Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story. (3 page)

However, your supernatural object
must
have limits. A limitless supernatural object removes all conflict from your book. Your story will end very quickly if your protagonist simply has to say, “I wish all my problems were solved.” (And you'll need to explain why your supposedly intelligent characters don't wish exactly that.) This means you need to work out exactly what your supernatural object can and cannot do in advance. Limits provide conflict, and conflict leads to plot. You may have noticed, for example, that many fairy tales allow only three wishes. The character uses the first wish to see if the magic really works. He uses the second wish to ask for something big that turns disastrous in some way, forcing him to use the third wish to set things right again. No more wishes — just in time for the story to end. “The Monkey's Paw” by W.W. Jacobs uses this limitation pattern.

Your object can have a limited number of uses, as noted above. Or it might only work under certain conditions — during the day, when the moon is full, after it's dipped in fresh blood. It might need time to “recharge” after each use, and the more power it uses, the more time it takes to charge up. It might work only for one gender or members of only one family or even only one person. It might drain energy from the user, leaving her exhausted. Or perhaps using the object changes the owner in some undesirable way, like the One Ring from J.R.R. Tolkien's
The Lord of the Rings
.

Objects can also be lost, stolen, or destroyed. Take away your hero's magic widget just before the final battle and see what happens. Or maybe the original owner comes back for it. Or it breaks, and the only person who can repair it is in a coma. Another character might unwittingly sell it on eBay. Or even worse — hand the thing over to the villain. The villain's power rises just as the hero's power drops. This is wonderful for conflict.

One thing you must
not
do is give an object a convenient new power that solves the hero's current problem. A hero who falls over a cliff can't unexpectedly discover that his grandfather's time-stopping pocket watch also lets him fly. This cheats your reader and shows poor writing. However, it's perfectly legal for your hero to find a creative new use for the device's existing power. Perhaps our hero realizes he can slow time as well as stop it, allowing him to drift slowly to the ground. The idea should be plausible within the rules and limitations you set up before you even begin writing.

Finally, an object doesn't just pop into existence. It needs a history. Who made the object, and why? What happened to the original owner? Who else, if anyone, has owned the object before now? Does anyone else know about the object? Is anyone hunting for it? Fleshing these ideas out will give you great ideas for plot development.

Just remember that in the end, the protagonist has to solve the book's problem, preferably without the object. The entire point of reading this type of book is to see how a particular character reacts to having a supernatural object thrust into her life. Your focus should be on the character, not the object. For a truly satisfying ending, the character has to win on her own.

You can also introduce a supernatural person. Does “person” have to mean “human”? Certainly not. The term
person
has a pretty broad definition in a paranormal book, but in this section I'm going to stick with mostly human-shaped people. (We'll talk about creatures later.)

As with supernatural objects, you can't just drop a supernatural character into a book without thinking carefully first. Even normal people carry around a certain amount of baggage — family history, likes, hates, hobbies, inconvenient food allergies, and so on. But supernatural people carry around an entire
ecology
. They eat, drink, sleep, and otherwise exist differently than ordinary folk. And just as with supernatural objects, you need to work out your supernatural person's abilities, complete with boundaries and limitations. Once that's done, you need to stay within those boundaries in order to play fair with the reader. Your werewolf, for example, can't spontaneously develop the ability to shoot death rays from his eyes because that ability traditionally has nothing to do with wolves or shape-shifting or being a were creature. Yes, this is the paranormal, and nothing will stop you from creating such a werewolf, but this will probably mess with your readers' heads, and not in a good way — they may very well toss your book aside. Why? Because you aren't playing fair. (More on this in chapter seven.)

Supernatural people get to have unique motivations for their actions. This can make them both more fun and more challenging, since you have to think outside the normal human box. Immortals don't worry about death (though they may worry about being killed) and have a rather different idea of what “a long time” means. Paranormals who feed on humans or otherwise depend on humans to exist may look at people as cattle, as possessions to be protected, or as prey that might turn dangerous. Paranormals who haven't interacted with humans before the book opens may be mystified by human behavior, treat humans with condescension, or even be frightened of them. Paranormals who used to be human (such as newly minted werewolves or vampires) are often torn between embracing their new nature and hanging on to their more familiar humanity. Truly powerful paranormals may not realize that humans are sentient — or even notice humans at all.

A supernatural person who falls in love with an ordinary human is such a powerful image that it spawned an entire genre: the paranormal romance. Stephenie Meyer may have gone mega-platinum with her YA
Twilight
novels, but Dracula obsessed over Mina Harker a hundred years before Edward and Bella appeared on the scene, and Cupid fell for Psyche nearly two thousand years before that. How to write a paranormal romance would be an entire book in itself, but in short, the conflict oft en arises between the clash of worlds. One lover is a being of some power, often immortal, who moves in a world that is hostile or even deadly to normal people, and the other lover is an ordinary human who will one day age and die. The story revolves around how these two will reconcile their difficulties so they can be together.

When it comes to building your book, you have several types of supernatural people to choose from. They include (but are not limited to):

The perennial favorite. The modern versions usually owe quite a lot to Bram Stoker's novel
Dracula
. Stoker himself seems to have combined fairy lore (the blood-sucking leanan sídhe), history (Vlad the Impaler), and ancient vampire lore to create his famous villain. Vampires traditionally shun sunlight, holy objects, and garlic, and need to drink human blood to live. They are immortal unless killed, usually by a stake through the heart, decapitation, or dismemberment. (Fantasy author Terry Pratchett has noted that all of these work nicely on non-vampires as well.) They usually have supernatural powers that range from super strength to invisibility to mental telepathy to shape-shifting.

Vampires started off as bad guys, but in recent decades, more and more authors have swung around to using them as protagonists. As creatures of the night — or cloudy days, in the case of
Twilight's
Edward Cullen — vampires are often portrayed as mysterious, sexy, and powerful with a strangely vulnerable side, since they can still die. Or fall in love.

When you write about vampires, you need to work out in advance exactly what they can and cannot do. The checklist below may help: