I'm guessing most writers are creative in other ways. Many are drawn to music or singing. Some are pet owners. Many craft or enjoy hobbies like collecting or doing photography. Most require creative thinking in other ways besides writing.
What do you like to do when you're not writing?
Besides owning pets, I enjoy creating things in miniature. See my other blog for a small scene I made a while ago.
Showing posts with label creativity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creativity. Show all posts
Monday, March 12, 2012
Thursday, January 26, 2012
More Elements of Style
Ahhh...class is in session. OK....about that wind whipping about ghostlike in your story and why it works... Look up metaphor and simile....in any grammar text. This is the nifty writers' tool for saying such as My father was like a tree, tall and straight and beautiful....LIKE is the KEY...you get to this kind of metaphor via LIKE and the word AS used in the "double AS" sense... Example: When I was a kid, my dad was as tall as a tree, and just as straight and beautiful.
Like and AS - your keys to how disparate things are alike....creating a connection between truly unconnected things. A man is not a tree...but we can imagine he is LIKE a tall Oak. Or Mother was as hard and callous as stone (logically impossible but metaphorically possible).
Take it a step farther and often it is cool if you can turn the metaphor or simile - how things are kinda sorta alike to say they are equals, THE SAME. This is an absolute statement. Absolutes take you to a higher level of IMAGERY (which this is all about...pictures in your readers' minds). Look up Absolutes - words that are absolute...EXAMPLE... The fog is a veil. It is not LIKE a veil or as thick as a veil....it g'damn sure IS a veil...IS acts as an EQUAL (=) SIGN.
'Nother example. The man is a walking cipher, or timepiece, or enigma. The man is a walking encyclopedia. More flowery might be: The thick jungle became a carpet of blackness by nightfall. A camel is a horse created by committee. Lots of jokes rely on metaphor, simile, and absolutes.
It is also an absolute to say simply this: The fog lifted from the carpeted cemetery.
THINK about that sentence. The fog did not SEEM to be lifting...did not perhaps or maybe begin to make a move toward lifting (Qualifiers - BAD for sentences, weakens them). No, the fog "ABSOLUTELY" lifted, NO doubt about it. AND the cemetery is absolutely carpeted....ever been to Arlington National Cemetery?
This is the magic secret surrounding that kind of thinking. My wife wrote a novel, The Well Meaning Killer. She had me edit it, of course, and there was a scene where her heroine goes out for a jog in the city of Baltimore and all along her route are trash bags for delivery pick up in her neighborhood, and being a cop, her first thought is how it looks...It looked as if the street was littered with body bags.
She put the bags out there; I merely suggested the body bag image come from her character's sense of things. The author liked it, and she added it.
Of course, if you like the ghost image I added in this article in first paragraph, and it is likely that you do, by all means it is YOURS for the taking. No one owns imagery, symbolism, representational language. Hey even Shakespeare learned from authors that came before him...like Plutarch from who he stole much.
Well just be certain to look up Qualifiers in a grammar book to know what to avoid; sometimes, as in the use of sometimes in this sentence, a qualifier like some, very, maybe, perhaps, etc. is 'absolutely' needed but most are way overused, for instance a word like VERY, maybe, perhaps, and the phrases 'I think' and 'in my opinion' and 'to me'....when it is totally NOT needed and only undercuts your strong sentence, weakening it.
By all means, look up Absolutes, words that are opposite in nature to Qualifiers. No wishy-washy with these words and using them MOST of the time, working toward all the time (all is absolute, most is qualifier) makes your fiction STRONG in voice so the reader BELIEVES you and is so willing to follow you because you are not 'hedging' like a politician (in my opinion).
This coupled with metaphor and simile gives readers a strong visual image deposited in their minds. One reviewer once said of my book of the time, "Mr. Walker quite literally snatches the reader's mind for the duration of the book!" -- Midwest Book Review, it was. Love that as that is my goal...my watchword stamped in my mind's eye is MAKE it COMPELLING - and do not forget to bring in your POV character in each scene via his five senses, his eyes, brain, hands, nose, smeller, taster, ears.
These are the elements of style. For more find my Dead on Writing on Kindle books or read my Titanic 2012 or Bismarck 2013 to determine if I practice what I preach.
I hope you will find time to comment here!
