"A better man than I am, and much beloved," is how Proust wanted to die. What about your characters?

So, I was thinking about putting some more workshops up on my blog. Nothing too fancy, just bits and pieces that I use when I’m writing. Some you’ve probably seen before, others will be rubbish, but occasionally there might be a nugget of something useful that will help you when you’re working on your books. And why Wednesdays? Well, I like alliteration, so it was the only day that would go with Workshop.

When I run workshops, I always say that characters are the most important thing in writing. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got the most amazing plot in the world, if your characters look like they’ve been hacked out of cardboard then nobody is going to believe in them, and nobody is going to care what happens to them. Get your characters right and not only will people be desperate to know what happens to them, but those characters will actually end up writing the story for you. You just have to try to keep up.

I usually do a simple questionnaire for my main characters when I’m starting a book, just a quick interrogation. It helps you think about them as living, breathing human beings rather than literary devices. A while back, though, I found something a little more useful: Proust’s Questionnaire (if you read Vanity Fair magazine you’ll know all about this). Proust didn’t invent this, he was just famous for his answers (the manuscript of which sold a decade or so ago for a small fortune). I don’t think it’s designed for literary characters, it’s more about confessions, about discovering hidden truths in your own personality (so by all means have a go at it yourself). But it’s incredibly useful for getting into the head of the person you’re writing about.

Take an hour or so, sit down with your character, and ask them these questions. Don’t think too hard about the answers, try to switch off and let them do the talking. It’s fascinating what they come up with. If you have a go, post your answers in the comments section! Oh, and there’s also a version of this on Vanity Fair’s website which tells you which luminary you most resemble. Fun!

1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
2. What is your greatest fear?
3. Which historical or living figure do you most identify with?
4. Which living person do you most admire?
5. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
6. What is the trait you most deplore in others?
7. What is your greatest extravagance?
8. On what occasions do you lie?
9. What do you dislike most about your appearance?
10. When and where were you happiest?
11. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
12. If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?
13. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
14. If you died and came back as a person or thing, what would it be?
15. What is your most treasured possession?
16. What do you regard as your lowest depth of misery?
17. Who are your heroes in real life?
18. What is it that you most dislike?
19. How would you like to die?
20. What is your motto?

And feel free to add your own questions too!

See you next week for another Workshop Wednesday (any requests for workshops, just ask in the comments below)!

Here’s another of the workshops I taught in Utah last year. It’s a little random and piecemeal in parts, but I hope it comes in useful for any YA horror writers out there!

‘The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.’ Lovecraft

Scaring your readers is hard. Kids these days have seen everything before – if they haven’t read about it then they’ve sure seen it in a film or in a video game. Concepts and imagery that once upon a time would have been terrifying have become familiar, and familiarity makes them stale. Kids know these tropes and clichés, and to know something is to take away the inherent horror of it.

Horror isn’t about trying to shock your readers, it is about more lasting emotions – it digs beneath the skin, stays with us.

Tip: When you read a passage that scares you, don’t just read it, write it out. Reading and writing are like a country path, but reading is flying over it in a plane and writing is like walking down it. If you copy out a passage you’ll get a much better sense of how it is constructed, and why it is so scary.

The most important rule to making your work scary is to have believable, likeable protagonists. Readers have to be able to put themselves in the character’s shoes, they have to be able to project onto them, empathise with them. If readers don’t like your characters, then no matter how terrifying the plot they won’t get scared because they haven’t invested anything in the protagonist.

1. Suspense: Let Your Readers Do the Work

Horror isn’t a genre, it is an emotion. And it isn’t simply fear or disgust. You can’t show an exploding head or a disfigured monster stepping out of the wardrobe and call it horror. Those things might give the reader a fright, yes, or make them throw up their dinner. But they don’t necessarily make for a good horror book.

“There’s two people having breakfast and there’s a bomb under the table. If it explodes, that’s a surprise. But if it doesn’t…” Hitchcock

“I’m not sure I can explain exactly how it works. It has to do with creating believable people for whom the reader can feel affection, then putting them in danger of the unnameable and unseen. And it has to be suspended. You can’t just pull a gun out and have them get shot. You have to allow the sense of underlying unease to intensify over time. As crucial as fear is dread. Dread is essential.” Peter Straub

In fact, the only person genuinely capable of inducing a feeling of pure horror is the reader. You have to make them do the hard work, and the best way to do that is by using mystery. Plant a seed of horror in their mind, a promise that something bad is coming, and then build the suspense by holding back that event, by using red herrings. With every word they will be waiting for something to happen, imagining it, fearing it. They will be creating their own sense of horror and anticipation. The end result will hopefully live up to their expectations, but even if it doesn’t they will be left with that sense of having gone through something terrifying – and of course you’ll be doing the same thing again later in the story. You’re giving readers the tools to create their own horror.

