The thing holding me back is that I have no plot. Or characters. Or setting. And I haven’t yet done any of the research necessary to make the story seem real—though in my defense, I attribute this deficiency to not yet having a plot, characters, or setting.
Ideas? Leave them in the comments.
I hear ya, brother. I’d like to score the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl, but I’m short, slow, and I ain’t getting any younger.
That’s not really what I was looking for, but thanks for sharing.
Main characters: Martha Stewart, Hillary Clinton.
Setting: Women’s prison, the year 2025 or so.
Theme: Elderly butch lesbian romance.
Scare factor: Years of nightmares trying to get those images out of your head.
Nice.
Now seriously. Anyone? I’m not looking for jokes. I’m looking for ideas. This is something I’m interested in doing.
A freakish new species of spiders is discovered in England.
You might lift from any number of responses to this story,
especially those posted at 13-10-2004 16:09 and
24-04-2002 17:49
Scientists develop petroleum eating bacteria to clean oil spills. Birds ingesting the bacteria develop a taste for gasoline, plus metal piercing beaks. Chaos ensues, especially on the interstates. Main female character has nice rack.
Ok ..
Scary: has to apocalyptic – micro or macro. (Viral or doomsday asteroid.) Depends on whether you want a minor “human tragedy” or a desperate attempt to save the world.
developing …
Sorry, I was guessing at your reason for posting this, I appear to have guessed wrong.
My point is, there must be millions of people who’d like to write the world’s greatest this, that, or the other. Those who will write them, are. And those who won’t, have the problems you are describing.
… and we have to lose.
Scenario: 2008, Kerry was elected President in 2004 and since then has been “engaging in dialogue” with the Europeans and the middle east.Iran has “finally” developed a nucleur weapon which it has used on Israel. The political fallout from European pundits has been negligible, some people even commenting on the illegality of “that shitty little country”. The people left alive in Israel are being systematically slaughtered.
Emboldened by sucess, the Islamization of the entire middle east, asia continues unabated. Kerry and members of congress make the apropriate noises of distress but do nothing but “dialogue” with various heads of countries and disident groups.
Many Americans are outraged but all of the MSM has put a concerted effort into preaching isolationism to the public. Suicide bombers become a regular feature on the nightly news.
I don’t know, someone else feel free to step in and flesh this out….
Plot: Seemingly-friendly aliens show up on Earth, offering to trade spacefaring technology for the manufacturing specs on a bunch of commoditized everyday items we have that they’ve never quite been able to figure out, such as instant coffee. The Chomskyite left decries this “interplanetary exploitive capitalism” and insists that this must in some way be a plot to benefit the ruling elite, while the religious right thunderously declares that we must close our borders to this “alien menace” unless they convert to Christianity. The two sides provoke each other into street riots which spill over into a low-grade civil war that lasts several years. For brief periods, each side manages to sieze power and start implementing its agenda. The aliens say “Fuck this, we’ll make our coffee the old-fashioned way” and leave.
Main Characters: Mitchell Mower and the Rev. Gerald Fowl.
Setting: America 2015
Matt—
I understand completely. And part of the post was tongue in cheek. But I’m just looking for ideas that might get my juices going. Kind of a group brainstorming session.
Or to put it another way, I’m pretty sure I can score that winning touchdown if the coach would just devise the right play for me.
Some interesting ideas so far, but they strike me as more sci-fi / Michael Crichton than they do truly scary. I’m looking for occultism. Freaky stuff. Exorcist. Foucault’s Pendulum. Etc.
Find a local writer’s group. It will force you to write something for each meeting.
Actually, I found one scary plot today.
Not fiction, but a novel might take out the UN.
Seemingly nice blogger turns out to be crazed, serial murderer. Travels the country and chops his commenters to pieces.
You have new, unknown technology,(blogs).
You have the annonimity of the killer (is that his/her REAL name, do they REALLY live in Colo?)
You could even throw in a cult thing, too.
Spamword: children, as in “Come to me my…”
I smell OSCAR!!
I can’t make anything up, but I can point you to a “freaky” mine. Seriously.
