Personal
Horror
by Tim Waggoner
Janet ran, stumbling
through the night, heart pounding, lungs on fire. All she
could hear was her own ragged breath and the rustle of leaf
and snap of twig as she crashed through the underbrush.
But she didn’t have to hear pounding footfalls to know
that HE was following close behind.
If only
she hadn’t had sex with Billy, had listened to her
mother and stayed a virgin. If only she had remained back
at camp with the other counselors. If only she gave more
to charity, was kinder to animals, read to shut-ins --
A huge,
shapeless silhouette reared up before her, sickly yellow
moonlight glinting off ax metal. Janet started to scream,
but all that came out was a hot, gurgling sound as the ax
bit deep into her throat. Again and again and again . .
.
The previous
scene is the sort of fiction produced by many beginning
horror writers, those who haven’t actually read much
in the genre and instead base their stories on umpty-leven
viewings of Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm
Street flicks. And while such films can have a visceral
(pun intended) impact, they don’t make good inspirational
fodder for fiction.
Slasher films
and their ilk rely primarily on shock. And shock
is a Jaycee-sponsored Halloween Haunted House sort of thing.
It relies on visual and auditory surprise -- some guy in
a rubber mask and fright wig jumping out from a darkened
doorway hollering "Ooga-booga!" Such effects are
nearly impossible to create on the page. They have to be
experienced live and in person.
Besides,
even if you could create shock effectively in written stories,
why would you want to? It’s an extremely limited technique.
The audience might gasp and jump the first time or two you
spring your Jack-the-Ripper-in-a-box on them, but no matter
how well crafted your shock machine is, readers will soon
become so desensitized to its tricks that they won’t
even be able to work up the energy to yawn.
Shock is
a quick, easy scare. Empty, and to the audience, ultimately
unsatisfying. Readers want horror that does more than go
"Boo!" They want horror that disturbs them, shakes
them up, that reaches into their guts with cold bony fingers
and stirs their wet parts around. So how do you write stories
that do this? By crafting stories drawn from personal horror.
As author
and critic Douglas Winter has pointed out, horror isn’t
a genre, but rather an emotion. In order to write effective
-- and original -- horror, you have to dig into your own
psyche and find out what scares you. Worried that no one
will be frightened by the same things you are? Don’t
be. As Aristotle said, the only way to get to the universal
is through the particular. By focusing on your own personal
fears and giving them shivery life on the page, you’ll
be connecting to your audience -- guaranteed.
Begin with
your childhood. Regardless of whether your wonder years
were TV movie of the week fodder or (seemingly) uneventful,
anyone who’s survived childhood has a wealth of story
material waiting to be mined.
What were
you afraid of as a child? The dark; thunder and lightning;
the barking German shepherd next door; Mommy and Daddy yelling
at each other? Make a list of your childhood bogeymen, and
write at least a paragraph about each item. Don’t think
in terms of story, just write whatever comes to mind. Try
to focus on your feelings and what sparked those
feelings -- remember, horror is an emotion.
And they
don’t have to be obvious fears, either. My mother once
told me that when I was a very small child, I was afraid
of feathers. What’s so scary about feathers? Well,
they have those hairy edges, and their spiny stems can stick
you. And the way they float downward so slowly, as if they
don’t want to leave the air. Where do they come from?
Mommy says they come from birds, but I’ve never seen
a bird leave any feathers in the house. What if they come
from somewhere else? Come from something else? What
if for some reason they’re coming from me?
Maybe I’ll
never get a story about of this minor childhood phobia,
but if I do, it’ll certainly be original!
Next -- and
this might be difficult -- make a list of any disturbing
events in your childhood. Encounters with schoolyard bullies,
severe illnesses, deaths of friends and family members.
Again, write at least a paragraph on each item.
When I was
around five or six, my mother was severely burned when taking
a roast out of the oven. I remember her being in the hospital,
the doctors taking skin from her legs and back to use for
grafts. I remember the watery feeling in my guts when later,
after she’d healed, she let me touch the brown patch
of tight smooth skin on her palm. The edges were so distinct;
it seemed as if I could pinch them between my thumb and
forefinger and slowly peel away my mother’s borrowed
flesh to reveal the moist secrets which lay within.
