Free Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story. by Steven Harper

recycled ingredients? Certainly not! And neither should you. The same principle goes for the folklore behind genies, angels, demons, zombies, werewolves, fairies, and the ghosts from a hundred different cultures.
    Besides, after a thousand carbon-copy Hollywood creatures, something that comes from actual folklore with an actual background comes across as fresh and fascinating on the page. So do some serious reading. It'll show in your writing.
IDEAS AND RESEARCH
    Finally, one of the best places to troll for new ideas is among new ideas. Ask any number of authors how oft en they stumble across something new in a bit of research that leads them to a new piece of writing.
    As just one example, I was taking a course in British literature and was thumbing idly though the forty-pound Norton anthology the professor made us buy. By sheer chance, I came across “The Chimney Sweeper,” a poem by William Blake. He wrote it in pre-Victorian London to protest the plight of climbing boys, little kids who were forced to crawl into dark chimneys and scrub them clean. The image of these children, slaves in all but name, creeping through black hell every day, refused to leave me alone, and I finally went to the library to look them up. (This was pre-Internet.) The more I learned, the more powerful and dreadful the images became. I started to wonder … modern children fear the monster under the bed or the creature in the closet. But these boys spent their days in chimneys and slept in piles of ash. No beds, no closets. What would their monsters look like?
    I conceived of a skeletal man in a black topcoat and top hat who slid into the tight places, brushed his cold fingers against climbing boys' faces, and caused the accidents that the boys were so prone to die from. He started chimney fires, jammed your knees against your chest so you suffocated, and broke chimneys away from houses so you fell five stories to the courtyard, encased in a brick coffin. And Dodd, my protagonist, was the only person who could see him.
    I finally wrote “Thin Man,” a story that included several images from Blake's original poem, and sent it to Marion Zimmer Bradley. She bought it and used it as a cover story for Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine . Fifteen years later, I was invited to submit a story to a steampunk anthology. Dodd slipped back into my mind and wouldn't leave. I realized I really wanted to know what happened to him after “Thin Man” ended, so I wrote a novelette called “The Soul Jar.” It appeared in The Shadow Conspiracy several months later. All because I learned something new.
    But it was more than that. I didn't just stumble across something new — I went out and looked for it. I learned quite a lot about climbing boys and their living conditions. I learned how they got in and out of the chimneys and what their brushes looked like. I learned why the chimney sweeps shaved the boys' heads and who gave the sweeps permission to steal the boys from orphanages and workhouses in the first place. Only then did the story truly take shape.
    Not all books and stories work this way, of course, but if a project ever gets stuck or you've hit a dry spell, a bit of research can bump things forward with amazing efficiency.
WHERE DO YOU GO?
    This may sound like a weird question to bring up in the Information Age, but it isn't. When I'm not writing, I teach high school English and the occasional graduate school course. I regularly assign research projects, and I've learned the hard way that I can't just turn my students loose to look things up, and I don't just mean my ninth graders. Why? Because they head straight to the computer and ignore everything else — a terrible mistake. Let's look at some really good resources first.
THE LIBRARY
    Obvious, right? But a lot of people don't know how to use a library very well — and many others dismiss the library as outdated or a waste of time in a day when the Internet gives us so many research tools.