Shhhhhh! Say Nothing!

Let’s have a little moment of truth between us. At some point or another, for any number of possible reasons, most of us have been in a position where it’s in our best interest not to answer a question.  Or, at the very least, to take as long as possible to answer it.  A few such questions might be....

— “Hey, what’s in the bag?”
— “Do these jeans make me look fat?”
— “Are you actually claiming this as a deduction?”
— “Did you eat the last piece of cheesecake?”
— “So, where were you last night?”

Now, by the same token, there are questions that should take no time at all to answer. Things where, if someone asks us and we know the answer, there are very few situations where it makes any sense for us to delay or be evasive. These are the ones where I have to seriously wonder why someone isn’t answering--and they’d better have a damn good reason for their lack of response. A few examples of that would be things like

— “Do you love me?”
— “How the hell do we get out of here?”
— “What are tonight’s specials?”
— “Which one of these is the antidote?”
— “WTF is that thing and how do we kill it?”

I mean, why would you hesitate on any of these? If we need the antidote and I know which vial it is, that's a no-brainer, right? Grab the yellow vial marked #23 and pour it down his throat.

For example, I loved LOST.  Yeah, sorry, absolutely loved it. Even the questionable third season. Yes, I will fight you if you say foolish things about the ending.

But... I can admit LOST suffered a bit when Benjamin Linus became a regular member of the cast. And a big part of that was because we all knew there was a lot of stuff he wasn’t telling anyone. There were still lots of cool mysteries on the island and Michael Emerson is a wonderful actor... but there were also lots of times where the “mystery” was just Ben sitting there... not talking.

A concept I’ve brought up here a bunch of times is withheld information. I’ve mentioned it a couple times recently, but it occurred to me I haven’t’ really explained it in... wow, ten years? Seriously? Okay, so this is long overdue.

Withheld information is when the characters (or really, the writer) hold back information from the audience for no other reason than to drive the plot forward. Characters just don’t talk about things, even though it’d be very natural for them to. Or they make vague statements when they could just as easily make clear ones. We’ve all seen things like this, yes? Where the only reason there are conflicts or challenges is because characters just aren’t saying what they know.

Withheld information’s the clumsy, unskilled version of mystery and suspense. It’s what I fall back on when my story doesn’t actually have a mystery but I’m trying to create the illusion of one. Because there’s more to a mystery—or suspense, or a twist—than me just not telling my readers stuff.

The thing is, withholding information is really just me and my characters... not doing anything. The plot may keep advancing in a clumsy way, but it’s almost always going to end up falling flat. Because information in a story tends to hit a tipping point. There comes a time when that knowledge has to come out because it just makes absolutely no logical sense for it not to. And when it doesn’t...

Y’see, Timmy, the one thing withheld information definitely creates is frustration with my reader. If Wakko’s been poisoned, Phoebe knows which one of the vials is the antidote, and she’s just not telling anyone—that’s just going to annoy the hell out of my reader. I mean, yeah, it makes the scene more tense, but why wouldn’t Phoebe save her friend? Why wouldn’t she help? If she’s the villain, sure, but other than that...?

And, wow, if we get to the end of the story and that’s when we find out Phoebe knew which one was the antidote and didn’t say anything? I mean, I need to have some ironclad reasons for her silence then. That’s when my readers are going to be looking to punch holes in things, so I need things to be sooooo solid if I’m going to go this way.

Now, all of this doesn’t mean I need to tell my readers everything. But what I don’t tell them depends on what kind of effect I’m trying to create in my story. If I withhold (or give out) information at the wrong points, my story’s going to trip over its own feet. So to speak.

So here are three story elements and how they use information.

A mystery is when the main character and the audience are aware a piece of information has been hidden from them, and my story usually involves a search for that unknown fact. At it’s simplest, a mystery is a question someone in my story is asking and trying to find the answer to.

Suspense is when there’s an important piece of information the audience knows and the characters don’t. The key here is that the characters don’t know that they need to know this vital fact. ussually as soon as possible. Like that Phoebe (who Wakko’s taking back to his hotel room) is the murderer. Or there’s a bomb under the table. These are common suspense situations we've all been in, right?

A twist is when a piece of information is revealed that my characters and my readers didn’t know was being kept from them. They didn’t even suspect those facts were out there, waiting to affect the story. A twist comes from out of nowhere and changes a lot of perceptions for the reader and probably the characters. We’ve all been assuming <<SPOILERS>> Luke Skywalker’s father is dead, so when we learn that Vader is his father, it’s a twist that alters our view of several things we’ve been told up until now.

Yeah, sorry. Blew the big Skywalker family secret there.

If I’m trying to use one of these devices, I want to make sure I’m using them correctly. I don’t want to just withhold information. My characters should be just as smart and clever as my audience, and if they aren’t talking... well, I should be sure there’s a solid reason why.

Next time, I’m going to try to answer another question that got tossed my way.

Until then, go write.

Scary Stories to Tell...

Pop culture reference. Haven’t done one of those in ages...

I've blathered on about different genres a bunch of times. It seemed like this might be a good time in the year to revisit one in particular that I haven’t talked about in a while. On the off chance you haven’t noticed the sudden rise of bats, pumpkins, and scarecrows in your neighborhood, we’re going to be talking about horror.

Maybe it’s just the particular bubble I’m in, but it feels like horror’s finally, truly inching its way out into the mainstream. Even just ten or fifteen years ago, a lot of folks still viewed horror as this big, general bin filled with Satanists, slashers, and screaming people. And, let's be honest, anyone who wrote horror clearly was just working through tons of childhood issues, right? Probably didn’t help that for years there were some folks who loudly insisted you could only write horror if you’d gone through something traumatic...

