Once In Every Childhood...

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

original posting: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 18:40:23 EDT

A quick, simple exercise that you can take as far as you like. Although I've written it for a story, you could also use it for poetic fodder. Enjoy, and keep those fingers moving...

1. Pick your emotion.

flip a coin. and roll a die (okay, pick a number from one to six...)

heads? your list is:

1. sadness 2. distress 3. relief 4. joy 5. hate 6. love

tails? your list is:

1. fear 2. anticipation 3. anger 4. guilt 5. gratitude 6. pride

2. Remember. Remember. Rememb...is that record skipping again?

Sometime when you were a child, you experienced this emotion. Remember that time. Roll back the years, let those wrinkles smooth away, and put yourself in those days of yore, with the laughing friends making you cry even harder over...or maybe the terror when you drove the neighbor's new gocart and the peddle stuck so you couldn't slow down...or what about the anger you felt when you saw that someone else was in your favorite seat on the bus?

3. Write it up. You can push the details around, maybe make the air from the drunk's mouth stink even worse than you really remember, or have Freddie's braces have these enormous spikes that tore into your lip...but make us feel the emotion. Make us jump in our seats, lean into the spin, call out her name as our favorite dog runs into the traffic and the truck hits...

4. Now. Take that same emotion and scene, but rewrite it so that your protagonist (or even the antagonist, doesn't matter) is experiencing it with perhaps slightly different (adult type) surroundings. Instead of the gocart whizzing around the vacant lot, maybe it's a militarized dunebuggy sliding around Las Vegas? Or what if the daughter of the police chief darts into traffic and is crushed?

Write about what you know? You certainly know how you felt...don't you? Just remember. Stare into the little whirling bits on the screen and remember...

To Dream, Aye, There's The Rub...

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

original posting: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 23:30:20 EDT

"To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause...who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveler returns..."

Hamlet, III, i, 56, Shakespeare
From Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th Edition.

fardels? oh, well, we could look it up, but such burdens and loads are not worthy of our harried times, eh?

[For those who may be wondering--this is a simple exercise in the art of tall tale construction, sometimes known as writing. For our purposes today, we'll be picking a few bits and pieces by selecting a number from one to six (you may use dice if you like). You may use or abuse the exercise as you like, the instructor in the course isn't terribly formal about it...]

Let's see. Try taking one from the following:

1. There and back again. ...in which someone from our world ventures, falls, or is abducted into another more magical world.
2. Beyond the fields we know. ...those works which take place entirely in magic worlds, with no concrete links to our own time and place.
3. Unicorns in the garden. ...those tales in which magical and fantastic events occur in our mundane world.
4. That Old Black Magic. stories in which the everyday is menaced by the supernatural to inspire fright and horror are a class by themselves; alas, the unknown is still terrifying to most of humanity.
5. Bambi's Children. ...stories in which animals think, speak, and act with human intelligence...
6. Once and Future Kings, Queens, and Heroes. stories that have been handed down from time immemorial, the great legends of many cultures, which have been used by contemporary authors to provide new insights into the ancient myths or into our own time.

[categories from A Reader's Guide to Fantasy, by Baird Searles, Beth Meacham, and Michael Franklin, ISBN 0-380-80333-x]

Mix well with...

1. Health - fitness, ailments, liver, bile, or physical infirmity?
2. Fate - work, career, plans and goals?
3. Success - prestige, distinction, a name?
4. Life - ambition, illness, emigration, where does this life wander?
5. Head - concentration, self-control, independent, reckless, mindful?
6. Heart - the emotions, the feelings, sympathy, jealousy, happiness?

[palmistry lines borrowed from The Book of Fortune Telling by Agnes M.
Miall, ISBN 0-517-64730-3]

Season with a dash of fairy dust, blinking in the eyelids:

1. Ghosts
2. A talking non-human entity (animal, mineral, veggie at your discretion)
3. A moving part of a dead body (which one? you decide!)
4. Energy (flashes, mere shocks, or whatever your little spirit moves...)
5. Parasites, small insects, or even your local viral infection...okay, a mold or two will do if you really prefer fungi
6. those amazing marching machines, ticking their way into your embrace...with a scalpel?

So - one very sketchy category of story, one line of interest, and a dash of ugliness. Stir well, and think about where your protagonist would like to go (the back seat of a chevy? why?) and what your evil genius (the monster, mashed?) wants (a quiet coffin of its very own? with a view of the swamp? simply heart rending, eh, wot?).

