The Horror, the Horror ...
What is your 'heart of darkness'? The secret places of our mind, our fears and obsessions can be useful depths to plumb in your writing. People like Stephen King, James Herbert and Dean Koontz have spun lucrative, long-lasting careers from tapping into these. Even if horror isn't your thing (it's not mine), considering the darker side of everyone's mind brings depth and contrast to your work. What scares you most - gory or psychological/spiritual horror? I can't watch or read the latter - overactive imagination possibly.
TODAY'S PROMPT: If you are more inclined towards 'sun lit' as I am, it's useful to counterbalance the light with the dark. Even if you have no interest in horror or sci-fi, writing about everyday fears brings depth to your characters, and can be a great catharsis for you and your readers. Today, why not take your notebook and write a 'Love' 'Hate' list. For example, if I wanted to think about contrasting scenes I might focus on the physical senses: Love: wood floors, silk, log fires, beeswax candlelight. Hate: carpet showrooms, nylon, air freshener, fluorescent strip light. You can apply this to anything - personality traits, food, location. Instantly, you have the bones of two scenes which will balance and enhance one another and provoke in your readers feelings of love/hate, relaxation/tension.
Children are naturally curious about ghosts and ghouls - when I was little I far preferred 'Misty' magazine to any other. It taught you useful life lessons - never mock a monkey for example. Growing up in Devon, stories of ghosts, disembodied hairy hands grabbing steering wheels on the moors and mischievous pixies were part of everyday life. Halloween is now as big over here as in the US - when I was little it was impossible to get pumpkins. Look at the popularity of Harry Potter - my mother was aghast that we let the six year old watch the first film (the vicar had told the congregation Harry was taking a generation to the dark side). There are any number of 'occult' children's characters - Casper, Meg and Mog, Winnie the Witch. How do you feel about them - is it exposing children to danger, or is it part of life? I've always felt Harry (at least before the book/black eye incident), was harmless entertainment teaching children about how important it is for good to battle evil.
Friends loaned us King's '1408' the other night - how good is John Cusack? To carry a film where your co-star is an evil hotel room ... the man is very, very watchable. I am hopeless with horror films and spent most of the time hiding behind the cushions. Whereas the pilot and our 92 year old grandmother can watch anything (she told me her secret years ago - if she gets scared, she just tells herself there are cameras in the room filming the scene). How do you feel about sci-fi, the fear of the unknown? Stories like Alien combine both this and gore, whereas in gentler tales like Cocoon, ET, the fear transforms into communication and joy. People's curiosity about unexplained phenomena - UFO sightings (also something we saw a lot of in Devon), crop circles, the 'orbs' appearing regularly in digital photographs - all are compelling sources for your work if you enjoy sci-fi and horror. Who can resist the tag-line 'based on a true story'?
My own nightmares are closer to home - more architectural (stone spiral staircases, aquaducts - Piranesi's prisons and Escher's stairs have a lot to answer for). My grandmother still lives in her isolated nunnery but I couldn't do it. It is stuffed to the ramparts with curious things - ivory samurai swords, groaning shelves of Staffordshire dogs staring at you balefully, family portraits where the eyes follow you as you walk along the corridors ... The cellars must be one of the oldest parts of the house and I've always hated them - the narrow stone spiral stairs, the low beams with hooks and the shelves disappearing into the darkness piled with dusty jars of pickles and preserves dating back decades. In winter they flood, and you wade knee deep through dark water to fetch anything. When we started looking for a house in France last year, we saw a beautiful house near Cognac - the deal breaker for me was the spiral staircase in the medieval tower, and the resistance tunnels hidden beneath a trap door in the living room. Some people would love it - to me the atmosphere was full of fear.
However you feel about the darker side of fiction, triggering people's imagination, natural fear or curiosity brings an adrenalin rush to your reader's experience, draws them in and helps those pages to turn. Maybe a slightly sadistic sense of schadenfreude is a huge element of people who enjoy horror - a sense of 'thank heaven it's not happening to me ...'. Or perhaps some people just like being scared - maybe it's that simple, what do you think?
TODAY'S PROMPT: If you are more inclined towards 'sun lit' as I am, it's useful to counterbalance the light with the dark. Even if you have no interest in horror or sci-fi, writing about everyday fears brings depth to your characters, and can be a great catharsis for you and your readers. Today, why not take your notebook and write a 'Love' 'Hate' list. For example, if I wanted to think about contrasting scenes I might focus on the physical senses: Love: wood floors, silk, log fires, beeswax candlelight. Hate: carpet showrooms, nylon, air freshener, fluorescent strip light. You can apply this to anything - personality traits, food, location. Instantly, you have the bones of two scenes which will balance and enhance one another and provoke in your readers feelings of love/hate, relaxation/tension.