Simple truth is, just like sci-fi or comedy or romance, horror stories get broken down into many different sub-genres.  Us is horror, sure, but that doesn’t mean we immediately lump it in with the new Halloween reboot. Cherie Priest’s The Toll is horror, too, but that doesn’t mean it’s doing the same things as Wesley Chu’s Walking Dead tie-in book, Typhoon. And none of these are like my story Dead Moon.

I’ve mentioned once or thrice before that sometimes things get the wrong genre label hung on them, and it creates a clash of expectations. We went in told we were getting a story that would do this and this, but got one that did that by using that. And, personally, I think this is true with sub-genres, too. If I tell readers they’re getting a slasher story and it turns out to be much more of a monster story, there’s a good chance a lot of the story is just going to feel off balance to them. It won’t hit a lot of the “correct” benchmarks my audience is expecting.

That said, I wanted to toss out a couple different sub-genres of horror to think about. Some of them are well established and have been discussed (and debated) to death.  Others are just things I've noticed and named on my own that I feel are worth mentioning. I’ve brought up a lot of them before.

Supernatural stories

This one’s easy. It's pretty much the classic spooky story. The pale woman out hitchhiking alone in the middle of night.  The awful-smelling thing down in the lower berth. That creepy guy in the elevator letting you know there's room for one more...

There are a few key things about these stories.  One of the biggies is that our protagonist usually doesn’t suffer any physical harm. Their underwear needs to go through the wash three or four times and they may not sleep well for years, but overall they tend to come out okay. If anyone suffers in a supernatural story it's usually the bad guy or a supporting character. Also, these stories tend not to have explanations-- they just are. There aren't any cursed objects or ancient histories at play.  This is just the kind of stuff that happens in a supernatural world.

Thrillers

Thrillers stand a bit away from the pack ‘cause they tend to be more grounded than most horror stories. Very few vampires, no demons, not a lot of machete-killers. Even if they have a supernatural element, the horror rarely comes from that element. They’re very real-world horror stories, for the most part.

The key thing is that a thriller’s all about right now.  It's about the ticking clock, the killer hiding behind the drapes, or the foot that’s just inches from the lethal booby trap. There's a lot of suspense focused on one or two characters and it stays focused on them for the run of my story.  A thriller keeps the characters (and the reader) on edge for almost the whole story.

Giant Evil stories

These are the tales when the universe itself is against my characters.  Every person they meet, every object they find, everything they do--it all serves some greater, awful evil. It’s just so big and overwhelming. You may have heard the terms “Lovecraftian horror” or “cosmic horror” too.

I think a lot, if not most, post-apocalyptic stories fall here. The ones that lean towards horror over sci-fi, anyway. The entire world now belongs to the zombie hordes, the cannibal gangs, the killer virus, whatever. I’d probably toss a lot of haunted house stories in here, too, because the haunted house (or ship, or insane asylum, or spaceship, or whatever) is essentially the universe of the story.  There’s nothing else for us or for the characters to interact with. 1408, The Shining, and Event Horizon could all be seen as supernatural stories, but their settings really elevate them to giant evil stories.

Slasher stories

When you get right down to it, these stories are just about body count. How many men, women, and teenagers can the killer reduce to cold meat? Point to note--almost never children.

One of the big things with slasher stories is there's usually a degree of creativity and violence to the deaths, although it's important to note it's rarely deliberate or malicious. It's just the killer using the most convenient tools at hand for the job. They’re pretty much a parkour of death. The original Friday the 13th franchise pretty much became the standard for slasher stories, and it's what most people tend to think of first when  the term comes up.

A lot slasher stories used to have a mystery sub-element to them, trying to figure out who the killer was. Then it kind of morphed into being a (usually) weak twist. Slasher stories also developed a bad habit of falling back on using insanity as their only motivation and got stereotyped as "psycho-killer" movies. Which is a shame 'cause some of them are very clever and creepy.

Torture porn

I’m not sure if Stephen King actually coined the term “torture porn” in his old Entertainment Weekly column (does he still do that?), but that’s the first place I remember seeing it.  At its simplest, torture porn is about making the reader squirm.  If I can make them physically ill, that’s a big win. 

The characters in torture porn are almost always underdeveloped, going with the idea that we’ll just relate to them and what they’re going through on a basic human level. More than any other form of horror, torture porn isn’t about characters—it’s about the visceral things being done to the characters.  They’re getting skinned, scalped, boiled, slowly impaled, vivisected... and we’re getting every gory detail of it.  Somebody I used to work with once told me “porn is when you show everything,” and this sub-genre really leaves nothing to the imagination.

A key element to torture porn is the victim is almost always helpless. They’re bound, drugged, completely alone, or vastly outnumbered. Unlike a slasher film-- where there's always that sense that Phoebe might escape if she just ran a little faster or make a bit less noise-- there is no question in these stories that the victim is not going to get away.  That hope isn't here, because that's not what these stories are about.

Worth noting there’s a few distinctions between a slasher story and a torture porn story, and one of the big ones is the sheer number of people killed. Slashers are about the body count, but (as the name implies) torture porn is about how long single deaths can be drawn out.

Monster stories

The tales in this little sub-genre tend to be about unstoppable, inescapable things that mean the protagonist harm. Monsters are rarely secretive or mysterious, but they do have an alarming tendency to be nigh-invulnerable. The emphasis here is that there's nothing my heroes (or anyone else) do can that'll stop this thing's rampage, and any worthwhile rampage tends to involve people dying.

