Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story. (15 page)

A lot of new writers think they need to finish all their research before they start writing. Nothing is further from the truth. No matter how much you learn about a given topic, there's always more, and it's too easy to fall into the research trap. Stop researching, start the book. Once you've written a chunk, pause for some more research, and then go back to writing. Keep up the pattern. Eventually you'll discover that something you wrote earlier is wrong. Don't worry about it. You can go back and make changes — that's the beauty of writing on a computer.

You won't ever get it perfect. You
will
make mistakes in your research. That's okay. Your main objective is to tell a compelling story that feels realistic
enough
. It doesn't need to be perfectly realistic. Besides, you could research for twenty years and some reader somewhere will still say, “Hey! That's not how it works.” A few of them might even write you or accost you in the hallway at a convention or conference and go on at great length about the errors in your book. If they do, the proper response is, “Did I make a mistake? Oops.” And then you walk away.

Don't let fear of facts bog you down. Better to write a book with a few mistakes in it than never to write a book at all.

Always remember that the story is king. Mark Twain famously said that if the Mississippi was in the wrong place for a story, he'd move it. In other words, if you unexpectedly come across an inconvenient fact that would wreck your story, ignore it and tell the story.

When you're researching history or folklore, you'll likely come across contradictions. People become werewolves in a number of different ways in the original tales, for example. You can cast a spell, get mauled by a werewolf, or just live an evil life. Which is the right one? Some survivors of the
Titanic
reported that the band played the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee” to keep the passengers calm as the ship sank, but Harold Bride, the ship's radio operator and an eminently credible witness, reported the musicians played the ragtime tune “Autumn.” Which is correct? How do you handle this for your book about ghosts and the
Titanic?

Some writers get paralyzed with indecision. Others try to figure out ways to work all possibilities into the book. Both approaches are mistakes. The best solution is the simplest:
Choose the one that best fits your story
. And don't apologize for it.

The author term for the cool research stuff you include in your book is
neepery
. The word first showed up in the computer crowd (possibly at Caltech), spread to the science fiction and fantasy crowd, and from there slipped into writer jargon.

Neepery can take over your story. There's so much cool stuff out there. I mean, did you know that Shakespeare's close friend Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton, posed for a painting in drag and no one knows exactly why? Or that a dime has only one less groove on its edge than a quarter? Or that a group of unicorns is called a blessing? (Though maybe it really should be called a hallucination.) There's a terrible temptation to put almost everything you find into your story. You worked hard to find it, and it fascinated you, so it should fascinate your readers, too.

Unfortunately, that's rarely the case. Unless you're writing a historical novel, neepery has only two functions: 1) to establish setting, and 2) to move the plot forward.

C.C. Finlay's marvelous book
Patriot Witch
, the first in his Traitor to the Crown series, is a beautiful example of a novel that inserts necessary neepery without bogging down the story. One method he uses is to insert a single sentence of it into an otherwise busy paragraph, like he does here:

The first two sentences slip us quite a lot of information. First, we now know that pre-Revolutionary Boston has coffeehouses. We're told that Boston is wealthy enough to have established its own glassmakers, but Colonial glassmaking is still an imperfect art at this point in history. And all of this information is handed over in the context of the story, which is Proctor's brief encounter with Emily and the feelings it arouses.

A moment later, Proctor enters the coffeehouse, and Finlay gives us a description of it:

A short, straight forward description that nonetheless tells us quite a lot. Tobacco is in general use. Coffeehouses are — or at least,
this
coffeehouse is — popular. There are plenty of British in Boston. Wigs are still in fashion for men. Boston is a hangout for merchants. And Finlay reminds us that slavery is still legal, even in the northern areas.

One thing Finlay neatly avoids is over-explanation. He doesn't say “ambitious merchants from London, Hamburg, and Amsterdam.” He doesn't detail the wigs. He doesn't have Proctor muse about the slaves and their plight. We already know everything we need to know for the story to continue, so Finlay shuts up and moves on to Proctor sitting down at a table with his fiancée Emily and her father Thomas, who doesn't like Proctor very much. This conflict is what the scene is really about.

Finlay has clearly spent hours researching Colonial America, but he only sprinkles in enough of it to set the scene and keep the story moving, and he oft en puts it in the context of action. It's a fine way to use that neepery.

You may have heard the saying
write what you know
. A lot of new writers take this to mean that you need to write about an area of expertise. If you're a teacher, set your book in a school. If you lived in Romania for a year, you're in a position to create a culture based on Eastern Europe. If you coached college wrestling, use the struggles of these athletes in your writing. Writing what you know lends necessary authenticity to your writing and makes everything feel more grounded in reality, since the details will be right in ways that mere research can't grant you.

