Category Archives: Horror

Making the Fear Personal

Over the last month we’ve been looking on the darker side of things, and at the way love and terror go so very well together. And they should, really. They are the most basic and universal of human emotions. They are intertwined and hardwired into our psyches, a part of the survival instinct that keeps our species alive and multiplying. They transcend culture, class, and temperament.

For instance, people feel envy over different things and react to it in different ways. I may never sympathize with someone enraged by some slight or another, even though I may understand it on a logical level. But someone who is terrified?

Absolutely.

The funny thing is that, many of us silly humans, seem to still feel that our emotions are unlike anyone else’s. “No one else can understand my heartache or my terror,” we tell ourselves. “They can’t know what I feel. Not really.”

Well, actually, yes, they can. That’s the basis for group therapy, after all, but we do like to feel like we are all the beautiful, unique snowflakes our mothers told us we were, don’t we?

From a writer’s perspective, the universality of these emotions and the vaulted position people like to place their own emotional experiences rather works in our favor. Love and fear are so ingrained in the human psyche that it’s hard to write compelling fiction without tripping over them both while gazing off into the clouds of our imaginations.

Fear is probably the first and most vital of emotions. The need to not get eaten by something big and bad, after all, is the primary instinct of most creatures on this planet. The fear of death, failure, disappointment, loneliness, and pain is prevalent across the fiction board. Fear is the root of tension and plants doubt in every protagonist in just about every book ever written. Small or large, incidental or monstrous, we all recognize the people we’re reading about when their fears are put on the page, and we all hope they overcome their fears somehow, even if (or especially because) we often cannot overcome our own.

At the same time humans are pack animals, and so it’s no surprise that we feel the need to include the binding emotion of love in our stories. The characters don’t necessarily have to be involved in the affair of the century. They simply have to care about something or someone. A character who cares for nothing, is…well…rather boring, to be honest. The anti-hero, Riddick, doesn’t care about anything or anyone when we first meet him in Pitch Black, but it is through his slow turn toward caring for the individuals around him that he becomes human to us, someone to sympathize with. I don’t think anyone could ever say that his caring strays to the romantic—the man is, after all, a psychopath—but his attachments motivate and drive him through multiple films. He changes from a monster himself, into one of us.

Or rather, I should say, his attachments mixed with the inevitable fear of losing those attachments, is what motivates him. It all comes back to the fear in fiction, doesn’t it?  Loving or needing something might be readily recognizable, but it’s the fear of losing those things or of them turning against us, that  really makes it worth reading.

Anytime love and fear end up on a page, we’re using the universal to make a moment personal. We give the readers something almost subconsciously familiar, made interesting by being seen through someone else’s eyes. We show a window into emotional lives that, at first blush, looks nothing like the reader’s, but in actuality uses their personal experiences to pull them further into the story.

We writers often struggle to write something compelling and moving. It’s nice to get a free-bee every so often.

How to Build a Murderer

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Horror and mayhem are all about the villain. Your murderer has to be  as real as and smarter than your hero, whether your hero is a street smart cop, a yoga teacher framed for the killing or a busy body old lady. And really, why would anyone invite Ms. Jane Marple (Agatha Christie’s heroine)  or Jessica Fletcher (Murder She Wrote) to a party? People are falling down dead all around them. All the time.

But I digress.

The challenge in writing a murderer is to push past your own personal revulsion at what the character does and see why he does it.

Why do we love Professor James Moriarty as much as Sherlock Holmes?

Because Moriarty is a whole and terribly wounded person. He has wants, needs and his own (internal) code of conduct. He is at least as clever as, if not more clever than, Sherlock. Moriarty is who Sherlock could have been if he’d been nudged down a different path.

My current work in progress is an urban fantasy thriller. So how did I create a murderer? I did what any writer would do. Research.

I’m probably on the NSA’s watch list based on the serial killer searches I ran from my computer. I read lots of thrillers, murder mysteries, and true crime novels. I took notes.  I read craft books including James N. Frey’s How to Write a Damned Good Mystery: A Practical Step-by-Step Guide from Inspiration to Finished Manuscript.  I highly recommend Frey’s book to anyone writing in this genre. mystery cover

My research confirmed a lot of what I suspected. What makes a good murderer? According to Frey:

“1. Our murderer will be evil.” Frey defines this as someone who is acting out of his or her best interests. I’ll add that this drive toward self-satisfaction will be overwhelming. Our killer doesn’t care who he hurts as long as he gets his selfish desires.

“2.  Our murder will not appear to be evil.”  Sadly, real life bears this principle out. Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Aileen Wuornos all looked respectable. Bundy worked a crisis hotline. The idea of evil lurking just under the skin is central to horror stories. Also, if the bad guy is the obvious suspect you fail to create the tension needed to maintain a horror, mystery or thriller.

“3. Our murderer will be clever and resourceful.” Sherlock would not spend his life trying to catch Moriarty if he wasn’t clever or resourceful. The near miss, the hero arriving moments too late, creates tension and makes the chase all that more thrilling. We read thrillers and murder mysteries for the chase and inevitable capture.

“4. Our murderer is wounded.”  A deep psychological wound drives our murderer. After all, he’s taken a step (or several dozen) past the line. He’s gone from thinking of ending someone’s life to actually doing it. Like Jack the Ripper, he may take his crime beyond mere murder and mutilate his victims. He’s shattered the veneer of civilization we all live with, and something outside the normal has made him do it. He (often) justifies killing because of this emotional wound. This is probably the step that most “failed” (defined as stories that didn’t capture my attention) stories miss. Without this driving force shaping your murderer he will feel like a two-dimensional character or a cliché.

“5. Our murderer is afraid.” Even with the thrill of the kill the murderer must worry about apprehension. His fear mixes with an intensifies his other emotions. Your character needs to feel fear whether fear of discovery, losing what he’s built or something else. Fear is a defining human trait. We all fear something. Often many somethings. Fear of failure. Fear of being not good enough. Fear of being discovered as a “fraud.” Without fear a character is a sketch.

Lots of craft books spend time on getting you to flesh out your characters. Your killer should be the most fully realized. You need to know his history and all his actions even though most will never make it into the story – only the results. The psychology of a killer is in many ways more important than his physiology. Merely hitting the high points of psychopathy – like most serial killers in their youth have tortured or killed animals – isn’t enough. Merely hating women isn’t enough. Something in the killer’s path has pushed him over the line from malcontent to murderer.

Did he accidentally kill someone in a fit of temper and “get away” with it but now he has to kill again to protect the life he’s built since (the example Frey uses in his book)? Did he like the thrill? What is he afraid of?

Simply put, if you don’t know how your killer got to the point we find him in this story he’s not going to be very compelling.

Frey spends about 20 pages on developing your murderer and becoming intimate with him. Obviously, I can’t do justice to Frey’s advice in the space of a blog post. But let me leave you with this:

Murderers are three-dimensional characters. They are clever, not just lucky. They are “evil” in the sense that their desires are the most important thing in the world to them. They are highly damaged people. Unless you know what drives your killer (his wound) you can’t know how he kills and won’t keep your reader engaged.

WEB_N Greene-1 You can find me at my blog. Twitter, and Facebook .

 

 

 

The Many Facets of Intimacy

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

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.