Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story. (21 page)

I teach a media studies class in high school. During the unit on the tricks and traps of TV advertising, I always ask my students, “How many of you live in a normal, ordinary family?”

No one ever raises a hand.

Almost nobody thinks of themselves or their family as completely ordinary. Everyone comes from something that they feel is at least a little odd or weird or different. It might be as small as having parents who were born in another country or as big as surviving two cancer operations. It might be a desire to be a dancer in a family of factory workers or a secret talent for knitting when your brothers all play football. It might be a sister who lives in a mental hospital or a father whose job takes him out of town three days out of five. Almost no one in the real world feels truly normal.

Fictional characters feel the same way. In the above example from
Unseen Academicals
, Glenda doesn't see herself as normal. She makes the best shepherd's pie in the world, works a night job instead of a day one, and keeps a level head in a place where everyone around her seems to go bonkers on a regular basis. Charlie from
A Dirty Job
doesn't see himself as normal either. He's a single father with an infant daughter. Nothing weird in that, except he's in this position not because of a divorce, but due to his wife's death. The otherwise normal children in Edward Eager's
Half Magic
also feel they're unusual because their father died years ago.

Lots of people in the world are levelheaded and work the night shift. Lots of people have lost wives or husbands. Lots of children have lost parents. Nothing unusual in any of this. But that's not how the characters
see it
. The characters see their situations as unusual, perhaps even unique.

This is human nature. Sometimes we want to believe that we're so different, so special, that no one else in the whole world is going through what we're going through, and neither can they understand it. (This is one reason why people turn to books, by the way — to see their lives reflected in fiction.) We want to be unique.

Other times we're sure no one else is going through what we are, so we don't bother talking about it, even though we'd secretly like to discuss the situation with someone who knows what it's like. When I adopted my sons from Ukraine, I talked about it quite openly among my co-workers and was surprised to discover a large number of people whose families had been touched by adoption. They had either adopted a child themselves or someone in their family had done so or they themselves had been adopted. Adoption isn't the rare event everyone thinks. It's certainly not unique, or even vaguely strange, but almost everyone I've talked to thought it was because they
felt
like it was. What's more, the people I talked to were quite happy, even relieved, to talk about it. Conversation broke the isolation.

Your characters need the same notion, some part of their lives that takes them off the beaten path as they see it. It'll make them like everyone else.

Actually,
everything
will make it into the book. Your character may never mention that her parents divorced messily when she was eight and that her mother dated a string of men thereafter, leaving her with a subconscious uncertainty about relationships. But
you'll
know, and this knowledge will tell you exactly what to do when Victor Vampire sweeps into Norma Normal's life, all handsome and delicious — and completely transient, from her perspective. Norma herself may not be aware why she keeps breaking it off with Victor even when it's clear she loves him, but you, the author, will know because you worked it out. Her reactions will come across as more consistent and therefore more realistic. So get that background together.

The other factor that makes ordinary people worth reading about is watching them cope with extraordinary situations. Seeing ordinary people deal with weird situations is, in fact, the core of a whole lot of stories, but paranormal stories have the chance to get really
extra
ordinary. So once you have your regular character fully developed and breathing nicely, you add the supernatural.

This is where the fun begins. How will your protagonist react when the magic shows up? See, the readers are regular people with (as observed above) one or two things that make them feel a little different, and if you've done your job, they're empathizing with the protagonist. On one level or another, they're pretending to be — or wanting to be — your main character. The only thing they're missing is honest-to-goodness magic, and it's your duty to supply it so they can face it right along with your protagonist.

So once you establish your character's normal life, you introduce the supernatural element(s) you chose from chapter two.

How soon? Depends, really. Some authors introduce it on the first page. Lucienne Diver's protagonist wakes up as a new vampire in her underground coffin in the opening paragraph of
Vamped
. Other authors take a little longer. Stephen King and Peter Straub barely hint at supernatural events when a seagull seems to stare at young Jack early on, but don't really get going on the magic until chapter three, when Jack talks to Speedy Parkway about the supernatural world known as the Territories. More in the middle is Christopher Moore's
A Dirty Job
, which hints at magic when Charlie's wife dies in chapter one and becomes much more supernatural when various objects in Charlie's shop acquire a magical red glow in chapter two. Chapter three starts with the wonderful line, “It was two weeks before Charlie left the apartment and walked down to the auto-teller on Columbus Avenue where he first killed a guy. His weapon of choice was the number forty-one bus.” From then on, a supernatural blizzard of demons, death goddesses, and hellhounds tears through nearly every page.

As a general rule, you'll want to introduce the supernatural element as early as possible. Otherwise your readers will start to wonder when the magic's going to show up, and they rightfully get upset if you hold back. Edward Eager sums it up very well through one of his characters in
Seven-Day Magic:

So get moving on the magic.

Once it shows up,
show us how the character reacts
. That's most of the fun. We want to see your main character's surprise, shock, elation, desire, fear, curiosity, or whatever other strong emotions smack him upside the head when he first realizes that selkies really do exist and he's just met one, or that the rusty old sword left to him by his great-uncle is an artifact of great power and a circle of sorcerers intends to kill him for it. It's what Bilbo Baggins felt when he picked up a ring that would turn him invisible, what Lucy Pevensie felt when she first crossed into Narnia, and what Charlie Asher felt when he realized he'd been recruited to take a job as Death. This “holy cow” response is called
the sense of wonder
and is practically a requirement of paranormal novels. We'll get into details of how to make your readers feel the character's emotions in chapter eight.