The main page also carries a link to weird or forteanish news
For a little chill right now, I would recommend these from the “It happened to me” thread:
Creepy Story at Pond
Also Raggedy Ann
First, the mandatory joke: what about a novel in which it turns out Michael Moore is right about everything?
Second, for some reason this reminds me of Jer Olson. I wonder what ever happened to him. You hear from him ever?
Third, I like the challenge, but no ideas come to mind just yet. I’ll brainstorm for a while and see if I can come up with anything.
Lonely desert road – your car breaks down (I imagine an MG Midget here, but anything is fine.) A pickup truck stops to “help”. Kos is driving Oliver to the Grand Revealing of the new Cheetos product, “Criscos” (they’ve figured out how to make small tubes out of Crisco, oddly curved and crunchy with a hint of cheesy taste.)
With the addition of your 80kg on board, their aging Suzuki pickup (retrofitted to burn methane) breaks down. Oliver blames you and begins to eat you one body part at a time. All the while Markos, who has gleaned your true identity, admonishes you for making Oliver late for his appointment.
Not much of a plot there either. Ne’er mind.
Spamword = mass, as in “Oliver’s sheer mass is lethal in the kinetic equation m x v2.”
From that Raggedy Ann thread: Evil clown dolls torturing children are always good for a spook:
I have a vivid recollection of a nightmare I had when I was about 2 and a half or so years old (1965 or ‘66, hence the political incorrectness of the doll): basically my golly -red tailed coat, matching bow tie, bright buttons, mitten-hands (no fingers!) and a big cheesy grin- came to life and got off the sofa where it was sitting, came over to where I was (one of those outsized wooden cage affairs my parents kept putting me in in the sitting room to stop me wandering around the house first thing in the morning on their days off), reached through the bars and started tickling me.
It kept this up until I could barely breath, darting around the bars to get at me whenever I moved to get away. Anyone else who hates being tickled knows how frantic you can get if your tickler doesn’t take the hint and stop when you make it clear you don’t like it: imagine what it’s like at 2 years old and the tickler isn’t even human.
Eventually I grabbed the toy gun that was in the ‘cage’ with me and fired it at the attacking golly. The damn thing flew backwards across the room, and without waiting to see where it landed I somehow got out of the cage and made a tearful, hysterical beeline for my mum and dad’s room.
They couldn’t get any sense out of me and couldn’t get rid of me either until my dad took me by the hand back into the room where it had all happened -and there was the golly, back on the sofa where it had started off -except that the side of its chest was ripped apart and all the stuffing was falling out, and there was bits of stuffing all over the floor around the ‘cage’ thing I’d been in…
OK, phobias are relative and person specific, so they don’t work–in other words, while Stephen King’s Aracnaphobia is probably some people’s scariest possible novel, it certainly won’t be universally so.
What’s truely upsetting/disturbing AND universal? Answer that, and you’ll be on the right track. My thought is that people’s assumptions about reality and about themselves are a universal element people can’t handle having disrupted. A world, then, in which the characters are strangely, suddenly, and continuously subjected to having their reality shattered would be pretty scary. Holy people would awake one day to find themselves in hell, strong people find their strength failing at critical moments, the intelligent are struck dumb…
Insanity is scary. Insane people, and the notion of being driven insane. The (horrible, really, just awful, don’t watch it, it’s that bad) movie Gothica uses that idea–a psychologist suddenly is made to think she’s actually an insane mental patient. Imagine reading a novel told in first person by someone who is insane. In a bad way. Like we’re talking serial killer, rapist, pedophile, necrophile lunatic.
And of course, the trick Stephen King is the master of–graphic description of physical pain and extreme gore.
OK, out of ideas. Gonna go do a post about buying a submarine I think. Later.
Horror that is supernatural, or just ‘someone is crazy-in-the-head’ horror?
Looking at Diana’s comments I think she’s on to something.. Since you dont want simply ‘scary’, but rather ‘scariest in the world’, then I would recommend that you dont immediately look for specifics but instead look at the overall story conceptually.. Youre looking for something that will tap into our common consciousness; our common anxiety. That means ‘end of the world’ stuff.. Religion is easily tied in for that creepy metaphysical angle.. For some odd psychological reason, people fear the end of the world more than they fear their own death.. though on a subjective level they amount to the same thing for the individual.
