Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story. (26 page)

N
o matter how wild and weird your paranormals get, you're always writing about humans. Even when you're writing about elves, vampires, werewolves, and wicked little pixies, you're writing about humans.

This isn't a bad thing.

First of all, you can't avoid writing about humans because
you're
a human. (Your eventual editor probably won't be — mine's a lava-snorting demon — and with any luck your agent will be a vampire, but you — you're human.) No one can completely step outside his own humanity far enough to write a completely inhuman character.

Nor should you want to do so. Your readers are humans, too, and won't be able to empathize or identify with a being who thinks and reacts in a completely inhuman manner. Vampires started out as bad guys because they were inhuman monsters, with needs and desires humans couldn't understand — and neither did they wish to. Later authors began to give vampires their humanity back. Vampires began to obsess over love partners, yearn for the past, and fight to control the inner beast. These are difficulties we humans understand because we go through them, too. The delicious and dark paranormal twist added to the struggle made the story even more compelling. As vampires became more and more human, they drifted away from being antagonistic and some even became full-blown protagonists. Nowadays, you're hard-pressed to find a vampire book in which the bloodsuckers are all bad to the blood. They became likable once they became human.

Your supernatural characters need to follow the same rule, so let's go through some ways to keep your paranormals human, even when they're not.

All humans fight the Inner Beast. It's that interior voice that tells us to lie, steal, cheat, hit, kick, punch, yell, shout, threaten, smash, crush, and kill. Some of us are better at ignoring it than others, and some days even the best of us give in to it, but everyone knows what it's like to fight it.

Many supernatural characters fight the Inner Beast, too, but with a thousand-volt boost, and human characters who are transformed into supernatural characters (as opposed to characters who are supernatural from birth) tend to get zapped the most. This only makes sense. People generally fear the unfamiliar and cling to the familiar. Humanity is familiar, and a human who is changed into a vampire or werewolf or ghost most likely wouldn't want to let go of that familiar humanity to embrace this weird new existence, and certainly not if becoming a vamp/were/ghost requires the character to do something that, as a human, he would have found repugnant, like behead puppies or snack on friends, no matter how alluring the new activity may have become.

Supernatural beings such as vampires and werewolves continually deal with new hungers that are far more powerful than the normal ones we humans live with. (It's puberty all over again.) As humans, we've all dealt with being surrounded by food and feeling hungry but knowing we mustn't eat, either because Mom said we'd spoil supper or because we're dieting or because the food belongs to someone else. It sucks. Sometimes we just deal with being hungry. Sometimes we eat anyway and damn the consequences.

Victor Vampire deals with this problem on a whole new level. He's surrounded by delicious food every moment he's awake, the most wonderful, ambrosial food imaginable, food he could pluck from the street as easily as a child picks an apple. But he mustn't. Either because he'd attract the attention of the authorities (and strong as the vampire may be, enough determined humans could eventually bring him down), because the prey he wants is someone he shouldn't kill for other reasons, or because the vampire is trying to hold on to his fast-eroding humanity, and drinking human blood Would Be Wrong. The conflict between Victor's hunger for blood and his need to avoid fulfilling it creates a powerful paranormal situation — and it's one human readers can still relate to.

The only trouble with this particular conflict is that it's been explored quite a lot, and you'll need to present it in a new way. You can use a new type of character, like Anne Rice does in her vampire books. (Back when she first did it, the idea of a gay vampire as a protagonist was a new one, and Claudia, the little girl vampire, is a perfect example of a vampire who is ruled by the Inner Beast.) Or you can use a new voice, like Lucienne Diver does in her Vamped series. (Editors love this approach, and we'll talk about voice in chapter twelve.) Or you can try new relationship structures, like Tanya Huff does in her Blood books. (The Inner Beast forces her vampires to snipe at and fight with each other in death, even if they were lovers in life, and her werewolf families, as I've pointed out elsewhere, have to split up sibling sets when the sisters go into heat so they don't try to mate with their own brothers.) Or you can explore some other facet of the struggle.

Some “converted” paranormals feel their humanity slipping away. They succumb to the power of the vampire or the werewolf or the spiritual world.

Every time they use their new powers, a piece of their former life slips away, and they find themselves less worried about their former friends, relatives, and lovers. For some paranormals, this creates conflict. They don't
want
to lose their humanity, but keeping it seems to be mutually exclusive with their new state; they can't be both human and supernatural. What to do? Terry Pratchett explores this idea in
Unseen Academicals
, although his human character is actually a goblin named Mr. Nutt who discovers, much to his dismay, that he's turning into an orc — or that he's always been one. Still, Mr. Nutt is a very human goblin, and we're with him all the way as he deals with the fear and difficulty of his transformation.

