Feeding the Creative Beast

 

I imagine my beast like THIS Beast. (comics) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Most of us around these parts are here because we are, on some level, creative people.

 

That could mean making things with your hands, creating worlds from your mind, or any other number of avenues of expression. Or many of them.

 

This week as Kristin and I gear up to launch the Magetech RPG for my other lover website, Searching for SuperWomen, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about creativity. Being between projects with one out on submission has left me without a lot of fiction to work on. I wrote two and a half books in 2012, and it feels strange to not be frantically typing away at something.

 

I’ve also noticed a certain kind of ebb and flow when it comes to my fiction writing. I’ll go through periods where I don’t read much — and during those periods I don’t write much. When the itch to read comes along, I know I’m coming back up on a bout of writing. I’ve noticed, in the decade or so I’ve been writing seriously, that reading is almost a direct conduit to my writing. It’s like fuel.

 

Even if I’m reading a thriller and writing urban fantasy. Reading epic fantasy or classics. It doesn’t matter what I’m reading, only that when I read a lot, I write more.

 

Perhaps it’s the opening up of my mind to absorb new ideas. Maybe it’s actively engaging with another world and giving my brain permission and leeway to critically analyze what’s on the page and assess what it does for me. Either way, the synapses firing seem to spark others to carry on in their place once the pages are closed again.

 

I won’t rehash Stephen King’s famous admonition to writers. But I do think that consuming media in your field is the best way to get those creative juices flowing.

 

As we’ve been building the world for our Magetech RPG, I’ve felt that we’re dangling tidbits under our WordBeast’s nose. I can almost hear the saliva dribbling down its chin and the throaty purr that says it knows we’re about to give it a meal. Sometimes having guidelines within which to create a thing help free a character you might never have given life in the first place.

 

(Ooh, this caption is in Hungarian) Bográcsgulyás, készült a fegyverneki gulyásfesztiválon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If I had to write up a recipe to get your Beast’s engine revving, this might be it:

 

1. Gather ingredients. These could be books, movies, paintings, comics, sunsets, tree leaves, a splash in the pool, getting whacked on the head with a stick. Experiences, whether your own or those of fictional characters or those told through an artist’s lens — these are the meat of your recipe.

 

2. Engage. You can’t just throw whole carrots and hunks of onion (or a whole chicken, for that matter) into a pot and hope to have a good stew. You need to engage with each ingredient you have, wash it of dirt (or feathers and beaks), prune the inedible bits away, and season it until it sings.

 

3. Turn on the stove. You can have all your ingredients lined up and organized by color, but nothing will ever get started if you don’t start the pot boiling. Your creative beast needs to eat, and looking at prettily arranged, carefully chosen ingredients will do nothing but make it stagnate.

 

The Beast is hungry, and while it might feel like you’re losing something to put all that effort into feeding it, the output you get is worth the toil. And I’m not going to continue with the food and digestive metaphor with that, because erm…no crap is going to sound enticing unless it’s dipped in gold. And even then, it’s just gilded poo. So…let’s say that your Beast instead creates heat. That heat powers your creations.

 

Will there be elements of the initial ingredients? Probably. But if you engaged properly and trimmed, bathed, and de-beaked them from the get-go, they’ll look like you and not like the original chicken.

 

The best thing about feeding the creative beast is that you get more out the more you put in.

 

Some people like the idea of having a muse, but I’ve always thought of muses as a fickle, passive sort of thing. Makes a great excuse when you can blame your muse for not creating. But feeding a beast? It requires action. It requires agency.

 

And the whole basis of “creative” implies a creator.

 

That’s you.

 

Feed your beast.

 

A New Normal

The Cat’s Eye Nebula, a planetary nebula formed by the death of a star with about the same mass as the Sun. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s almost three in the morning, though you won’t see this until later. It took me this long to realize that I knew what I needed to write about. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about stories. What makes me engage with them. What makes me back away like I’ve touched a pane of bees with stingers at the ready.

Last week’s episode of Game of Thrones sort of prompted it, because it reminded me why I’d stopped reading the books. They’d violated something I felt they were obligated to maintain. I read a lot of fantasy growing up. Heaps of it. My favorite stories were always fantasy. As I grew older, those stories evolved.

