ACTION! How editing a book trailer taught me to flow without words

Writers, you know the feeling:  mind racing, heart pumping, fingers flying on the keyboard.  That’s creative flow.  I have fallen into flow while writing novels, short stories, screenplays, poems, and blogs, beginning with the picture books I wrote as young as age four.

But last weekend, something remarkable happened:  I fell deeply into flow, but I wasn’t writing.  I wasn’t even typing.  I was using iMovie to edit the video I’d shot earlier that day on my iPhone.

Despite having written several screenplays—my husband and I sold three drafts of our adaptation of my novel The Good House to Fox Searchlight—I had never edited video.  Last year, when I shot a book trailer for my novel My Soul to Take in my basement, I did it in one take precisely so I wouldn’t have to edit video.  When I noticed something bothersome in one of the scenes, I went down and shot the whole thing again.

But my ideas for a book trailer for the upcoming novel I co-authored with my husband, Steven Barnes, were more elaborate than a single take would allow.  Although the trailer would be short, I wanted to sew it together in the style of the horror movies Steve and I love.  And since I wanted to recruit my 8-year-old son as the star, I didn’t necessarily want him to be present during scenes I thought might frighten him.

Atria Books–July 31, 2012

Our novel, Devil’s Wake, is a YA/crossover novel about teenagers seeking safety and community after an infection that mimics a zombie outbreak, although we never use the word “zombie.”  The trailer is intended to create a mood more than to convey the plot.

I could have taken a YouTube tutorial on how to use iMovie 11, but instead I signed up for a free workshop at my local Apple store.  In a single hour of furious note-taking, I learned enough to get me excited and ready to work.  (If you don’t have a Mac, you can use Windows Movie Maker.)

I started small, using iMovie’s trailer template.  While it didn’t allow me the flexibility of adding my own sound, it had a polished look that gave me ideas for how to splice the rest together.  And although the template only allowed for several two- to three-second clips (approximately), I discovered that if I continued the next clip where the last one left off, I could create a sustained shot—for instance, my son walking down the stairs for several seconds.

I know, it doesn’t sound like much—but I was ecstatic. I was obsessed.  I examined clips in tenth-of-a-second increments, looking for the right places to splice, the way the film majors in my dorm used to when we were undergraduates at Northwestern.  I hunted for just…the right…spots.

I was in flow.

That day, I learned that storytelling is storytelling for me, whether it’s written or visual.  Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.  Stories don’t have to be told in words.

When I teach my screenwriting class at Spelman College this fall, I’ll give my students a short assignment to shoot and edit a video themselves—so they can experience filmmaking from the inside out while they write their screenplays.

That’s especially important in an industry that makes precious little space for projects by people of color—but all screenwriters should realize that writing a script is only the first step.  If they ever want to see their movie made, they might have to shoot, direct and finance it too.  (That is also true for novelists hoping to be discovered by Hollywood.)

No, I don’t think I’m Spike Lee or Kathryn Bigelow.  My little trailer is just a newbie effort.  No crane shots or tracking shots—yet.  To me, the important lesson was the realization that I had no reason to fear the technology, and that I could use editing to create illusions and impressions that would tell my story.

I hope to shoot at least two more trailers before the book is published in July, this time without the safety wheels of the template.   Next time, I want to use sound.

And screams.

TO SEE THE FINISHED TRAILER, CLICK HERE. 

Tananarive Due, the incoming Cosby Chair of Humanities (2012-2013) at Spelman College in Atlanta, is an American Book Award winner and NAACP Image Award winner. Her website is at www.tananarivedue.com.

This Little Light: writing through pain and loss

Today is not the day.  It could be but it is not.  Today is today.

–Audre Lorde

Recently, my father and I spent most of the day at my mother’s bedside—him with his laptop and me with mine—and spun words to try to whisk ourselves somewhere else.  Anywhere else.  I worked on my upcoming mystery novel; my father, a civil rights attorney, worked on his memoir on race and racism.

While my mother slept, we wrote to try to dull the pain of her dying.

My mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, is gravely ill with thyroid cancer.  After a two-year fight with ups and downs, advances and setbacks, my sisters, father and I are realizing that she will not be with us much longer.  Her moments of responsiveness are farther apart.  Her body is weaker and weaker.