Believe it or not, this is a very human conflict. Change is forced on all of us throughout our lives, even if we don't want it. A big one is puberty, which changes our bodies, the way we see other people, and the way we see the entire damn world. It's scary, it's freaky, and it's glorious all at once, and there's no way to stop it. Other breathtaking, scary changes explode into our lives — falling in love, falling out of it, finding a job, getting married, having a child, getting divorced, dealing with a death in the family, moving to a new town and swearing we won't lose contact with old friends even though we know it'll happen — and every one of these changes us in unexpected ways. Sometimes we become more powerful, sometimes less so, sometimes we grow up, and sometimes we learn things we'd rather have stayed ignorant about. In any case, we deal and keep moving.

Forcing your paranormals to deal with their own magical changes (loss of humanity) makes them feel more human to the readers because the readers have gone through their own version of it, and it makes such characters more sympathetic. So don't hesitate to force it on them.

Not all supernatural characters were once human. Elves, dwarves, selkies, angels, demons, and others may have partially human form, but they don't think or act like humans. As I've pointed out above, nonhuman protagonists do have to be human enough for readers to identify with them and like them. However, nonhuman characters also need to explore their nonhuman side. One way to do that is to use them as contrast between humans and nonhumans.

Nonhuman characters provide you with an opportunity to comment on human existence or point out the silly, foolish, and outrageous. As outsiders, nonhumans take nothing for granted and look at humans from a different point of view. This allows them to see our foibles, and since they're outsiders, they can mention these flaws out of scorn, naïveté, or curiosity. I already used the example of the elf attending a birthday party and finding it confusing. To take it a little further, he might ask the family questions about what's going on:

Cultural clashes between humans and nonhumans actually serve to highlight humanity and make the nonhuman characters more fun to read about.

Nonhumans might find human ways disgusting (to be avoided), intriguing (to be watched), or even seductive (to be joined in on). They might want to keep their ways and customs separate from human pollution, or they might be sucked in against their will. The humans change the nonhumans, the nonhumans change the humans, and the transformation makes for a fun story.

The interaction and absorption of human and nonhuman ways is another facet of the supernatural Terry Pratchett explores extensively in several of his books. His dwarves, for example, are quite literal-minded. As a result, the language of humans, “with its unthinking reliance on metaphor and simile, is a veritable minefi — a complete morass — a fog of incomprehensi — very difficult” for dwarves. (This is from Pratchett's
The Discworld Companion
, with Stephen Briggs.) Additionally, dwarves don't get along well with outsiders — except for the ones who move to Ankh-Morpork, a supernatural combination of Victorian London and modernday New York City. There, dwarves become model citizens, once a few incidents of hacking-at-the-knees with trolls are smoothed over. Ankh-Morpork dwarves still find humans confusing and difficult, but they also find their modern way of life quite seductive. Some of the more daring female dwarves start wearing makeup under their beards, stirring up quite the scandal back home under the mountain and raising questions about equal rights for everyone, regardless of what they wear under their chainmail. Ultimately, all of it is commentary on human behavior.

Not even the stoniest Creature of the Night can operate without emotion. Or maybe they do — who knows for sure? If they do, I don't want to know about it. Your fictional creatures, however, need to emote because the human readers do. It forges a connection between your character and your reader.

Despite this fact, one of the most common comments I write on student manuscripts is, “How does the character feel about this?” or “What is her reaction?” It's easy to narrate events, much harder to show internal reactions. But as a writer, you need to show us these reactions. Knowing how the characters feel draws the readers into the story.

So how do you do it? Here's a primer. (Incidentally, I'm going to use several basic grammatical terms in the following section, ones all writers should be familiar with. If you come across a term you don't know, definitely pause to look it up in a grammar book or online.)

You can tell the reader exactly what the character is feeling:

Although it's concise and direct, this actually is the weakest way. For one thing, you're
telling
the reader what the character is feeling instead of
showing
it, and it's almost always better to show the readers something rather than tell them about it. Second, this method uses linking verbs, which make for dull sentences — the character is existing, not acting. Use this method sparingly, if at all.

Action makes for more compelling reading than mere existence. Combining it with a few emotional adjectives or adverbs lets us in on the character's emotional state. You can use an action to hint about a character's emotional state, and use a descriptive (an adjective or adverb) to confirm it.

In these examples, note how the action hints and the descriptives confirm.

Sweat breaks out — a hint that Nick is nervous — and it's a
nervous
sweat, which confirms. Jessica tosses her head — a hint that she's proud — and she does so
proudly
, which confirms.

This is another method not to overuse, however. Adverbs that end in
-ly
get fingered as repetitive quite a lot, and if your adjectives outnumber everything else in your sentence, you're heading into what's called
purple prose
. Passages like
Harold crept through the dank, twisted passages, wondering how he'd ever overcome the deep, turgid terror of his frightened soul as his heart pounded hard and timidly within the dark cavity of his chest
overwhelm and annoy the reader. Use balance and moderation.