Wickedly wicked...

 

Wicked! Now there's a word!

I just love that word. It conjures up images of witches and wizards for me and I always think of Ray Bradbury‘s brilliant novel “Something wicked this way comes”. He took his inspiration from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, of course.

Nowadays it is used by young people as a replacement for the word ‘brilliant’ or something similar. It is also associated with the word ‘cool’ – as in something or someone being ‘hip’ or current. Whoever said language was not a living breathing changeable entity!

Anyway, I digress. What I mean to talk about is the original proper use of the word. When I looked it up in my dictionary it said it meant evil or sinful. But then there was a whole host of harsh words from ‘abominable’ to ‘abased’ to ‘shameful’ and ‘vicious’. In fact over fifty similar words! Many of which I have used time and again in my own supernatural thriller writing.

But nothing says something evil quite as succinctly as ‘wicked’. It goes best with villainous characters and horrific deeds. A good word like this can be as helpful in horror/thriller writing as love is in romance writing. But it can equally be much overused and abused. At this particular time of year - this post seems particularly pertinent - especially if you are a thriller writer - Happy Halloween everyone!

So do you have favourite words that you feel inclined to use more often than not?

National Association of Writers Groups

Hi everyone

Just back from a very enjoyable weekend at Warwick University for the NAWG Writing Festival weekend. And what a festival it was!
Workshops galore - run by some very successful writers in their own right - and the gala dinner night topped off a fabulous weekend.
There was something for everyone - from poetry, fiction writing and life writing to lyric writing, self publishing and radio plays.
Paul Dodgson, who has worked in radio all his working life and still writes and produces plays, gave a very interesting talk about how radio has developed since its inception and his experience of working in the BBC.
For myself, I certainly picked up loads of tips and gained some invaluable advice about epublishing and the technological advances in regard to the future of our industry.
The Esteemed David Nobbs (writer of 'The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin' and 'A bit of a do') gave an entertaining after dinner speech about his life and works and we were all amused by his hilarious anecdotes.
A brilliant two days of total value for money!!
See you all next year!!

 For more info and brilliant pics - see website  NAWG

Return of the lost blogger!

So...

Hello everybody!

 I may finally be ready to get some serious writing done after a year of moving home, country, health issues and general mayhem! Writing and blogging have been quite far down my 'to do' list, I'm afraid especially as I have spent some weeks in hospital.

But I'm back and raring to go but...

I'm so sad that my blog has been overrun with spam and people hacking into it. I am now cleaning it up and I should be in full swing very soon.

Please bear with me whilst I get up and running.

Satisfying middles and thriller endings.

If there’s one thing that annoys me more than anything else when I’m reading, it is the climax that flaps about like a fish out of water and then a ‘so what’ ending. I feel particularly disgruntled when I have spent many hours patiently reading (page by page and sentence by sentence) a book that seemed to promise a breath-taking climax, only to find the writer chickened out and produced a  wet firework instead of an explosive high point.

Endings and climaxes are two different things, I do realise, but they should both produce a feeling of satisfaction if the reader is to feel the story was worth reading.  In thriller writing the climax is the point at which you should feel excited (read thrilled) and can’t wait to see how it all comes out! Perhaps you should even feel like your on the high point of a roller coaster...

In thrillers, one of the best (and most used) climaxes is when someone’s life is threatened or someone is about to be killed and the hero finally succeeds and overcomes the threats. Building up to this point in a proper believable way needs to be appropriately handled according to the story.

The ending is somewhat down river of this high point but it too should produce a feeling of satisfaction that all has turned out as it should. The ending should also fulfil and answer the original story question posed at the beginning of the book. All loose ends need to be tied up as you approach this part and the reader should know it is the end of the story. Not turning the last page to see if there is any more…

So are your scenes properly built up so the reader is thrilled/excited? Are your endings rewarding the reader? Do you agree that this is important?

 

Immortality - the utimate end game?

“I shall not altogether die”, Horace 65-8 BC

In writing about death (yet again), I am aware that many may be a tad concerned at my fascination with the ultimate end game! (But there again, I am a thriller writer…) And as someone once said the two things you can depend on in this life are death and taxes!

In fiction writing, life extension or immortality has been a popular topic. It would seem that it is the ultimate goal of many a villain, one way or another. But immortality is one more step into the realms of fantasy. I guess it’s because none of us actually knows what lies waiting for us at the end and for lots of people it is still a fairly scary (if not taboo) subject. The origins of striving for immortality go right back in the annals of story epics – in fact in the Epic of Gilgamesh which dates back to 22 BC,  there was a quest to become immortal.