I just talked about monsters a few months back, so I won’t rehash a lot of that here. You can just go read my birthday post.

Adventure Horror stories

To paraphrase from the original Hellboy movie (which fits nicely in this category), adventure horror is where the good guys bump back.  While they may use a lot of tropes from some of the other subgenres, the key element to these stories is that the heroes are fighting back. Not in a desperate, flailing way, but in a trained, well-equipped, locked-and-loaded way.

I’m not saying it won’t go exceptionally bad for them (and it often does), but there stories are about protagonists who get to inflict a bit of damage and live to tell the tale.  For a while, anyway.  To quote an even wiser man... even monsters have nightmares.

So there’s a couple of subgenres we could break horror down into.  And like I said before, there’s many more.  It’s not a complete list, and you can probably think of some others we could talk about. Feel free to add ‘em down in the comments.

Also, why are we talking about this?

When most of us start off as writers, we flail a bit. We attempt to copy stories even though we don’t quite understand all the mechanics of them.  We’re not sure where our own stories fit under that big horror umbrella (or sci-fi, or fantasy, or...).  We'll begin a tale in one sub-genre, then move into a plot more fitting a different one, wrap up with an ending that belongs on a third, and have the overall tone of yet another. 

Y’see, Timmy, it's important to know what I’m writing for two different reasons.  One is so I’ll be true to it and don't end up with a sprawling story that covers everything and goes nowhere.  Two is that I also want to be able to market my story, which means I need to know what it is. If I tell the editor it's not torture porn when it plainly is, at the best I’m going to get rejected. My readers may toss it aside.

At the worst, they'll all remember me as "that idiot" the next time they see something of mine.

Next time... well, next time it’s actually Halloween. But it’s also the day before November begins. And for a lot of writers November means NaNoWriMo. So I wanted to toss out a few quick thoughts about that.

Until then, go write.

Maberry

The Genre-Device Mnemonic Caper

             Middleman reference.

            Very sorry I missed the last two weeks. Lots going on, which I’ll get to in a minute 

            I wanted to toss out a couple of quick, easy genre/device mnemonics for you.  These are a couple of things I’ve heard over the years.  Sometimes—when I’m struggling with something in a story—I’ve found them helpful for getting my head wrapped around things.

            So, what is it you’re working on right now. Maybe keep in mind...

            Suspense is about what’s going to happen

            A thriller’s about what is happening

            A mystery is about something that already happened

            Granted, these are kind of broad definitions, and there’s always going to be an exception or two. But I’ve mentioned once or thrice before the problems that can crop up when I try to push this kind of story into that framework.  And if I’m trying to write a thriller that’s about events that already happened... well, there’s probably a reason I’m having problems with it.  Or maybe my readers are having problems with it.

            It’s not a bad thing to double check what I’m writing about and what I think I’m writing about.

            Now, let’s flip this and talk about devices.

            A mystery is when my characters are actively searching for a piece of information they don’t know.

            Suspense is when my readers—or the audience, in a larger sense—knows a piece of information that my characters need to know but don’t.

            A twist, is when we’re talking about a piece of information that nobody even suspects exists (readers or characters), but once we learn it, it’ll change how we view a lot of what’s already happened in the story.

                       
            I think we all mess these up a lot when we’re starting out. We’re trying to use a device or write in a specific genre, but we fall into the patterns of another one.  Or we’re so focused on having, for example, a cool mystery that we don’t realize we’ve actually set up a twist.  And it’s kind of a weak twist because... well, we’re still trying for a mystery.

            Worse yet, sometimes we learn these mistakes.  They become that thing we’re convinced is right because we never learned anything different. And so we stick with these mistakes for years, focusing on other things instead fo the one clearly-wrong thing.

            Make sense?

            That’s why I like a lot of these little mnemonics.  They’re easy things to keep in the back of my mind and check my work, so to speak, every now and then. Good for starting out, good for later on, too.

            Next time...

            Okay, truth is, I had surgery last Tuesday.  Nothing super-serious, don’t worry, but it was pretty intense and the painkillers have really knocked me for a loop (and really messed with my sleep). Heck, this post was mostly done last week and I couldn’t pull it together long enough to get this up on the site.  Barely got that cartoon up the other day.

            Long story short—no idea if I’ll have a coherent post done for next week.  August might be my lame month.

            At the least, I’ll put up another cartoon. At the best... well, we’ll see how close I am to reality at the given moment.

            As always, please feel free to toss any requests or suggestions in the comments below. Or any handy mnemonics of your own.

            Until then, no matter what... go write.

Mystery vs. Mystery

           I was talking with someone a few weeks back about mysteries.  To be honest, she talked. I just got kind of confused.  In fact the more she talked, the more I was baffled.  Her thoughts on mystery were just... well, I couldn’t figure out where she’d gotten them from.

            And then I realized the problem was that she wasn’t talking about mysteries.  Well, she was.  She’d just confused mystery with mystery, and then mixed them up a bit.  It’s a completely understandable mistake.

            It isn’t?

            Okay, then...

            I’ve talked here a few times about mystery, suspense, romance, and comedy.  I’ve also done a few posts about mystery, suspense, romance, and comedy.  And maybe it’s worth clarifying that, because it’d be bad if someone was working on a mystery and tried to follow all the guidelines I’ve tossed down about mysteries.

            Totally confused yet?

            Excellent.

            When I’m talking about mystery versus mystery, I’m talking about a genre versus a literary device.  If it helps, think of sci-fi versus a twist.  It’s a lot clearer that way, yes?

