Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story. (38 page)

The same goes for changing background and characterization. Characters change and grow in a book — and in the writer's mind. When you're rereading your own work, keep a special eye out for people who act out of character.

Letting your novel sit for a while first will allow you to come to the rewrites pretending to be a new reader, someone who doesn't know anything about this supernatural world or these supernatural characters. This is good for checking your exposition. Have you overexplained? Underexplained? Did you delete a scene that also had some necessary exposition in it?

As an example, I realized I had started my novel The Doomsday Vault too early, so I scrapped the first several scenes I'd written and jumped ahead to a more action-based scene for the opening hook. The new beginning was much tighter, with a faster pace. Perfect! However, when I was going over the rewrites, I discovered that along with those early scenes, I'd inadvertently cut the introduction of an important character. As a result, this character just showed up in a later chapter, with no rhyme or reason. Oops. I had to sneak him into an earlier scene during the rewrites.

These apply to anyone and everyone, but it's amazing how few people bother with them, so I'm giving them their own section.

When you're done, run a spell-check. No matter how good a speller or typist you are, you
will
make some errors. A spell-checker won't catch all your mistakes, but every one it
does
catch is one fewer mistake an editor will see.

If you know you're prone to mix up
its
and
it's
or
their, there
, and
they're
, beg someone who knows better to go through your manuscript for grammatical mistakes. Because every editor and agent in the world has his or her grammatical pet peeves (such as starting a sentence with the word
because
), and you don't want to look like an idiot in front of someone you're hoping to impress.

N
ow we come to some of the hard stuff — and some of the most valuable. It's the stuff that separates the good from the great, the decent from the powerful, the fine from the freaky. We're talking about theme, symbolism, and voice. This is where your true power as a writer lies, so let's dig in.

There are different ways to define
theme
. One way to look at it is as what your book is about, and I don't mean the plot or the story. The story is what happens, one event building on another. The theme is the idea your book explores. It can be a big concept like love or death or war or choices, or it might be more specific, like
defying authority
or
loss of love
or
restriction of choice
.

Once a big idea appears, it usually needs to be narrowed even more. This is what the book is saying about the big idea. It can — should — be extremely specific, like
No one finds his dreams
or
Death finds everyone
or
Everything has its opposite.
J.K. Rowling and Christopher Moore both write about the desire to avoid death, for example, but their actual themes are much more specific. Rowling wrote about the search for immortality. Lord Voldemort wants it in a literal sense. Harry and Dumbledore gain it in the metaphorical sense. Harry's parents give their lives to deny it to Voldemort and ensure it to Harry. On the other hand, Moore writes about the futility of fighting or avoiding death, and how by giving in to it, you conquer it. Charlie loses his wife to death and tries to fight death. He ends up fighting death gods quite literally. He tries to avoid becoming death, and only wins in the end when he gives in not only to his role as death, but embraces death itself.

Narrowing the idea, having something to say about it, is what separates the ordinary from the extraordinary. It's easy to claim your book is about life and nature. Heck, just about every book in existence talks about one or the other. Exactly what is your book
saying
about those two concepts?

These ideas are abstracts, something that readers can't see or hear. They touch emotions and spirits and resonate there. A powerful theme stays with the reader after the book ends, and makes the reader want to return to it. A masterful book has themes woven into many layers so readers can read the same book more than once and discover something new about the themes — or maybe find an entirely new theme the second time around.

Actually, you can get away without putting a theme in your book. But your book will be the poorer for it. It's like making a cake entirely out of frosting — it might look good, but there won't be much substance there. Theme shows deeper thought, richer layers of reading. Even if readers aren't fully aware of all the themes, they'll be still touched by them on other levels.

A theme holds a story together on a more abstract level. When most — or all — of the plots and subplots and images work toward a single theme, the book comes together more powerfully than does a book without a theme. Theme unites the book.

It's actually not difficult to include theme. In fact, it's almost impossible
not
to include at least one theme in your writing. You can't avoid the “big idea” ones — any book with human beings in it will at minimum discuss the themes of life and humanity struggling to survive physically or emotionally.

Sometimes the difficult part is actually noticing the themes in your own work. Even experienced authors can miss them. I once interviewed award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer Octavia E. Butler for a magazine, and I asked her about a recurring theme in her work — the idea of people being forced to make tough, rock-or-hard-place choices. The idea appears in nearly all of her work, both short and long. She blinked at me in surprise for a few moments, then answered, “Well, we don't always have choices…. And all too oft en even when we do have choices, they're not necessarily the ones we want.” In other words, the idea was part of Butler's worldview, and she had never noticed she had incorporated it as a theme into the body of her own work. (I feel I should point out that Butler, a master of the craft, also inserts a number of themes into her work on purpose, which makes the appearance of an accidental theme all the more interesting.)

