And family doesn't have to mean birth family. It can mean any group of people that interacts as a family would. Humans form family units through marriage, adoption, deep friendship, and even circumstance. When your main character wakes up as a vampire one evening, she may discover she's joined an extended clan of undead, whether she likes it or not.
Families band together to form communities with extended customs, traditions, conflicts, and friendships all their own. In a modern setting, these communities can keep in contact with each other easily enough through electronic means. Octavia E. Butler created a wide-reaching vampire-and-human community in Kindred. Her vampires both feed off and safeguard their humans, physically and financially, while maintaining an intricate set of relationships with each other. The entire book revolves around the main character's relationships within her community.
ART AND RECREATION
When people have spare time, they play around and make stuff. Supernatural people, especially the immortal ones, have a lot of spare time. What do they fill it with? Bored people with power become … dangerous.
Supernatural people who live within another culture might continue to use the recreation of the normal people around them, but how much fun can it be to play basketball against normals when you can jump fifteen feet into the air? Paranormals also may feel that the social boundaries laid down by mortals are unfair or simply don't apply to them, which has an impact on the sort of art they produce and the kind of recreation they enjoy. Art and recreation can be a piece of the background, such as the terrifying vampire theater in Anne Rice's novels, or it can become the center of the story, such as the magical wine making in Laura Anne Gilman's Vineart War books.
FOOD
Any foodie will tell you how culture and food feed each other. People eat what's available to them, which shapes their culture. The culture, in turn, shapes attitudes toward food. When new sources of nutrition show up, cultures integrate them according to already established cultural norms — or the people may simply refuse to eat them, based on their culture. Grasshoppers, for example, are perfectly edible for humans. Yet few Americans, who see insects as disgusting, are willing to eat them, while they're routinely enjoyed in Africa and Asia, where insects are seen as little snacks with wings.
Supernatural characters are famous for having rarified diets. Many of them hanker after human flesh or blood. Others simply need a lot of food. Feeding the dragons in Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon and its sequels, for example, turns into a major problem. Will Laurence spends considerable time figuring out how to feed a growing — and ravenous — baby dragon when the infant Temeraire hatches unexpectedly at sea.
In the same book, we learn that English dragons eat their meat raw. Later in the series, Temeraire discovers that Chinese dragons enjoy meals prepared by high-class chefs. He acquires a taste for foreign cuisine and ultimately begins to realize how badly British dragons are treated compared to their Chinese counterparts. This leads him to try and start a revolt among English dragons, with Will Laurence as a reluctant cohort. And it all begins with food.
Your own book can benefit from addressing this issue. It goes beyond what paranormals eat. How the food is acquired is equally important, especially if the food is rare or valuable or considered strange by others. And some food (such as human blood) is illegal. Once food is acquired, someone must prepare it. Who? In human culture, women are largely in charge of food preparation. Is it the same among elves? In India among the Hindu, eating food prepared by someone from a lower caste makes the consumer impure. Do the fairies feel the same way about food prepared by humans? And, of course, many stories mention the hazards of eating supernatural food. Persephone is forced to stay in Hades after eating six pomegranate seeds, and mortals who consume food in the realm of the fair folk are doomed to remain there forever.
Eating has a culture all its own. Among humans, people consume their meals seated at low tables, perched on high stools, and lounging in front of a television. Formal meals of state are different from casual meals with family. Festival meals are special, with their own foods and traditions. And some foods are forbidden. Exploring the food rituals of your supernatural characters will enrich them, make them seem more real — and can also help move the plot forward.
TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGY
Okay, so you worked out what magical powers and limitations your weretigers have. You know they're powerful hand-to-claw fighters, they have to transform into tiger form once a month during the full moon, and can change into a man-tiger form the rest of the month, but only after sunset. You know that they're waging a constant underground war with an ancient clan of mummies that have secretly taken over New Haven, Connecticut, and there's going to be a major turf battle tomorrow night. Your weretiger protagonist, an information tech geek recently turned into a sexy werecreature, is both psyched and nervous because this fight will be his initiation into the Blood Stripe Clan.
So the question is, do the weretigers have grenade launchers?
Seriously. If the weretigers have underground contacts and they really want to take out the mummies once and for all, what's stopping them from getting their claws on a few well-placed grenades and wiping them out from a safe distance? Yes, I know you want to create tension, put your protagonist in danger, and move the story forward, but you've got a serious plot hole here. The technology for long-distance combat is widely available on modern Earth, and you've established the weretigers operate an underground war, meaning they'd have access to all kinds of illegal stuff. Giving them grenade launchers would only make sense. Or maybe the weretigers could hack into the mummies' computers and wreak havoc on their financial records, destroying their stranglehold on New Haven's government and rendering them vulnerable. Your information tech protagonist would certainly have the know-how. Why are your weretigers heading into an iffy face-to-face fight when modern society presents them with so many more surefire options?