            When I talk about mystery and mystery, I’m talking about two things with very different rules.  We have mystery, the genre, which has some solid guidelines about word count, page length, setting, and so on.  Then there’s mystery, the device I use within my story, where one or more characters are searching for information that’s been hidden from them.  The rules for one aren’t the rules for the other, and if I get them confused, it’s going to cause problems.

             Consider romance. I’ve talked about my world-famous, patent-pending Rules of Love (TM) a few times here, and also about avoiding the common traps of romantic triangles.  My book, The Fold, has a definite romance element that follows these guidelines.
            But... it isn’t a romance novel.  That’s a very different animal.

            Let’s go a little bigger.  I’m going to guess a fair number of you reading this saw Doctor Strange, yes?  Maybe in theaters, maybe through Netflix, maybe you splurged for the 3-D collector's edition BluRay or something.  There were some funny moments in that movie, right?  Usually pertaining to Strange’s complete fish-out-of-water situation when he starts learning sorcery.  There was also that sort of unrequited love angle between him and Christine, never lining up in quite the right way even though it’s clear they both care about each other.

            So... is Doctor Strange a rom-com?  It’s got romance.  It’s got comedy.  That’s pretty much the definition of a rom-com, right?

            No, of course not.

            Y’see, Timmy, we recognize there’s more to a genre than just containing a literary device of the same name.  Suspense does not equal suspense, some comedy does not make this a comedy, and the presence of a mystery doesn’t mean my story’s a mystery. And if I get confused about this—if I start mistaking the rules of one for the rules of another (or maybe even mixing and matching like those last few socks on laundry day)—then this is going to cause problems on the writing side and on the business side.

            Now, sure—you wouldn’t make that mistake. You’re clever and you’ve been at this a while now.  But I see this kind of thing happen a lot, especially when people are trying to force a story into a genre where it doesn’t really belong.  A lot of folks do it in an attempt to get someone to read their work. “Someone” might be an agent, an editor, or even just a general audience.  If mysteries are really hot right now, I might be tempted to fudge the description of my story a bit and play up that element—even if said story is nothing like a mystery.

            I believe I’ve mentioned how rarely it goes well when I tell someone they’re getting X and they end up with a few hundred pages of Y, right?

            Genre. Devices. I need to remember which is which. Cause if I don’t, I’m either going to mess up my story... or I’m going to mess up selling my story.

            Speaking of selling stories—another shameless moment. Dead Men Can’t Complain, my first short story collection, comes out as an Audible exclusive next week.  It’s got creepy stuff, exciting stuff, funny stuff, and some never seen (or heard) before stuff.  Check it out.

            Next time, I think I may talk a little bit about dialogue. Or maybe character-building.  If you have a preference—or a different request—let me know.

            For now... go write.

The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is...

            Historical reference! It’s like a pop culture reference, but it lets you pass tests...

            I've talked about different genre issues a few times in the past.  With the upcoming holiday, though, I thought it would be nice to revisit one that's near and dear to me.  To be more specific, I thought we could talk about the different forms of horror. 

            Anyone who's dabbled in horror knows that, when we tell folks this is our chosen genre, our work tends to get lumped into this vague slasher/vampire/Satanist category.  Either that or we’re tagged as someone working through a collection of childhood issues.  Most folks don't realize horror can be broken down into many different sub-genres, just like drama or comedy or war stories.  Just because Resident Evil is under the umbrella (no pun intended) of horror doesn't mean it’s anything like It Follows, and neither of them resembles Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  Or Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot.  Or Craig DiLouie’s Suffer The Children.

            So, here's a few different panels of that umbrella.  Some of them are established sub-genres which have already been debated to death.  Others are just things I've noticed and named on my own that I feel are worth mentioning.

            Also, you may notice I’m defining a lot of these by how the characters in the story react/interact with the scary things.  That’s deliberate. All stories are about characters, and horror stories hinge on that.  One of the most common complaints we all hear about horror—to the point that it’s almost a joke—is when the characters do something that makes no sense.  So how my characters act and react is going to have a lot of effect on the story I’m telling...

Supernatural stories—This is one of the easiest ones to spot.  It's your classic ghost story.  The phone lines that fall into the cemetery.  The pale girl out hitchhiking alone in the middle of night.  The foul-smelling thing in the lower berth. 

            There are a few key things you'll notice about these.  One of the biggies is that the protagonist rarely comes to harm in a supernatural story.  Their underwear will need to go through the wash three or four times and they may not sleep well for years afterwards, but physically, and even mentally, they tend to come out okay.  If anyone suffers in a supernatural story it's usually the bad guy or some smaller character.  Also, these stories tend not to have explanations-- they just are.  There aren't any cursed objects or ancient histories at play.  Things happen because... well, they happen.

            The Sixth Sense is still a great example of a supernatural story, as is "A Christmas Carol" by that populist hack Charles Dickens.  Even the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is more supernatural stories than anything else.

Giant Evil stories—These are the grim tales when the universe itself is against my characters.  Every person they meet, everything they encounter--it all serves some greater, awful evil.  H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard wrote a lot of giant evil stories.  The Omen is another good (so to speak) story of the universe turning against the protagonist.  Any fan of Sutter Cane will of course remember the reality-twisting film In The Mouth of Madness.  In a way, most post-apocalyptic stories fall here, too—the world belongs to radioactive mutants, the killer virus, or the zombie hordes.

            Personally, I’d toss a lot of haunted house stories in here, because the haunted house (or ship, or insane asylum, or spaceship, or whatever) is essentially the universe of the story.  Not all of them, but a decent number.  The reader or audience doesn’t see anything else and the characters don’t get to interact with anything else.  House on Haunted Hill, The Shining, Event Horizon, and most of the Paranormal Activity films could all be seen as supernatural stories, but their settings really elevate them to giant evil stories.