Although in years past I found comfort in journaling during times of crisis, I have been unable to journal about the experience with my mother’s illness.  I wrote a column about her cancer fight for CNN.com [SEE STORY HERE] last June, but since then I have been largely wordless.

Holding my mother's hand

Instead, I am busy.  In addition to the time I spend with Mom, I teach my classes at Spelman College, I’m raising my 8-year-old son, Jason, with my husband, and I’m racing to finish a novel that has been competing against my mother’s illness since the day it was born.

But the novel, which I’m co-authoring with my husband, Steven Barnes, is far from a burden—now, my novel is my sanctuary.  When it is finished, I’ll be expelled from my world of imagination, left to face the reality of here and now.

Recently, I assigned my Spelman freshmen a literacy narrative, an essay recalling a significant encounter with reading and/or writing during their formative years.  As an example, I shared my experience as a 14-year-old during race riots in Miami, the day in my junior high school cafeteria I first learned that I could write to save my sanity.  My essay, “I Want to Live,” described a society without bigotry and hate, and writing it made a pain in my chest go away.  I remember my mother telling me how lucky I was that I have writing as an outlet.

Mom also taught me the power of writing as a tool of preservation.  In 2003, we co-authored a nonfiction civil rights memoir, Freedom in the Family: a Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights, which is oh-so-precious to me.  If we do not write our own stories, Mom always said, they will never be told.  We must write, she said.

And here is my old friend, yet again.

Over these past difficult years, months and hours, watching my mother’s decline, I often have reassured myself with the stanza in Audre Lorde’s poem, “Today is Not the Day,” which she wrote while fighting breast cancer:  Today is not the day. / It could be but it is not. / Today is today.

Those words have served not only as an inspiration through this season of uncertainty, but also as a reminder that Lorde herself found refuge from her cancer battle in her writing.  One day, I hope writing will help ferry me to the other side, too.

But I know that writing will not patch every hole, or stanch every tear.  I have heard about a writer I admire who reportedly could not write for a year after her own mother’s death.  Writing, like everything in life, has its limitations.

But as my father and I sat in my mother’s room together—each of us transporting ourselves to a different world—I remembered anew what a blessing writing has been in my life.

Today was not a good day with my mother medically, and I am writing.

Tomorrow, I will be writing.

We write.  We write.  We write.

UPDATED 2/8/12:  Patricia Stephens Due died on February 7, 2012.  From CNN’s “In America” blog:  http://wp.me/p1Ezur-1PM

For more information about Patricia Stephens Due, see Wikipedia.

Hear an interview with Patricia Stephens Due and Tananarive Due on NPR’s “Fresh Air” (2003)  LISTEN

(left to right) John Due, Patricia Stephens Due and Tananarive Due outside of the White House after the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009

Your blockbuster book trailer (on a budget)

For years, writers have been using book trailers to bring attention to their work, hoping to create the coveted “viral” YouTube video…or at least make a few readers curious enough to check out their next book.  Several companies offer services to produce trailers for authors, and some of them do good work.

My husband, Steven Barnes, and I were thrilled in 2010 when our partner Blair Underwood directed and produced The Best Book Trailer Ever Made (in our opinion) as part of the Vook (video ebook) for our mystery collaboration From Cape Town with Love, which I have written about on this blog.  But Blair had a $5,000 promotional budget from our publisher to produce several video vignettes that were woven together into a trailer…and most of us won’t have that kind of money to invest.

Fresh from my experience on From Cape Town with Love, I decided to shoot a short promotional video for my upcoming novel.   And I wanted to do it with no budget, no cast and (virtually) no film experience.  Years ago, I remember watching what I thought was one of the scariest movie promos I’d ever seen–a trailer for the movie Se7en that was brilliant in its simplicity: If I’m remembering right, director David Fincher simply stared into a camera and talked about how he’d just made the scariest movie of his career.   He was so convincing that I had goosebumps by the time he finished, and I couldn’t wait to see his film.

