Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story. (7 page)

Angels often finds themselves in the same situation, but mirror-reversed — sent down to Earth to accomplish some divine duty, only to realize that life down here is more diverting than in Heaven. Some angels have been cast out and need to earn their way back home.

The fun of using an angel or demon comes from mixing shades of gray. Angels and demons are supposed to be creatures of pure good or pure evil. Putting them on Earth, where almost nothing is absolute, taints their purity and forces them to deal with it, an endlessly fascinating device for writers and readers alike.

Angels and demons of folklore have an enormous variety of powers and limitations. There's simply no standard angel or demon. This means you can give them any ability you like, but it also means it's vitally important to set the limitations and stick with them.

Zombies are enjoying a new life, so to speak. They started off as mindless monsters under the control of an evil magician, then evolved into braineating hordes, and have recently become … good guys?

The main challenge of writing zombie good guys is the ick factor. Zombies are walking, rotting corpses that eat human flesh, and it's hard to empathize with something like that. Stacey Jay gets around this by playing it for laughs in
You Are So Undead to Me
, in which a high school girl discovers she's a “Settler,” someone who can end the unresolved problems that bring the dead shambling from their graves.

The other factor zombie authors have to think about is how zombies are made — and destroyed. In original folklore, they were raised by a voudon (voodoo, vodoun) sorcerer in a complicated ritual. Their main weakness (other than a bad smell and an inability to heal wounds) was salt. Flinging a handful on a zombie would de-animate it, melt it, or otherwise destroy it. Since then, other ways to create zombies have cropped up — disease, radiation, poisons, meteor strikes, even nanotechnology — and each version has its own weaknesses. Often a chainsaw is involved. Although the movie version has been around for quite some time, this type of supernatural character is a relative newcomer to paranormal novels with lots of potential to explore.

There's something irresistible about being able to change shapes. Shapeshifters get to release the inner beast and do cool things in animal shape even as they roil in angst over what terrible deeds they may have wrought. They are forced to cross the thin line between human and animal, and oft en face the unsettling discovery that releasing the beast brings rather more enjoyment than it should.

Werecreatures are the cursed version of shape-shifters. They
must
change shape under certain conditions. When in the cursed shape, the beast takes control, and the human side has little or no memory of what happens. Early on, many were creatures have no idea what's happening to them, or even that they carry the curse. Some even join the hunt for the terrible beast that's begun rampaging through the town.

The most famous of these beasts is the werewolf, a human who becomes a ravenous wolf on nights of the full moon. Werewolf folklore varies. Some people become werewolves on purpose by living an evil life or through a complicated magical ritual. Others are bitten by a werewolf and accidentally become one. And some are born into werewolf families, such as the Heerkens family in
Blood Trail
by Tanya Huff. Although werewolves have the advantage of familiarity — there's less to explain and the reader is more willing to come along for the ride — they have the disadvantage of being overly familiar ground, meaning you'll have to work a little harder to make your werewolf interesting.

But there's no reason to stay solely with wolves. In her Anita Blake books, Laurell K. Hamilton uses a number of different werecreatures, including lions, tigers, leopards, rats, foxes, hyenas, jaguars, snakes, and even swans. This is the paranormal — pick an animal and run with it.

Other shape-shifters aren't actually cursed like werecreatures. They can simply take one or more animal shapes at will. Selkies from Irish and Scottish folklore are seals that change into humans, for example. They sometimes fall in love with ordinary mortals, but eventually return to the sea, leaving a sorrowful husband or wife behind. The Manitou from Peter Straub's
Ghost Story
is an evil shape-shifter that can take many forms, as can Mulgarath, the ogre villain from The Spiderwick Chronicles books by Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi.

Shape-shifters often have abilities beyond changing shape. Their human forms might have the sharp senses of an animal, for example, and their animals forms are oft en bigger, faster, and stronger than a normal animal of the same kind. Other shape-shifters can command animals from their own species. Laurell K. Hamilton's werewolves can force normal wolves to do their bidding, for example. Notice, however, that these powers usually have something to do with the type of animal involved. It wouldn't make sense to have a wereswan that can turn coal into diamonds, though you could probably get away with one that could learn to fly in human form, since swans have flying ability.

The primary idea to remember with shape-shifters is that, like all supernatural characters, they need to have limitations. If your werewolves are fast and strong and smart and impossible to kill, why don't they rule over the puny humans of the world? Answer: They have debilitating weaknesses that prevent it. Hamilton's werewolves can change form at will, but they need a lot of food right after they've changed, and when they return to human form, they fall comatose — easy prey for enemies. To make things even more challenging, werecreatures who spend too much time as animals find it difficult to regain human form. You need to make sure your own shape-shifters have good reason to stay in the shadows — unless you're writing about a world ruled by shape-shifters.

Fairies cover a wide range of supernatural people, including elves, dwarves, brownies, dryads, gnomes, kobolds, goblins, merfolk, trolls, and more. They are oft en long-lived or outright immortal, and usually visit the human world from some other realm. Often, they don't change, and chaotic, ever-shifting humans fascinate them.

Fairies are similar to angels and demons in that they come in many shapes and forms, depending on their original folklore, and each type of fairy usually has its own powers and weaknesses. A leprechaun must give anyone who captures him a wish. Greedy dwarves create amazing magical objects. Trolls are strong but stupid, and they turn to stone in daylight. Beautiful, immortal elves oft en fail to understand brutish, short-lived humans. Non-European cultures have fairies as well. In Japan, the mischievous
kitsune
, or fox spirit, loves practical jokes. Tennyo live on mountaintops and fascinate mortals with their impossible beauty. Yosei can change into swans and cranes.