Then write that tale of the darkness, enchant the evil spirits, and send it in to the contest! Only a few hours remain before sharp edge of time cuts across the deadline, so hurry, hurry, hurry, scrape your very own beast out of the dusty soul of the cemetary and let it go...

[this was an exercise as part of a contest, thus the deadline - but you can set your own!]

Fast Start?

From the shadows, bent, fetid, tumultuous and lonely, squealing and whistling now and then with exhilaration, it watched.

[You may use this sentence to start your work if you like.]

What dreams may come...

[was that a shiver running down your spine...or a ghastly finger from beyond?]

Don't Open The Door!

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

original posting: Sun, 29 Sep 1996 19:19:13 EDT

[based on Chapter 5 in How To Write Horror Fiction by William F. Nolan]

(Behind that locked door, so rumor goes, lie the remains of...)

Suspense!

"_Anticipation_ is the key to suspense. You are leading your reader towards what he or she _knows_ is going to result in a dangerous confrontation with evil. You do it in careful stages, encouraging the reader to anticipate the horror, but holding it back, layering in other sequences that move your story forward but delay the actual climax the reader _knows_ is coming."

(no, no, it was years ago, and the key was lost. It was almost a work of art, that key, and...yes, that's it! Where did you get...you can't be the long lost son of the family, sent away in hopes that the curse...oh, nothing, nothing...)

"If you have done the proper job of characterization, of making your reader _care_ about the protagonist, then they will emotionally identify with the upcoming danger."

"The descriptive words and phrases you use to build suspense are extremely important. They set the proper mood for the upcoming encounter."

"The reader never knows when or under what circumstances this horrible transformation will occur--a guarantee of reader anticipation."

(I remember the night when it first happened...the dark clouds rolled over the waning moon, and the ocean seemed to moan against the rocks, grinding, battering, roaring defiance of the fates...)

1. Set up your threat early. Right in the beginning, have someone else die, let a rumor ramble past, refer to the mystery...

2. build and deepen suspense by bringing the menace closer. a near encounter, destruction of the means of escape/rescue, loss of protection...

(We thought the priest could save us...and then we discovered him crouched outside the church, frothing at the mouth, with his own hands holding the stake in his chest...)

3. separation/isolation are excellent aids in building the suspense. Start with a busload of happy travellers, then whittle them down, down, down to the final desperate survivors, standing off the hordes of genetically exercised cockroaches with a bowie knife and a can of beans...

"Your readers will stick with you as long as the outcome is uncertain. They will be trying to guess what's going to happen, so your job is to give the narrative a sudden twist that misleads. This creates surprise and continues the process of building suspense."

"The threat cannot be false. It must pay off, and this means you must show your monster _in action_. Chewing up minor characters, for instance..."

1. The Principle -- Don't Open That Door! And the hero(ine) walks down the long, dark hallway, takes a deep breath, and slowly, slowly turns the handle...
2. Isolation, vulnerability -- put your characters at the mercy of the incoming menace with nowhere to run, no one to help...and feel the suspense rise!
3. Darkness. The primal fear of the night, of what may be lurking in the shadows, of that sound from behind the black shield...
4. Is the Monster Real? Often, characters start out not believing, then slowly give ground, until they finally believe completely in the monster, just as they finally reach the limits of their attempts to deal with it...often while the people at the 911 desk are still chuckling about the nut with their crazy story...
   

Okay? So, pick a number from one to six...

1. napkin
2. telephone
3. empty vase
4. broken light
5. wastebasket
6. painting

and again?

1. A door
2. A cave
3. A car trunk (or the bonnet, for those of you who speak the queen's own)
4. A locked suitcase
5. A closet
6. A long-unused boat house

and one more time?

1. the family curse
2. the monster from...
3. the marching dead
4. a zombie snake
5. a doctor who doesn't know when to say "no more cutting and stitching!"
6. your own pet fear, magnified and manifested out there, waiting for us...

Take the object, put it in the place, and think about how finding a napkin in a locked suitcase could be the clue that makes (in time, once we've fought our way past the disbelief, past the fear that clutches our stomach, past all that...until, at last) your protagonist rock and roll with the marching dead, streaming past on their way to...

Short starter?

"I don't want to go in there," she said.

But you and I know that she will, almost certainly, because she has to face her terrors...and those terrors will grow, will encircle her, and will make her shake in agony...

shiver!

(and if you're still wondering what's behind the door...open it, go ahead, turn the latch, pull on the handle and...now tell us what you found there!)