Coming Sept. 6th

My upcoming novel is a supernatural thriller, My Soul to Take, to be published Sept. 6th.  It’s part of a series I launched in 1997 with the novel My Soul to Keep, about a woman who discovers that her husband, Dawit, is a 500-year-old immortal.  The Living Blood that created his immortality has sustained three other novels, and is the core of a fictitious underground drug called Glow that can heal any ailment.  I decided against the Fincher staring-into-the-camera idea because my first take didn’t work for me.  Not enough mood.   Ultimately, my own face bored me.

So I decided to do what countless other horror filmmakers have done when they want to produce cheap movies:  I went the mock documentary route.   All I would need was a video camera,  a dark room and a premise.  The premise was easy:  I’d already established an illegal network to transport the Glow in my previous novel, so I decided to shoot a video tutorial for “conductors” on the Underground Railroad.  (I’d similarly posted “rules” for conductors on the Facebook fan page for my fictitious character Fana-Glow Healer.)    All I needed was images and my voice, and I’d find a fun way to promote the book directly at the end.

Of course, equipment was a limitation, since my favorite video camera is on my iPhone.  I knew it would look cheap, so I used the effects from a $1.99 iPhone app called 8mm Vintage Camera to make the video quality look even worse.  (“That’s right, folks–I meant for it to look like this!”)   And by doing it all in one take–actually three takes, since my flashlight didn’t work once and I flubbed lines in another try–I didn’t even have to learn video editing.  Heck, I didn’t even insert credits.  It’s all on the screen.

And it’s all in the script.  Try to use cleverness to compensate for your lack of cash.  To me, that’s the real lesson of this experience:  If you can bite off a tiny chunk of your novel’s premise and find a way to bring it to life, there’s no need to spend a lot of money.  A book trailer can be a series of quick video footage from man-on-the-street style interviews with people who love your work–or will pretend they do.  A book trailer can take any shape or form you can dream up…no matter how small.

I’m not saying this trailer will win any Oscars, or get a million hits.  But it was fun to shoot, and my readers got a glimpse of a world they love.

CLICK HERE to see what you think.  What are your ideas for making a book trailer on a budget?

WRITERS’ SECRETS: You tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine

What tips and tricks get you through the writing day?

Anyone who writes regularly knows that writing is a complex psychological and technical process, much more than coming up with an idea and happily typing on the page.  As writers, we trip ourselves up at so many stages:

• We want to write, but never find the time.
• We write, but we don’t finish what we write.
• We finish what we write, but we don’t submit for representation or publication.
• We don’t KEEP submitting until we find the right home.

And writing never gets any easier.  With every new project, I am besieged by voices that tell me my writing is terrible, my new  project won’t hold up to anything else I’ve written, and I’ll be laughed out of the industry.  Every project.

Recently, when I mentioned this on Twitter, one of my followers confessed that her internal editor has prevented her from writing any fiction since January.  That’s no joke.  For some writers, fearful voices might mean a project is never written.  A dream is deferred.

Here’s another secret: I have to fight to find time to write too.  I once knew a poet who disappeared to a cabin in the woods each summer to do his writing, but I never learned the art of the complete-peace-and-solitude model—the closest I get to that is a closed door and a deadline.  The less time I have to write, the less time I have to search for a magical state of “flow.”   Because of my career in journalism, I’ve trained my Muse to show up on a schedule, more or less, whether she likes it or not.

How do I do it?  By editing my freshest pages on the project, or my most polished.  And lots of music.

Because writers often work alone, too often we feel like we must suffer alone.  That’s why it’s so important for writers to seek out each other’s fellowship, and to hear writers they enjoy confess that they grapple with the same struggles.  I have had great teachers, readers and advice along the way.

My single best piece of writing advice might have come from my 11^th grade English teacher, Mrs. Estaver.  “In order to be a writer,” she told me, “you must wallpaper your wall with rejection slips.”  While that advice may not hold as true in the era of instant publishing, it was the perfect advice for an insecure artist about to weather her storm of rejection.

That one simple statement told me that it wouldn’t be easy.  It wouldn’t come quickly.  It would be the battle of my life.

Once I knew that, I could relax and get started.

What was your best writing advice?  What secrets get you through your writing day?

