Nate's Workshop On Horrible Writing #2

Copyright 1998-2004 by Nate Leved
Horrible Writing Tips:!
This is not an English class. It is a writing workshop, so I'm going to assume that you know the basics of the English language, spelling and grammar. We are going to build upon your basic knowledge and hopefully open that little gate in your mind that will allow you to become an acceptably horrible writer. You should know the English language well enough to make your stories easily read, however, writing horrible stories should not necessarily be an academic exercise. If, in fact, you wrote all of your stories in strict academic form, they would be pretty dry reading and most probably produce "Sleeping Reader Syndrome". Then too, your stories would likely fail in the action and emotional development departments too. Often times, we horrible story writers forget about academic form and fail to use complete sentences and stuff like that. We do it because the more worked up we get in the thick of our story, the more likely we are to pick up that rusty meat cleaver and wield it. Whap! Whap! Whap! The blood splattered against the ancient cathedral wall as the horribly disfigured body of the alien creature crumpled to the dust. The high-pitched screaming seemed endless. "Oh my ears!" My college English Professors would blanch. I believe they call such liberties "Poetic License" or something like that.

Now for the important stuff. The trick to generating interest in a horrible story is to develop your reader's emotions. It's easy. You do that by setting a scene that has all of the earmarks of something sinister about to happen and then slowly develop it. There are such things as base emotions, and writers can tweak them into existence with a few well chosen words. The little child in the gay, floral dress was playing, singing to herself, near the edge of Bottomless Pit when the shadow of the molester darkened the ground, startling her. Jumping back... Writers become masters of orchestrating feelings in their audiences. They know the spine chilling, teeth-aching effect of drawing their fingernails across a blackboard. Sccccrrrriiiittttcccchhhh!

See? However, more useful to the horrible story writer is the knowledge that the fear of death is the grand daddy of all fears, and all others are subject to it. Nothing will generate emotional activity and character empathy quite like the fears of falling, confinement, suffocation, contamination, starvation, dehydration, molestation or an IRS audit. Such conditions can make the palms of your reader's hands grow moist with fear and apprehension. That's what horror is all about! Yes, fear and the apprehension of disaster will glue your reader's eyes to your pages! Did you ever watch a snake work a chicken? What will happen to Mary Jane now that her little child has fallen into Bottomless Pit? How can she go on? Obviously, your audience can't put your story down until they find out who killed "Cock Robin," so you need to have a series of interesting and magnetic occurrences materialize at regular intervals throughout your work to lengthen your reader's attention span and otherwise fan their emotional interest into flame.

Of course, there are more subtle ways of achieving the desired effect without actually giving your readers an injection of abject horroribleness right in the arm every few minutes. Which is to say, that you would do well to learn the fingernail-chewing, subtle but effective art of Foreshadowing. The intent is similar to slowly working up to a giant orgasm. Mary Jane was pining away for her little child there in her cabin near the edge of the mountain, not knowing or caring what would be her fate now that little Jenny was gone. She shuddered. Short (bang!) sentences like the preceding example can snap a reader into the reality of your story. It drives your horribleness home like a stake through the heart of a vampire!

Miles away, Joe Armstrong, the seismologist, was astounded by the buildup of tensions in the Bottomless Fault. Why, at any moment, the plates could slip ( skitter askew) and bring the whole mountain and everything on it down into the pit. Never had the probabilities been so great for a total cataclysm as had the latest computer printout revealed. Pouring a stiff drink, Joe phoned his boss, Blade Forbes, with the news of the pending disaster to see what to do next. "Yo Blade," hollered the excited engineer into the phone's black mouthpiece. "The whole darn mountain's ready to come down! What the heck are we gonna do?" "Now, settle down, Joe. I know that you're stressed, but you gotta get up there on that mountain and warn as many folks as you can to pack up and get away from there!" "Ya, I know, Boss, but who's gonna run the machines here?" "Who cares, Joe?" asked Blade, the quick thinking manager of the Kazoo Company. "In a short while, it won't matter. Now, quit fussing and fuming. Get yourself up there on that mountain-- do it now!" This dialogue sequence will drive your grammar checker nuts, but again, who cares? People talk like that. Only a very few are college professors. Me? Oh, I drew a 4.0 average in English and am qualified to teach it. Or I would if I'd quit reading comic books and abstain from writing horrible stories.