Rob Walker
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www.robertwalkerbooks.com
Like and AS - your keys to how disparate things are alike....creating a connection between truly unconnected things. A man is not a tree...but we can imagine he is LIKE a tall Oak. Or Mother was as hard and callous as stone (logically impossible but metaphorically possible).
Take it a step farther and often it is cool if you can turn the metaphor or simile - how things are kinda sorta alike to say they are equals, THE SAME. This is an absolute statement. Absolutes take you to a higher level of IMAGERY (which this is all about...pictures in your readers' minds). Look up Absolutes - words that are absolute...EXAMPLE... The fog is a veil. It is not LIKE a veil or as thick as a veil....it g'damn sure IS a veil...IS acts as an EQUAL (=) SIGN.
'Nother example. The man is a walking cipher, or timepiece, or enigma. The man is a walking encyclopedia. More flowery might be: The thick jungle became a carpet of blackness by nightfall. A camel is a horse created by committee. Lots of jokes rely on metaphor, simile, and absolutes.
It is also an absolute to say simply this: The fog lifted from the carpeted cemetery.
THINK about that sentence. The fog did not SEEM to be lifting...did not perhaps or maybe begin to make a move toward lifting (Qualifiers - BAD for sentences, weakens them). No, the fog "ABSOLUTELY" lifted, NO doubt about it. AND the cemetery is absolutely carpeted....ever been to Arlington National Cemetery?
This is the magic secret surrounding that kind of thinking. My wife wrote a novel, The Well Meaning Killer. She had me edit it, of course, and there was a scene where her heroine goes out for a jog in the city of Baltimore and all along her route are trash bags for delivery pick up in her neighborhood, and being a cop, her first thought is how it looks...It looked as if the street was littered with body bags.
She put the bags out there; I merely suggested the body bag image come from her character's sense of things. The author liked it, and she added it.
Of course, if you like the ghost image I added in this article in first paragraph, and it is likely that you do, by all means it is YOURS for the taking. No one owns imagery, symbolism, representational language. Hey even Shakespeare learned from authors that came before him...like Plutarch from who he stole much.
Well just be certain to look up Qualifiers in a grammar book to know what to avoid; sometimes, as in the use of sometimes in this sentence, a qualifier like some, very, maybe, perhaps, etc. is 'absolutely' needed but most are way overused, for instance a word like VERY, maybe, perhaps, and the phrases 'I think' and 'in my opinion' and 'to me'....when it is totally NOT needed and only undercuts your strong sentence, weakening it.
By all means, look up Absolutes, words that are opposite in nature to Qualifiers. No wishy-washy with these words and using them MOST of the time, working toward all the time (all is absolute, most is qualifier) makes your fiction STRONG in voice so the reader BELIEVES you and is so willing to follow you because you are not 'hedging' like a politician (in my opinion).
This coupled with metaphor and simile gives readers a strong visual image deposited in their minds. One reviewer once said of my book of the time, "Mr. Walker quite literally snatches the reader's mind for the duration of the book!" -- Midwest Book Review, it was. Love that as that is my goal...my watchword stamped in my mind's eye is MAKE it COMPELLING - and do not forget to bring in your POV character in each scene via his five senses, his eyes, brain, hands, nose, smeller, taster, ears.
These are the elements of style. For more find my Dead on Writing on Kindle books or read my Titanic 2012 or Bismarck 2013 to determine if I practice what I preach.
I hope you will find time to comment here!
Rob Walker
.jpg)
Thursday, June 2, 2011
The Mystical, Magical Moments in Creative Writing
OCD perhaps how we writers keep on writing in the face of defeat after defeat. I am reminded of the song lyric, "When my smallest of dreams won't come true..." We are accused of being dreamers and how can we not be just that? Our stock in trade is our dreams, our imaginations, our visions, those voices so demanding within us, in our hearts and in our heads, demanding to be released out into the world, and we visualize it all from the outset to the finish line as one perfect set of characters aligned with a perfect plot in the perfect setting be it aboard a doomed ship, in a wooded dale, in a dark and sinister city of our creation and sifted through the five senses and sometimes the sixth sense of our character(s).