You'll need to decide what technology your supernatural people have access to, either because they developed it themselves or because they live in a society that developed it for them (say, ours). Technology, remember, is any kind of tool, not just a piece of electronics. A rock becomes technology if you use it to crack a nut. And if your paranormals come from another world entirely, you'll need to decide what technology they developed.
Technology can be subdivided into weapons, transportation, medicine, production, and communication. There are other subdivisions, but these will do for our purposes.
Weapons
This includes both offensive and defensive tools. Body weaponry such as fists and claws are the most basic ones, and from there we progress to sticks, sharp sticks, stone blades, and metal blades. (Past that, and you're getting into science fiction — another topic entirely.) Projectile (thrown) weapons start with rocks and progress to spears, bows, crossbows, catapults, and eventually to chemical-driven projectiles such as bullets. And don't forget gunpowder, dynamite, plastique, nuclear bombs, and other explosives.
Many handheld weapons can also be used for defense — you can both attack and parry with a sword — but eventually it occurs to someone to invent the shield, then armor, then chainmail, and then Kevlar.
You'll need to know what weapons your supernatural people have access to — or are willing to use. It's quite possible your paranormals have a cultural aversion to a particular weapon. Perhaps the weretigers in the above example find killing enemies from a distance cowardly and dishonorable, a “weakness” the mummies intend to exploit.
Transportation
How do your paranormals get from Point A to Point B? In human cultures, foot travel always comes first. Water travel develops next, when it's available, and people who figure out how to domesticate large animals oft en realize they can ride — either on the animal or behind it. The invention of the wheel leads to the cart, and here the technology stops until someone figures out internal combustion, which allows automobiles to exist. Hot-air balloons and blimps appear on
the scene at some point, along with airplanes and jets and the space shuttle.
Magical talents can jiggle this process at any point. It might not even occur to teleporters to ride slow, plodding animals. Paranormals who can fly might develop different methods of mass air travel quickly, or take advantage of airborne creatures. Naomi Novik's dragons try to fly almost before they can fully walk, for example, and their humans ride right along. Dragons transport messages, too, and are the backbone of the swift courier service.
Medicine
In the normal world, medical technology started with herbs and hope. It progressed to cloth bandages and stitches, then to germ theory and vaccines, and now it's gone into a dozen different directions: cloning, gene therapy, magnetic resonance imaging, laser surgery, silicone implants, Botox, and a thousand other inventions. Paranormals can change all that. They may be more or less fragile than humans. They may heal faster (always a plus if you want to hurt your hero but have him up and running a few pages later), which may inhibit medical research — why bother learning how to stitch wounds when they close on their own within moments? And some paranormals may be able to heal others magically, which might halt any desire to develop medical technology altogether.
On the other hand, your paranormals may be vulnerable to diseases or conditions that don't bother humans — and they might develop their own ways to get around it. after all, humans figure out how to solve many of life's problems, so why shouldn't intelligent paranormals? If sunlight fries your vampires, might polarized sunglasses and a good slathering of SPF 30 sunblock remedy the situation? Mercedes Lackey's elves in her SERRAted Edge books are poisoned by iron and steel, which makes driving a race car problematic for them. They solve this difficulty by using advanced plastics and special polymers in place of most of the metal. Your paranormals should be equally resourceful to be believable — unless they're supposed to be less intelligent than humans.
Production
How do people make stuff ? Humans used to make everything individually, by hand. Then the production line was invented — and not by Henry Ford. The Egyptians used it in mummification thousands of years before Detroit was even founded. Later, machines added to — or took over — the production lines. Farms and animal husbandry were also affected. Hunting and gathering were replaced by small farms, which were replaced by large, industrial farms. Humans worked alone in the fields and hunting grounds at first, but then animals aided them, and finally machines arrived on the scene. The rise of mass production changed the face of the planet, bringing us to the edge of environmental disaster. You'll need to decide where your paranormals are on that continuum (though perhaps your people are wiser than we are).
This topic may seem boring, but it bears thinking about. Someone has to make that suit of armor, that magic wand, that cloak of invisibility. Are these items unique? Rare? Common? Mass-produced? What if your vampires figured out a way to raise humans in their version of a high-density feedlot? Applying principles of production to your book can open up entirely new plots or lines of thought.
Slavery
Another production issue to consider is slavery. Many cultures practice it. The availability of cheap, intelligent labor has a tremendous impact on a culture, and people who grow up with slaves — or as slaves — think very differently from people who grow up in emancipated cultures. If your paranormals view humans as a lesser species, they may very well keep humans as slaves, either openly (in a sunlight supernatural world) or on the black market (in a secret supernatural world).
Most people think of nineteenth-century American slavery when the concept comes up, but many other types of slavery exist. People once sold themselves into slavery to pay debts. There's temporary slavery, sometimes called indentured servitude. Ancient Greece maintained a series of laws about the treatment of slaves, including what they must be fed and how much they must be paid. Medieval European serfs were basically slaves who were tied to a place instead of a person.
