From Zombos Closet

What to Write About
By Scott M. Baker

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Hemingway_at_his_writing_desk_
Okay, I get it. If I write one page a day, in a year I’ll have a novel. My problem is I have no idea what to write about.

You’re sitting on a mother lode of ideas. You just haven’t mined them yet.

A good story, no matter what the genre, is about conflict. It’s about developing your main character(s) so that the reader likes (and hopefully can relate) to them, and then placing obstacles in the way of obtaining their goals. The story is not so much about the challenges as it is how the main character(s) confront these challenges by overcoming their weaknesses and expanding on their strengths. The story is not about the conclusion. It’s about the journey to that concluding page, and what the main character(s) learn about themselves on the way.

Think of how boring The Lord of the Rings would have been if Bilbo had decided to keep the ring for himself rather than give it to Frodo to return to Mount Doom. Or if Ralphie’s mother had acquiesced in the opening scene of A Christmas Story and agreed to buy him an official Red Ryder carbine action 200-shot air model range rifle. Or if Shelby from Steel Magnolias did not have a medical condition that endangered her life during pregnancy.

Such stories come from within us. There’s no one reading this blog who hasn’t experienced some type of conflict, whether it’s as simple as a troubled romance, as life altering as death or illness or surviving combat, as traumatic as disloyalty or loss of honor, or as frustrating (or comical, depending on the situation) as a dysfunctional family. Tap into those emotions and build your story around them. Will it be painful or uncomfortable to bear your soul like this? Probably. But if you can be honest to your emotions and successfully weave them into your novel, you’ll relate to your readers. That’s what writing is all about. So if I may use an old clichéd phrase, write what you know.

Write what you know? You write about zombies and vampires. What do you know about them?

Good question. I asked the same thing years ago of Brian Keene, author of The Rising, the novel that launched a new wave of zombie apocalypse stories. The Rising is about Jim Thurmond who lives on the West Coast. As civilization crashes around him, Jim gets a phone call from his young son on the East Coast asking his father to come rescue him; he sets out on foot across a zombie-infested country in a desperate journey to save his son. Prior to writing the novel, Brian had received a phone call from his ten-year-old son whom he had not seen since infancy and who wanted to meet. He made the trip, all the while wondering what their meeting would be like. Brian later wrote about that emotional turmoil in The Rising, and then added some zombies.

Brian’s advice helped me to find my focus for The Vampire Hunters. At its essence, the story is about the war on terror and how those fighting it deal with the reality that for every terrorist brought down, ten others take his place. My main characters embody the three primary outlooks of any long-term struggle: Drake Matthews, the gung-ho commander who’s in the fight for the long haul no matter how long it takes; Alison Monroe, who follows Drake willingly but who, at some point, wants to put down her weapons lead a normal life; and Jim DelMarco, the young kid drafted into the conflict who does not want to be there, but who fights anyway. The trilogy deals with how each of these characters handles the stresses of combat, and how their experiences prepare them for the final battle. Then I substituted vampires for terrorists.

So write what you know, but don’t be afraid to embellish a bit.

A final note: One thing that every publisher and agent has told me is not to write your own iteration of the latest blockbuster. The DaVinci Code and Twilight were overnight phenomenons because they were new and distinctly unique, which is why they sparked the public’s imagination. After each of these novels went to the best seller list, publishing houses and literary agencies were inundated with knock-offs, most of which were not very good, and many pushed the bounds of copyright infringement. Sure, some of them got published. But rarely did any of these enjoy the success of the original works. Your goal should not be to write the next Harry Potter. Your goal should be to write a novel so unique that five years from now other writers will want to imitate you.

Uzumaki (Spiral, 2000)

/ Movies (Horror) / 3 Comments

Uzumaki_shot2a
Zombos Says: Excellent

As Shuichi’s father says, “One brings forth one’s own uzumaki!” in this dark glimpse into Lovecraftian terror and looming doom.  Uzumaki is director Higuchinsky’s cinematic distillation of in-need-of-therapy Jungi Ito’s three volume, manga-sized descent into madness and chaos. The town of Kurozu-cho is beset by spirals, spinning the lives and minds of the townspeople, and changing them in  ghastly ways.  Higuchinsky captures the grotesque and arabesque images of Ito’s manga by using tightly framed, sharply angled views, tinted  green to accentuate the weirdness. There’s a panoply of bread and butter cinematography used to contrast against the spiral terror: tracking shots, panning shots, close-ups, and hazy, ghostly faces appear and fade. CGI spirals twirling in unexpected places on the screen also appear throughout the movie.