To a certain extent this is true — but only to a certain extent. Paranormal novels (and science fiction novels, to bring in our sister genre) include a great many impossible elements. I mean, there's no way for anyone to write what they know when it comes to vampires or werewolves or ghosts or magical gateways. No one understands what it's like to be a vampire. No one knows how it feels to transform into a wolf at the full moon. No one knows what a ghost thinks or how to push through to another world. So does that mean you can't write about these things?

Of course not.

The reason you — and any number of other authors — can write about things you can't possibly know anything about is that even when you aren't writing what you know, you're
still
writing what you know, and that wasn't a meaningless tautology. You're injecting what you
do
know into what you don't. You don't know what it's like to be a vampire, but you do know what it's like to be hungry, lonely, and an outsider. You don't know how it feels to transform into a wolf at the full moon, but you
do
know how it feels to be wrenched from one mood to another, what physical pain feels like, and what it's like to battle internal demons. You don't know what a ghost thinks, but you do know those strange and alien thoughts that crowd your mind at three in the morning when you can't sleep. You don't know how it is to push through to another world, but you do know how it feels to arrive in a foreign country (or at a new job or in a new school or …), with no idea where anything is, who's in charge, or how anything works. In the example from the preceding section, C.C. Finlay can't know what it's like to be a young witch living in the Colonial era but (I'm assuming) he does know what it's like to have a secret, to be in love, and to be meeting your potential father-in-law for the first time. He includes these feelings in his writing, so Proctor comes across as eminently authentic, even though his existence is completely impossible. Injecting your own human experiences into your paranormal situations will grant your story that powerful authenticity your human readers crave.

So yeah — write what you know, even when it seems nonsensical to do so.

Even though the story is king, you don't quite have carte blanche to do anything you like. Yes, readers (and editors) will forgive the occasional error or departure and keep reading, but you can't willfully ignore or change well-established fact and folklore.

If you tell the readers your main character is a werewolf, she'd better turn into some sort of lupine creature at some point in the book. Writing about ghosts? Someone probably needs to be dead or otherwise separated from his body. Demons are evil spirits, angels are good ones. All supernatural creatures have a host of background baggage that the readers are well aware of, and you do need to follow it to a certain extent. Calling a bloodsucking, undead corpse a fairy will confuse the reader, as will giving your werewolves the power to walk through walls. Readers pick up a werewolf book expecting you to meet certain precedents, and you can't depart from them (too oft en).

But this does bring up a question. Everyone knows vampires don't do daylight. The sun strikes them dead, or burns them to ash, or poisons them, or maybe just seriously hurts their eyes. In some vampire stories, the problem is instantaneous, and in others stories it takes a while. Some vampires fall comatose the moment the sun rises, while others remain functional. Some vampires can shield themselves with heavy clothing or a blanket, and some can survive in sunlight with nothing but a pair of dark glasses. In any case, the stories all agree — vampires and daylight don't mix.

So how come Stephenie Meyer's
Twilight
vampires sparkle in the sun?

There's no precedent for it anywhere in folklore. I mean,
nowhere
. Meyer made it up completely on her own. How is she able to get away with it?

Easy. Meyer followed a simple rule (though I can't pretend to know if she did it consciously or not):
You can make one major departure per book
. Meyer's vampires drink blood, they live forever, and they have strength and speed beyond those of mere mortals, all of which comes right out of regular folklore. The sunlight sparkles are the only major departure in the first book.

Not only that, the difference shows up fairly late in the story. She establishes the other vampiric phenomena first. By the time the sparkling shows up, Edward Cullen's identity as a “regular” vampire is firmly established in the reader's mind, and Meyer is able to stray into sparkleland. Also, the sparkle effect gives her vampires a reason to avoid sunlight, something traditional vampires do, so it's less of a departure than it appears to be.

Finally, Meyer knows her audience. Her readers — primarily girls and young women — don't want a novel about a boyfriend who turns into a monster or a pile of dust. They want a novel about a heroine who ends up with the perfect guy. Edward has to sparkle, or that facet of the story would be ruined and Meyer would lose readers.

Departing from established supernatural norms in some way is actually a darned good idea. Readers — and editors — love vampires, but they don't want to read about exactly the same type of vampire. They want to see what
you've
done with a familiar concept that's also a little different. You need to avoid the clichés.

And that's the topic for the next chapter.

S
top me if you've heard this one. Intrepid Author finishes her first novel and, with trembling fingers, looks up Emily Editor's address at Paranormal Books and drops the manuscript into the mail. Several months of fearful, feverish waiting pass, but at last Intrepid Author receives a response. “I'm sorry,” Emily Editor writes, “but I'm not interested in more novels about angst-ridden vampires who open detective agencies. Too cliché.”