Thrillers—Thrillers also stand a bit away from the pack because they tend to be the most grounded of horror stories.  Few creatures of the night, no dark entities, far fewer axe-wielding psychopaths.  The key thing to remember is that a thriller is all about right now.  It's about the clock counting down in front of my heroine, the killer hiding right there in the closet, or the booby trap that's a razor-width from going off and doing... well, awful things to my characters.  There's a lot of suspense focused on one or two characters and it stays focused on them for the run of my story.  A thriller keeps the characters (and the reader) on edge almost every minute.

Slasher stories—These are really about one thing, and that’s body count.  How many men, women, and fornicating teens can the killer reduce to cold meat?  Note that there’s a few distinctions between a slasher story and a torture porn story (see below), and one of them is usually the sheer number of people killed.  There's also often a degree of creativity and violence to the deaths, although it's important to note it's rarely deliberate or malicious.  Often it's just the killer using the most convenient tools at hand for the job—slasher tales are pretty much a parkour of death.  The original Friday the 13th film series has pretty much become the standard for slasher pics, and it's what most people tend to think of first when you mention the term.

            A lot slasher stories used to have a mystery sub-element to them, and often it was trying to figure out who the killer was.  Then it kind of morphed into being a twist... alas, often not a very well-done one.   Slasher stories also developed a bad habit of falling back on the insanity defense and got stereotyped as "psycho-killer" movies.  Which is a shame because some of them are actually very clever and creepy.

Monster stories—The tales in this little sub-genre tend to be about unstoppable, inescapable things that mean the protagonist harm.  They’re rarely secretive or mysterious, but they do have an alarming habit of tending toward nigh-immortality.   The emphasis here is that nothing my heroes (or the villains, police, military, or the innocent bystanders) do can end this thing's rampage, and any worthwhile rampage tends to involve people dying.  There may be blood and death, but the focus with a monster isn’t finding it or learning about it-- it’s stopping it.  Or at least getting as far away from it as possible.  Of course, how far is far enough with something that doesn't stop?

            The original monster story is, of course, Frankenstein.  Godzilla is a monster, in a very obvious sense, but so are zombies, Samara in The Ring, and even Freddy Kruger.  I still hold that the reason Jason X is so reviled by fans of the franchise is that the filmmakers turned it into a monster movie, not a slasher film like the ones before it.

            My lovely lady also made an interesting observation recently.  In monster stories, you almost always have a moment when the audience feels a twinge of sympathy for the monster.  Look at any of those named above, and you’ll see there’s a point when we empathize with Frankenstein, Godzilla, and yeah... even super-killer cyborg Jason (who seems to settle down once a holodeck dumps him back at a deserted and lonely Camp Crystal Lake and you realize he just wants to be left alone).

Adventure Horror stories—To paraphrase from Hellboy (which would fit quite well in this category), adventure horror is where the good guys bump back.  While they may use a lot of tropes from some of the other subgenres, the key element to these stories is that the heroes are fighting back.  Not in a weak, flailing, shrieking cheerleader way, but in a trained, heavily-armed, we've-got-your-number way.  Oh, it can still go exceptionally bad for them (and often does), but this sub-genre is about protagonists who get to inflict a bit of damage and live to tell the tale.  For a while, anyway.  To quote an even wiser man, even monsters have nightmares.

            The Resident Evil franchise is horror adventure with zombies, just like my own Ex-Heroes.  Jonathan Maberry’s definitely dabbled in it as well, with some of his eerier Joe Ledger books. The Ghostbusters movies could fit here, too.  There’s long-running shows like Grimm and Supernatural, and some of you may have seen a fun little cable series called Ash vs. Evil Dead. 

Torture porn—Director Paul Verhoven once commented that the reason Murphy is killed so brutally in the beginning of Robocop was because there wasn’t time at the start of the film to develop him as a character.  So they gave him a horribly gruesome death, knowing it would create instant sympathy for him, and then they’d be able to fill in more details about his life later on in the film.  That’s the general idea behind torture porn.  Minus the filling in more details about the characters later.

            I’m not sure if King himself actually coined the term “torture porn” in his Entertainment Weekly column, but that’s the first place I remember seeing it.  At its simplest, torture porn is about making the reader or the audience squirm.  If you can make them physically ill, power to you.  The victims are usually underdeveloped, unmemorable, and doomed from the moment they’re introduced.  It’s not about characters, it’s about the visceral things being done to the characters.  They’re getting skinned, scalped, boiled, slowly impaled, vivisected... and we’re getting every gory detail of it.  A film industry co-worker once told me “porn is when you show everything,” and this sub-genre really is about leaving nothing to the imagination.  They are the anti-thriller, to put it simply.

            A key element to torture porn is the victim is almost always helpless.  They’re bound, drugged, completely alone, or vastly outnumbered.  Unlike a slasher film-- where there's always that sense that Dot might escape if she just ran a little faster or make a bit less noise-- there is no question in these stories that the victim is not going to get away.  That hope isn't here, because that's not what these stories are about.

            So there’s seven subgenres we can break horror down into.  And there’s many more.  All fascinating stuff, right?

            Why are we talking about it?

            Y’see, Timmy, when a lot of us start off  as writers, we flail a bit, usually in the attempt to copy stories we don’t quite understand the mechanics of.  As such, we aren't sure where our own stories fit under the big horror umbrella (or sci-fi, or fantasy, or...).  We'll begin a tale in one sub-genre, then move into a plot more fitting a different one, wrap up with an ending that belongs on a third, and have the tone of yet another through the whole thing. 