European fairies usually fear iron and sunlight, which either cripple or kill them. There are any number of other ways mortals can ward them off, including turning their clothes inside-out, striking a church bell, or getting drunk. Often mortals who encounter fairies forget the incident later, or remember it only as a dream. Raymond E. Feist uses fairies as antagonists in a modern setting to marvelous effect in his book
Faerie Tale
.

Numerous books have used elves as major characters. Legolas in Tolkien's
The Lord of the Rings
is perhaps the most famous example, and Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman created Tanis, a half-elven, half-human protagonist, for their Dragonlance fantasy series. Anyone who wants to use an elf as a main character will be inevitably compared to these two. To get around this, Mercedes Lackey took elves out of their traditional fantasy setting and used them as race car drivers in the SERRAted Edge series she wrote with various co-authors. The new setting and new plot went a long way toward reinvigorating an old trope. Hint hint.

Humans have been spinning supernatural people into their stories for thousands of years, and listing all possible types would take an encyclopedia. Ultimately,
any
supernatural person can become a character in a novel as long as you remember three cardinal rules:

 


1. You must know exactly what your supernatural person can do.
   

 


2. You must know exactly what your supernatural person's limitations are.
   

 


3. If you bend or break Rule 1 or Rule 2, be sure it makes sense within the mythology you've created.
   

And always remember that the
character
, not the magic, should be the central focus of your book. Readers want stories about people, not empty animal skins. We'll look more closely at creating well-rounded characters in chapter six.

If your book can't exist without a particular fantastic beastie, you're writing about a supernatural creature. They tend to take over because they're so much fun. Supernatural creatures are distinguished from supernatural people by the amount of self-awareness. If your griffin can hold a conversation and ask where to have lunch, it's more of a person. The dragons in Naomi Novik's books are really people, for example, not beasts.

Supernatural creatures come in a variety of forms, though certain creatures show up all over the world. All cultures tell stories about dragons and giants, for some reason. Terry Pratchett points out that if turtles live on a particular continent, at least one culture there will tell stories about the world living on a turtle's back. Witches take familiars. Sorcerers summon elementals. Some creatures are just slightly more intelligent versions of their real-world counterparts, such as the owls that deliver mail and run other errands in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, and other creatures are more outlandish, such as the manticore in Greek mythology.

Supernatural creatures seem to come in a couple of flavors:

These creatures are here to help our hero. They are healers or guides or protectors. They may be operating on their own or at the behest of someone else. Unlike supernatural characters, they can't communicate very well, and their help may be more instinctive than purposeful.

As a downside, the presence of a kind helper may be inconvenient. Byron the griffin in The Spiderwick Chronicles books is a powerful guardian for the children, but the kids are forced to find creative ways to hide and feed him, since a creature with a lion's body and eagle's wings would attract unwelcome attention from the authorities. This can be played for comedy or for serious conflict, depending on the tone your book is going for.

These creatures are out for our hero's blood. They may be working on their own, or for the villain. In more horrific stories, they may show up as hordes of single-minded animals like the weird toads in Stephen King's short story “Rainy Season.” Or they might be single creatures intent on destruction, as we've seen in any number of slay-the-monster books or in the semi-intelligent Bad Thing in Raymond E. Feist's
Faerie Tale
.

The main concern in dealing with creatures of either stripe is figuring out their ecology. What do they eat and how do they get it? Do certain noises or other stimuli make them react in a particular (or awkward) way? Is your creature a pack animal or a loner? What are the form and function of various body parts? Meat eaters, for example, will have teeth (or a beak) to reflect their diet, as will plant eaters. Any creature can have claws, but herbivores usually use them for something other than fighting — digging, climbing, scratching in the dirt, etc. A good way to “build” a creature is to decide what normal animal it most closely resembles and use that as a starting point.

It
is
true that supernatural creatures might depart from the rules of nature, and readers will let you get away with it. The laws of physics simply won't let a horse grow a set of wings big enough to let it fly, but no one minds. Impossible fire-breathing dragons have become such a staple — or cliché — that some authors have their dragons breathe something else, such as ice or acid, and readers happily come along for the ride. Some authors even have fun with explaining how weird abilities work. Terry Pratchett's odd little dragons in
Guards! Guards!
eat coal and, due to a buildup of internal flammable gasses, occasionally explode. There's no reason you can't — or shouldn't — indulge in a little magical Darwinism yourself. Still, your reader's suspension of disbelief will only stretch so far. You'll have a difficult time convincing people that your slow, bumbling plant eater would need a mouthful of fangs.

If your life in this world grinds you down, escape into another one. Humans have fantasized about magical gateways for thousands of years. Stonehenge is living proof of that. The idea of a door that can transport you to a wildly different, fascinating new world is all but irresistible. The most famous of stories in this category of supernatural elements is C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia series, in which various children find their way from 1940s England into the magical world of Narnia. Peter Straub and Stephen King flip Jack Sawyer back and forth between our world and the Territories in
The Talisman
. We all know about Dorothy's tornado in L. Frank Baum's
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
and Alice's rabbit hole. You could also argue that any number of time-travel romances use this idea.

When the author uses this element, a character from our world steps through a gateway or is otherwise transported into another world, and the reader gets to come along. The character spends a certain amount of time figuring out where she is, how this strange new world works, and why she's there. Usually some sort of goal appears — defeat the villain, rescue someone important, restore order, etc. Toward the end, a major element of suspense arises: How will the character return home? Perhaps the gate only opens at certain times or under certain conditions, or the character needs a certain object to open the gate. Sometimes the suspense arises because the character has found romance or made close friends or otherwise found happiness in the new world, but the gate to the old one will close soon forever. Which world does she truly want?