*****

Tananarive Due has won an American Book Award and an NAACP Image Award.  Her audio MP3, “Secrets to a Writer’s Life:  From Inspiration to Publication” is available for instant download.  CLICK HERE for more information.

Writing & the day job: 5 tips to balance art and commerce

The first time I walked into my agent’s office at John Hawkins & Associates in New York, I noticed a framed letter from turn-of-the-century black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar on the wall.  The letter is dated Dec. 31, 1901, addressed to the agency founder.

Paul Laurence Dunbar: 1872-1906

          Dear Mr. Reynolds, 

           A merry Christmas and a happy New Year.  Both should be abolished.  I am broke!

Once the thrill of seeing a century-old letter from Dunbar wore off, its message was ominous.  I had the security of being a novelist (not a poet, for Pete’s sake!), but I never forgot the cautionary tale framed on my agent’s wall.

That was in about 2001, and I was riding high in my fledgling career.  The advance for my first novel, The Between, had been slightly higher than my annual salary as a reporter for The Miami Herald.  My next, for My Soul to Keep, was higher still.  In both black fiction and horror fiction, the book circuit was a thriving village of new writers, ambitious editors, courageous booksellers and readers starved for more.  Terry McMillan had taught publishers that black folks did read, and we were stoking their appetite.

I left my job at the Miami Herald after a decade in 1998, when I married fellow novelist Steven Barnes.  We had met at a 1997 conference at Clark Atlanta University entitled “The African-American Fantastic Imagination:  Explorations in Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror,” alongside Octavia E. Butler, Jewelle Gomez and Samuel R. Delany.

Heady times.

But if I had sat Octavia down for a frank conversation about writing and finances, she could have told me a grim tale of struggle.  “Celebrated author” and “rich author” are not synonymous—and never have been.  (Octavia achieved a level of financial security she’d never known when she was awarded her MacArthur Genius Grant in 1995.)

Steve supplemented his income as a novelist with television writing on “The Outer Limits,” “The Twilight Zone”…even “Baywatch.”  More recently, he has written for Cartoon Network and BET, and launched a life coaching and internet sales business.  Most novelists you read and admire have day jobs, often as college English or writing professors.  I have been teaching part-time in an M.F.A. program at Antioch University Los Angeles since 2007, and I have private writing clients.  Writers also earn income through speaking engagements and writing workshops.

But it’s a piecemeal and unpredictable living.

The only writers I know who get health care strictly through their writing are those who earn the qualifying minimum of more than $30,000 a year through Hollywood’s Writers’ Guild of America (WGA)—but it’s not easy to earn, especially year after year.  Screenplays are tough to sell.  Television jobs come and go—one year you’re the story editor on a hit series, and the next year you could be unemployed.  C’est la vie.

When I quit my day job in 1998, I couldn’t imagine a better existence than setting my own hours and spinning fiction all day.  I still sometimes feel guilty when I’m writing in the middle of the day, as if there’s something else I should be doing.  (Well, nowadays that something is called “grading papers.”)  Liberation never gets old.

But unpredictability gets old.  Fast.

In my novel Joplin’s Ghost, an up-and-coming R&B singer who fears she is “selling out” has ghost encounters with the spirit of turn-of-the-century ragtime composer Scott Joplin, who died virtually penniless and bitter trying to mount an opera.  That novel’s conversation about art and commerce was a message to me, and to all artists.

Often, art and commerce must take divergent paths, one setting the other free.

I’m proud of everything I’ve published that bears my name, but I’m not happy with lashing a whip over my muse.  I was trained on deadlines as a journalist, but rushing to finish a project because of financial need feels like sending my inner child out to work while I sit at home eating Bon Bons, yelling, “Faster, faster!”

I wrote both The Between (1995) and My Soul to Keep (1997) as an unpublished fiction writer holding down a full-time newspaper job.  Neither book was under contract; I wrote them strictly because they were stories I wanted to tell, even if no one else ever read them.  Most writers I know juggle fiction, their day jobs and their families.

Can my outer grownup relieve my inner child?

I’ve been blessed so far to feel like I’m writing exactly what I want to be writing—except for that short story collection I’ve dreamed of, perhaps—but one question now nags me:  What would I be writing if I didn’t support myself with my fiction?

