Life's little random bits

Okay, give me a second here. Because my wife and I are both exhausted at the end of a normal work day, laundry normally gets done on weekends. In this little chore, my beloved shamelessly exploits my machismo, and I end up being the one to load the washer and the dryer. Just now, as I was putting a load of colors in, the alarm on the car, about a foot away, goes off. I had the keychain and alarm remote in my pocket, and one of the keys probably hit the panic button. Our garage is not a large one, and so the sound bounced around and I jumped about three feet in the air. I'm still hearing the horn, somewhere in the background noise of my head.

Big deal? No. Just one of those odd moments that prove how chaotic the real world is. But think how something like that could be used in a story. While driving to lunch this afternoon, I saw a man riding his bicycle on the sidewalk. He was wearing a black suit, black sneakers, and a black straw cowboy hat. The black sunglasses added just the right touch. Now he could have been on his way home from church, on his way to church, or maybe he just didn't have a car to drive at that time and felt like dressing up anyway when he went out to lunch. Whatever the reason, I can say with 99% percent certainty that it's nothing alarming, and probably not even interesting.

But what could it have been, if we ignored the laws of probability? If we were characters in books we like to read or in movies that we like to watch, what might have happened? Would he have noticed us staring, cranked a bit on his handlebar brakes to slow down, and then turned around to come tap on the passenger-side window? Might we have seen him get a flat tire, and then come ask us for a ride because he's on his way to an exorcism, and can't be late? Maybe we would have forgotten about him completely, until we came home and saw him waiting on our front porch, smiling at us.

A little while back when I was explaining how that 'dumb' heroine might not be so dumb, I asked you to take note of all the little details of life around you that might mean something. Now think about all those odd, random moments you've had when life took a turn without signaling. Have you ever seen someone streak across the room while you and your friends were playing bingo? Encountered some idiot driving the wrong way on the street? Been talking to someone in a darkened room during the middle of the night, you turn around to see what they're suddenly looking at over your shoulder, and you see a single balloon drifting down the hall toward you?

Pick one of those moments, and pull it in the direction of your preferred genre. What's the story behind what you saw? If you're a romantic, is that person driving the wrong way trying to get to their true love's house before they go off with someone else? It's too easy to pigeonhole the streakers into comedy, so let's make them players in a drama about a bunch of guys on a Navy ship sitting around for weeks as they wait for the day when they go in the take the beaches of Kuwait. That's a teeny bit of humor in a long, slow story about young men wondering whether or not they're going to survive.

Get your mind used to doing that, to taking those odd moments, and even those normal moments, and then say 'What if -?” Congratulations. That's the first step to writing.

That's what I'm doing.

A necessary step?

Ask your standard Joe on the street what horror is sometime. I'm willing to bet that A: He or she gives examples rather than a definition, and B: Most of those examples are movies, and they include things like Dracula, Friday the Thirteenth, and Halloween, if they're my age. If they're not, well, hopefully it's American Horror Story or even Paranormal Activity. Just please not Twilight, because it really isn't horror.

Now I need to veer a bit to one side here. Hold on to the rail, please. While I'm distrustful of those who say one genre or another has a 'purpose' or function,' I do think that some types of fiction (printed or filmed) have effects on people. One effect that horror can have, depending on how your head is wired, is to help you deal with the 'real' things that you're afraid of. You watch Roddy McDowall triumph over a murderous, psychotic ghost, then you don't think having to ask your grouchy boss for some vacation time is as bad as you thought it could be. A girl survives (mostly) an encounter with a crazed family who kill all her friends with meathooks and chainsaws, so you can survive doing your taxes. A young doctor finds his true love and saves her from the vampirous reincarnation of her distant ancestor, so I can get over the disappointment of rejection and send more of my work out. We can tell all those motivational gurus that they're full of it, but those poor fools whose only sin was to take a wrong turn? Heck, that was us just last week.

Now here's my question, how far off the path of reality do we need to go? With the success of the Saw and Hostel series of movies, I'd be hard pressed to say that those films don't offer their audiences something. But I wonder if it's the same as the ones with a supernatural element. I know that there's nothing overtly supernatural in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so maybe my second example isn't the best, but the sheer craziness of the Leatherface family keeps it from being torture porn. Even one of my favorite directors, Takashi Miike, filmed 'Audition,' and had a cameo in one of the Hostel movies (brief tangent, I saw Audition, and it creeped me out like nothing else since when I saw Night of the Living Dead, at about age ten).

Does it make the horror easier to deal with, if it's about something unreal? I'm not going to address people's beliefs on ghosts, etc here, because for this discussion it isn't rellevant. Do we come away better armored for having watched The Exorcist, or The Last House on the Left?

What, you think I know? I'm asking the question. What's your answer?