The story begins as flashback, told by Kirie (Eriko Hatsune), a young girl who sees the effects of the curse descending on her small, isolated town by the water. A gust of wind scatters leaves around her, startling her into remembering. Or is she forgetting? The mesmerizing vortex is never-ending, and perhaps Higuchinsky is telling us Kirie is caught in a larger one of time, folding over and over on itself in repetition, trapping her and her town by its endless looping.

Shuichi (Fhi Fan), Kirie’s morose, since-childhood, boyfriend tells her of his fears the town is beset by a curse of spirals. His father (Ren Ohsugi), consumed with thoughts of them, becomes an early victim.  Kirie sees him filming a snail. He ignores her. He begins to ignore everything except the spiral pattern he seeks out. He steals the hair salon’s spiraling sign and devours spiral noodles. A startling transformation, before a more physically terminal one, shows him exerting his own uzumaki by impossibly spiraling his eyes after seeking the pattern is no longer satisfying.

More victims follow as Kirie’s classmates  succumb to physical transformations with some turning into slimy human snails, another girl vainly sports a new hairdo of enormous black spirals imbued with their own life,  and a boy committing suicide splatters at the foot of the school’s spiral staircase. Someone remarks how happy his broken, blood-smeared face looks in death.

Spiraling out of control deaths escalate: first perplexed by Shuichi’s father’s enfatuation with spirals, Kirie’s own father (Taro Suwa), a pottery maker, becomes enthralled with the swirling clay to his detriment;  Shuichi’s mother (Keiko  Takahashi) collapses at the funeral for his father when she sees his face spiraling in the sky against swirling curls of smoke rising from the crematorium. She goes mad and cuts off her hair and fingertips to eliminate looking at anything resembling a spiral; an unwanted suitor for Kirie fatally wraps himself around a moving car’s wheel; and even Shuichi finally succumbs to the twisting madness permeating the sky, the ground, and eventually everyone. Even the tunnel leading into the town becomes useless, twisting on itself so no one can leave or enter.

A news reporter hunts down tantalizing clues for the curse involving serpents, mirrors, and Dragonfly Pond, the possible source of the growing otherworldliness. These hints at the cause for the bedevilment descending on the town ultimately tease but never explain. Various elements from the trilogy are here, but the final revelation of the curse, and its more visually gruesome encounters such as Umbilical Cord ( in volume 2) and The Scar (volume 1) are missing in this evocative Lovecraftian horror. That’s a shame. Uzumaki captures the manga mood of Ito’s spiral horrors so well, to see these additional terrors onscreen would have been like tasting the rich icing on a moist red velvet cake touched with cinnamon: sickeningly sweet but damn satisfying.

Whispering Corridors (1998)

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Whipsering corridors
Zombos Says: Very Good

Of all the places to die, why choose school?

Ki-hyeong Park’s Whispering Corridors (Yeogo Goedam)  balances commentary on the psychological and physical abuse found in South Korean girls’ schools, sympathy for a lost spirit dwelling equally in daylight and black of night, and a symbolic use of pouring blood to tell a story of loss, brief redemption, and continued loss.

It opens with the ghost prowling school grounds at night, seeking vengeance on a teacher who mistreated her.  The discovery of the teacher’s hanging body the next day is seen first in the surprised face of the student who finds it, then next from behind her as she views it, but her head blocks our view. Finally, a step to her left and we see the entire body in the farground with the back of the student in the foreground, side by side. Other student’s reactions are then shown in still shots as they come upon the body.