Now also consider how you want to define ‘scary’.. Are you thinking of a story that builds to a apocalyptic ending or is the anxiety constant throughout ? I’ve always considered stories that deal with horrifying circumstances in a very realistic way to be the scariest.. Consider the movie ‘Independence Day’.. Giant alien crafts hover over every major city.. but they never get into the paralyzing, pant soiling fear that would come when one is faced with not only irrefutable evidence of intelligent alien life.. but that said alien life as planning on anihilating you , your family and every one youve ever known..
OK, I’m stopping (at least for a while) right here because I could discuss this shit for hours… or pages in this case… last thing.. a couple stories that might illustrate what I mean.. Childhood’s End by A. Clarke.. The concept that we’ve misunderstood the roots of our religion and beliefs and the end has come and humanity is evolving but its not taking us with it. and the other’s name eludes me, but maybe someone else will remember.. It was about the relationships between a handful of people that were spending their last days alive as an asteroid was about to strike the planet.. a drama that goes through the steps of grief and denial and acceptance in a realistic way as they face the certainty of their mortality..
This is the kind of subject that you crack beers and toss around for hours…
Oh, and on a personal level..I like lots of body count.. vast conspiracies (like illuminati, mason, roman catholic stuff, CIA), and all kind of gratuitous nudity/sex.. I mean, you have to think about what sells..right?
Plot: That which seems ordinary has a malevolent undertone which slowly consumes the normalcy.
Characters: Regular folks, albeit with intriguing personality quirks.
Setting: Someplace you could easily picture yourself.
Seeing that the Turing word is “schools”, I’d say you’re halfway there….
In a certain school, ordinary students/teachers slowly become aware of a hidden horror in the basement of the Psychology building. Various dorm residents are told they are “flunking out” and have to move out of the dorms—but somehow never make it home. One partially-chewed body found off-campus matches DNA from a missing student, but the body proportions are all wrong…..
Ia, Ia, Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!
Oops. Sorry there. Got carried away.
Stephen King might be a master … but many of his novel have terrible last thirds … as if he just gets tired of writing them, and wants to wrap it all up ASAP. The Shining, and The Stand were outsanding, of course.
Beck’s comment reminded me of why the scariest movie, imho, is scary (The Prince of Darkness.) That our idea of Good and Evil is totally wrong …
Man, that is such a scary movie.
Exorcist. Foucault’s Pendulum. Occult. Religion. Mystery. Portent. Foreboding. Fear.
To be clear, though, I’m more interested in specific ideas than I am in the more generalized tips on how to develop them into a story. It’s not the actually creative writing I have a problem with. It’s coming up with a good, serious plot.
developing …
I’m thinking of something along the line of Play misty for me. Except Clint would be playing a Blogger, that gets a love crazed groupie after his ass. You already have a cast of characters (see above).
On second thought, how about a mix of Play Misty for me and Stephen Kings Mysery.
Ya know, maybe Gail, Ana and RWS come to the Rocky Mountain High and get a little freaky with a witch coven thing. In the end you would have to end up as the hero that saves your wife, kid and dog. In a Dean Koontz kind of way…………..
Hell, a story of a passenger’s perspective aboard one of the 9/11 suicide jets would be horrifying and unforgettable.. Imagine the various ways that people dealt with the knowledge that they would be dead in a short while and they were powerless to stop it..Look at all the pathos.. There were unaccompanied children on board.. some pople snapped..some people accepted.. some made peace with their God.. some pleade and begged for their life .. some tried to do something.. some no doubt just shook and peed their pants.. hundreds of stories.. maybe a dozen woven stories all seening the same event but reacting differently..
Fear fear fear … well, being a parent, I would say most of my fears are for my kids and the future. So … so play on that-
– what if our kids were all somehow turning evil? Giving birth to and evil race …- and we’d have to kill ‘em all, and start over?
-or somehow the schools (or tv, or videogames) were brainwashing them into being Terrorists (too political? lol
Ok, my ideas suck. But, brainstorming is a process, is it not?