The same applies with villains – if you show them too early, you show their limitations. Build up the mythology of a villain or a monster, make the reader imagine how terrible this thing could be, and they will do your job for you in terms of scaring themselves. I did this with Alfred Furnace.

Showing the horror makes it known, and our greatest fear is of the unknown.

2. Use Your Fears

But imaginatively. Pick something that you are afraid of – it can be anything, from cockroaches or spiders to fear of the dark or of small places. It could even be clowns! Say you are afraid of cockroaches, that in itself isn’t really going to be enough fear fodder for a whole novel (but maybe a short story). However, ask yourself why you are afraid of cockroaches. Is it a fear of things that scuttle under the furniture? In that case, could it really be a fear of hidden things – a world that exists just beneath the skin of your own life, writhing and chittering and ready to burst free at any time. Or maybe it’s a fear of things getting out of control, dirt and infestations. Look at the root of a fear, try to understand the mechanics of the terror it inspires, it will lead to some interesting and terrifying writing. Most fears and phobias tie into a deeper horror – we externalise our fears onto other things.

This is a great way of creating realistic characters and scary prose – use these fears in a subplot to get to the root of your character’s psyche.

Stephen King’s The Shining is a great example of this technique in action. The main plot of the story is Jack Torrence battling the ghosts at the Overlook Hotel, which is isolated in the wintry mountains of Colorado. In the subplot, our hero battles with a troubled past of alcoholism and guilt over hurting his son. He also struggles with a short temper.

The Overlook Hotel’s unsavory history and the ghosts that haunt its corridors are metaphors for Torrence’s life – how his troubled past haunts his present. There is also a boiler in the Hotel’s basement that he has to release pressure from each day. That’s a metaphor for his short temper that he’s always trying to keep in check.

Activity: Pick one of your most potent fears – it can be anything – and create a character with the same phobia. Now think of some reasons why a character might have these fears, and what they might represent in terms of deeper, subconscious terrors and real-life struggles. Then think of a monster, or a horror, that represents these real-life fears.

Use Your Fears in your Language

Your fears don’t have to be literal inside your story, they can exist as fleeting references, subtle shades that induce a creeping terror in your readers. If you are scared of cockroaches, use insect-like description: ‘Fear scuttled up her spine’, ‘he stared at her with black, emotionless eyes, a spider’s eyes’, ‘her thoughts escaped like cockroaches, vanishing into the shadows’, ‘the cluster of boils had grown, stuck to the skin of her armpit like insect eggs’, etc. If you are afraid of drowning, then use this terror carefully in your description: ‘He couldn’t seem to remember how to draw a breath, like he was submerged in dark water’, ‘she fought against the current of her thoughts’, etc. You’re not using your fears literally, but they are still there in your writing, and the reader picks up on them. They are arguably more effective this way, because a reader will grow uneasy, sensing horror there even though nothing horrific might actually be happening.

And make up your own verbs if you like! ‘Her face was carapaced black, hard and chitinous’,  or ‘insect legs needled up her spine’, etc.

Even without using your worst fear you can use language to establish a mood of horror. Look at the second paragraph of The Exorcist, specifically at the words used to evoke discomfort and fear:

The house was a rental. Brooding. Tight. A brick colonial ripped by ivy in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. Across the street was a fringe of campus belonging to Georgetown university; to the rear a sheer embankment plummeting steep to busy M street and, beyond, the muddy Potomac. Early on the morning of 1^st April, the house was quiet… At approximately 12:25 AM, Chris glanced from her script with a frown of puzzlement. She heard rapping sounds. They were odd. Muffled. Profound. Rhythmically clustered. Alien code tapped out by a dead man.

Activity: Take your fear and use it metaphorically and linguistically – or just write a paragraph using verbs that unsettle and disturb. Create a mood of horror before the horror even begins.

Writing like this helps avoid clichés – chills up the spine, inky darkness, etc – which have the opposite effect of scaring your readers!

3. To Gore or Not to Gore…

Horror is often synonymous with gore and violence, but how much can you really get away with in a YA book? My philosophy is to push the boat out as far as I can and let an editor rein it in if necessary, but there are some things you just shouldn’t show!

Furnace is a violent book, but much of the horror is implied rather than explicit. There are ways of ‘showing’ things without really showing them, and these are often far more terrifying because it leaves the truth of it to the reader’s imagination. Use all of your senses. If something horrible is about to happen, have your character look away and just hear it, the snapping bones and dripping blood, or feel the spray of blood, or smell the ruptured organs (ew!). By not showing it explicitly you are almost making it worse. Likewise show something after the deed – the mess it makes, the stitches, etc. In Furnace Alex sees the end results of the warden’s surgery long before he sees it in progress, and it is much scarier when he doesn’t know what is happening because it leaves it to the reader’s own imagination. Dreams and stories within the book can work the same way, creating tension. Again, with a ghost story, it is far scarier seeing the evidence a ghost has left behind that finally seeing the ghost itself.