Writing is in effect a huge leap of faith. Think of it, you set out with a single phrase, a single sentence, hoping it will lead to a single paragraph, knowing all the while that you are committing yourself to months, perhaps years of hard labor despite its being a labor of love. What motivates us to put down that first word in the building of yet another novel after the first? How do we ever manage to go on to the second and beyond that?
It really truly helps to thoroughly know your character(s), particularly those who can carry the weight of successive books on their shoulders as they make the new title a good deal easier to get into as you KNOW this ensemble so well from your having lived with them through a previous novel, previous perils and adventures. You get to know them often better than you know any real person.
Still what makes us driven to write and write again, despite the overwhelming odds. "Never tell me the odds, kid," says Han Solo to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. If we were to dwell on the odds of actually completing a novel, and then actually finding anyone who'd care to publish it, and then any audience willing to pay good money for it....would we ever begin? Is it really about that or is there some deeper, even cosmic reason behnd WHY...why we write?
Frankly, for me, I suspect it is genetic--yes, all in the heredity of the born storyteller whose gift at birth then is nourished and allowed to flourish. If I could look into a crystal ball not at the future but at the past, would I find my Uncle John there, the great oral storyman looking back at me? What of a grandfather, a great grandfather in the old homeland of Scotland? And before that...in the time of the first men to sit about a campfire and retell events of the hunt? Something in a story wants telling, needs telling, and needs people like you and me to hear it and hear it well, and to demand it be told well.
Voices out of the past, voices in the present, voices out of the future infiltrate a storyteller's mind and they all demand a hearing, and so it goes...we are OCD about getting all the stories we hear in our heads outside of us and on paper. We have little choice otherwise. The whole damn thing is mystical, and the older a storyteller gets, the more mystical the process becomes.
Robert W. Walker, author of Titanic 2012, Children of Salem, and more...
Writing is in effect a huge leap of faith. Think of it, you set out with a single phrase, a single sentence, hoping it will lead to a single paragraph, knowing all the while that you are committing yourself to months, perhaps years of hard labor despite its being a labor of love. What motivates us to put down that first word in the building of yet another novel after the first? How do we ever manage to go on to the second and beyond that?
It really truly helps to thoroughly know your character(s), particularly those who can carry the weight of successive books on their shoulders as they make the new title a good deal easier to get into as you KNOW this ensemble so well from your having lived with them through a previous novel, previous perils and adventures. You get to know them often better than you know any real person.
Still what makes us driven to write and write again, despite the overwhelming odds. "Never tell me the odds, kid," says Han Solo to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. If we were to dwell on the odds of actually completing a novel, and then actually finding anyone who'd care to publish it, and then any audience willing to pay good money for it....would we ever begin? Is it really about that or is there some deeper, even cosmic reason behnd WHY...why we write?
Frankly, for me, I suspect it is genetic--yes, all in the heredity of the born storyteller whose gift at birth then is nourished and allowed to flourish. If I could look into a crystal ball not at the future but at the past, would I find my Uncle John there, the great oral storyman looking back at me? What of a grandfather, a great grandfather in the old homeland of Scotland? And before that...in the time of the first men to sit about a campfire and retell events of the hunt? Something in a story wants telling, needs telling, and needs people like you and me to hear it and hear it well, and to demand it be told well.
Voices out of the past, voices in the present, voices out of the future infiltrate a storyteller's mind and they all demand a hearing, and so it goes...we are OCD about getting all the stories we hear in our heads outside of us and on paper. We have little choice otherwise. The whole damn thing is mystical, and the older a storyteller gets, the more mystical the process becomes.
Robert W. Walker, author of Titanic 2012, Children of Salem, and more...
Friday, May 28, 2010
Personality's Importance in Fiction Writing
Time for Psych 101 - Personality is important in Writing? You BET!
Q 4: How does 'personality' assist in the writing of fiction?
Answer: Personality...and this means A, B, C and all types, figure heavily in fiction and typically the author's own personality comes into play as does the readers for that matter!
A writer has to be somewhat driven and obsessive to stick with it for the duration of what is often called a "checkered" career in such a fickle business, such a roulette wheel business as publishing.
The Reader also must have the 'right stuff' to bring a book to completion--that is a personaltiy that sees a novel through. In other words: Writer endures to the end, flip-side that, reader hopefully endures to the end. I had a teacher who once asked me when I balked at War and Peace in its abridged form, "Are you going to beat that book, or are you going to let it beat you?"
