3. Find different ways to scare your audience. You can do this by slowly building the horror in a scene when the characters have to enter a haunted house and creepier and creepier things occur—and then play this off with scares that are completely unexpected—like a hatchet coming out of nowhere and lopping off a head—horror that takes the characters and the audience completely by surprise. In other words, mix up the way you deliver the scares.
4. Find ways to bring humor into your horror project. Humor always plays well in the horror genre because it gives the audience a chance to laugh and dispel tension, before you ratchet up the suspense and horror even more. When you scare us, it makes every fiber in our being taut with tension—so occasionally we need a reprieve, and humor is how that reprieve is achieved. Find funny moments or comedic characters or humorous situations to achieve this goal. It will heighten your ability to scare your audience even more.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY (edited with exercise by Laurie Lamson)
Introduction to the 1831 Edition of Frankenstein
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY (1797–1851) was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, and biographer, best known as the author of the Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. She was married to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who encouraged her work as a writer.
A key aspect of the Now Write! series is the chance to learn from, and be inspired by, successful authors’ writing journeys. Reading Mary Shelley’s Introduction to the 1831 Edition of Frankenstein, I was struck by how much it reminded me of a Now Write! exercise introduction. She was giving future writers a gift by sharing the inside story of how this classic came to be. There were so many long-departed writers I wished could contribute to this book—and now I had found a way to include one! After all, who could be a more fitting contributor to this edition of Now Write! than the godmother of modern horror?
In the summer of 1816, we visited Switzerland, and became the neighbors of Lord Byron. At first we spent our pleasant hours on the lake, or wandering on its shores; and Lord Byron, who was writing the third canto of Childe Harold, was the only one among us who put his thoughts upon paper. These, as he brought them successively to us, clothed in all the light and harmony of poetry, seemed to stamp as divine the glories of heaven and earth, whose influences we partook with him.
But it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house. Some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into French, fell into our hands. There was the History of the Inconstant Lover, who, when he thought to clasp the bride to whom he had pledged his vows, found himself in the arms of the pale ghost of her whom he had deserted. There was the tale of the sinful founder of his race, whose miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all the younger sons of his fated house, just when they reached the age of promise. I have not seen these stories since then; but their incidents are as fresh in my mind as if I had read them yesterday.
“We will each write a ghost story,” said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us. The noble author began a tale, a fragment of which he printed at the end of his poem of Mazeppa. Shelley, more apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of brilliant imagery, commenced one founded on the experiences of his early life. Poor Polidori* had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a key-hole—what to see I forget—something very shocking and wrong of course; but when she was reduced to a worse condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry*, he did not know what to do with her, and was obliged to dispatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was fitted. The illustrious poets also, annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished the uncongenial task.
I busied myself to think of a story,—a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name. I thought and pondered—vainly. I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.
Every thing must have a beginning, and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of molding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.
Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated. They talked of the experiments of Dr. Darwin, who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.
Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by, before we retired to rest. When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench forever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.
I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. I see them still; the very room, the dark parquet, the closed shutters, with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond. I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted me. I must try to think of something else. I recurred to my ghost story, my tiresome unlucky ghost story! O! if I could only contrive one which would frighten my reader as I myself had been frightened that night!
Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. “I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.” On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. I began that day with the words, It was on a dreary night of November, making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.
At first I thought but of a few pages of a short tale; but Shelley urged me to develop the idea at greater length. I certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of
one train of feeling, to my husband, and yet but for his incitement, it would never have taken the form in which it was presented.
And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart.—M.W.S. London, October 15, 1831
EXERCISE
Let Mary Shelley inspire you:
1. Make friends with at least one other writer who is different enough in style or medium that you can encourage each other without becoming too competitive.
2. Read stories in your genre for inspiration.
3. Read and discuss scientific news for inspiration—does anything new in the scientific world suggest to your imagination an idea or story of horror, fantasy, or science fiction?