Digging into
your childhood traumas might not easy, might even be disturbing
for you. But if you want to write horror -- real
horror, not Freddy vs. Jason stuff -- then you need to have
at least a nodding acquaintance with your dark side. Besides,
writing is cheaper than therapy.
Childhood
is a time when everything is new, wondrous and terrifying.
A time when we feel emotions most deeply. And it’s
those sort of intense emotions you want to summon and use
to write your horror. But you don’t have to confine
your self-exploration to the past.
Pay attention
to the events in the news which upset and anger you. Clip
newspaper and magazine articles and keep them in a folder.
Don’t merely collect every article on murder you find.
Look for stories which arouse an emotional reaction in you,
stories which fascinate you.
One of the
news stories I’ve collected concerns a campus-area
apartment house which has an electric chair perched on the
roof. According to the article, the current occupants had
no idea who put the chair up there and why. It was there
when they moved in. As they said, It’s always been
there.
Now there’s
a story waiting to happen!
Another area
you can explore for ideas is the realm of dreams. Every
morning, as soon as you get up, record your dreams in a
journal. A friend of mine in college had been keeping dream
journals for years. When he first started, he only remembered
having two or three dreams a night. But after a couple years
of faithfully writing in his journal, he routinely recalled
fifteen or sixteen. And while many of them weren’t
more than snatches of everyday life replayed on the mind’s
dream-screen, he always had at least a couple that were
quite surreal and disturbing. Added up over the course of
a year, that’s a lot of potential story ideas.
A recurring
dream of mine has me lost and wandering within a building
of endless rooms and hallways which seems to continually
grow and shift around me. Once I woke up from a snooze on
the couch remembering a dream I’d just had. In it,
a witch became pregnant and her familiar thought the fetus
was a tumor killing his mistress. That dream became my story
"Newcomer," which was published in 100 Wicked
Little Witch Stories.
In our dreams,
our defenses and pretenses are swept aside, and we are most
ourselves. Your dreams are unique; use them to write stories
that are uniquely yours.
Another technique
(one I’ve stolen from Stephen King), is to take a look
around you and let your imagination run paranoid. Choose
a minor aspect of your life or an ordinary event and tell
yourself that something is wrong with it. Seriously wrong.
Not too far
from where I live is house where the lawn is always perfect.
I mean perfect in every single way. The grass is always
the same height, the same shade of green, the edging always
neat and straight. But I’ve never seen anyone working
on the lawn. In fact, I’ve never seen anyone enter
or leave the house. The reality is that the yard probably
belongs to a retiree with a lot of time on his or her hands.
But when I look at that lawn and tell myself something is
seriously wrong with it, I start to wonder what kind of
rigid, type-A landscaping Nazi it would take to maintain
a lawn like that. And what would happen if someone decided
to mess up that yard . . .
Speaking
of lawns, one summer day I was mowing mine, and when I neared
the driveway, I saw a crumpled piece of white cloth which
I knew hadn’t been there when I started mowing. I stopped
the mower, walked over, and picked up what turned out to
be a bloody sock. I live on a busy street, so I’m used
to finding all sorts of strange items that litterjerks have
tossed out their car windows. But I’d never found anything
like this before. I had a quick flash -- what if something
were seriously wrong with this sock?
What if it
had been thrown out of a car by someone who was injured,
perhaps being held captive? Worse, what if it was one of
my wife’s socks? The mower made a lot of noise, and
I hadn’t been watching the front door. What if for
some reason she’d been injured and left the house without
telling me? What if she -- and our two-year-old daughter
-- had been taken from the house?
I threw the
sock in the garbage, and went inside to wash my hands and,
I admit it, also check on my wife and daughter. Both of
whom were fine, of course, but thanks to an inconsiderate
(and slightly wounded) motorist or passenger, I had the
beginnings of a new story.
Lastly, ask
yourself what’s most important, most dear to you. What
do you treasure? Who do you love? Now ask yourself what
if these things were threatened, removed, altered, turned
against me? How would you feel? And most importantly, what
would you do about it? Your answers to these questions will
provide some of your best and most personal story ideas.
In the end,
it’s simple: If you want to write truly effective horror,
don’t merely recycle the imaginings of others. Write
the stories only you can tell.
And in the
process, scare the crap out of the rest of us.
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