In the depiction of character, personality is the culmination of conditioning, struggle against conditioning, or failure to make that struggle and accepting one's conditioning (we're all brain washed to something as it is the nature of nurture, right?). What motivates a person equals personality.
Comes of having personal goals, and every character, good, bad, ugly and in between must have goals and perhaps a super goal. Characters have run ins with themselves--memories, sensations, images. Flash backs or hallucinations, etc. These form layers in a character's personae.
A character is molded by circumstances or resists them. Either way tensions and conflict can come of a stubborn obsessive compulsive, and the most memorable characters have these traits when they set their eyes on the prize.
Ahab in Moby Dick had a wooden leg for a reason. If he was sound of leg and mind, if he still had both his legs, or if he had no legs and was confined to a wheel chair and could not act on his mad obsession over the whale, or didn't really care to be bothered, it wouldn't be quite the memorable saga it is. It'd be flatline story for sure, for sure....
Ahab would never walk the deck of a ship. Would not be motivated to do so. Would retire.
Nightmare, memory, learned experience, what's in the character's bedrock DNA is at the heart of personality and story. The best authors know how to create full-blown characters fully realized. Characters are multi-layered and complex as in life. Readers today demand far more complexity of character than complexity of storyline.
In other words a character-driven story is at least as important as a plot-driven story, and the best stories are characte fits plotline like a glove stories wherein both are equally important. If you exchanged Ahab's personality for instance for that of Sherlock Holmes, it would change the dynamic of the story as surely as chaning the plot line. Can you imagine Sherlock in Ahab's shoes...errr ahhh pegleg?
Do leave a comment; would love to hear your remarks on this area of Psych for Writers.
Rob Walker
http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/ FREE stuff
http://www.makeminemystery.blogspot.com/
Q 4: How does 'personality' assist in the writing of fiction?
Answer: Personality...and this means A, B, C and all types, figure heavily in fiction and typically the author's own personality comes into play as does the readers for that matter!
A writer has to be somewhat driven and obsessive to stick with it for the duration of what is often called a "checkered" career in such a fickle business, such a roulette wheel business as publishing.
The Reader also must have the 'right stuff' to bring a book to completion--that is a personaltiy that sees a novel through. In other words: Writer endures to the end, flip-side that, reader hopefully endures to the end. I had a teacher who once asked me when I balked at War and Peace in its abridged form, "Are you going to beat that book, or are you going to let it beat you?"
In the depiction of character, personality is the culmination of conditioning, struggle against conditioning, or failure to make that struggle and accepting one's conditioning (we're all brain washed to something as it is the nature of nurture, right?). What motivates a person equals personality.
Comes of having personal goals, and every character, good, bad, ugly and in between must have goals and perhaps a super goal. Characters have run ins with themselves--memories, sensations, images. Flash backs or hallucinations, etc. These form layers in a character's personae.
A character is molded by circumstances or resists them. Either way tensions and conflict can come of a stubborn obsessive compulsive, and the most memorable characters have these traits when they set their eyes on the prize.
Ahab in Moby Dick had a wooden leg for a reason. If he was sound of leg and mind, if he still had both his legs, or if he had no legs and was confined to a wheel chair and could not act on his mad obsession over the whale, or didn't really care to be bothered, it wouldn't be quite the memorable saga it is. It'd be flatline story for sure, for sure....
Ahab would never walk the deck of a ship. Would not be motivated to do so. Would retire.
Nightmare, memory, learned experience, what's in the character's bedrock DNA is at the heart of personality and story. The best authors know how to create full-blown characters fully realized. Characters are multi-layered and complex as in life. Readers today demand far more complexity of character than complexity of storyline.
In other words a character-driven story is at least as important as a plot-driven story, and the best stories are characte fits plotline like a glove stories wherein both are equally important. If you exchanged Ahab's personality for instance for that of Sherlock Holmes, it would change the dynamic of the story as surely as chaning the plot line. Can you imagine Sherlock in Ahab's shoes...errr ahhh pegleg?
Do leave a comment; would love to hear your remarks on this area of Psych for Writers.