Muted, somber colors inside and out lend starkness to the secrecy unfolding to discovery in the school, toned by the callous mistreatment of the students and the teachers’ indifference to their emotional needs. Male teachers in the school are chauvinistic and condenscending, and become violent with little provocation. Mr. Oh (Mad Dog, as the students call him), with his stick and sarcastic temperament, reminded me of a math teacher I suffered through one semester in grade school. He also carried a stick and whacked us on the head with it at little provocation. It is in this restrictive, competitive, and individuality-stifling environment the ghost haunts day and night: by day, as one of the students blending into class for years without any teacher realizing she’s hung around year after year, and by night as a vengeance spirit, murdering those teachers who mistreated her or mistreat other girls.

It isn’t impossible for a student to attend classes for years and not be noticed: I sat in two college classes, back to back, with the same boring professor and he didn’t remember my name or that I had taken another class with him the previous semester. And I sat in the second row, directly in front of him all that time. Park is simply emphasizing how teachers are more involved with keeping authority and class order instead of attending to students’ individual needs.

The ghost just wants to be normal, to relive her classroom life again and again in hopes of getting it right. She doesn’t want to harm anyone, but vindictive and sadistic teachers keep mistreating the students, bringing on her vengeance-side. While it appears only three times, each occurrence is heralded by supernatural events, leading to a bloody attack, but without gore. Blood isn’t used for shock value, especially at the end when a classroom becomes inundated with it, but to convey the flow of life can be either positive or negative, given the ghost of a chance either way.

How to Write Well
By Scott M. Baker

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Old-Typewriter-Keyboard-101853 So all I have to do is write a page a day and in a year I’ll have a novel good enough to be published?

Not necessarily. You’ll have a novel. Whether it’s good enough to be published is another matter. Remember, writing is an art, much like figure skating, singing, acting, or painting. You have to practice at your craft to become good at it.

I used to write espionage/techno thrillers. I don’t even admit to the first book because, in retrospect, it was crap. The second book was better, but still not quite publishable. By the third book I had found my style. The plot dealt with North Korea acquiring nuclear weapons and planting four of them in cities in the United States to blackmail the government. I quickly picked up an agent who presented it to several publishers, all of whom liked the book. Unfortunately, this occurred right after 11 September, and the market for those books had dried up. So I switched genres. It had taken me ten years to get to that point in my career, and then I had to start all over. Rather than viewing it as a setback, however, I saw this only as a slight detour. That decade of experience well prepared me for writing in the horror genre.

So get out there and write. And just as important, submit you work.

But what if my work isn’t good enough and it gets rejected?

Don’t get depressed if it gets rejected – that’s the nature of the game. It happens to all authors. And not all rejections are bad. Occasionally an editor/publisher sends you feedback; if they do, consider yourself fortunate. Most editors/publishers reject stories and manuscripts with a simple form letter, if they even respond at all. If one takes the time to offer you feedback means he/she sees potential in you work, and is taking the time to help you hone your skills. Take advantage of that opportunity.

The best way to hone your skills is to get readers who will provide critical feedback. Your mother and significant other do not count – chances are they’ll say it’s good, even if it isn’t. My suggestion is to find a good writer’s group with published authors or aspiring authors who are also interested in improving their craft. I’m a member of The Washington Fiction Writer’s League and the League of Extraordinary Authors, and the feedback they provide has been invaluable to improving what I’ve eventually published.

If you do go this route, remember two very important things.

First, find critique groups that will provide honest feedback. I’ve seen too many groups where the members will tear someone else’s work to shreds, but become indignant if you provide any critical feedback on their material. Avoid those groups like you would a horde of ravenous zombies. They’re filled with people who think ripping apart your work will somehow make them better writers. Trust me, it doesn’t work that way.

Second, and this is the hardest thing, is lock away your ego in a dark room during feedback sessions. As long as the feedback isn’t personal, listen to it and adopt it where appropriate. Every author is wedded to his/her work and hates to here that it is not quite as good as he/she thought it was. Get over yourself. I did. 

Remember, no matter how well you write, there is always room for improvement. Your goal is not to write the best book ever written. Your goal is to write the best book you possibly can. Every work has flaws. But if a reader can overlook the occasional grammatical error or plot flaw because the rest of the story is so entertaining it keeps them glued to the edge of their seat, then you’ve succeeded as a writer.