I’ll be frank and say that I’ve had a severe case of reader’s block in the last year. I’ve been flailing at A Memory of Light for months. I have A Gentleman’s Game sitting next to my bed when it should be getting back to its owner. Maybe it’s circumstance, maybe it’s weariness, but television has been where I get my stories lately. There are any number of stories I engage with on a weekly basis, and even more every year. Dexter. How I Met Your Mother. The Vampire Diaries. Buffy (always). Supernatural. Star Wars. Breaking Bad. Game of Thrones. Two Broke Girls. The Bachelor/ette. True Blood. Homeland. New Girl. Workaholics. The Walking Dead.

On any given week, our DVR is filled with different stories. Some of these stories I’ve kept with for years. There’s something that keeps me coming back to them over and over.

I have managed to read a few books through in the past few months, and they share a common thread.

When you ask a storyteller to tell you lies, you’re asking her to make you believe them.

A great story replaces the world around you with a new one. A world with new rules, whether those new rules allow for gravity-defying pixy dust or simply a group of four friends always managing to sit at the same booth at their favorite bar.

They create a new normal.

The great stories make you sob when a character’s mind reaches out to touch a tainted power source because you know it will drive him mad. Even though no such thing is happening or even possible — that is the normal of his world made yours.

The great stories make you crow with glee and feel pangs of loss alike when a suffering, grieving vampire shoves the world’s only cure for vampirism down the throat of her enemy instead of using it to take back a life that was reft from her. Even though there are no vampires, and you can’t go home again — that is the normal of her world made yours.

The great stories allow you to destroy a Death Star or fly a broomstick or fight an ogre or make love to a god because they are making their normal yours.

Some people call it suspension of disbelief, but I think it’s more than that. Perhaps in the mediocre tales we suspend disbelief. The great tales leave us no say in the matter.

What worlds gave you a new normal? What universes would you choose to visit — or go to stay?

Listening to Fear

I remember reading once that we are born with two innate fears: loud noises and falling.

Every other fear we have is learned behaviour.

“Let’s go kiss some babies.” Scary Mask 10-24-2009a (Photo credit: Brendan O’s)

I’m not saying go test this out by dressing up as a grotesque monster dripping blood and cooing at some babies to see if they giggle or scream, but when I think about the things that scare me, they are things that I’ve learned.

I learned to fear spiders when I watched Arachnophobia at the age of four. I learned to fear clowns when I saw It at age eight, and I learned that dolls are creepy when I watched all the Child’s Play movies when I was six or seven. All of those things stuck with me because filmmakers and writers created something truly frightening.

Yup. The little freak still creeps me out. Creepy Chucky doll lashed to a bike (Photo credit: massdistraction)

For years, I would read R.L. Stine’s Fear Street books before bed and sleep just fine. Rotting purple flesh, decomposing cheerleaders, bodies hanging like pendulums — none of that scarred me for life, but it taught me to respect fear.

Fear is an emotion that’s made out of many series of psychosomatic impulses. It’s mind and body, working together to give you a wiggins. It’s why the image of a foreign finger tracing an ice cold line down the back of your neck is probably creepier than a knife by itself. Fear is something that is built up in the mind and expressed in responses of the body.

The great writers of horror, like H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, understand that creepy is a state of mind. Before you can make an audience jump or shiver or perspire, you have to lure them into your world. Here are a few of the ways to do that.

Creepy House on Mill Dam Rd (Photo credit: vork22)

Isolation

Are the scariest scenes set in crowds of bodies? Not usually. Most real horror involves isolation. Most often this is physical, but sometimes it is mental isolation. One of the first films I remember truly terrifying me was The Blair Witch Project. In that film, the three protagonists are isolated in the Maryland forests. Once it becomes clear that something scary is going on, they can’t seem to find their way out. They are in almost total isolation, stuck with a malevolent force.

This theme is also true in one of my new favourite shows, American Horror Story. In the first season, you have a family isolated in a home filled with dead people. They can’t sell it, and they can’t afford to move. In the second season, the show bridges both the inherent physical isolation of an asylum, but also integrates the mental isolation of the asylum’s masters and those imprisoned within its walls. A great example of mental isolation is the film The Craft, where the protagonist isn’t necessarily physically isolated, but the tension between her and her coven gradually increases her mental isolation from her family, her classmates, and her love interest.