Rob Walker
http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/ FREE stuff
http://www.makeminemystery.blogspot.com/
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Abnormal Behavior & Pavlov's Doggie
PSYCH 101 for Writers and Their Characters Continued
\Q 3— How does ‘abnormal behavior’ enter into the realm of crime writing and fiction in general?
Answer: Have you read any one of my books? OK…risky word phrase this ‘abnormal behavior’ as you have to ask then what is ‘normal’ behavior in a species that ‘won’ out as the meat eater of all the great apes? Authors are forever dealing with perceptions of what is right and what is wrong, what is good, what is evil, and the common error of taking things at face value. Is writing and painting and creating ‘abnormal’ in itself since, like actors, all artists have to be driven and obsessed to become a player in this field? This question may be too complex to answer here, but let’s keep exploring.
Appearance is seldom what it seems in a novel, especially a mystery or suspense or thriller. Societal norms are taken to task. Since I write about murder and often times serial murder, murder is my stock and trade, my INC. This means ‘abnormal behavior’ is my bread and butter but once removed as I have killed no one except on a stage. My evil antagonists are always into aberrant and sickening words and actions; what he says, thinks, and does is who he or she is (see Final Edge for the worst female killer in all the history of books! Laurelie Blodgett). Such characters are motivated by sick fantasies, mania, fear, psychological disorders, obsessions, phobias, actual physical deformities, actual illnesses just as are Shakespeare’s worst villainous scum like Iago. They are motivated often by ‘abnormal’ beliefs, but often such ‘abnormal’ beliefs come out of popular cultural beliefs, legends, even religion as in anti-religious behavior on a grand scale. Some sick beliefs have a foothold in historical fact about mankind–as in cannibalistic behavior, perhaps even necrophilia–sex with the dead. Certainly there are enough scatologically disgusting elements about mankind and his history to provide fodder for many, many an aberrant behavior or belief system or ‘nutty’ fantasy, desire, want, goal.
I don’t have to mention Stephen King and Anne Rice made a killing on abnormal behavior, do I? Still there is a fine line at work here. Abnormal can slip over into caricature and unintended funnies in the blink of a Cyclop’s eye if one is not careful. How far from the ‘norm’ can our ‘abnormal’ Grandma Grimwood go before she becomes a twisted Dickensian comical granny?
In books about psychotics, sociopaths, organized and disorganized killers of every stripe there is great latitude in defining abnormal, but in all cases the sociopathic monster has to have its\his\her roots in humanity and where we’ve come from…from the primitive lizard brain to the present…roots are sunk deep. This is why the abnormal among us, in the end, are human after all. Humanity swings a wide arc across the rainbow from purity to the unspeakably vile and no author can turn away and not see this if the story demands it. Those who do turn a blind eye to the absolute end of the spectrum, the deepest rung in the pit miss an entire part of the human condition and it’s like being color blind, missing an entire spectrum of the rainbow itself.
OK…believe it or not.
Robert W. Walker
author Killer Instinct, Fatal Instinct and Dead On
Thanks so much and find me on facebook, twitter, myspace, and at www.acmeauthorslink.blogspot.com and do leave a message here.
\Q 3— How does ‘abnormal behavior’ enter into the realm of crime writing and fiction in general?
Answer: Have you read any one of my books? OK…risky word phrase this ‘abnormal behavior’ as you have to ask then what is ‘normal’ behavior in a species that ‘won’ out as the meat eater of all the great apes? Authors are forever dealing with perceptions of what is right and what is wrong, what is good, what is evil, and the common error of taking things at face value. Is writing and painting and creating ‘abnormal’ in itself since, like actors, all artists have to be driven and obsessed to become a player in this field? This question may be too complex to answer here, but let’s keep exploring.
