmer.  There were aspects I needed to reconsider.

I worked on it off and on the following year, considering new ideas and beginning new projects all the while, but I always seemed to come back to the original; indeed, I never stopped developing the world, or my ideas on how the outline should play out.

I will tell you a bit about it so I can make a point later.  I will try to be pretty general rather than get locked down in specific details.  The setting was a jungle type environment, something I had never seen before as the prime location in a fantasy story, and one that I was really excited to work with.  Within the jungle lived a single tribe with a terrifying history.  Some time ago, perhaps hundreds of years, the world was locked in eternal war, human blood spilled constantly and endlessly.  The earth was forced to drink this blood, and with enough of it, a terrible evil quickened beneath the crust, giving rise to a malicious jungle.  Most of the population was wiped out as the vegetation sprung up overnight, choking with vines, stabbing with roots, cutting with razor sharp leaves, what have you; quickened through decades of violence, this villainous jungle craved human blood to fuel its growth.

Humans fled as the jungle took root, and the few survivors were able to convene and establish a horribly burned and scarred track of land where nothing whatsoever would grow.  And so they were safe from the onslaught of the jungle, and in time, were able to form a community and begin to slowly grow the human population.

Those are about all the details necessary.  The point is, I worked with this idea for some time, beginning work on the actual novel with interruptions here and there for more world building about what the society was like, how their struggle for survival would play out.

But I began to feel limited.  I was working with a relatively small population, in a relatively cramped and concentrated pocket of the world.  The society itself was nowhere near as complex or established enough for me to tie it allegorically to problems in modern society, which I very badly wanted to do.  What was once a spark, then a fire, eventually dulled and burned out; development ceased and I was unable to overcome these glaring problems with the established world-building.

Recently, a few weeks ago, that unmistakable spark hit me again, and I began to solve my problems.  I had new, vaster ideas; ideas that took all the work I had done into its fold and established something larger.  Suddenly, the old idea was but a facet of the new.  The world, and the story, grew in scope and complexity and have become much more relatable, much easier to work with.

I have heard it say that many works of art – poems, paintings, songs, and novels – are never truly finished.  The artist eventually has to pick a point and sort of walk away, presenting it to the world in its current state.  This makes more sense to me now than it ever has before.  How many of you have experienced the same: an idea that never stops growing, that always becomes richer and more refined.  An idea that will grow over several days, then months, and eventually years.

It is clear to me that an idea for a world and a story is never “finished’ and ready to write.  It is true, at some point we will be forced to take what we have and run with it or else it will never see life, but I am sure many of us could sit and incubate a single idea for the entirety of our lives – I can only wonder how imaginative and complex these could grow.

As for me, I am more excited than ever for November to roll around, to give my newly reborn idea another shot at NaNoWriMo and see if it is finally ready to take its first steps into life.