Tag Archives: horror

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

Guest Posts No Comments

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.

Nothing to Fear but the Demons Inside

February 10, 2014

Matt Jones

Matt Jones Reflection 1 Comment

Scary Tree I admit up front that I don’t read much Horror. It’s not that I don’t like the stories or the work as a whole, it’s just that it makes me uncomfortable. And it’s supposed to, that’s its entire job! A good horror novel will take you through an emotional journey no other genre does. It elicits emotions of fear, confusion, pain, angst, and sorrow. All novels attempt to play with your emotions to some degree, but few attempt to do so in a way that is supposed to make you uncomfortable.

Despite all the books I read, I never actually thought about what, exactly, is it in horror novels that makes me avoid them. I enjoy the excitement and the anticipation that they create. The adrenaline rush makes me feel alive and excited in a life where the most fear I’ll feel is while getting cut off on the freeway. The monsters are imaginative and creative. But most of all, the emotions are powerful! For other novels, I’ll smile during the love scenes and sigh during the sad scenes. I’ll play the good reader and act the way I’m supposed to, but usually it’s only horror that can make me act as a frightened boy and not simply a silent observer.

So, if horror novels are so powerful, why do I rarely actually read them? Maybe it’s because these adrenaline filled moments feel unnatural to me. They might remind my mind of past events that brought about the same physiological response. For example, getting shot at in Iraq while deployed in the military. Or, maybe something as simple as the power going out at night while I was in our unfinished basement as a kid. Neither experience was something I enjoyed.

It might also be the discomfort caused by breaking social rules. Many horror characters have to deal with mental issues that either force or just allows them to go against the social norms that have been drilled into us since childhood. You are put into the mind of someone who steals, rapes, maims, and murders without any remorse. While this is uncomfortable to read, the real shocker comes when you let yourself go to the story and you start agreeing with the actions taken. When you’re in the head of that character who is walking down the hall with the knife in their hands and you find yourself agreeing that the little boy must die to ensure there are no witnesses.

To be honest, I’m not sure what the reason is. They are all good reasons, but I also think they are the reasons I am drawn to horror novels every now and then. Whenever I want to shake up the norm and remind myself that these primal feeling still rest within my soul and heart.

However, there might be one other reason why I have an uneasy relationship with horror. A reason that, as an fellow writer, you might experience as well.
When I was younger, my friends and I threw a Halloween party. Part of the fun and games was a writing contest. Bring a story and read it to the group for praise and prizes. I worked hard and wrote a story about a killer who stalks and rapes young women before sending them to their death. It was dark and the motivations were twisted and gruesome. It had a satisfying ending, if not the happiest in the world. It was a good piece of literary work, in my opinion, and it definitely got an emotional response from the party goers. I thought it was a success, but was surprised at the response afterwards.

My friends who listened to the story, friends who I’ve known for years, looked at me as if I was a new person. A girl I’ve dated asked me later how I could think up something so dark. I heard rumors that some friends thought my character in the story was a representation of who I really wanted to be inside. I began to wonder if my friends thought I really wanted to kill them. And what could I say? I was just a teenager. What if these stories that I thought up really were the thoughts of some inner demon?

Maybe I avoid horror because I’m afraid it’ll show me a side of myself that I really don’t want to see. Maybe I do have demons in my soul that will see the words as an invitation to let loose on the world.

I’m not sure I have a good answer, but I do know one thing: I took the fear and suspicion of my friends as the highest praise I’ve ever gotten. Demons or no demons, horror is a part of me. Even if I only open myself up to it sparingly.

Love and Murder: A Valentine’s Day Tale

February 4, 2014

fictorians

Guest Posts 1 Comment

Mercedes M Yardley A guest post by Mercedes M. Yardley.

What’s the draw to love and murder? Why does it add such spice to our favorite stories?

I sat down to write a tale. A love story. Not a romance, because that’s something completely different, but a story with love and heart and something a little special. Then I threw in a heavy dose of murder.

Well, “heavy” might be misleading. I based the story on it. Two broken people who find each other and fall madly, cosmically in love, and crisscross the country on a murder spree. Kissing. Dreaming. Whispering their secrets to each other. Wiping blood spatter from their faces and slipping in pools of it, leaving red footprints behind them.

Pretty much your typical love story, I suppose. With blood lust and, hopefully, sympathetic characters.

I’m not alone in this. In February, this month of love and hearts and cupids with arrows, I’ve been reflecting on the love-and-murder relationship, and the way it goes hand-in-hand.

Take Romeo and Juliet. Take, also, its unofficial sequel: West Side Story. What would these stories be without the murders or Tybalt and Mercutio, Riff and Tony? Think about Kind David and Bathsheba. And moving away from romantic love into the area of platonic love, what about Of Mice and Men? Can a greater love story really ever be told? And murder is right in the heart of it. Without murder, that story would be a charming little tale about two good buddies. Sweet and fairly wholesome, but certainly not intricate or memorable.

What makes it that makes the chaos compelling, I wonder? Love and death, romance and murder, they go together so beautifully. Why, even Valentine’s Day is somewhat loosely based on love and death. We’re told many versions of the story, but one of the most popular is that Saint Valentine dared marry young couple in secret at a time when marriages were illegal. As punishment, he was thrown into the dungeon. The story goes that he fell in love with the jailer’s beautiful daughter and smuggled her notes signed “From your Valentine.” Or that, while imprisoned, he received notes and thank you cards from the young couples he had married. Eventually, the most popular theory says, he was beheaded for his crimes.

Crimes of passion. You’ve heard the term. And perhaps that is why death and love are so tightly bound together. Nothing can end a love like death can. It’s the most brutal ending to the most intense and fiery of desires. Edgar Allan Poe famously write about his young bride who died tragically. In his poem “Annabel Lee” he even went so far as to claim that the angels of heaven, driven mad with jealousy, murdered his bride. Passion against passion. Love and the greatest anti-love there is. It’s like a volcano and the ocean coming together and destroying everything. A thing of terror. A thing of beauty.

The intensity demonstrated by linking together such polar opposites as adoration and murder is nearly unfathomable. Love is supposed to conquer all, but death does the same thing. All you need is love. Love makes the world go round. But the only thing you can depend on is death and taxes. Anais Nin tells us that love never dies a natural death, but death spares no one. Take the two biggest conflicting forces, set them at war in a story, and watch the sparks fly. You may love the sparks. They may be deadly. But they’ll be beautiful.

Guest Writer Bio: Mercedes M. Yardley wears stilettos, red lipstick, and poisonous flowers in her hair. She likes to do a little bit of everything, and writes dark fantasy, horror, nonfiction, and poetry. Mercedes minored in Creative Writing and worked for four years as a contributing editor for Shock Totem Magazine. She is the author of the short story collection Beautiful Sorrows, the novella Apocalyptic Montessa and Nuclear Lulu: A Tale of Atomic Love and her debut novel Nameless: The Darkness Comes. Nameless just released this month and is Book One in The Bone Angel Trilogy. Mercedes lives and works in Sin City, and you can reach her at her website, www.mercedesyardley.com.