Appearance is seldom what it seems in a novel, especially a mystery or suspense or thriller. Societal norms are taken to task. Since I write about murder and often times serial murder, murder is my stock and trade, my INC. This means ‘abnormal behavior’ is my bread and butter but once removed as I have killed no one except on a stage. My evil antagonists are always into aberrant and sickening words and actions; what he says, thinks, and does is who he or she is (see Final Edge for the worst female killer in all the history of books! Laurelie Blodgett). Such characters are motivated by sick fantasies, mania, fear, psychological disorders, obsessions, phobias, actual physical deformities, actual illnesses just as are Shakespeare’s worst villainous scum like Iago. They are motivated often by ‘abnormal’ beliefs, but often such ‘abnormal’ beliefs come out of popular cultural beliefs, legends, even religion as in anti-religious behavior on a grand scale. Some sick beliefs have a foothold in historical fact about mankind–as in cannibalistic behavior, perhaps even necrophilia–sex with the dead. Certainly there are enough scatologically disgusting elements about mankind and his history to provide fodder for many, many an aberrant behavior or belief system or ‘nutty’ fantasy, desire, want, goal.
I don’t have to mention Stephen King and Anne Rice made a killing on abnormal behavior, do I? Still there is a fine line at work here. Abnormal can slip over into caricature and unintended funnies in the blink of a Cyclop’s eye if one is not careful. How far from the ‘norm’ can our ‘abnormal’ Grandma Grimwood go before she becomes a twisted Dickensian comical granny?
In books about psychotics, sociopaths, organized and disorganized killers of every stripe there is great latitude in defining abnormal, but in all cases the sociopathic monster has to have its\his\her roots in humanity and where we’ve come from…from the primitive lizard brain to the present…roots are sunk deep. This is why the abnormal among us, in the end, are human after all. Humanity swings a wide arc across the rainbow from purity to the unspeakably vile and no author can turn away and not see this if the story demands it. Those who do turn a blind eye to the absolute end of the spectrum, the deepest rung in the pit miss an entire part of the human condition and it’s like being color blind, missing an entire spectrum of the rainbow itself.
OK…believe it or not.
Robert W. Walker
author Killer Instinct, Fatal Instinct and Dead On
Thanks so much and find me on facebook, twitter, myspace, and at www.acmeauthorslink.blogspot.com and do leave a message here.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Pavlov's Dog is Wagging its Tail for Writers
Robert W. Walker’s Psych 101 Questions -- Over time, I have considered these 10 questions that delve into the relationship between psychology and writing the novel, and being a novelist. In other words, what has psychology got to do with imagination and creating whole worlds populated with people out of ink marks on a page? The following questions and answers delve into the psychology of the author himself, and eventually will also ask about the psychology of characters an author creates: This is Psych 101 for Authors and readers interested in the craft and creative impulse.
Q#2 -- How does 'abnormal behavior' enter into the realm of creative writing and fiction?
Answer: Have you read any one of my books? OK...risky word phrase this 'abnormal behavior' as you have to ask then what is 'normal' behavior in a species that 'won' out as the meat eater of all the great apes? Authors are forever dealing with perceptions of what is right and what is wrong, what is good, what is evil, and the common error of taking things at face value. Is writing and painting and creating 'abnormal' in itself since, like actors, all artists have to be driven and obsessed to become a player in this field? This question may be too complex to answer here, but let's keep exploring.
Appearance is seldom what it seems in a novel, especially a mystery or suspense or thriller. Societal norms are taken to task. Since I write about murder and often times serial murder, murder is my stock and trade, my INC. This means 'abnormal behavior' is my bread and butter but once removed as I have killed no one except on a stage. My evil antagonists are always into aberrant and sickening words and actions; what he says, thinks, and does is who he or she is (see Final Edge for the worst female killer in all the history of books! Laurelie Blodgett). Such characters are motivated by sick fantasies, mania, fear, psychological disorders, obsessions, phobias, actual physical deformities, actual illnesses just as are Shakespeare's worst villainous scum like Iago. They are motivated often by 'abnormal' beliefs, but often such 'abnormal' beliefs come out of popular cultural beliefs, legends, even religion as in anti-religious behavior on a grand scale. Some sick beliefs have a foothold in historical fact about mankind--as in cannibalistic behavior, perhaps even necrophilia--sex with the dead. Certainly there are enough scatologically disgusting elements about mankind and his history to provide fodder for many, many an aberrant behavior or belief system or 'nutty' fantasy, desire, want, goal.
I don't have to mention Stephen King and Anne Rice made a killing on abnormal behavior, do I? Still there is a fine line at work here. Abnormal can slip over into caricature and unintended funnies in the blink of a Cyclop's eye if one is not careful. How far from the 'norm' can our 'abnormal' Grandma Grimwood go before she becomes a twisted Dickensian comical granny?