Notice that what we are doing is weaving several little stories into one larger whole, jumping back and forth from one to the other at appropriate intervals in order to create interest, interject ideas and add value. These little stories within the larger story are called threads. The trick is to weave the various threads together in an interesting manner that will capture and hold your reader's attention all the while moving him or her along through your story toward the finish. However, don't forget to tie off all of your threads in some way that adds value to your story. Not all of your threads have to come together at the ending, culmination or climax of your story. Certain threads may expire at any given point in your story as long as they make sense to your readers. Grandma might raise the child, but she doesn't have to hang around through the whole story unless she has a good reason for being there.

The ladies of Bottomless Church brought Mary Jane a fruitcake and some peanut punch to cheer her up, thinking that a little company would surely help the poor waif. However, nothing they did seemed to help. Use anything you can to hold your reader's interest, all the while keeping their emotions whipped to a froth while Mary Jane wrings her hands there on the old, floral sofa. Oh yeah, more than one thing can happen at a time too. You see, Hashi and Yeheda were making small talk over their drinks while enjoying their long transcontinental flight on the big Boeing Jet. In just a short while, they would touch down at the Pleasantville Airport just 10 miles from Bottomless Pit where they were going to join Joe Armstrong in exploring some interesting and rather mysterious underground caves in the vicinity. They drank a toast to each other as Yeheda noticed the thin trail of oil escaping from the cowling of the number two engine, creating a growing dark spot upon the wing. Just then Gustav jammed a thirty round clip into his Uzi and jacked the bolt home. Ready to go, He kicked open the cargo door and entered the main passenger body of the big plane...

Whew! Do you see what I mean? The longer the story, the more people, places and events need to be incorporated. But right now, we are working with short, horrible stories so you don't need to get carried away with too many action producing devices. However, if you use them, you must tie them all together into a sort of an upheaval or orgasm which we call an ending. Like the plane crashes into a sensitive spot near old Bottomless, which triggers the earthquake that brings down the mountain, but it's all right as Joe Armstrong saves the heroine and helps her make a new little child. Of course that's too bad, because the earthquake wakes up Godzella or whatever was sleeping down there in those interesting and mysterious caves Naturally, the monster ends up eating everyone up anyway. I snuck up on you, huh!

Got your head swimming? Well, don't fret. Until you get used to spinning yarns, you can use another device called an outline to keep track of all the goings on (action) in your short, horrible story. Making a good outline can be a big help to you later on when things get hot and thick. Following your outline will allow you to check off all of the bits and pieces of your story as they happen, so you don't miss anything or leave any threads untied. Too bad about Gustav breaking his foot on the cargo door and rolling back into the cargo compartment there as the motor exploded, and the wind ripped the wing off of the jet, sending hot oil all over him as the cargo panel burst open from the wing slapping into it. Whap!

Moreover, as an adjunct to your outline, whip up some character development sheets. They are where you build up your characters and bring them to life in your mind so that you know them almost as real people. Those sheets are where you list the traits, strengths, wits, emotions, weaknesses, disabilities, and demographics of your individual characters. That way, you will cause your characters to act within the limits or scope of their character. After all, an octogenarian grandmother, hobbling about on a cane, can't very well go violently whizzing around on a motorized skateboard, now can she? Well, maybe she could if she were really a 30 year old, athletic grandson, disguised as his granny while trying to break into his dead grand daddy's vault because he fears that the old boy didn't leave him anything in his will...

Do you see it? As a writer, you are god, or at least as a god. You are the creator and the bearer of light to your readers. The better job you do, the better they will like what you do and keep on reading your words. Now, writing a training manual for budding, horrible writers is a bunch of work, but it is also a labor of love, as I will leave something more of interest behind for mankind to mess with. I do that a lot these days. Now, I didn't presume to cover everything necessary for the creation of interesting horrible stories or the writing of them in this little article, but I had a good time fooling with it. I'll write more articles later and include more fine tuning that will help out some of you while pissing others of you off. So what else is new. If I get one of you fired up enough to write a decent horrible story this little endeavor will be worth the effort.

Nate

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