Baby socks (Photo credit: Being a Dilettante)

The Unexpected

Sure, the image above isn’t that creepy by itself. But what if I told you it was taken at a crime scene? That would bring to mind questions. Who arranged those socks like that, and why? Were babies harmed? The unexpected isn’t about startling people into jumping high enough to bonk their heads on the ceiling. The unexpected is about putting something safe and familiar in a hostile context.

Some of the most iconic moments in horror stem from something unexpected. A child twitching a finger and saying, “Red rum” over and over again — who doesn’t remember the first time they realised he was saying MURDER backward?

Museum Collections Centre – 25 Dollman Street – cages – grandfather clock (Photo credit: ell brown)

Toy With Time

Fear is closely tied to suspense. Both are an anticipation of something to come, though fear has a more negative connotation. As writers, we have the unique ability to slow time and stretch out moments. Where fear and suspense in film are often heightened by details and focus on one thing (a long dark hallway, or silence), in writing you have to tie together multiple elements to create a truly scary scene.

Time can be slowed by zooming in on one detail. A fluttering curtain when all the windows are meant to be closed. Or it can be slowed by concentrating on a protagonist’s emotion, like the slickness of sweat on the back of his neck. The real magic happens when you strike the balance of giving the reader just enough to pull them from sentence to sentence while drawing out the moment of reward as long as possible.

Repetition

When done with care, weaving in a repetitive detail to a narrative can increase suspense. It can provide a reader with clues about when it’s time to be scared. In cases where repetition is used with extreme subtlety, it can foster a sense of foreboding without the reader even being able to pinpoint the reason for it.

An example of using repetition is what was done in the film The Ring. By the time you first saw the video in the film all the way through, you already associated the phone ringing with death and violence. When I first watched that film with friends, the phone happened to ring at that exact moment. We all screeched — wouldn’t you? This is one of the more obvious examples of repetition, but it can be a very effective technique no matter where you aim on the spectrum of subtlety.

Creating fear in a reader is a daunting task. It takes drawing on your own experiences as well as an understanding that just about anything can be frightening if you give it the proper attention. As writers, our words and stories can take people beyond the simplicity of loud noises and falling to deep psychological disturbance and pulse-pounding terror. It’s all up to how you use them.

What are your first memories of fear? What experiences do you draw on when you write scary scenes? How do you twist the mundane to push the reader in uncomfortable territory and then over the line into fear?

Structure: Plot’s BFF

This blueprint of what La Belle would have looked like was created in the 20th century, after excavation. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was a born planner.

Every December, I would start planning my birthday party. I’d write out a birthday list, figure out who I would invite, tell my mum the entire deal, and then flounce back to my room to figure out the details.

My birthday? It’s in November.

Looking back at that, it’s a surprise that when I started writing novels, I did it by the seat of my pants. Maybe that’s what happens when an INFJ tries to balance the intuitive with the judger.

I wrote my first two and a half novels (well, two and two halves) without any idea of what would come next aside from a vague sort of picture and once a brief outline. None of them worked. I couldn’t figure out why it took my beta readers months and months and death threats to return any feedback to me.

Nothing really motivated them enough to read my work. I couldn’t fathom why. I thought it was good. Maybe not perfect, but good.

Then about a year ago, I heard of something called “structure.”

Smoke (Photo credit: AMagill)

For a while, this idea of structure eluded me like trying to catch smoke in a net. All the while, I felt like a really crappy Indiana Jones searching for relics on a waitress’s budget with no passport.

Which was sort of true. Except I have a passport.

It wasn’t until I read Story Engineering by Larry Brooks that something massive clicked in my head, like the giant boulder finding the perfect niche.

My first books didn’t work because they completely lacked structure. Every book, play, and screenplay follows a certain amount of rules. It’s what keeps tension going. It’s what moves the story along. At its core, it is the instinctual resonance of a narrative arc that goes back to the days where we all sat around in caves picking our teeth with splintered femurs while a clan storyteller regaled us with legends and myths and feuds about cows.

Plot and structure are lovers, and good plots have great structure. Amazing plots have exceptional structure.

Most creative people don’t stand up and cheer when someone mentions rules or rigid words like structure. But structure isn’t something with much wiggle room, and once I realised that, I found I had more creative freedom. Not less. Because learning about structure gave me what every wannabe published writer writes for: an audience.