Using senses other than sight increases the mystery because we don’t know exactly what is happening, it makes things scarier. The less we see, the more we have to imagine, and the more we have to fear…

Put Yourself in the Villain’s Shoes

Write from the perspective of the demon, the monster, the serial killer, the ghost. Delve into the darkest part of your own mind – it’s a good way to scare yourself.

Be Surreal

Pick a horror element and take it to the extreme – break the rules of what’s real, break the tropes. Instead of a vampire drinking blood, have it peel off the skin and wear it, taking on your personality, stealing your identity. Or introduce a vampire, then have it terrified of an evil greater threat, something new and vastly more evil. Instead of a zombie eating you, have them feed themselves to you, to try and live on inside your body. Taking things in a completely new, insane direction can sometimes spark off brand new, horrific ideas.

4. Setting

Setting plays an important part in making horror stories scary. Not just haunted corridors filled with cobwebs, or cemeteries in the dead of night. Anywhere can be scary, and the scariest places of all can be the familiar ones, but where unfamiliar things are happening. One of the best ways to unsettle a reader is to make your protagonist (and therefore the reader) feel isolated, cut off from other people and therefore by herself. You can do this in conventional ways, by removing a cell phone signal, perhaps, or sinking the ferry to the mainland, etc. Having a character alone in a big house at night, or trapped in a location like a school or a library. Or maybe inside a crippled space ship (like in Alien), and, of course, inside a prison cut off from the real world.

But there are other ways of creating that terrifying sense of isolation. Maybe the character’s parents / friends don’t believe her stories of the paranormal – this isolates the character and forces her to act by herself. In The Fury the protagonists are cut off from help because anyone they go near turns psychotically feral and tries to kill them – they can have no contact with any potential saviours. Or you can kill off friends and loved ones, removing a character’s security piece by piece. You leave the character trapped and powerless, increasing the tension, but you also force them to use their own resources and strengths, which is vital for YA horror.

More ways include turning the protagonist’s world upside down – making her world unfamiliar by people doing strange things, behaving oddly, events that push the character away from her comfortable world, making her an outsider, trapping her outside the familiar. Make the familiar unfamiliar.

Have fun with your scary stories!

I’m just back from an awesome trip to the States, which I’ll blog about very soon. The main reason I was over there was to teach some writing workshops at the annual League of Utah Writers convention. I had such a cool time there, and got some great feedback for the workshops, so I thought I’d post them here in case anyone wants to have a look!

Now obviously I’m still a beginner, and I always feel like a bit of a fraud when I’m standing in front of other writers telling them how I write. I’m certainly not saying that this is the best way of writing, because there is no right or wrong way to tell a story. But these are the things that help me, things I have picked up from other people along the way, and when we teach workshops I guess that’s all we can really hope to do: pass on the things that we have learned. So, here we go!

I’ll post the ‘Writing at the Speed of Life’ workshop today, and the others later on. This was definitely my favourite, because I love writing action scenes!! Oh, and I have split it into two parts because it’s quite long…

Happy writing!

Writing at the Speed of Life!

This workshop is all about pacing, especially during action scenes, and I called it ‘Writing at the Speed of Life’ for a couple of reasons. The first is that I want to talk about how your writing should try to imitate the action inside a scene. The second is that I want to talk about ‘living’ rather than plotting – the act of throwing yourself into the story and literally writing it as you live it.

1. Imitative Writing

Writing should aim to imitate the action it is describing, especially during an action scene. You need to throw yourself into the scene – don’t imagine it as an observer, a writer, but as your character. If you’re watching an action sequence in a film you have time to picture the glorious scenery, the impressive explosions, the chorography of the car chase. Because in films you’re an observer, not a participant. But if you are the person inside the story you don’t have any time to appreciate these details because if you stop to admire the scenery you get shot (or run over, or blown up, or bitten by vampires, etc). Likewise you don’t always stop to think about how scared or angry you are in the middle of danger – you don’t do much thinking at all except about how to get out of the situation, how to survive.

Action and danger get the adrenaline pumping, and that tunnels your senses. You’re only paying attention to the things you need to survive. Superfluous description and too much emotional detail slows down the scene and also makes it unrealistic for a reader. Trim out everything that feels unnecessary, you want your action scenes to be as sharp as a knife-edge. It also slows down time, allowing you to picture every instant.

When writing these scenes pull the camera in close, rather than looking at the wider picture. Look at details like blood in the mouth, the edge of the blade, the ringing in the ears. These sense details create a feeling of intimacy and urgency. Always write an action scene from inside the head of the character, never just looking on.

