Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story. (13 page)

T
he McNamara Federal Building in downtown Detroit doesn't look like it's full of people with guns. It's a tall, gray block of a skyscraper with a really ugly sculpture out front made of smashed-up cars set in an arrangement vaguely similar to Stonehenge. I parked my car and dropped quarters into the meter. For once, I was wearing a shirt with a button-down collar, slacks, and decent shoes instead of my more usual torn jeans and ancient T-shirt. Under my arm I carried a zippered leather folder.

You want to look nice when you're interviewing the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

When you enter the lobby of the McNamara Federal Building, all your stuff goes through an X-ray machine and you go through a metal detector. The guards are polite, friendly, and watchful. A creaky, shuddering elevator takes you upward, past the Treasury Department and the IRS, to the twenty-sixth floor and the FBI.

In the elevator foyer are posted pictures and descriptions of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted. Osama bin Laden still tops the list, in case you were curious. You have to pass through another metal detector to get into the reception area. This one doesn't give you the chance to empty your pockets, so your keys and change set off the alarm. (I rather suspect it's less for safety and more to alert the receptionists, who are behind bulletproof glass, to your presence.) I walked up to the bulletproof glass with a polite smile on my face and my card in my hand.

The things I do for research.

“But wait!” you say. “I'm writing a paranormal book. I'm making it all up. Why do I need to do research if it's all fake?”

Sorry — even the fake stuff is real. Terry Pratchett once teamed up with artist Stephen Briggs to create
The Discworld Mapp
, an atlas of Pratchett's famous Discworld. When the project came out, Pratchett was startled to learn that British bookstores had shelved it in the nonfiction section. Why? The stores maintained that although the thing was a map of a fictional place, it was nonetheless a
real
map. So it
isn't
all fake, and you
must
do research. Research can separate a good manuscript from a great one — and mean the difference between rejection and publication.

When you say
research
, most people think of a pale person sitting at a table paging through a stack of musty books with one hand and taking frantic notes with the other. Sometimes this is the case, and we'll talk about that. And there's also this Internet thing, which is supposedly putting books out of business. We'll talk about that, too. Books can't answer direct questions, though, and oft en as I'm paging through some dusty tome trying to find out just when the ground was broken on Ann Arbor's first cemetery, I find myself saying, “This is the sort of thing I could find out in less than ten seconds if I could just ask someone.” So we'll talk about that. And other resources, to boot.

First of all, when it comes to your world and your magic, you're not really making anything up. You're creating the illusion of reality, and that means you need a logical starting point, a real-world reason for the reader to start believing your illusion. If you make mistakes in your world building, knowledgeable readers will trip over them and be reminded that they're reading a story. You don't want them to remember they're reading a story. You want them to stay immersed in the book and forget that they're reading anything at all.

The more realistic you make the rest of your world, the more likely the reader will go along with the impossible elements. Become familiar with how a castle is constructed, say, and how people with swords
really
fight (as opposed to how they do it in most movies), and how to make bread in a commercial kitchen. Using real principles of bread baking and castle building and sword fighting lend verisimilitude to your world, even if you're adding magic to it. In other words, your supernatural baker may have magic to help him, but the whole process will feel more real to your reader if you use actual commercial baking as a starting point. And that means you have to look up how it's done.

Also, in a book set closer to home, you might want to use existing settings. Having your main character stroll down a real street in a real town and stop for a bagel at a real bakery adds extra reality to your book and helps the reader suspend disbelief once the impossible supernatural elements show up. It's somehow easier to believe, for example, that an angel will take on human form and fall in love with a human man if the two bump into each other at Zingerman's Deli on Washtenaw Avenue in downtown Ann Arbor just after a University of Michigan football game. Not only do the details of the real setting give you the extra dash of reality, but Ann Arbor natives will also love seeing their town immortalized in print, which will boost local book sales. This means you'll have to look things up, though — a lot of people live in Ann Arbor and they all know that Zingerman's is actually on Detroit Street, not Washtenaw. Mistakes like this will call attention to the fact that they're reading fiction and yank them out of the story. Research will help you get those small details right.

There's more “real-life” stuff to look up besides places. When you're creating a new supernatural culture (as we did in chapter three), the best place to look for inspiration is a human culture. Fairies might be similar to ancient Celts. Vampires might run their underground society on the medieval feudal model. Werewolves might hold gladiator contests similar to those of ancient Rome. It's fairly easy to use an existing human culture as a starting point for your nonhuman people. You can research and modify the original culture to suit your purposes. Once you decide that werewolves indulge in monthly public battles much like those in the Colosseum, you can read up on life in ancient Rome, cull from it what works for your book, and mold it into a shape that suits you. This will make your werewolf fights feel more authentic to human readers, since humans ultimately invented the system.

The idea of trying to make a completely unrealistic creature more real may seem strange, but that's what you're going for — that illusion of reality. Your reader has to set aside quite a lot of disbelief to accept a bunch of people who change into ravening wolves during the full moon and who create underground societies during the days between. They need some human qualities to balance out the weirdness. (And don't worry about finding the weird. There's nothing so strange that some human society somewhere hasn't tried it, smoked it, or regretted it the next morning.)

True, you might want to create some truly inhuman paranormals — and why shouldn't you? — but this type of character is best used as a secondary character, not a main character. A completely inhuman main character wouldn't interest human readers much. There'd be no common interests, no way for the reader to empathize with such characters, and you want your readers to empathize with your main characters.