Jeff, why dont you narrow it down for us..? Kind of give us a broad idea of what kind of horror youre interested in doing and let us try to think of plots that might work.. Horror is too broad of a genre to look at as a whole.. If I had a solid working plot line and just needed to flesh it out with episodic snapshots, I’d be writing ‘The Scariest Story in the World’ myself…
And Carin.. Youre totally right..King writes decent content but the man never has been able to devise a decent ending.. The Stand is the perfect example of that.. The Shining was too but Kubrick redeemed it.. I liked ‘IT’.. Pennywise is scary.. clowns are scary.. but he uses a good formula.. small town.. common people.. then inject a great evil under the facade.
“It” was the scariest book I’ve ever read.
Lloyd took my idea, at least partly. I was thinking it starts out as an Internet stalker, Play Misty for Me, kind of thing, then when the plot appears to be following the expected path it veers off into something like Vanished, with a villain tricking the hero into coming face to face with his greatest fear.
I like the idea that in trying to get away from something, you’re actually hurtling toward it.
If most of it happened online, it could be a 21st century epistolary novel.
Uh Yup, Gail’s making sense.
The “greatest fear” thing would have to be something that gradually eats away at your free will until there are no choices left, and the final move is one you’ve boxed yourself into in the process of trying to avoid it.
I think you need to come up with the scary thing, then devise the secret society/natural effect that has been nurturing it on the fringes of our cosy little world, then build the plot about people enountering it and vanquishing it or escaping.
So, what are you afraid of? Loneliness?—some sort of chance of being cast into the void… Disease?—killer microbes are easy… Lack of control?—something’s gonna take over your mind… Man’s inhumanity to man?—there are people capable of monstrous acts among us….
Then you have the cloaking secret—it can be a group that is sort of recognizable that few really understand: Illuminati, Masons, Mormons, Templars, University Deans, Libertarians….or natural phenomenon, ditto: permafrost, wandering magnetic poles, sunspots, a sealed cave, an unknown species.
There are so many options—what sort of thing are you looking for?
Something with a demonic feel.
If anyone here has read Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, you’ll recognize the kind of feel I’m going for. To a lesser extent, The Ninth Gate (made into a pretty interesting movie by Roman Polanski).
And what if the thing you fear the most is not something that happens to you but something you do, something that would completely go against everything you hold sacred, yet still you are moved inexorably toward it?
Turing word: How?
Demonic involves moral terror, the fear of becoming something horrible.
“the final move is one you’ve boxed yourself into in the process of trying to avoid it”
gail – it’s like the damn Dusty Girls
Interesting, Gail.
Awhile back, I struck on the (very loose) idea of writing a novel in which the protagonist seems to be butting heads with a person whose influence his begins to see as rather demonic, but as the narrative progresses, the reader slowly becomes aware that it is the protagonist himself who is the demonic force in the story—that his self-assurance has blinded him to his own vulnerabilities to evil, that his propensity for keeping an “open mind” left a vacuum in his thinking that was filled by evil, which makes itself completely (though still only on the perimeters of the tale) manifest by the story’s end.
A thinly-concealed metaphor for the failings of modern day progressivism, in essence.
Difficult narrative structure and pov exercise, but certainly doable. Haven’t a clue about a plot yet, though.
“The Ninth Gate” was good, but, again, to be scarier, we lose.
This “true” story has a very scary twist involving a demonic or malevolent entity,,,
evil face
Turing word: “specific.” It’s a
signportent.Of course its a perfect time for a ‘Rise of the Anti-Christ’, demonic kind of novel.. You could work in the VRWC/Illuminati/ZOG thing (all true of course).. I’ve always been attracted to stories like ‘The Magus’.. where everything you know.. everything you believe.. everything around you is just living theatre.. and all the other actors know it.. youre the only one in the dark..
Maybe a novel where we (the average people) think we’re the good guys but were actually the minions of Satan and Islam IS the one true faith.. and Chimpy and his people are in working with the Illuminati, et al, (tie them all together) to once and for all defeat God in a second war for the throne..