Just as in reality, humans aren't above keeping slaves in paranormal fiction. Isn't Aladdin's genie his slave? And, as I've already pointed out, the English essentially enslave the dragons in Naomi Novik's books. Mercedes Lackey and Andre Norton explore the concept of paranormals and slavery in their Halfblood Chronicles books. A less-than-idyllic set of race relations creates conflict and tension, which leads to more interesting stories, so don't be afraid to introduce such problems.
Communication
The transmission of ideas and information has an enormous impact on culture. New ideas transform people, energize them, and motivate them. It's why dictators try so hard to control the flow of information. Communication started with the invention of language itself. Then came people who traveled from place to place, carrying information and ideas. Written language appeared. The printing press started up the idea of mass communication. The telegraph and telephone introduced instant long-distance communication. Radio and television trotted out long-distance mass communication. And then came the Internet …
Paranormals can add new wrinkles to communication and communication technology. Humans don't communicate much by scent, but animalbased paranormals might. Tanya Huff's werewolves use scent quite a bit in their communication. Stephenie Meyer — and many other authors before her — made her vampires telepathic. These possibilities have major ramifications on the story and you'll need to consider them in your own work.
Communication technology actually provides one of the thorniest problems for many authors. Although it may be fun and interesting to give your main character a telepathic bond with her pack mates, or arrange for your lovers to find a set of rings that let them hear each other's voices whenever they want, you'll have to address the issue of isolation. At some point, you'll probably want to isolate your protagonist and get her into severe trouble with no hope of rescue. If she has a telepathic bond/magic ring/cell phone, you'll need to explain why she can't simply shout for help. And no, I'm afraid claiming she's “too proud to call for assistance” won't carry you through — readers won't buy that one, especially in a life-or-death situation. There should be a compelling, believable reason why your character can't call her friends or the cops. (More on this in chapter seven.)
This, by the way, is why many modern authors spend enormous amounts of time creating characters who forget their cell phones, fail to recharge the batteries, wander out of service range, drop their phones, break them, lose them, or otherwise find themselves without a working connection. One little call to 911, and Pauline Peril's problems go poof! The same problem will apply to characters with a supernatural method of communication, so you'll need to build in reasons why Pauline can't call the cavalry. Perhaps the person at the other end can't “hear” her, or the magical power has a limited range, or her captor has a way to block the magical ability, or …
A Final Thought
Technology doesn't always develop evenly in all areas. The Egyptians, for example, developed fantastic methods of production, but their medical technology stagnated, mired down by tradition. Your supernatural people could quite conceivably come from a society that has advanced in one direction but slowed in another. We see slavery as a backward, primitive idea, for example, but other cultures see it as normal, even essential. Your fairies may be advanced healers who never developed writing and are puzzled by the very idea of “words that stay.”
POP CULTURE
We've always had a popular culture. We just didn't know it until the 1960s. (The term “popular culture” actually dates back to World War II, but no one paid attention. We were rather occupied.) Pop culture changes people, and people change pop culture. The difference between pop culture and “regular” culture is that pop culture changes fast.
Assuming you've set your paranormal novel on some version of our world, you'll have two facets of pop culture to consider.
The Impact of Pop Culture on the Paranormal
Normal humans obsess over the latest episode of Popular TV Show. They listen to Popular Fema
le Music Star. They connect with friends and family through Popular Social Network. Trends in clothing, hair, slang, movies, video games, and more surface, spread, and sink with devastating speed.
Why shouldn't paranormals experience the same thing? Vampires connect with potential blood donors online. Werewolf cubs argue hairstyles with their parents. Sirens sing rock music. Paranormals may well take things further and form their own pop culture. Fairies with the ability to fly might develop club dancing that goes beyond anything humans might conceive. Sorcerers with mind control powers might possess ordinary humans and wear them like suits of clothes, with certain types of people falling in and out of fashion. Young mediums (media?) develop their own subculture, complete with slang, while talking with dead teenagers. Esther Friesner edited a number of anthologies set in supernatural suburbia that explore these ideas, including Witch Way to the Mall, Strip Mauled, and Fangs for the Mammaries, if you want to see some examples in short stories.
The Impact of the Paranormal on Pop Culture
The essence of pop culture is its malleability — and there's no way to predict what might mold it next. The public's attention is notoriously fickle. Today's hot trend is tomorrow's bargain bin. Remember boy bands? Beanie Babies? The Macarena?
In a secret supernatural world, magical elements may be behind a given idea's popularity. Who's to say fairies weren't quietly boosting Tickle Me Elmo? And perhaps the “I've fallen and I can't get up” commercial was an unconscious reference to werewolves and their prey. Anne Rice, of course, put her vampire on stage in a popular rock band in The Vampire Lestat, creating a fictional music sensation that bled over into the real world for a short time.
Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story. Page 5