4. Give yourselves a writing challenge that includes an idea from your genre reading and one from your science reading—each writer contributes one idea to the challenge. Individually incorporate an image or idea from a dream or nightmare.
5. Give yourselves time to let the ideas marinate, but hold each other accountable to share the results.
KATE BERNHEIMER
The Grimm Art of Fairy Tales
KATE BERNHEIMER is the author of five books of fiction including her collection Horse, Flower, Bird (Coffee House Press, 2010) and How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales (Coffee House Press, 2014). She has edited four anthologies including the World Fantasy Award–winning My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin, 2010), with xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths (Penguin, 2013).
The first story I ever wrote was a fairy tale. It was serialized in a newsletter that my dearest childhood friend and I wrote and edited together, mimeographed at our elementary school, and distributed for a nominal subscription fee to family members. We had named the newsletter in a strange ritual. One muted suburban evening in the hush of one of our backyards, we whispered over and over again the initials of our two names: K B K B K B . . . D S D S D S D S . . . thus my name became Kubbe and hers became Deus (she got the better deal I am certain) and our newsletter was titled Kubbedeus.
Up in Deus’s attic, we made paper dolls that were orphans. They lived in a cardboard box that had been sent via airmail from another country. It was stamped with words in a language we did not know. Most of the dolls had eye patches and had escaped from horrible circumstances we noted in pencil on their flat paper-doll backs: “No mother, no father. Sisters all died.”
Deus and I both loved to read, and in Kubbedeus we published summaries of favorite books by Andrew Lang, Joan Aiken, Beatrix Potter, and so forth. Deus also published ardent editorials about our need for a woman president. Ploddingly (or shall we say with great dedication) I published fairy tale after fairy tale. The characters were borrowed from things I had read or had heard; the characters were utterly undeveloped; the plots were entirely unrealistic; and the stories all had blissed-out happy endings.
I began to send my stories to magazines and literary journals when I was around eighteen. I got some kind rejections and others that were not so kind. An editor told me that my story was “not logical.” Another editor said that the “characters were flat.” Another said that the ending of my story was “happy” and this seemed unrealistic. If the ending were changed to something more believable, he might publish it. Another editor commented that my stories were “Too imaginative—There is not a beverage called a ‘Pink Gorilla’ that glows.” Also I was told that things “needed to be fleshed out.” My writing was too unembellished. And where was the character motivation? What did the characters want? A girl couldn’t just want to survive terrible beatings—she had to have more psychological motivation to leave that small town. Etcetera.
Also I learned that my stories were “not literary.” Sadly, I learned fairy tale books are wolves leading us to stray off the “capital-L” literature path.
Over and over again for years I received rejections like this one, typed verbatim: “This is one of the most beautiful manuscripts I ever have read, but it is not a story.” Over time, without even realizing it, I abandoned the source of my greatest childhood bliss—fairy tales. Is it any surprise that reading and writing began to lose pleasure for me? I didn’t know why. I thought maybe I just wasn’t very good at either, which was depressing, as books had pretty much saved my life earlier on.
It was not until many years later in a moment of fairy tale luck, that I stumbled across a shelf of fairy tale scholarship in the library. As I read through these studies (which took all sorts of different approaches: Marxist, feminist, Freudian, formalist, and so forth) I entered a state of amazing enchantment. I felt—once again—real.
And I recognized that every hurtful critique I ever had heard was true, except for one thing: the techniques editors called dung were my treasures. They were precisely the qualities I had to learn how to control, not abandon; I needed the discipline of fairy tale craft. I continue to seek to increase my dexterity in this diverse and supernatural form.