Activity: Think of an action scene in your own work, or pick one at random (an attack, a gunfight, a plane crash), and put yourself in a character’s shoes. When all hell is breaking loose around you, what do you really have time to notice? Do you appreciate the fireball and the way it paints the scene gold and sends birds flying into the sky, or does the world just erupt in white heat, pain clawing up your back as you run? Take a few minutes and write a couple of rough paragraphs.

2. Short and Sweet

Cutting out extraneous detail isn’t the only thing you need to do to make your writing mimetic. Sentence structure also changes depending on the action in a scene.

Think about your breathing and your heart rate. If you’re sitting in a café with a friend, having a nice conversation, then your breathing is slow, your heart rate calm. You have time to look around, to take in the details. Everything happens at a nice relaxed pace. When you’re crafting a scene like this, your writing is naturally mimetic – your sentences will be longer, the language more flowery and descriptive, flowing. Your character has time to notice things in more detail, and therefore so do you.

However, if armed robbers suddenly burst into the café and started shooting, or there was an explosion / UFO / werewolf outside the window, or your friend suddenly leapt over the table and started strangling you, then biologically everything changes – your heartbeat goes into overdrive and you claw in short, desperate breaths. Again, your writing should imitate your character’s biological state. Sentences need to be short, punchy, abrupt, even truncated. Your character’s thoughts are broken up by panic and fear, so your sentences can be too. There’s no need to say ‘The boy’s teeth bit down on her skin, working away at her cheek like a bit of old meat, and she could smell her own blood on his breath.’ Cut it down: ‘Teeth in her flesh, ripping, chewing. The stench of blood blasted out of his mouth.’ Those are the things your character would notice, that’s all you need to write – keep everything short, ragged. Use powerful verbs (punched, blasted, ripped – even if those aren’t the physical actions you’re describing, breaths can be punched from lungs, a character can rip herself from her seat etc) and cut any adjectives and adverbs you don’t need (which could be all of them!)

(Note: That isn’t to say you want to race through an action scene – you want the pace of the scene to be fast, but you also want to draw out the action because this is why people are reading your book. They don’t necessarily want the action scenes to be short. Just because you keep the description down and the writing tight doesn’t mean you can’t stretch out the action. Remember, time slows down in an action scene.)

The opposite can also work, though – creating longer sentences that flow in an almost manic way. But even these are broken up by commas into short bursts.

Tip: Use progressive verbs, those that end in ‘-ing’. ‘She pounced, screaming, flailing, pounding at him with bloodied fists.’ Used liberally these give the sense of action happening right now, rather than in the past.

Activity: Look at the action scene you wrote for the last activity, or a scene from your book. What kind of sentences have you used? Are they long, fully formed, descriptive? If so, try chopping them down. Replace commas with periods. Try taking out words, pruning anything that isn’t needed, pare some right down to the bone. Think about the rhythm of the scene, of your character’s breathing and pulse, and take out or change anything that doesn’t match that rhythm. Try writing the next few lines from the scene in a way that imitates physiology.

3. Sentence Structure

It’s also worth taking a quick look at how you structure your sentences, because this can affect the pace of your action scenes. Anything you do that draws a reader’s attention to form rather than content slows the pace of the piece.

Beginnings: Look at the way you start each sentence. Do you usually begin with ‘I’ or ‘He/She’? ‘I walked to the door and turned the handle. I didn’t know what would be inside and I didn’t know if I wanted to find out. I pushed it open. I heard the screams before I saw what lay inside, etc.’ Starting every sentence in the same way is repetitive, and repetition slows down the pace of a piece of writing because a reader feels like they are settling into a pattern, they are conscious of the sound of the writing when they shouldn’t really be aware of the writing at all. Mix it up: ‘The door stood before me. I reached out, the metal handle warm to the touch. It turned easily, like it wanted me to open it, and when the screams slid out from inside I knew why.’ This feels more flowing, you’re less conscious of the structure of the sentence and therefore more immersed in the world of the story.

Repetition: Likewise, look for any writing ‘tics’ that you might have, things that you do over and over again that may pull a reader out of the story by making them focus on the structure of the writing. I have plenty of bad habits, including writing in threes (‘cold and dark and ancient’). If you use these too often they slow down the pace of the writing by drawing attention to it. I’m not saying don’t use them, just don’t overuse them!

Active vs Passive: Keep your sentences active, rather than passive, because active sentences have more movement in them. ‘The door was smashed open by the man outside’ sounds better as ‘the man outside smashed open the door’.

Activity: Look at your action scene and underline sentences that begin the same way, or any writing tics that you may have. Try mixing up the structure of your sentences to see how it changes the pace of the scene.

Click here for Part 2!