In books about psychotics, sociopaths, organized and disorganized killers of every stripe there is great latitude in defining abnormal, but in all cases the sociopathic monster has to have its\his\her roots in humanity and where we've come from...from the primitive lizard brain to the present...roots are sunk deep. This is why the abnormal among us, in the end, are human after all. Humanity swings a wide arc across the rainbow from purity to the unspeakably vile and no author can turn away and not see this if the story demands it. Those who do turn a blind eye to the absolute end of the spectrum, the deepest rung in the pit miss an entire part of the human condition and it's like being color blind, missing an entire spectrum of the rainbow itself.
OK...believe it or not. Am sorry as I had promised Abnormal Behavior. Will have to hold on that...Pavlov chewed my notes. Will get to it. Meanwhile, next Friday right here I will take up Question #3 which is: How does 'health and stress' play a role in fiction writing?
Catch my new ebook on Kindle - Killer Instinct, a Dr. Jessica Coran novel...in fact her first introduction, and by the way, do DO do leave a comment!
Rob Walker
http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/
http://www.makeminemystery.com/
Q#2 -- How does 'abnormal behavior' enter into the realm of creative writing and fiction?
Answer: Have you read any one of my books? OK...risky word phrase this 'abnormal behavior' as you have to ask then what is 'normal' behavior in a species that 'won' out as the meat eater of all the great apes? Authors are forever dealing with perceptions of what is right and what is wrong, what is good, what is evil, and the common error of taking things at face value. Is writing and painting and creating 'abnormal' in itself since, like actors, all artists have to be driven and obsessed to become a player in this field? This question may be too complex to answer here, but let's keep exploring.
Appearance is seldom what it seems in a novel, especially a mystery or suspense or thriller. Societal norms are taken to task. Since I write about murder and often times serial murder, murder is my stock and trade, my INC. This means 'abnormal behavior' is my bread and butter but once removed as I have killed no one except on a stage. My evil antagonists are always into aberrant and sickening words and actions; what he says, thinks, and does is who he or she is (see Final Edge for the worst female killer in all the history of books! Laurelie Blodgett). Such characters are motivated by sick fantasies, mania, fear, psychological disorders, obsessions, phobias, actual physical deformities, actual illnesses just as are Shakespeare's worst villainous scum like Iago. They are motivated often by 'abnormal' beliefs, but often such 'abnormal' beliefs come out of popular cultural beliefs, legends, even religion as in anti-religious behavior on a grand scale. Some sick beliefs have a foothold in historical fact about mankind--as in cannibalistic behavior, perhaps even necrophilia--sex with the dead. Certainly there are enough scatologically disgusting elements about mankind and his history to provide fodder for many, many an aberrant behavior or belief system or 'nutty' fantasy, desire, want, goal.
I don't have to mention Stephen King and Anne Rice made a killing on abnormal behavior, do I? Still there is a fine line at work here. Abnormal can slip over into caricature and unintended funnies in the blink of a Cyclop's eye if one is not careful. How far from the 'norm' can our 'abnormal' Grandma Grimwood go before she becomes a twisted Dickensian comical granny?
In books about psychotics, sociopaths, organized and disorganized killers of every stripe there is great latitude in defining abnormal, but in all cases the sociopathic monster has to have its\his\her roots in humanity and where we've come from...from the primitive lizard brain to the present...roots are sunk deep. This is why the abnormal among us, in the end, are human after all. Humanity swings a wide arc across the rainbow from purity to the unspeakably vile and no author can turn away and not see this if the story demands it. Those who do turn a blind eye to the absolute end of the spectrum, the deepest rung in the pit miss an entire part of the human condition and it's like being color blind, missing an entire spectrum of the rainbow itself.
OK...believe it or not. Am sorry as I had promised Abnormal Behavior. Will have to hold on that...Pavlov chewed my notes. Will get to it. Meanwhile, next Friday right here I will take up Question #3 which is: How does 'health and stress' play a role in fiction writing?
Catch my new ebook on Kindle - Killer Instinct, a Dr. Jessica Coran novel...in fact her first introduction, and by the way, do DO do leave a comment!
Rob Walker
http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/
http://www.makeminemystery.com/
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