            It's important to know what I’m writing for two different reasons.  One is so I’ll be true to it and don't end up with a sprawling story that covers everything and goes nowhere.  I don't want my thriller to degenerate into a slasher, and if I’m aiming for cosmic-level, Lovecraftian evil it'd be depressing to find all the earmarks of a classic supernatural story.  I also want to be able to market my story, which means I need to know what it is.  If I tell an editor it's not torture porn when it plainly is, at the best I’m going to get rejected.  At the worst, they'll remember me as "that idiot" when my next piece crosses their desk.

            In closing, I’ll also toss in the free observation that it’s difficult to merge two of these subgenres because a lot of them contradict each other by their very nature.  Not impossible, mind you, but difficult.  Probably one of the few exceptions I can think of in recent times is The Cabin In The Woods, which does an amazing dancing back and forth between being a monster movie and a giant evil movie.

            So, that's enough of that.  Feel free to dwell on these points over the weekend while you’re drinking, watching some scary movies, and sneaking Kit Kats out of the candy bowl (seriously—feel ashamed about that. Those are for the kids!)

            Next time... I thought we could talk a little bit about democracy.

            Happy Halloween.  Don't forget to get some writing done.

Come On and Twist A Little Closer Now

            If you don’t get the title reference, I’m afraid you have to leave.  It’s not my choice, you understand.  It’s the law.

            Anyway...

            I’ve run into a few folks recently talking about spoilers, usually pertaining to twists.  It’s a little bothersome how many times I’ve seen people say that knowing a twist in advance shouldn’t—and doesn’t—affect their view of a story.  And this is... well, just wrong.  That’s not a matter of opinion.  It’s just flat out wrong.

            So I thought it might be worth discussing some of the finer points of a well-executed twist.

            First, though, let’s define a few terms.

            A mystery is when the main character and the readers are aware that information has been hidden from them, and the story usually involves the search for that unknown fact. At it’s simplest, a mystery is when someone in my story asks a question and then tries to find the answer. 

            Suspense is when there’s an important piece of information my readers know and the characters don’t. The key here is that my characters don’t know that they need to know this vital fact. The woman Yakko is going upstairs with is the murderer.  There’s a bomb under the table.  Dot’s going into a meeting with a bunch of her superiors who all know what she did.  These are common suspense situations.

           A twist is when information is revealed that my characters and the audience didn’t know was being kept from them.  They don’t even suspect those facts are out there, waiting to affect the story.  When a twist appears, it comes from out of nowhere and changes a lot of perceptions for the characters and the audience.  We’ve all been told that Luke Skywalker’s father is dead, so when we learn that Darth Vader is his father, it’s a bombshell that alters our view of everything.

            Assuming we didn’t see all the advertising for the prequels...

            But that’s a different discussion...

            Notice that in most of these, the characters and the readers are in the same position.  Their view of things lines up.  The only time it doesn’t (with suspense) is when the characters are in extreme danger because of what they don’t know, which cranks up the tension for the audience.

            Going off the above definitions, one of the main components of a successful twist is that the reader (or audience) doesn’t know it’s coming.  We can’t be surprised or taken off guard by something we’re expecting, right?  So without that element... well, it’s not a twist anymore.  This moment becomes empty, poorly structured suspense, a missed beat in the structure of my story.

            Personally, this is why I’m so nuts about spoilers.  One small spoiler can rip the heart out of a great reveal and leave it flapping in the wind like an empty shirt on a clothesline.  Rather than identifying with the characters, we’re waiting for them to catch up and shaking our heads at how long it’s taking them.

            Y’see, Timmy, saying a twist should still make sense whether or not I know it’s coming is like saying a defibrillator should still work whether or not it’s got electricity running through it.  We’ve removed a vital element that it needs to function.  A working defibrillator won’t always perform the function it was made to, yeah, but it simply can’t when it’s not even plugged in.

            Now, there are two other things that can make a twist flop.  One is when the information the twist reveals isn’t actually a surprise, or it’s something the reader probably figured out on their own.  If you’re a long-time fan of The Simpsons, you may remember one time when Homer told the Nativity story in church.  And he ended his little sermon with these drama-filled words...

            “And did you know that baby Jesus grew up to be... Jesus?”

            It’s a perfect example of this point.  If I’m two or three steps ahead of the characters and the author, a “reveal” like this borders on comedy.  Which is great if I’m writing comedy, not so good if my book is a techno-thriller.  A twist that tells us something we already know, by definition, isn’t a twist, and it doesn’t matter if the author hasn’t specifically spelled it out or not in the book.  If all my readers figure out who Dr. Acula really is on page two, it’s my own fault when the big twist falls flat.

            The second thing that kills a twist is the flipside of what I just said.  It’s also not a twist if there’s absolutely no way we could’ve suspected it.  Yes, a twist depends on us not knowing something’s coming, but when it arrives it needs to fit with everything we’ve been told all along.  A reveal should mesh with what we know, not contradict, and make us look at things in a new way.  Finding out Phoebe is my long-lost cousin in the last fifty pages is a twist.  Finding out Phoebe is a third-gender alien from the year 2241 in the last fifty pages means I should...

          Wait, an alien from 2241?  Hasn’t this a period murder-mystery novel for the past two hundred pages?  What the hell...?

