ARTICLE > ON WRITING > DRAWING YOUR READER INTO THE SHADOWSif you never planned to do so. Learning to betrue to your story is one of the hardest thingsyou will have to learn. You can not save everybody and sometimes the people you haveinvested the most time and care in will have todie. Be brave and you will see the rewards inyour work.Your reaction to someone dying should mirrorthe reaction that you want your reader to feel. Ifind that in cinematic horror I find myselfthinking “Glad that’s not me!” or “That lookslike it hurts” but I have no real sympathy forthe characters because they are, quite often,stereotypical movie clones. If that is what youare aiming for then that is fine but I want todeliver more than a momentary spasm ofrevulsion. I want to chill my reader to the bone.To do that I need to create tension.My English teacher would always use a stormas an analogy for creating tension. At first thesky darkens and the clouds move in. You canhear thunder over the horizon but you can notmake it out and then suddenly the lightningflares over the trees, the air changes, the windchanges and the light shifts. You can feel astorm. You know it is coming before it arrivesand you are powerless to prevent it– this ishow to create tension and that is what youwant to inflict on your reader.So we come to the danger. I have oftenlamented the castration and over analysis ofmy favourite monsters. Many of the classicshave been rendered impotent by modernincarnations or attempts to rationalize them.This means that if you want to give yourreader a fright you need to find new monstersand that is not as difficult as you may think.What is a monster?It is a literalization of fear. So what are youafraid of? What makes your skin turn cold,your throat dry, your stomach churn and yourpulse race? What makes you pull the blanketover your head at night?On the big screen the answer seems to bedeath, but that is an easy answer. Try to digdeeper. What about the things you face on adaily basis? Paying your bills, love, trust,failure, exposure, being different, conforming,sex, technology, getting older, weakness,illness, parenthood, being too powerful or notpowerful enough.I compiled this list by talking to friends andfamily, it is an extension of the basic answer. Itis the unknown and what lies in wait for us.For me, it is not the dark that frightens butwhat lurks within it. Shadows can move,change shape and come from where you donot. You can not see into them until a flash oflight illuminates them and as that flashilluminates the shadows you almost do notwant to see into them just in case there issomething lurking inside. That feeling istension, spilling into fear and that is what you,in my opinion, should really be aiming toachieve.Literal shadows are too gothic for many writersbut suppose you are writing about a familystruggling to pay their bills, and a young girlrealises that she can obtain the money in theoldest profession. What if someone has acrush on her and sees what she is doing butdoes not understand it. Jealousy overpowershis rational thought and he kills the man, andthe next, and the next until the police suspecther.This is an idea that I used in one of my firstshort stories and it illustrates how shadowyfiction can grow from out of the fears of thecharacters within the novel. In the first draft,which was a short story, the storm remainedon the horizon but when I returned to it laterand developed it into a book, the storm finallyarrived and all hell broke loose but not until theend. Not until the people, the shadows and thetension had swollen up and primed my reader.The story will dictate where to place yourshocks and scares, and the people dictate thestory. So work on the people and they willdraw the reader into the shadows with them.FEVER DREAMS ISSUE 3
ARTICLE > ON WRITING > CREATING FANTASY CREATURESThere are in my mind,three main divisions offantasy beings.The first, and perhaps most obvious, are thosebased in folk and mythological sources. Thencome the monsters and finally comes theimaginary creature.Elves, dwarves and trolls have been aroundas long as we have and as such require littlediscussion from me. Likewise, monsters wereinvented by human minds to make sense ofthe world around them and there are betterpeople to discuss them with than myself.Instead I would like to focus on the process ofdeveloping an entirely new creature.There are two ways in which you can do this.The first is to start with the habitat and itscharacteristics and from that contrive acreature capable of living there. This requiresa careful examination of the context and thenwe work backward from that to find thecreatures characteristics. A little research andsome common sense are all that is required.If you were creating a Norse based culturethat lived in a glaciated artic tundra that wasplagued with blizzards then what kind of wildlifewould they hunt?The easy solution is to look up arctic wildlifeand copy it but lets say we want somethingnew for our readers. The environment is coldARTICLE by Joseph Carswellso the creature will most likely need to belarge and have thick fur. The large size willprovide extra body warmth and the fur stops itbeing lost through insulation. In the arcticthere are issues with snow blindness andfreezing of the eyes so the creature would alsorequire a feature that functions akin to humansnow goggles. There are numerous desertcreatures with extra eyelids so we’ll take thatfeature and adapt it for our needs. Lastly if wewant it to be a herbivore then it will either needa feature to allow it to dig up tubers and rootsfrom beneath the frozen ground or will live in acave system and live off mushrooms andlichen because no vegetation will grow in thesnow laden plains. If it is carnivorous then itwill need a means to hunt and kill its prey.Whichever route you decide to take will havean impact on your local inhabitants. A largecamouflaged predator is something to beafraid of and may mean that children are forbiddenfrom leaving the village, it could alsoaffect the availability of other food sources forthe villagers especially if it attacks their livestock.A large grazing herbivore may have alarge horn on its head or claws for digging inthe frozen earth making it difficult to bringdown one on one, whereas a large herbivorewho lives in caves prevents them from usingspears and ropes but makes it easier to trackand its mushrooms could provide a usefulFEVER DREAMS ISSUE 3
Change language