A Plot Point Wrapped In An Enigma Wrapped In A Conundrum (20/11)
Sometimes when I’m lying awake in the middle of the night, I wonder about the makers of the various sounds outside. On one of these occasions, I made a conscious decision early on that I would put my reader, (hopefully, you!) into a similar position, and that you will only know as much as my characters. This is because, ultimately, I want to scare you all.
It’s nothing personal, honest.
This was always the goal of my story – to scare, to thrill, and to hopefully offer this all along the path of solving a mystery. Obviously that last one won’t work if I tell you too much up front, so the rest will have to be similarly drip-fed.
On top of this, when it comes to the scary stuff, I would like to think my approach is inspired by the likes of Clive Barker or H.P. Lovecraft. In the cases of both those gentlemen, there are scares aplenty, but not all of them are conducted in the print. Both authors will focus on a facet of the beast or event, and provide beautiful descriptions, wonderfully vivid paintings of texture and depth…but with just enough detail to prompt you, the scaree, to finish the job.
At this point, your wonderful brain, so used to looking for patterns and making sense of the abstract, kicks in. It takes the creepy morsels in these words, and it tries to find ways to connect them, and then to visualize these connections into a fully fledged construct. If the author had laid this all out for you, every single aspect inscribed and painstakingly detailed, you might well have a scary mental picture. However, if all you knew from the prose was that it was a giant shape from hell, complete with a brace of slippery, writhing tentacles, and a presence that turned your blood to ice as you could feel probing in the back of your mind…that conceptual kick-start will make whatever you come up with, THAT much creepier.
I can’t scare you anywhere near as well as you can scare yourself. The best thing I can do is plant the idea, and point you in a particular direction.
When was the last time you looked under your bed?
End of Day Word Count: 27,382. (I do not expect my results to be anywhere near as terrifying as those of Messrs Lovecraft and Barker)
~ by nick on November 20, 2013.
Posted in Ramble
Tags: clive barker, hp lovecraft, nanowrimo
Thoughts In The Key Of N 
Kind of like hearing about these albino kids with black eyes asking to be invited into your home or car to use your phone to call their mother. Nice
Eeep! I often get more scared by books than I do from movies, and on a couple of occasions, have had to move scary books out of my eyeline before I can sleep.
And that is how it should be.
Respect The Book! Fear The Book! Keep The Book In Daylight At All Times!
(Or so I’ve been told…)