They love me! They really love me! Wait, why aren’t they looking at me? Audience (Photo credit: thinkmedialabs)

Screenplays work in three acts, but I’m now convinced that novels don’t. Novels are subject to something that I (among more notable authors) like to call the Muddle. The Muddle is what happens when you take a beginning and an end and sit on them. They get squished underneath your bum until there’s just a flat squidgy place in the middle that looks suspiciously like the rear end that indented it.

Because of the Muddle, I like to think of novel structure in quadrants.

Quadrant 1: Bring It On

In the first 20-25% of a novel, we meet the main characters. The time bomb starts ticking, an inciting incident happens, we get a feel for the antagonist, and we get a glimpse of the protagonist’s “normal” before proceeding to pick it up and smash it to bits. (Those things don’t happen in that order.) If these things aren’t present, why would any reader go on?

The inciting incident may or may not be the same as the first plot point (or the break into Act II, as they say in film), but sometimes it is. But when it happens, it must propel the protagonist into a life-altering decision and give the first real glimpse of the antagonist.

Quadrant 2: Flailing in the Waves

After the protagonist’s Big Life-Altering Decision, she starts finding out that what she thought was an inconvenient puddle is really a mire of badness. Quadrant 2 is her reacting, wading in, flailing out, and probably not having the most success. This is also a reason to love the four quadrants as opposed to one big second act — the protagonist’s flailing in Quadrant 2 leads up to the single biggest turning point in the novel: the midpoint.

Halfway through, your protagonist has another decision. This time it has to move her from reacting into being proactive. She has to learn information that forces her to move from lowly, nose-picking protagonist to chest-puffed hero.

Quadrant 3: Take the Fight

The third quadrant pushes the protagonist into fighting back against the aggressors, whether the antagonist is a specific person or many people or a fleet of rabid ants. She might not (probably won’t) always come out on top in these little skirmishes, but she has to try.

Quadrant 3 is your last chance for exposition, your last stand of the big reveals that culminates in your second plot point (or break into Act III — because big reveals after that plot point annoy readers and viewers alike. I think M. Night Shyamalan needs to read Story Engineering. A giant twist 10 pages from the end might seem snazzy, but it does nothing but confuse and cheat your readers.

Quadrant 4: Boom, Bam, Bow

After you bust the door down into this last quadrant, your story ought to be rolling down the hill like an unsupervised Violet Beauregard on an incline. It should roll smoothly toward the climactic final confrontation, and from there into a nice little meadow filled with tied-up subplots and dandelions.

That’s why I turned in my pantser card. While I had enough of a feel for structure to get turning points in the right place, they weren’t as effective because I could never verbalise what made them strong or weak. Knowing what needs to go where freed me up — especially when I started plucking books off my shelves to check up on these things. Pick up great books, and you’ll see that their quadrants all line up almost exactly.

I might not outline the entire book down to its toenails, but I will make sure I know certain things. And because I love you, here’s Emmie’s Magical Pre-Plot Checklist!

• Who is my protagonist, what does she want, and why does she want it?
• Who is my antagonist, what does she want, and why does she want it?
• What is the central conflict of the story? What are three other layers of that conflict?
• What is my first plot point? How will it show the antagonist threat for the first time and goose my character into the next quadrant?
• What is my midpoint? What information will change my protagonist’s goals, mindset, and plan enough to propel her into proactivity?
• What is my second plot point? What information must my protagonist have before the climax? What can shake her and still push her to be stronger? Does she need a “dark night of the soul?”
• What is my climax? How is my protagonist going to beat my antagonist?

This is now my bare minimum for starting on page one — and I prefer to get more in-depth than that, at least when it comes to my characters if not the precise lining out of chapters. If nothing else, it helps avoid the Muddle!

How do you plot? Do you plot? Have you had to deal with the Silence of the Beta Readers? Do you actively think about the structure of your novels, or do you wing it? Does it work? Are you hating me right now? 🙂

Thanks for bearing with a long first post — I promise next time I’ll be more succinct. 

 

Related articles

• Confessions of a Former Pantser (spellboundscribes.wordpress.com)
• Is writing an uphill battle? (gilshalev.com)
• Pantsers Anonymous (joeberhardt.com)