What would my muse give me if I let her run outside and play?

TIPS FOR BALANCING ART & COMMERCE:

1.)     So you’d like to leave your job to concentrate on your fiction!  Great, but be realistic. Unless a supportive partner/family with a steady job is there to help your dream come true, you should have two years’ worth of savings first.  You might spend your first year of freedom writing—and your second year looking for a new job. Don’t wait until your money runs out to figure out where you will land next. If your employer offers a leave of absence, that’s probably better than starting fresh.  This is a tough economy to leave a job without careful planning.

2.)    Even if you have what seems like a secure respite from the workplace, remember that you can’t predict the future.  Circumstances change.  Keep your job skills current in case a partner’s job loss or family member’s illness force you back to work sooner than expected.  When I left journalism in 1998, there were few blogs, no Blackberrys, no Facebook, no Twitter.  Google was a start-up.  If I hadn’t learned internet marketing through my books and my husband’s internet sales business, I would be a complete dinosaur in the job market today.  If you’re a lawyer, pay your Bar dues.  If you were in medicine, keep up with advances.  Don’t assume you’ll be writing at home forever.

3.)    If you can’t afford to leave your job, don’t despair:  You CAN find the time to write.  Gather tools to help you create laser-like concentration so you can dive into flow state if you only have 30 minutes instead of four hours.  Write on your lunch break.  Turn off the TV at night and hide in the bathroom, if you must.  (I’ve written in hotel bathrooms many times to avoid disturbing a sleeping family.)  Even if you don’t have time to write temporarily, read over the last pages you wrote on a regular basis to keep characters fresh in your mind—that way, when you DO get unexpected writing time, you don’t have to waste your hour refreshing yourself.  If you don’t have a fiction project underway, journal or blog to keep your writing mind sharp.

4.)    Choose your projects carefully.  When I talk to my film agent, he cautions me not to even try writing certain scripts because the marketplace won’t support them.  That attitude can be taken to extremes. Most bestselling writers you know are writing exactly what they darn well please.  E. Lynn Harris didn’t gain fame jumping into the thriving bisexual black fiction market—he created his own market.  You’ll produce your best work if you’re writing your bliss.

But…

While you should listen to advice about what sells and what doesn’t with a grain of salt…DO listen.  Write your bliss…but see if you can steer your bliss.  Steve uses a great Venn Diagram (intersecting circles) to help students and clients determine what they should write.  One circle represents your dream projects.  The other represents projects you think you could actually sell.  Shade in the portion in the middle where those circles intersect, try to write THAT.  If you’re only imitating a successful writer or trying to follow a trend, beware: by the time your book is published or your screenplay is produced, readers and audiences will have moved on.

5.)    Don’t expect your writing to support you.  Even if you finally land that great contract, don’t expect a similar income flow next year, or the year after.  It’s better to be surprised by an income that’s higher than expected than disappointed by inevitable ebbs and flows.  If you somehow get rich through your writing—congratulations!  But baby, it ain’t the way to bet.  (See Paul Laurence Dunbar letter above.)

Lessons from Hollywood: How the screenwriter for The King’s Speech found his voice

From time to time—but not nearly often enough—I attend a Los Angeles area screening for Oscar-caliber films with Q&A sessions with the screenwriter.  Last night, I jumped at the chance to hear 73-year-old David Seidler discuss his odyssey as he wrote The King’s Speech.

His story is almost as fascinating as his film.

I love that he is 73, working in a town where aging is considered a sin.  I love that he himself is a stutterer (“Once a stutterer, always a stutterer,” he said), although he never stuttered during his talk because, as he put it, “I know all the tricks.”  I love that King George VI was his childhood hero because of the king’s struggle to overcome his stuttering to rally his nation.

I love that Seidler waited 25 years to write his dream project because when he asked the Queen Mother’s permission, she said, “Not in my lifetime.”  (Can you even imagine?  She wasn’t a consultant on the film, but her permission was a condition of speech therapist Lionel Logue’s surviving son, who gave Seidler access to his father’s notes from the therapy sessions!)