We all know vampires aren't real. But the folklore behind them is. Bram Stoker knew that very well. His Count Dracula was an amalgam of Irish folk tales and Eastern European vampire lore. Some of it he used: Vampires drink human blood; vampires can't bear garlic and holy objects; vampires can only be killed by decapitation or sunlight. Some of it he ignored: Scatter millet seeds on a vampire's coffin, and he'll spend the entire night counting them; vampires can spontaneously rise from long-dead corpses; vampires can't cross running water. And some he created out of thin air: Vampires can climb walls like a spider; vampires crumble to dust when killed; vampires can't cross a circle drawn in the dirt with a holy wafer in the center.

Here's the thing: A hundred wannabes copy Bram Stoker instead of using the original folklore. Why? They don't do their research. They rely on vampire lore gleaned from movies, half-remembered stories, and episodes of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. In other words, they got their material secondhand and thirdhand and think they're creating something new. But would a professional chef use someone else's recipe? Or recycled ingredients? Certainly not! And neither should you. The same principle goes for the folklore behind genies, angels, demons, zombies, werewolves, fairies, and the ghosts from a hundred different cultures.

Besides, after a thousand carbon-copy Hollywood creatures, something that comes from actual folklore with an actual background comes across as fresh and fascinating on the page. So do some serious reading. It'll show in your writing.

Finally, one of the best places to troll for new ideas is among new ideas. Ask any number of authors how oft en they stumble across something new in a bit of research that leads them to a new piece of writing.

As just one example, I was taking a course in British literature and was thumbing idly though the forty-pound Norton anthology the professor made us buy. By sheer chance, I came across “The Chimney Sweeper,” a poem by William Blake. He wrote it in pre-Victorian London to protest the plight of climbing boys, little kids who were forced to crawl into dark chimneys and scrub them clean. The image of these children, slaves in all but name, creeping through black hell every day, refused to leave me alone, and I finally went to the library to look them up. (This was pre-Internet.) The more I learned, the more powerful and dreadful the images became. I started to wonder … modern children fear the monster under the bed or the creature in the closet. But these boys spent their days in chimneys and slept in piles of ash. No beds, no closets. What would their monsters look like?

I conceived of a skeletal man in a black topcoat and top hat who slid into the tight places, brushed his cold fingers against climbing boys' faces, and caused the accidents that the boys were so prone to die from. He started chimney fires, jammed your knees against your chest so you suffocated, and broke chimneys away from houses so you fell five stories to the courtyard, encased in a brick coffin. And Dodd, my protagonist, was the only person who could see him.

I finally wrote “Thin Man,” a story that included several images from Blake's original poem, and sent it to Marion Zimmer Bradley. She bought it and used it as a cover story for
Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine
. Fifteen years later, I was invited to submit a story to a steampunk anthology. Dodd slipped back into my mind and wouldn't leave. I realized I really wanted to know what happened to him after “Thin Man” ended, so I wrote a novelette called “The Soul Jar.” It appeared in
The Shadow Conspiracy
several months later. All because I learned something new.

But it was more than that. I didn't just stumble across something new — I went out and
looked
for it. I learned quite a lot about climbing boys and their living conditions. I learned how they got in and out of the chimneys and what their brushes looked like. I learned why the chimney sweeps shaved the boys' heads and who gave the sweeps permission to steal the boys from orphanages and workhouses in the first place. Only then did the story truly take shape.

Not all books and stories work this way, of course, but if a project ever gets stuck or you've hit a dry spell, a bit of research can bump things forward with amazing efficiency.

This may sound like a weird question to bring up in the Information Age, but it isn't. When I'm not writing, I teach high school English and the occasional graduate school course. I regularly assign research projects, and I've learned the hard way that I can't just turn my students loose to look things up, and I don't just mean my ninth graders. Why? Because they head straight to the computer and ignore everything else — a terrible mistake. Let's look at some really good resources first.

Obvious, right? But a lot of people don't know how to use a library very well — and many others dismiss the library as outdated or a waste of time in a day when the Internet gives us so many research tools. However, even a small, local library can offer several advantages the Internet simply can't match.

First, Google is not your friend. (I'll cover this in more detail in the Internet section on page 62.) You've doubtless already figured out that if you enter “vampire” into Google — or any other search engine — you'll end up with hundreds of millions of entries, most of which are movies or Wikipedia. (Another site that's not necessarily your friend.) Most libraries, however, subscribe to a host of research databases, including ERIC, SIRS, Gale, and others. These databases gather magazine articles, scholarly journals, newspapers, electronic books, and more. They winnow out the useless junk and categorize it for you. And they're usually free for library patrons. All you need to do is register for a password. At the library.

Second, the libraries have people on staff who can help you, who love to help you. These people are called reference librarians, and they live for those odd questions. Their eyes positively light up when someone walks up to their desks and says, “I'm looking for information on Japanese fox spirits. Can you point me in the right direction?”

Third, the local library is
the
place to go if you're looking for local history or local folklore. They're likely to have old newspapers, yearbooks, photo albums, maps, letters, diaries, and more. And if you live in a city with an actual historical library in it — heaven! Historical librarians know
everything
. Use them. They love it.

Finally, when you go to the library, you're more likely to work than become distracted. Hey, you made a special trip, perhaps even through bad weather, so your mind-set is likely to be
I'm here to get things done
. You won't be tempted to check your e-mail, post something on your favorite social network, or play a “quick” game of solitaire. You'll get your work done.