Wait.. Didnt David Icke already write this ?
Thanks, Sarah.
In Foucault’s Pendulum, it all starts as a game, with people who think they’re in control of something that is essentially harmless, an intellectual amusement. That sort of unintended consequences theme could potentially work into an internet theme where some kind of moral monstrosity is created through hypertext linkages. One thing piles onto another until there’s no turning back–everything seems innocent taken separately, but together the result is demonic, possibly even taking on a life of its own.
Jeff..
One last question about goals.. Are you looking to sell a novel and perhaps even turn it into a screenplay at somepoint.. and of course make beaucoup dollars.. ?
-Or-
Are you looking at producing some post modern horror masterpiece that will establish you as a peer of David Foster Wallace ?
I mean, Wallace is brilliant in his writing.. but King is a multi, multi millionaire.. Only a romance novelist might make more..
Doing both is difficult with a reader base raised on King and network TV..
The protagonist could be the one who instigates and organizes the construction of the monstrosity, using other people to develop the individual, seemingly innocuous, parts of the puzzle. Then the protagonist begins to realize that he has unconsciously planned this evil all along, but it’s an evil that he didn’t originally recognize as such. Once he recognizes it, he can’t find a way to put the toothpaste back in the tube–and doesn’t even know if he wants to.
My goal is to write it. And to come away from it thinking that it’s pretty good.
It’s nice to start somewhere benign and nice and then rip it to shreds. Like a family vacation or a mission trip. Someone gives the protagonist a voodoo doll as a gag and it has it’s own little bundle of mojo. And they are in a bunch of shit because they suck some pins in it and someone’s dead. In the Caribbean or maybe the Seychells. And then you got your animism, snakes, unknown gods, sacrifices, and the undead and maybe some tribal lords who like to eat the hearts of their rivals. Fear requires more psychology than horror.
This might help if voodoo is interesting to you.
On a more practical level, what if the game is to convince people to believe something ridiculous, to start a cult, to see how far people will go, sort of a Milgram experiment.
In my original idea, the protagonist was a grad student who found himself getting sucked in with a band of what he thought were neo-hedonists (libertarian); but it turns out that his rabid progressivism and superiority led him to do things that he assumed they would approve of, but which were in fact an anathema to their worldview. In the end, they aren’t the evil ones; he was. But because the story is told through his perspective (3rd person limited) the reader only slowly comes to realize such.
Now, I’d like to take those TYPE of relationships and apply them to a more frightening set of plot points. Protagonist could be a Kafka-esque clerk, or somebody we’re naturally inclined to believe by fictional convention is the “victim,” but who turns out to be the unwitting villain. The story is about intellectual and belief-born hubris. The scare comes from the sudden epiphany you’re entire worldview has crumbled.
Think Flannery O’Connor’s grotesques told realistically and writ large.
on steroids
When you talk about ideology-driven evil, I keep thinking of the Leopold and Loeb case.
The Bobby Franks murder, all based on one guy’s obsession with Nietzche.
So you are saying you want to write something with bigger words in it than say …. a Stephen King novel?
In that case it was one guy manipulating another, but if there was a group involved, each individual could be manipulated into doing something that seemed maybe a little strange, maybe pushing the envelope a little, but not evil–until all the pieces came together.
Gotta go. Back soon.
I’m really sorry!
I know you’re being serious, but I have this story line in my head of the Skull & Bones Society conspiracy to inject hormone replacement therapies into all the little Heinz ketchup packets – distributing them all over the red counties to McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s to depopulate the VRWC. However, there is a counter-conspiracy within the same organization, to buy Starbuck’s and lace the latte froth with the very same thing.
What would be really weird is; if you’re a Demon Jeff and you’re trying to get us to come up with a plan that you could put into play that would wreak havoc on mankind. While you just sit back and watch. Of course as things start to came apart around us you would let us know on your blog that it was us that did it.
God you’re such an evil bastard Jeff.
Actually, I’m on the track of Freemasons. The list of characters, and potential for conspiracy, is way long.
Lloyd.. I dont know if you meant that seriously or as a joke.. but that idea is beauty..