            I once read a book where we found out in the last twenty pages that the leader of the all-woman biker gang is actually a vampire.  And while we’d known this was an urban fantasy novel, there’d been no clue whatsoever that vampires exist.  It was a first person story and the main character had never even told us that vampires were a thing, even though we learned in those final pages that this is the vampire she knew had killed her husband.  The reveal clashed with what I knew about the world and the character, and that clash jarred me out of the book at a point when the author really needed me to be sucked into it.

            And that’s the real killer. When my twist falls flat, for any reason, it breaks the flow of the story.  And since big twists tend to come toward the end of a story, it means I’m giving my readers a reason to stop when I want them to be checking the clock to see how late it is and if they can finish the book tonight.

            A twist is a powerful device, the five-point-palm technique of storytelling.  It needs to be done a certain way, but if I can master it I’ll be unstoppable. And if I do it wrong...  I’m just going to piss off my target.

            Next time, I think we need to discuss paying dues.  Especially those of you who’ve been here for a while.

            Until then, go write.

Bloodsoaked Carnage and Horror 101

            Running late, as usual. In more ways than one.  I was looking back and realized I haven’t done a solid Halloween-related post in ages.  So this is doubly long-overdue.

            Anyway...

            I wanted to revisit something I blabbed on about once a few years back.  I figured it was worth going over again for the holidays and for general purposes.

            When I sit down to write something scary, it helps to know just what I’m trying to accomplish.  “Scary” means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and some of that depends on context.  Do I want to make hearts race or blood run cold?  Am I trying to make sure someone never walks down a dark hall again, or that from this point on they can never eat chicken and rice without thinking of... well, other things?

            Someone with a sheet draped over them can be funny, creepy, or plain terrifying, but if I don’t know which one I’m aiming for, it’s much harder to accomplish anything.  I mean, I can’t get the desired effect if I don’t know which effect I desire, right?  It’s like playing pool (or billiards, for you continental types).  I can call my shots or I can smash the cue ball into anything on the table.  Either way, there’s a chance of getting a ball in a pocket, but one’s got a much better chance of doing something impressive.

            With that in mind... what kind of scares am I going for?

            There’s a bunch of arguments to be made in several directions, but I think fear, as a storytelling device, generally breaks down into three basic categories.  Stephen King’s said something similar a few times, and I’m kind of expanding on that in my own way.  There’s a couple different names people use for them, but for our purposes today, let’s call them the shocker, the gross out, and dread.  These three form the core elements of most scary stories.  They’re the base ingredients, as it were.

            Let’s review...

            The Shocker- This is when something unexpected happens and makes the reader or audience jump.  It’s an immediate fear caused by something happening right at this moment.   When that bear trap snaps shut on someone’s leg or they get a machete in the head, that’s a shock.  Ever seen someone’s eyes bug while they’re reading?  They probably just found a shocker.   A lot of the deaths on Game of Thrones tend to be shockers because—as violent as that world is—we don’t expect to see people we like bite it on such a regular basis.  Individual shocks can be stretched out a bit with chaos and shouting to keep it going—especially on film—but a shocker is really a short-lived thing.

            The shocker is a powerful storytelling tool, don’t get me wrong, but it’s important to remember that it can’t stand on its own for long.  By it’s very nature it’s quick and done.  There can be fallout and aftershocks, but they’re always going to be weaker. I also can’t use shocks one after another.  Repetition bleeds their strength and can even make them lean into comedy or (worse yet)boredom. 

            The Gross-Out - As King himself names it.  This is when things are just disgusting.  It’s when I tap into the reader’s sense of revulsion and maybe even induce some nausea.  It’s when we spend six paragraphs going over the exquisite sensation of lifting someone’s still-attached eyeball out of their socket, maybe turning it around to get a view of the room, and then sliding sewing needles into it (maybe even through it) again and again until it bursts and the warm liquid runs down the optic nerve and drips into the empty socket.  Which then gets packed with salt.  Or maybe it’s just about running a lawnmower over a zombie and describing every color and texture as the half-rotted body sprays out across the grass.

            One of the big differences between the gross out and the shocker is duration.  While a shock loses power the longer I try to prolong it, a gross out can gain strength as it goes on and on (and thus, torture porn was born).  Still, like anything, if it goes on too long or happens too often, my readers will get bored with the gross out, too.

            Another interesting point.  The audience often (but not always) knows the gross out is coming.   Anticipation is part of it.  We don’t have pages and pages of set-up, but it rarely pops up out of nowhere (because if it did, it’d be a shocker).

            Dread - This is when something doesn’t happen, but we know it could.  Or maybe it’s something we know is happening even if we don’t actually see it.  Dread is fear of potential events, if that makes sense, which puts it very close to suspense.  We know any minute now something’s going to crawl out of the shed or reach out from under the bed, and the fact that it hasn’t yet is what gives us the chills.  Dread needs enough space for my readers to realize things aren’t matching up within the story or within their own experiences.  It works well in larger tales because there’s space for back story, but if I’ve got enough experience I can make it function in tighter spaces

            Now, there’s three catches that come with me using dread.  One is that it relies on me having a very solid grasp of how my readers are going to react and what they’re going to know.  If I say you’ve been invited to the Strexcorp company picnic, most of you are going to shrug, put on some sunscreen, and head down to play volleyball.  I have been known to have a bug thing now and then, but I shouldn’t assume everyone will find the sight of a cockroach to be the most awful thing ever.  If the shocker is a sledgehammer, then suspense is the scalpel of fear.

            The second catch is that dread relies on the audience having... well, not to sound elitist, but it depends on a certain level of intelligence and involvement.  If you try explaining climate change to a chimpanzee, you’ll notice they don’t get too worried about it—assuming they sit there for your whole lecture.  The huge reveal about David Warner’s photographs in The Omen doesn’t pack anywhere near the same punch if I come in when they’re done examining the priest’s apartment (see—you should’ve watched The Omen and then this would make sense).  Dread requires an investment and an attention span. 

