Moonlight and Monsters
I received a great book for my birthday, one that helps get your
paranormal ducks in a row so that your created world and creatures
behave with logic and are consistent. Lots of guidelines that help
to stop your reader going "huh?' when something that wasn't
possible in chapter 2 suddenly is in chapter 14.
For anyone interested in this genre, I can highly recommend it. Some of the exercises make you answer questions that then trigger off plot ideas. For example, if you're going to write about vampires:
1. How do they become one?
2. How can you kill them?
3. What does the sun do to them?
Garlic? Crosses? Holy water?
There's some of these that almost feel prescribed - as if you have to stick to a certain lore. But where is that lore coming from?
It's a popular "belief" that vampires combust and turn to immediate dust in the sun, but this is a more recent development. The myth stories had them not coping with the light as they'd been buried in a grave for a while. If you're creating a paranormal world, then the rules are whatever you say they are: human torch, slight discomfort, sparkling. (Calm down, calm down).
Once you have these rules, they have to be communicated to the reader. This is hopefully without an info dump. Which brings me to something I've seen which I thought was a great way to go about it.
A recent work avoidance technique I have been employing is to watch back to back episodes of the series "Moonlight". The interview scene at the start of this is a very clever device for setting the rules of this world.
Here tis:
For anyone interested in this genre, I can highly recommend it. Some of the exercises make you answer questions that then trigger off plot ideas. For example, if you're going to write about vampires:
1. How do they become one?
2. How can you kill them?
3. What does the sun do to them?
Garlic? Crosses? Holy water?
There's some of these that almost feel prescribed - as if you have to stick to a certain lore. But where is that lore coming from?
It's a popular "belief" that vampires combust and turn to immediate dust in the sun, but this is a more recent development. The myth stories had them not coping with the light as they'd been buried in a grave for a while. If you're creating a paranormal world, then the rules are whatever you say they are: human torch, slight discomfort, sparkling. (Calm down, calm down).
Once you have these rules, they have to be communicated to the reader. This is hopefully without an info dump. Which brings me to something I've seen which I thought was a great way to go about it.
A recent work avoidance technique I have been employing is to watch back to back episodes of the series "Moonlight". The interview scene at the start of this is a very clever device for setting the rules of this world.
Here tis:
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2 Comments
With my stories, the plot and the people have to live within earthly limitations, but your way of doing things is really appealing to me. I like trying to push the boundaries of human nature from different personalities' pov.
I don't know a lot about vampires or demons, but the more I delve (mainly due to being in the Temple) the more interested I am. I've always loved supernatural things and unexplained phenomena, and have read books on witchcraft and warewolfs and folklore etc - but not in story form. I think that to have the ability to create your own truth and to make it believable is very exciting. At the same time, it must be difficult to convince the reader. Sounds like this book is an excellent tool to achieving that.
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