Many religions have, as their foundation, a belief in the existence of an ‘Afterlife’ and it is a popular subject in supernatural fiction. Wraiths, Spirits, Ghosts, Vampires and Zombies all use the plot device of actually dying at a particular point and then returning to some kind of life.

The other interesting point with all these supernatural characters is that they all have a (according to their genre’s) a weakness. Otherwise they would have taken over the entire universe by now! So to make decent adversaries for our stories they must have an Achilles heel.

In the case of vampires, for example, they may be killed by sunlight, burning or decapitation. Their bodies have an absence of heart rate, breathing etc but somehow they continue living (although needing to imbibe blood to do this). This requires the reader to suspend belief to step into this vampiric world.

Wraiths and Spirits can pass between this world and the next but there weakness is that they grow weary and long for everlasting peace.

The Undead (Zombies) are similar to Vampires, in that they appear to be alive but are not. They have no soul so cannot experience emotions of any kind. Stakes through the heart seem to be the way to do for many of these – or basic dropping off of body parts!

All of these creations make for fascinating fiction and whilst the whole genre is make-believe there are certain rules that all genre writers tend not to break. It is almost as if these beings were real ‘people’ in the first place!!

So , are you a fan of this kind of fiction? Do you expect the characters to conform to rules about immortality?

 

Back to WIP - or not??

New year – New Aspirations!

 At least that’s what it’s meant to be. But maybe the aspirations are not so new…  It’s been quite a while since I worked on my WIP and whilst I did have every intention of continuing with it, I now feel like starting a new project! I guess it’s the New Year thing – new broom and all that!

The thing is my WIP is 60000 words done so it seems a shame to abandon it. But I won’t shelve it forever. I think I’ll just get going on something else and keep it in the background. I will, in any case, have to sit and re-read it all anyway - just to remind myself of where I was at. So maybe when I’ve done that I’ll feel re-invigorated and excited by it again!!

Perhaps the solution is to try a few short stories and then see how I feel… (sighs and pulls face…)

 But then again – some brilliant ideas are calling out to me. They just don’t want to wait on the backburner and I worry that I will forget or lose the main idea if I prevaricate. I have made notes but that’s not the same as starting a new project fired up with the enthusiasm and excitement which will carry me through the first chapters.

I know many people say they start a work with great hope and then part way through go stale and abandon it, especially if the writing gets tough or the plot starts going nowhere. But I must say I am a finisher and rarely give up on a work even when it gets hard. There is satisfaction in just completing and often the work is better for struggling through some hard parts.

So, maybe I will get back to my original work, after all…

Are you a 'completer/finisher' of one work or do you have more than one project on the go at a time?

In the dark of the night...

“With light is coupled warmth; with darkness cold”

I guess there is something so old and primordial about using night-time or darkness to enhance the fear factor in thrillers. It strikes me that the dark can be a source of so many fears that in and of itself it could be something to explore in depth in a novel.

An old favourite of mine, Dennis Wheatly,   once wrote that existence is dominated by two powers – light and darkness. When life is devoid of light all progress is halted and if darkness continues unchecked death and decay will follow. So light is therefore associated with powers of good and darkness with evil.

Everyone is familiar with the notion that everyday familiar non-threatening things in the day time can take on a strong aura of menace at night. I know this can be attributed to something as simple as not being able to see well but God (or whatever you believe created us!) has equipped us with a certain amount of night vision. But there again, maybe it’s the fact that one can see in the dark to a certain extent (especially in good moonlight) but not with full acuity. This allows the imagination permission to come into play to fill in the bits our senses are not able to pick up. And no matter how hard you try to neutralise imagination it will have its day!

Many children are fearful of the dark as night-time/sleep-time is a time when they have to cope on their own, without the reassurance of others around them. No small wonder then, that they imagine bogeymen in the wardrobe and things crawling under the bed! 

So it is a well-used vehicle in many horror/thriller stories where one wants to create an unsettling fearful atmosphere or simply to enhance the tension and fudge what’s real and what is not. There is always a feeling of relief for the reader when night turns to day and the plot can roll merrily along without the uncertainty of the dark interfering.

Dastardly deeds are also often committed under cover of darkness and it is easy to see how darkness is associated with evil and how day (light) with goodness. All extremely subjective, by the way, but that is how it is generally perceived.

I feel the dark is a very useful tool to use in supernatural, thriller stories and I use it frequently. In fact my latest book has ‘dark’ in its title and I notice that many more thriller/horror stories use the word in their titles too. It signals a certain kind of story to a read, does it not?

What do you think? Do thriller stories set in darkness conjure up feelings of fear and tension in you?