Sadly, the bit in the second paragraph about rejection is true to life. Amazon shot down Roja based on the pitch alone, and Gray Matter Press declined on Dirty. Oh well.

I'm still writing.

Why the ending matters so much

Okay, picture this: You're a contestant on a game show, and your challenge is to run an obstacle courser. It's a really strange one, and you've got a crowd of people standing in front of it, and they will decide whether you win or lose. It's a big crowd, too.

First, you get up on a stage, and you have to get the crowd interested. So you tell them a scary story about a family living in a haunted house, and how your heroes were smart enough to solve the mystery, and kind enough to be gentle to the people who had the best of intentions when they started it. You've got 'em.

Then you're off. You climb up a narrow beam, carefully balancing between falling one way or the other. You run at breakneck speed toward solid walls, nimbly finding some way over, under, or around them at the last minute. Far above the crowd, you get progressively farther out on ledges, somehow always able to keep from falling.

Through the whole thing, you've been moving in roughly the same direction. At the end of the course that you're headed toward there are two posts with a ribbon tied across them and a big sign above them that says 'Finish.' You spring over the last obstacle in your way and dash along the straight, open path. At the last minute, you come to a dead stop and run off in a different direction. You go to a tree that no one was paying any attention to, slap it like a kid playing tag, and take your bows in front of the crowd.

By the way, did I mention my wife and I watched 'Red Lights' on Netflix last week?

Most of the time when you tell a story, you're going somewhere. Cast your mind way back to geometry class and see yourself drawing your story like a line on a sheet of graph paper. You start at a point, and go in a certain direction for a certain distance. (So it's a ray illustrating a vector, if you remember all those terms) Even if you wibble around and don't go in a straight line, your reader can still see the graph in their heads. They can see where you started, and where you finished. They'll probably even draw their own simplified, straighter line to remember the story. So if you curve, have a reason.

But if you only curve a little (and some curving is a good thing), your reader soon gets an idea where you're headed before you get there. If you curve a lot, it takes longer, but most will eventually figure out the direction that you're going. This is a good thing. People enjoy having a certain amount of knowledge about how a story is going to end. Not all of it, but a certain amount. Letting them pick out the point of the ending, on their own, makes them emotionally invested. They're gambling with a bit of their own happiness.

So if you zip along in a straight line at the end and then suddenly go in a different direction and stop, your audience has invested with you and lost. How likely are you to keep investing with a broker that lost your money?

Given that, why would someone change directions at the last minute like that? Well, imagine you're the one running the obstacle course. The whole point of this is to please the audience. (You want them to keep investing with you!) So, right as you step out to wait for the signal to start the course, you take a good look at them, just to see if you can judge what they might be in the mood for.

They're all wearing masks; big, plain white ones with tiny holes for eyes. They don't even have any features. You have no idea if the people are smiling, frowning, or laughing while you risk life and limb for their amusement. Because we're using this as an analogy for making a film or writing a book, we can include the fact that you can have either test screenings or beta readers. But all that does is pull one or two people from the audience at those times that you take a quick break and have those people take off their masks for a minute while you ask them if they like how things are going so far. You don't get to run the whole course, and then do it again differently if most of the people didn't like it. You get one shot per course. Period.

So you better know ahead of time if the audience will appreciate your little twist that you think is the coolest thing ever. If you're a film-maker, you need to watch other films and learn how their audiences reacted. If you're a writer, you better read other books in your genre and know if the audience liked them or not. The people who went to see those film-makers/writers run their courses are the same ones who will be watching you.

By the way, a bit of research on the web shows that there might be an alternate ending to 'Red Lights.' I hope so.

Still writing.

How to dance

For the first few days after I sent Roja in, I was in this weird state of, 'okay, now what do I do?' Working on short stories after doing a book feels like a step back. I keep wanting to dive nosefirst into the next one. Of course, bitter experience has shown me that's one of the best ways to foul something up.

So I started on one that's a little different. It's not horror, or even science fiction. It might have its roots in the months that I spent down in Panama when I was in the Marine Corps, or it may just have been lodged in a loose stitch in my little bag of nightmares. Sometimes I get a stray beat in my heat that won't go away, the kind that you find yourself tapping your foot to when you're not paying attention. At some point, I could see a man dancing to that beat, and the audience clapping it in time. This guy can move like few human beings have ever been able to move, and people love him for it. Then I saw something really bloody happen, right there on the stage.

On a different note, my wife took me to see Hansel and Gretel, Witch Hunters today. It was a good fun, but more like an action movie than I thought it would be. It reminded me a lot of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, only without the historical connections. That gave it a lot more room to play around with themes that it wouldn't normally have. It was fun.

Still writing, only right now it feels like dancing.