The
Horror of It All
by
Tim Waggoner
Want to write
horror? A lot of folks do. The mainstream publishing industry
may have momentarily turned its collective back on the genre,
but the small press scene is thriving, not to mention the
burgeoning number of horror Ezines on the Net. Unfortunately,
a great many stories published in these markets are uninspired
(to put it kindly) and just plain bad (to put it honestly).
Want your work to stand out from the rest of the lycanthropic
pack? Want to start selling to larger and more prestigious
markets? Want your horror stories to be so good that people
breathlessly race through your prose, barely able to whisper
an exhausted, "Goddamn, that was something,"
when they've finished reading?
It ain't easy.
But I've got three tips to offer that will increase your
chances of joining the dark pantheon of horror writers who
kick major ass.
1. Beware
of clichés.
Read widely,
both inside and outside of the horror genre, so you can
recognize plots that have been done to (living) death. Then
you’ll know better than to write a story which ends, "And
it was all a dream" or "And then he realized as
his lover sank her fangs into his neck that she... was...
a... VAMPIRE!"
When I was in
my teens, I wrote a horror story with the embarrassing title
of "Scary Christmas." In it, a young punk torments
and kills an elderly man whose ghost comes seeking Yuletide
revenge. At least I had the good sense never to send this
piece of crap out. Revenge stories are one of the biggest
clichés in horror fiction, and beside that, there's
no tension in them. Readers know exactly how they're going
to turn out every time.
Still, you can
make clichés work for you. In my story, "Blackwater
Dreams," published in Bruce Coville's Book of Nightmares
2, I tried my hand at another ghostly revenge story.
Only this time I took the cliché and gave it a twist.
The man character, a young boy who blames himself for the
drowning death of a friend, is visited in his dreams by
his friend's ghost. He fears the spirit has come seeking
revenge, but the friend isn't angry -- he's lonely. At the
end of the story, my protagonist has to make a terrible
choice: leave his friend to his loneliness, or join him
in his watery afterlife.
In my story "Alacrity's
Spectatorium," I twisted another cliché around.
I took the notion that vampires don't cast reflections and
created a dark mirror which displays only the reflections
of vampires. What price would vampires pay for a glimpse
of themselves in such a unique mirror? More, what would
such a glimpse mean to them?
Instead of ending
with a cliché, why not begin with one? Start with
"It was all a dream" and build your story from
there. Why not begin with a man discovering his lover's
a vampire and see what happens after that? Or flip the cliché
around. What if a vampire discovered his lover wasn't another
nosferatu but was instead (shudder) a human?
And try to avoid
the most overworked plot in horror fiction, which author
Gary A. Braunbeck (Time Was, Things Left Behind)
describes as a story in which the main character exists
only to get "slurped by the glop." Stories in
which characters are merely props to be eaten, drained,
eviscerated, sliced, diced and turned into julienne fries
by your monstrous "glop," whether it's a vampire,
werewolf or the ubiquitous serial killer. These stories
aren't just boring; they're insulting to readers who deserve
better.
Probably the
best way to avoid clichés is to adhere to one of
the hoariest: write what you know. Draw on your own experience
for your story ideas, write about the things that excite
and disturb you, the people, places and events that form
the unique fabric of your existence, which make your life
different than any other that's ever been lived before.
If you do this, you can't help but be original.
2. There's
a difference between disturbing readers and simply grossing
them out.
Too many beginners
think that writing horror is all about detailed descriptions
of disembowelments and gushing bodily fluids. They mistake
the use of such elements for artistic audacity and cutting-edge
(pun intended) writing. The truth is, though, that such
writers are the literary equivalent of the kid who jams
his finger up his nose and pulls forth a big old nasty booger
so he can wave it in his friends’ faces.
Good horror --
like all fiction that truly matters -- is about affecting
readers emotionally. True, revulsion is an emotional reaction,
but it's a simplistic one with a limited effect on readers.
They finish your story about a penis-munching condom, think,
Man, that's sick, and immediately forget all about
it. You've failed to touch them save on the most shallow
of levels.
I'm not saying
you should avoid writing about the dark and disturbing.
That's what horror's all about, from the quiet subtlety
of a half-glimpsed shadow on an otherwise sunny day to the
in-your-face nastiness of blood dripping from the glinting
metal of a straight razor. But if you are, as Stephen King
puts it, going to go for the gross-out, it has to arise
naturally from the story itself, to be so integral to the
tale you're telling that it can't be removed without making
the story suffer.
In Gary
A. Braunbeck's novella, "Some Touch of Pity"
(also an excellent example of a writer taking a cliché
-- the werewolf story -- and putting an original spin on
it), there's a flashback detailing a character's rape. Not
just the physical aspect of it, but what the character experiences
emotionally as the rape occurs. The scene is absolutely
brutal, but it's also completely necessary to the story.
If the scene were toned down, or worse, removed, the story
would be far less emotionally wrenching.
In my story,
"Keeping It Together," forthcoming in the SFF-Net
anthology Between the Darkness and the Fire, I write
about a gay man living a heterosexual lifestyle in a home
and with a family that he has created from his own desperate
desire to be what he perceives as "normal." But
it's an illusion which can't be sustained, and as the story
progresses, the house, his wife and young daughter all begin
to decay around him. In one scene he has sex with his wife
out of a sense of husbandly duty, and since she is well
along in her dissolution by this point, their lovemaking
. . . damages her. I created this scene not merely to make
readers go "Ooooh, yuck!" but to further dramatize
the impact of such deep-seated denial on both my main character
and those around him.
Remember that
extreme elements, like anything else in fiction, are only
tools to help you tell your stories in the best way you
can. But like any powerful tool, they should be used sparingly,
cautiously and always with good reason.
3. Give us
characters we care about.
Let me say right
up front that this bit of advice doesn't mean that we have
to like your characters. It means your characters
should be so well developed and interesting that we want
to read your story to find out what happens to them. There
are characters -- Ahab, Sherlock Holmes, Hannibal Lector
-- who aren't always likable (and are sometimes downright
despicable) but who are so unique, so fully realized, that
they can't fail to fascinate. Compelling characters is what
memorable fiction is all about, whether you're writing for
the New Yorker or Cemetery Dance.
In my story,
"Seeker," which appeared in the White Wolf anthology,
Dark Tyrants, I write about a disillusioned crusader
who has lost his faith in God and has gone searching for
a nest of vampires in order to prove to himself that there
is some sort of spiritual aspect to existence, even if that
aspect is evil. The plot runs on two tracks. First is a
narrative of the crusader penetrating the forest where the
vampires live, being attacked by them, and finally dealing
with their leader (who I made not merely a vampire but one
who has merged with the Wood itself). The second track details,
through various flashbacks, the events that caused the crusader
to lose his faith and make him so desperate to find a sign
-- any sign -- that there's Something More to life.
If I did my job
right, readers will be interested not only in the action
in the story, but also in the crusader himself, so that
when the story reaches its climax and the character's quest
is fulfilled in a way he -- and hopefully readers -- never
imagined (no, he doesn't become a vampire himself; remember
what I said earlier about avoiding clichés? I try
to practice what I preach), there's not only an emotional
pay-off, but hopefully readers will leave the story thinking
a little bit about their own spirituality.
There's a lot
more to writing good horror, but if you take the three morsels
of advice I've given you to heart, you’ll create stories
which will not only rise above the generic tales of flesh-munching
zombies and blood-lusting serial killers that are out there,
you'll create fiction worth reading -- and worth remembering.
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