This has happened to me, too. One of my books was reviewed in the
Library Journal
, and the reviewer pointed out that the theme of the book was loss and reconciliation, since several characters in the novel came from broken families and were trying to reconnect. I stared at the review and realized she was right, even though that hadn't been on my mind at all when I was writing. I'd been thinking about escaping physical and emotional slavery, and of the relationship between the real world and the world that makes up dreams. However, I'd written the book just after a tremendous upheaval within my own family, and the loss and reconciliation idea had clearly crept into the story as well.

I wish I had noticed this theme myself — I would have changed parts of the story to reflect it more powerfully. It's overall much better if a theme is developed on purpose. That way, the disparate elements in the story will point toward the theme in a more unified, careful way instead of by accident. It's also one of the better ways to help your book get published — as a new writer, you need a theme to help your book break in. Your book needs to be
better
than normal to get an editor or agent's attention, and a powerful theme that stays in the editor or agent's head is the perfect way to show your book's worthiness. If the editor can't get your book out of her head (for good reasons), you've probably got a sale.

Usually it's a matter of whether you want theme to be under your control or not. And you
do
want it under your control. An accidental theme is a kid learning to ice skate. His main goal is to make it across the arena without falling over, and he doesn't notice the patterns he draws in the ice as he skates. Once or twice, he skitters sideways and wrecks part of the pattern, but his parents still applaud when he arrives. Such a good boy!

A controlled theme is an Olympic skater, leaping and spinning with precision, and leaving exact swirls and cuts on the surface of the ice. He goes exactly where he wants to and concentrates on both the individual moves and the overall pattern. When he's finished, a stadium filled with people thunders in appreciation and the judges award him a medal. Both skaters have accomplished something worthwhile, but the second touches more people and has a better chance of being remembered. Even if you feel like a kid learning to skate, aim for the Olympics.

Paranormal books have the power to explore themes that “normal” books can't. Normal books (i.e., books that have no impossible elements to them) are locked out of a number of themes. Werewolf novels often look at themes of controlling that inner beast, or about forces of nature and their inescapable impact on our existence. The better novels about vampires explore a number of themes — the downward spiral of the dead feeding off the living, the living world's dual fascination with and fear of the dead, the war between light and darkness, faith and skepticism, domination and submission. Octavia E. Butler's final novel
Fledgling
delves into the relationship between vampire and prey. Is it domination and submission, or symbiosis and interdependency? This theme isn't something easily explored outside the paranormal genre. Philip Pullman explores several themes relating to humanity's fall from grace and the desire to redeem itself, as well as the more down-to-earth theme of using knowledge to gain freedom. Although the latter theme can appear in any book, the former is particularly well-suited to a supernatural setting.

Paranormal novels can also explore normal themes using supernatural means. This harkens back to the ordinary subject matter with a supernatural twist added to it. The children of Edward Eager's
Half Magic
feel their family has been split in half after the death of their father, which has also left them with only half a mother. The book explores their attempts to create a whole family again, with and without a half-magic charm. This theme allows the book to transcend its 1920s setting and resonate with children and adults decades after the book was written. Terry Pratchett puts a con man in charge of the Ankh-Morpork mint in
Making Money
to take a hard look at how frighteningly ridiculous — and delicate — our own entire banking system is, how much of it is based on con games and illusion. In the end, he uses an army of solid gold golems to show how money can really work for you, something you couldn't
really
do in a novel set on real-life Wall Street.

You have the power to use any number of resonant themes in your own book, whether they're supernatural or not. To make your good book great, you need to keep theme uppermost in your mind.

So this brings up a big question: Do you start with a theme or add one later? And the answer is: whichever one makes you happy as a writer.

Really. It may sound counterintuitive after that long harangue about having theme under your control from the start that I'm now telling you that theme can show up early or late in the process, but this is indeed the case. It's because everyone's writing process is different. Some writers can start with a theme in mind while others need to wait for one to show up. As long as it's there and under control by the time the book is finished, it doesn't matter how or when it arrived.

I've actually done it from both ends, myself. The story “Thin Man,” which I've mentioned before, has a theme that showed up late. The story was nearly finished when I realized I had a recurring theme, the idea of people being tricked into believing they had no choices when actually they had several. I also saw that I had the ideal vehicle for this theme — the chimneys that Dodd is forced to climb into and clean every day. The chimneys give Dodd only one way in and one way out, with hard, unyielding bricks on every side to enforce the singleness of the direction. Once I realized this, I was able to go back and ensure that the events of the story and the settings and even the dialogue tilt toward this theme. I'm convinced the presence of this theme is the reason Marion Zimmer Bradley bought the story for her magazine, even though she specifically stated in her guidelines that she didn't want dark fantasy or stories with child protagonists. She broke her rules on the strength of the story's theme, a theme that showed up late in the writing process.