A brief tour of fairy tale techniques, as I at last understood them, and which I think can help any writer, if she or he gives them a chance:
Intuitive Logic. The fairy tale world does not conform to the rules of this world, outside of a book, but it does have rules. They will not be explained with insistence. A teapot will sing. A path will appear just when children need to escape terrible danger. A girl will outsmart a witch. Your chopped-off hands will turn into silver and save your life later. In my early fiction, my characters often argued with those around them that they were misunderstood; when I removed all efforts to justify logic (try removing transitions like “therefore” and “because”), my readers stopped arguing the stories were illogical.
Flatness. In many old fairy tales, characters are not very deep, psychologically speaking. Snow White, the target of murderous impulses by relatives (sisters or mother) does not suffer depression as a result. She does have responses however: fear, sadness, etc. They are logical and not lingered on deeply. There is nothing wrong with stories that explore ideas about psychological depth; I like many of these stories. Yet flat characters leave room for the reader. In the space left behind, one can think in new ways—imagine new planes of existence. By flattening characters out, fairy tales exceed the limitations of individuality, uniqueness, and self.
Happy Endings. Happy endings are underrated and misunderstood. In lots of old fairy tales, terrible things precede the beautiful images that begin and end most fairy tales; besides, what’s wrong with a little consolation in a world teeming with senseless violence, poverty, grief? J. R. R. Tolkien once defended happy endings as a vital technique in literature—reflecting, “Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” If I want to end a story about death with an image of a white horse running down a beach, as men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns wander drunkenly into the sea, leaving a pretty girl on the beach, counting pennies in the moonlight—if I can create poetic joy in the words—this is okay. (That’s an ending from my early story rejected for its happy ending, and requesting that I revise it accordingly—I was twenty-four and the letter came from The New Yorker in a full-page hand-written letter. Perhaps it wasn’t a very dexterous story, but I remain uncertain the happy ending holds all the blame.)
Fairy tales are storybook worlds. You can cast the spell.
EXERCISE
Find a very short, very old fairy tale or myth and look for instances of intuitive logic, flatness, and happy endings in it.
Then look at one of your own new stories and look for examples of explained logic, character depth, and tragedy. Remove efforts to explain the logic; eliminate character depth; but don’t erase the tragedy—just quickly and without transition, add a strange, strangely blissful image afterward—beyond the walls of the world—your own Grimm gesture, artful, sublime.
VINCENT M. WALES
Credibility
VINCENT M. WALES is the award-winning YA speculative fiction author of Wish You Were Here and One Nation Under God (both DGC Press). When not writing, he is active with volunteer work and has long been an activist for free thought, alternative lifestyle, and mental health issues. He currently lives in Sacramento, California, and is generally considered to be more fun than diphtheria.
One of the most important aspects of a story (and of an author) is credibility. This is an important trait that’s not hard to gain, but easy to lose. And few things can ruin credibility like factual inaccuracy. No matter how obscure an area of knowledge is, someone out there will know if you’re wrong and won’t hesitate to let you know where you screwed up.
Take James Cameron’s film TITANIC. After the film was released, none other than renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson called Cameron on the carpet for a glaring (to Tyson and other stargazers) mistake: The star field shown during the scene in which Rose is looking at the sky after the shipwreck was wrong for that time and place. When Cameron re-released the film in 3-D, he made the field correct.
Writers of speculative fiction often find themselves writing about science, which is an especially easy area in which to make mistakes, since most fiction writers don’t have scientific backgrounds. We write what sounds good and hope the reader’s suspension of disbelief will carry over and deem it plausible. Sometimes it will, but not always.
The first time I saw JURASSIC PARK I was so annoyed by a scientific foul that I literally couldn’t enjoy the rest of the movie. In the film, Dr. Alan Grant “knows” that the visual acuity of the T. rex is based on movement (i.e., if you stand perfectly still, it can’t see you). Dr. Grant might be a great paleontologist, but this is simply not something anyone can possibly know, or even suspect, by studying fossils. It just isn’t possible. This “fact,” however, was of critical importance in the film, as the knowledge prevented Dr. Grant and Lex Murphy from becoming the T. rex’s next meal.
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