            Last but not least, dread needs good characters  more than the other two types of horror mentioned above.  My readers need to be able to identify with what a character’s going through.  If they can’t, this isn’t a story, it’s a news report.

            Now, after all that, here’s one more mouthful for you to digest.  Did you notice that each of these types of horror has a different time investment?  The shocker is quick, the gross out needs a few minutes, and dread really takes its time.  Each one is very distinct.  I can’t expect to stretch a shock over two or three pages and I can’t build a sense of dread in a single paragraph.

            Once I know just what I’m trying to do, it’s easy to see how each type of horror should work on the page and also how they can work with each other.  A lot of old ghost stories are little suspense tales that build to a shock.  A lot of  torture porn films start with a bit of dread, but then dive headfirst into gross-outs punctuated by shocks. 

            Y’see, Timmy, when I’m writing horror I need to be aware of the effect I’m trying to create and how much space I need to accomplish that effect.  If I’m trying to build a sense of dread in less than a page, or if I want to make a shock last for just as long, my story’s doomed.  These are things that are very hard to manipulate.

            Of course, it’s possible to do scary things without any of these core elements, just like it’s possible to bake without using flour or sugar.  But I need to be aware that working around these things means a lot of extra effort.  And maybe some really clever thinking.

            Next time, I want to break this bad habit of running late and start over from scratch.

            Until then, go hand out candy.  Oh, and write.

The Bomb Will Kill An Innocent Person

             Running behind this week.  Sorry.  I’ve just gotten too relaxed after Ex-Communication and the success of 14.  And I got zombie Legos, which have taken up far more of my time than a grown man should probably admit to...

            Bonus points if you know when Batman blackmailed someone with that title line.  Yeah, Batman.  Hiding a bomb somewhere in Gotham to stop his opponent.

            Anyway... on a related note.

            The late, great Alfred Hitchcock had a famous example about suspense that you’ve probably heard before.  To paraphrase, suspense is when two people are having breakfast and they don’t know there’s a bomb under the table.  If the bomb goes off, it’s a shock, absolutely, but the longer they sit there and the bomb doesn’t go off... well, the tension’s going up a few notches every minute.

            Now there’s a few conditions that have to be met for this to work.  It doesn’t matter if I'm writing a short story, a novel, or a screenplay.  Suspense needs certain elements to be effective.

            First off is that there has to be a real threat.  A can of whipped cream under the table just doesn’t equate to four pounds of plastique.  Neither does four pounds of liquid negathilium with a dynochrome timer, because none of us have the slightest clue what that is (for all we know it might be tastier than the whipped cream).  The bomb under the table has to be something the readers immediately understand is a horrible thing.

            Second, the reader or audience needs to know about the threat, even though the character doesn’t.  We have to be cringing every time they bang a glass on the table or pound their fist for emphasis.  If one of them is checking their watch, it should make us tremble every time we see those hands tick forward another minute.

            Third is that the characters need to be smart enough to recognize that threat—if they knew about it.  This is where it gets tricky, because this requirement has to be carefully balanced with the first two. 

            Let me toss out a trio of quick examples.  Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

            A while back I watched a movie where the main character’s friend was... well, psycho.  Not quietly, in-the-background psycho, mind you.  She was brutally-kill-your-pet, attack-and-mutilate your next best-friend, constantly-check-up-on-you, stare-at-you-longingly while you sleep psycho.  There were so many warning signs that she was unstable.  How could everyone not catch all those pointed glances and wild eyes and trembling hands.

            My lovely lady was reading a script a while back where a naive country boy moved to Manhattan and was taken advantage of again and again.  And again.  And then one more time after that.  And every time it was made painfully obvious that the woman/ man/ indeterminate the main character was dealing with was screwing him over.  It was like reading a cartoon script where nobody recognizes Snidely Whiplash as the villain, even with his black cape, twirling mustache, and bad habit of ending every sentence with an evil cackle.

            Finally, there was a fairly popular sci-fi prequel this summer.  It featured, in one scene, a hissing alien which seemed to be a cross between an cobra, a python, and a gigantic, albino leech.  One of the human characters, you may remember, kept trying to pat it on the head.

            In each of these cases, the writers were so desperate to meet one or both of the first two requirements (establishing the threat and letting the reader know about that threat) that the third requirement suffered for it.  This is a recurring mistake I see when people try to create suspense.  My characters aren’t supposed to know about the bomb (to keep using our main example), so they just don’t see it.  No matter how much evidence there is that a high explosive device has been activated under the breakfast table, no one reacts.  Because if they reacted, there wouldn’t be any suspense.  So the attempt to create tension just creates a ridiculous blind spot instead.

            Y’see, Timmy, there’s a corollary lesson to be learned here.  If there’s a bomb under the table and my characters don’t know it, that could be considered suspense, yes. 

            However, if the bomb has a bright red flasher, ticks louder than Big Ben, and the characters still don’t know about it, that isn’t suspense. 

            It just means my characters are idiots.

            And it’s tough for any of us to relate to characters who are idiots.  I’ve mentioned a few times now that my characters should always be as smart as my audience.  If they’re not, everyone’s just going to get frustrated.  So when I’m building suspense and tension, I have to make sure it’s in a way that makes my characters look smart while still informing my readers.

            No, it isn’t easy.  If it was, everybody would be doing it.

            Next time, I want to talk about triangles.  They’re dangerous, pointy things.

            Until then, go write.