Did I mention that I also love how well researched the film was?

It’s crucial to find ways to ask screenwriters how they achieved the magical act of getting a script written and produced.  That’s why I always encourage screenwriters to attend L.A.’s Screenwriting Expo each fall.

Here are the impressions I took from Seidler’s talk:

RESEARCH, RESEARCH, RESEARCH. Far too many writers think writing screenplays will be easy because they love watching movies.  Please.  Cameron Crowe spent years writing Jerry Maguire.  Seidler researched his script meticulously, even for dialogue viewers might assume he made up.  Even if your screenplay is pure fiction, KNOW the world you are depicting inside and out.  That ring of truth is what makes scripts great.

PATIENCE IS EVERYTHING. It doesn’t always take 25 or 30 years to get a screenplay produced, but you can grow a tree in the time it can take to make a movie.  My novel My Soul to Keep has been in development at Fox Searchlight since before my 7-year-old son was born.  It’s always an exciting day when someone calls and wants to option your script or novel…but if you want to keep your sanity, consider that the first step on a very long, foggy, crooked road…that will probably disappear into a cliff at the end.

TRY, TRY AGAIN. If you haven’t learned by now that writing is rewriting, you are not truly a screenwriter.  There is no such thing as the perfect first draft.  When Seidler’s wife told him that his first draft had an unnecessary B story because he was trying to write a “movie,” she advised him to go back and write it as a play.  Get to the heart of the characters, she said—and your movie will come from that.  She was absolutely right.

BE BOLD. Shyness is not rewarded in Hollywood.  We might never have seen The King’s Speech if someone on Seidler’s team hadn’t slipped a copy of the play version in actor Geoffery Rush’s…er…personal mailbox because she lived nearby.  When Seidler objected to the plan, he was told it had already been done.  “Don’t ever do this,” Seidler told the audience.

Except that…Rush read the script.  After a delay—always expect delays—he informed Seidler that he wouldn’t commit to a stage version, but he would attach himself to a film version.  Feel free to use my name, he said.

And this is my favorite lesson from Seidler’s talk:

WHENEVER POSSIBLE, DO NOT WRITE FOR FREE. Even after Rush’s exciting commitment, did Seidler rush straight to his computer to start writing a new screenplay version?  No!  Why not?

He wasn’t being paid to write it, and he wasn’t going to write it for free. After his initial investment of a first draft and play, his “practice” drafts, he needed to be paid to keep moving forward.

A screenplay is a huge commitment, and there is no such thing as a “sure thing.”  We all start out writing spec scripts in hopes of getting paid down the road, and I’m no exception:  In 2009, hubby Steven Barnes and I had a screenplay in development for months with a major production company in the hope that they could sell it to the studio where they had their deal.  I looked at it as a learning experience, knowing we might never see a dime.  We didn’t.

Are there scripts I would write out of love or practice?  Absolutely.  If you want to be a good screenwriter, you have to write a lot of scripts.  Period.

But here’s the thing:  Until I started working in Hollywood, I had never been asked to do so much work without pay.  Often, Hollywood internships don’t pay.  Studios are scaling back on their development money for screenplays, more interested in finished scripts than books that need adaptation.  I understand this:  The adaptation process can take years.

But that doesn’t mean you have to write for free.

“You’ll get paid when we get our financing.”

“You’ll get paid when we get our distribution.”

“You’ll get a piece of the back end.”

All of this may be true—but pretend there will never be financing, distribution or a back end…because, most likely, there won’t be.  That’s life in the film business.  Sorry.

In Seidler’s case, a commitment from a major actor helped him put together a deal.  Whether it was a matter of principle or simply because he couldn’t afford it, he waited he took the time to dive into yet another draft.

But you don’t need a major actor to get paid for writing a treatment or script.  Whether it’s a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars—with a commitment to defer the remainder of your Guild cut until there is other financing—you deserve payment for your time and work.

If you don’t speak up and ask to be paid, you won’t be.  Even if you end up walking away from what feels like a great opportunity, you can console yourself by producing income elsewhere with the time you would have spent working for free.  The King’s Speech was Seidler’s lifelong dream, and even with emotional stakes that high, he found a way to get paid for his time and talent.