Lloyd.. kind of like the scientists that built the first atomic bomb.. It was built as an intellectual challenge.. without morality.. to prove to themselves that they could do it.. It wasnt until afterward that Oppenheimer saw the weight of what they’d invented and said ‘ I am become death.. destroyer of worlds’
An exclusive (by its nature) Blog that appeals to intellectuals, artists, academics..that is run by Lucifer himself (using a pen name of course).. and allows Man to devise his own downfall as an intellectual exercise.. removed from the reality of the world.. but it isnt..
Turing word: order
As in: Novus Ordo Seclorum
I like the idea of some kind of social experiment, manipulating people’s conception of reality to see the extent to which they’ll go against their own beliefs and inclinations. When I was in college I remember being shown the films of the Milgram experiment and being deeply shocked, not so much by the behavior of the subjects, whom I thought had been tricked by the unconscious signalling of the researchers into doing things they would not do in a natural setting, but by the incredible arrogance of Milgram and his grad students/minions who thought it could possibly be ok to manipulate people in that manner. To convince people to do evil is an evil in itself, no matter how scientific or socially “pure” the objective.
I do not Compel .
I only impel.
— Lucifer
AB,
I was smiling as I wrote it, but ya know…….
The milgram experiments didnt compel the ‘teachers’to give harsher and harsher punishment to their ‘students’.. The ‘experimenter’ simply put the teacher in a situation where he/she was instructed to give a punishment and relieved of any responsibilty (legal, moral or ethical) for doing so. And being good, obedient teachers, they did as they were told.. and these were otherwise normal, average people giving what they believed to be dangerous levels of electricity.
Now couple that lack of the burden of responsibility for ones own actions with a clear threat of punishment to the teacher or their family if they choose not to administer the shock and I’ll wager the % of teachers that ultimately gave lethal shocks to the students would climb from 65% to at or near 100%.. The really scarey part is that it illustrates (in my mind) that an awful lot of those Nazi War Criminals probably coped with their actions by believing that they were simply following orders they were too scared to refuse… They were like most of us…
What I really hated about the way the Milgram experiment was designed, besides the fact that it was manipulative and deceptive and cavalier about the potential moral and psychological damage to the subjects, was that the researchers didn’t take into account the semiotic (unspoken,body language) clues they must have been broadcasting like a bad smell (“THIS IS ALL A FAKE” “SOMETHING FISHY HERE”) to their subjects. I’m not saying ordinary people won’t do evil things when they’re told to in a natural setting, just that Milgram didn’t provide a natural setting to prove anything of the kind. His researchers would have had to believe they were doing what the subjects thought they were doing. Because it wasn’t double blind, it was a useless piece of showboating besides being immoral. Needless to say, I have a serious problem with Milgram.
Getting back to the idea for a story, though, if you had people who had been conditioned actually to believe that what they were doing was right, benificial, etc., then gradually find out that they were doing something horrible, the whole social experiment idea could become very scary.
Perhaps something along Lloyd’s line of reasoning (I think; kind of late to the game, having spent the day dealing with financials and the dog park…anyway); a blogger in 21st century American enlists his minons to write a novel on-line. The “novelists” unlease viral code that enable computers to write their own nanotechnologic code…
Kind of a Vonnegut theme, machines and madness.
Damn Shiraz…..
Setting: Amsterdam. (It has to be in Europe or Russia.) Protagonist: young college student. Plot: Down on his luck non-practicing Catholic spends time enjoying the seedier aspects of Amsterdam, starts descent into world of occult out of curiousity and things slowly start to spin out of his control.
And as much as I like you guys, the Internet is not scary. “It’s the IRC channel… of the damned!” (Then again, “The Necronomiblog” does have a certain ring to it.) Basically the scariest you could get would be about as scary as “The Net”.
An EMP Attack: Two nuclear weapons are detonated at a precise high altitude over both the east and west coasts. The resulting Electro Magnetic Pulse fries major electrical infrasture, creating a cascading nationwide meltdown.
No electrictiy. No cars, trucks, planes, trains. No radio. No television. America thrown back into the 1800s. In a moment in time.
