Alexander Gordon Smith's Blog, page 7

Workshop: Scaring Your Readers!

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 1st 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!

The Fat and the Furious!

No, I'm not talking about me when the shop runs out of Cornettos, I'm talking about this!!!

 

Whoa!

 

Look how big it is compared to my tiny head!! It's only the proof copy, so there will be a few tweaks (and the real thing will probably be a tiny bit thinner because the paper used for printing proofs is often pretty thick), but this, in all its immense gory glory, is The Fury!

At a whopping 534 pages, it's by far the longest and most ambitious thing I have ever written – and this is only half the story, as the second and final book is due out next year. I am absolutely thrilled with it. And I hope you all like it too! I'll hopefully be giving away some signed proof copies on the blog at some point, so stay tuned. And it's only three months (today, I think) that it is released!

As far as I know, Faber will be running some kind of filmmaking competition to coincide with the release of the book, and I'll let you know the details as soon as I have them. Until then, stay Furious!

 

Win Stuff On Facebook!!!

Just a quick reminder that I'm running a 12 Days of Christmas giveaway extravaganza on my Facebook Lockdown page at the moment! And if you're thinking, 'But the 12 Days of Christmas are almost over' then you're wrong, as I'm running waaaaay behind (currently on Day 5)!

Prizes include loads of books, some rare proof copies, posters, T-shirts and other prizes which truly are unique. So head over to the page right now, click Like, and keep your fingers crossed.

Good luck everyone!!

 

Happy New Year!!!

Here's hoping the Mayans were wrong...

Happy New Year everybody!!!

It's a little worrying just how many end-of-the-world images crop up when you do a Google image search for 2012…

But Armageddon aside, I think 2012 is shaping up to be a great year! Even the sound of it rolls off the tongue – twenty-twelve. That is a good-sounding year. It's the kind of year that is made for looking back on in the future and saying: "Yeah, 2012 ROCKED!!"

I'm going to be blogging a lot more this year, mainly so I can keep track of my new year's resolutions (I have about twenty, and counting). Some of the things I am most excited about this year include writing a new book in January, Fugitives coming out in the US in February, my US tour in March, The Fury being published in April, finally seeing Stagnant the movie getting made in May, getting a six-pack in June, holiday in July, the Edinburgh Festival in August, celebrating my gold medal at the Olympics in August as well, Execution coming out in the US in September, writing another new book in October, another US trip in November and Christmas in December!!

Okay, not all of those things will actually happen (I have yet to think of a way of getting a gold medal), but hopefully most of them!

Anyway, I just wanted to wish everybody an absolutely wonderful year. I hope 2012 is totally amazing for you all!

Workshop: Writing at the Speed of Life Part 2!

Here's the second part of the workshop, click here if you missed Part 1!

 

4. Writing on the Edge

That's probably enough about the structure of writing, now let's move onto method. Everybody has a different way of writing a book – some plan everything in meticulous detail before they start their first sentence, others start writing and fly along by the seat of their pants hoping it takes them somewhere good. There is no right or wrong way, but it's good to try both methods to see which works for you, and there are definite advantages of each when writing action scenes.

Personally, I don't like to plan my action scenes. I try to live them. I find that if I plan out every detail of an action scene it loses its urgency. I know what's coming, and so it feels less exciting to write. I worry that readers might sense that events have been preordained, choreographed to perfection, and feel somehow cheated. Also, it's more exciting for me as a writer to go into an action scene not knowing how it will turn out.

But that's not saying I want to go into an action scene totally blind, because I could end up floundering. Instead of planning out every detail of the scene in terms of plot, I plan out every detail of the scene in terms of setting and character. Say we're in a gas station, and a character pulls up on his scooter not knowing that he is 'infected' with something that makes everyone want to kill him. I don't want to choreograph a sequence of events for him – filling his bike with gas / seeing the owner of the petrol station walk towards him looking angry / gets attacked / tries to run away / can't get his bike started / chased by others etc. If I did that, I'd feel like the character was following my instructions, that maybe he wasn't acting naturally according to the character traits I had built up for him.

What I'd rather do is picture the scene, get a perfect mental image of the gas station – the forecourt with its four pumps, the sheen of petrol on the concrete, the way the cover overhead plunges the world into shadow even though it is pouring with sunlight beyond, the smell of gas and car fumes and the nearby ocean, the sound of the metal hatches clanging as the bike rolls over them, laughter from nearby, gulls squawking, the vague image of the attendant behind the glass, serving somebody else, with the character's own reflection laid over him. Before I start writing I try to imagine the scene in as much detail as possible, I want to be utterly immersed in that piece of my story's world.

(It also goes without saying that you have to know your characters incredibly well – better than you know your partner, your best friends. You have to know instantly what decisions they'd make in any situation, their strengths and weaknesses. If you haven't taken the time to intimately get to know your main characters, then writing a scene this way won't work.)

When I feel like I'm right there, inside that world, when I know every sight, every sound, every smell, I start to write. This is what I mean when I say 'Writing at the Speed of Life', because for the duration of the scene you are right there with the character. You don't know what's going to happen, you don't know how things are going to turn out. The action starts and you are forced to live it at the speed at which it happens (well, as fast as you can type it anyway!). You don't act out a rehearsed scene, you react to whatever is happening. The attendant is coming out of the garage, storming towards you with an expression that suggests he wants to execute you on the spot. What do you do? Because you're writing and thinking at the same time the scene feels more realistic, you might not necessarily make the right choices. You shout out to the man, asking him what's wrong, even though your instincts are to get on your bike and get out of there. But if you don't make that decision straight away, and have already started writing something else, then you can't go back and change it because you're living out this scene in realtime. By the time you do decide to get on the bike it's too late, the man has reached you. You have to fight.

I love writing like this because it feels so immediate. When things kick off you act and think the same way your characters do – you know the layout of the garage so you mentally plot your escape route. You know the floor is slippery with petrol so you tread carefully and maybe slip. You can picture the attendant, so when his hands wrap around your throat you are there, inside the story, writing to escape. This isn't just your book, this is your life. The choices your character makes will be more realistic because they are real – you are making them in the same split-second panic as your character.

Don't worry about writing something perfect. Don't worry about spelling and grammar, don't even worry about the rest of the stuff we have covered today – all of that can be polished and edited later on. Right now all you need to worry about is writing your way out of whatever emergency or danger you have concocted. Of course it doesn't always work, and you may end up writing your character into a scene they really can't do anything with (in which case go back and try again). But when it does work you end up with action scenes that are as breathlessly exciting as they are believable.

Activity: Continue with your action scene, or start a new one. Take a few minutes to place yourself inside the scene, really get a feel for it. Then put your character in, kickstart the action, and just write. Really believe that this is life or death for you as well as your character. Write at the speed of life.

I hope that comes in useful!