Book idea:
As Galileo is crashed into Jupiter its final images reveal something completely unbeleivable.
Sorry, Jeff, if I had known you wanted to write the world’s scariest novel, I wouldn’t have gone and done it already. (You should read it. It’s very short, and so scary you’ll probably cry like a little girl.) I didn’t mean to step on your toes there; next time, you should tell me your plans a bit earlier.
Jeff–
The Lao have a belief about something called (I think) a ‘Khun Khong’. It’s kind of hard to get them to talk about it, because some of them sort of take it seriously.
As I understand it (perhaps wrongly): a Khun Khong is a man who goes to a witch to ask for power to do some deed, but the power tends to increase and their humanity to decrease. It is said they end up being impervious to bullets and engage in cannibalism and other depraved acts.
I guess I picture some poor fellow who wants to protect his family, whatever, and ends up being consumed from within. To me, the idea of the loss of self is fairly frightening, and it sure seems to scare the shit out of my wife.
Not really sure if that’s what you had in mind.
I was thinking about this last night while trying, unsuccessfully, to sleep. I didn’t really come up with anything helpful, but did have a random thought that I felt made for an interesting idea. Can you imagine how hard it would be to write a book like Lolita from the young girl’s perspective? To write it, you’d have to have one hell of an insight into the mind of pre-pubescent women; otherwise, it’d come off like some old white guy’s perverted fantasies.
More on topic, you can’t go wrong with reading some old H.P. Lovecraft to get the creative juices flowing. All the demonic evilness you could possibly ask for lies therein.
If you were interested in lumping in a critique of progressivism, you could do something along the lines of Anthem–a dystopic view of the way the world would be if Karl Marx were given the total reigns of world power.
Here’s an idea for a plot:
a bunch of palestinian christians convince protestant pastors in the u.s. to use their churches to denounce … you guessed it .. the jooz.
here’s the link
http://www.judeo-christianalliance.org
Seth, the Lao fable reminds me of the movie Pumpkinhead, where a man goes to a witch for the power to avenge his son and is taken over by the demon that he calls up. Great movie, with Lance
Hendrickson.
It came from Arkansas born from white trash Demoncrats…raised in Washington D.C……OH NO..it’s the Chelsea!!!…Run for your lives!
JWebb, S.M.Sterling wrote that one last year.
I demand royalties.
I’ll tell him.
Jeff, the problem is you want to write a horror novel. What you just described — no plot, no characters of interest, no setting — is a New Yorker/Iowa Writer Workshop literary novel.
Charlie, Combine the horror genre with the Iowa Writers Workshop and that about sums up Umberto Eco.
The power of the horror novel lies not just in the “horror” images, but in how much the author gets the reader to emotionally invest in his characters. Then when bad things start to happen you can’t put the book down and you find yourself almost screaming at the character in print “Do NOT go down into the dark basement alone!!”
And that’s where King’s strength lies, not in his novels (though The Shining and It are exceptions) but in his excellent shortstories and novellas. It’s the strength of Blatty’s “The Exorcist” and Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House” (which probably still holds the title of best opening paragraph of any horror novel out there).
Make your readers emotionally bond with your characters and any horror visited upon them will, no matter if the particulars have been done elsewhere, will scare and horrify to the same degree of emotional investment.
Concrete suggestion: fairly middleclass, very loving young couple who finally succeed at having their first child. Beautiful child, wholesome, etc. But starts changing about age 7. And suddenly other 7 y/o’s are changing too. Not “evil” but alien kind of different. How does this affect the couple, how does the community react, the government? Is it natural? or conspiracy? Internal or External? Think a modern updated twist on AC Clarke’s Childhood’s End.
Let me add a counter example of what doesn’t work (at least for me)
The movie “13 Ghosts”… interesting plot, cool and unique setting, great effects
But I just couldn’t connect with the characters and as a consequence whatever happened to them I was thinking more along the lines of “well, that was a cool special effect” instead of levitating off my chair in shock.
A struggling family wakes up one day to discover that the government has established a “Population Stabilization Office” that makes sure that people who have slipped below a certain Quality Of Life Index are properly euthanized.
Of course, the Index is so broad and vague that everyone in the family falls under that category in some fashion or other. The Compassion Officers start by coming for the narrator’s diabetic teenage daughter…
To crank up the volume on my idea, you have to visualize it: the government finds out you’ve fallen below a certain point on their Quality of Life index, they send out a Compassion Administrator to your house to administer the lethal Mercy injection. Picture two armed thugs accompanying a sweet, maternal grandmotherly type, all sunshine and puppies and rainbows about her job…. and of course everyone (especially in the press) consider these Compassion Administrators to be such WONDERFUL, WARM, KIND, ANGELIC people for relieving suffering.
And everyone’s HAPPY now, aren’t they? But you have to look close to see that the happy smiles are frozen on people’s face in a rictus of fear… because, after all, “chronic depression” can drop you down the QOL scale…
And everywhere the family flees, they have no help, no shelter. Because everyone’s so full of COMPASSION, they’re all trying to “help them let go” of their daughter. And everyone’s SMILING and oh so REASONABLE about it, even while they’re trying to turn them over to the authorities for euthanization.
The scariest scene in the book would be when a whole diner full of people recognize them, and proceed to restrain the parents and daughter, cooing at the father and trying to calm him down like he’s an escaped mental patient while they phone for the police….
and of course time is running out for their daughter, because the production of insulin has been outlawed (the Abolition of Futile Medication Act, and the Animal Rights Amendment— you did know animals were used in the production of insulin, didn’t you?)…..
Scary stuff? How about this:
A city is filled with fear of a criminal who kills people who behave in inappropriate ways. The victims are people who litter, play loud music from their car stereos, don’t use their turn signals, talk too loudly on their cellphones, whatever. The killer leaves a calling card: a yellow post-it note describing the sins of the dead, and the time of his call.
The killer strikes randomly, but his cause is effective: the city becomes stiflingly polite (think: New Orleans into Salt Lake City or Singapore a la Tom Waits to Singapore a la caned ass). The killer gets more and more petty, and gets caught by chance after killing a homeless guy for peeing behind a dumpster at night.
As he is being driven to the station, the killer tells the officer his story, reasons, motivation, and whatnot (doled out very slowly). And the officer becomes the next killer, but that’s the rest of the book.
Sorry to tune in so late. Lots of good ideas here.
For me, the scariest stuff is the truly random occurence of violence. Where there is literally no initial defining event that inspires the violence…no occult, no criminal intent, no revenge motive…no motive at all. Just weird, chaotic, dehumanizing, random violent acts delivered on the innocent by the inexplicably evil.
And zombies…zombies creep me out.
But in my version, the good guys kill the bad guys (with guns, mostly) and get the girls. Life may not be like a Louis L’Amour novel, but it should be.
What if, on a certain day at a specific hour, every schizophrenic on the globe started hearing the same voice, saying “_________ ____ __ ___.”?
The setting wears me out. You’re on your own with the plot and characters.
Or maybe time travel. Inasmuch as the above was posted an hour before I wrote it.
Even my VCR automatically shifts to DST.
One or two books of Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminati trilogy was written by taking all of the most insane paranoid letters he recieved when he was editor for Playboy’s letter’s page and writing a novel in which every single paranoid fantasy was true. That meant ignoring the letters that said stuff like “the mob is out to get me” because it’s possible that the mob IS out to get that person. But you get a letter that says “Elvis was kidnapped by aliens and who used plastic surgery to make him into Hillary Clinton and she’s trying to corrupt my precious bodily fluids” and it’s off to the races.
I know that’s not the sort of novel you asked about, but you have AN ENTIRE INTERNET full of paraniod schitzophrenics to expoit for comic potential – how can you ignore such a prime resource?
For instance, imagine you read only of the most paranoid ravings at DU and Islamist sites and wrote a novel in which they were all TRUE.
Sadr is preaching to his huge flocks that the US invaded Iraq to kill the ghost of the Mohammad’s cousin to prevent the second coming. No joke
Or imagine a world where everything ever posted on KOS’ site was 100% true!
Zeb–
whiskey for my men, beer for my horses.