Sure, there may be exceptions…but never make writing for free your rule. Steve and I had come to this conclusion on our own, and I loved hearing a similar story from a screenwriter who just became an overnight sensation at 73.

What was Seidler’s crowning moment on his journey?

According to him, it wasn’t the day he finally had the chance to begin writing the script.  Or the day Geoffrey Rush said he would attach himself—which was the key piece in getting the film made.  It wasn’t even this week’s screenwriting Oscar nomination, one of 12 for his film.

To him, the most amazing moment was at the end of the screening at the Toronto Film Festival, in a room of 2,000 viewers who gave the film rousing applause even before the end credits.  When he heard the audience response, tears streamed from his eyes.

“I had finally found my voice,” he said.

Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due will facilitate the 2011 Organization of Black Screenwriters Writers’ Retreat in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, November 7-13, 2011.  For more information, click HERE.

Writing & the Art of a Good Scare

 

 

I try to sound sympathetic, but secretly   the stories are music to my ears.

I couldn’t sleep.  I had to put your book   down for a while.  The cover was so  scary that I had to take if off.  I can’t look at dead leaves the same way.  My husband dressed up like your character and scared me to death when he jumped out of the closet. (He’s a keeper!)

The great Harlan Ellison once advised me to avoid labels like the plague, and I know some readers are forced to argue my case at their book club meetings.  The scariest book I’ve ever read may be Toni Morrison’s Beloved, alongside novels like Pet Sematary by Stephen King.  Horror is just a label.

But I like to write scary stuff.  I don’t know why.  If I want to write about a woman in a difficult relationship, her lover is an immortal.  If I’m reuniting a character with her grandmother, Grandma has been dead for years.  I can’t help myself.  Sometimes I wish I could.

Often, the supernatural element is more gentle and metaphysical, but once in a while I set out to give readers nightmares.

Original hardcover: My Soul to Keep (1997)

It’s not an easy task.  Novelists have to compete with real-life headlines and everyday turmoil that are far scarier than anything we can dream up.  Haunted house—so what?  The bank just foreclosed on your house.  Your boss just laid you off.  Your parent is in a nursing home.

The challenge of writing scary fiction, I think, rests with the very thing that appeals to us as readers and writers:  We’re looking for an escape. No matter what else happens to us over the course of our lives, we won’t have to confront a demon that can possess us.  Most of us, anyway.    Horror fiction scares us in a safe context.  As both a writer and a reader, I look to characters unfortunate enough to land in these books for tools about how to behave when the world caves in on us.

My favorite experiences as a writer are when I can make myself cry…or scare myself.  The crying is easy—I’m a softie.  I can find myself bawling as I write a scene a reader might encounter without the blink of an eye.  Whatever pain I’ve pricked might be purely personal.

But if I scare myself…chances are, I’ll scare the reader too.

The scariest book I’ve written may be a novel called The Good House.  It’s my only book about characters facing a force that’s Evil through and through—so evil it had to be put to sleep hundreds of years ago, and my characters accidentally woke it up.

Every writer of scary fiction has a different philosophy about how to scare the pants off of readers, but I’ll use The Good House as an example of what worked for me.  (And bear in mind that many of these tools are useful in creating engaging fiction across the board.)

1.)    Create characters your readers believe.

This is probably the most oft-ignored rule in bad horror movies and fiction.  You can create the most frightening concept imaginable, but if you don’t have real people to unleash it on, your readers will yawn.  Who would read a 300-plus page novel about a dog barking outside of a Pinto unless they really cared about the mother and son trapped inside?  (Cujo.) Ask Stephen King how important characterization is in creating horror fiction.

While I was writing, I tried to make the protagonist in The Good House especially vivid by pinning up a photo of Angela Bassett, after whom my lead character was named.  I tried to infuse my book’s Angela with the brittle strength Bassett conveys in so many of her movie roles.  The rest was just trying to imagine how I would behave if I found myself in her horrible predicament.

2.)    Delve into your own fears.

This might sound like a no-brainer, but sometimes writers do everything they can to avoid touching the heart of what frightens them.  The Good House was chock full of real-life horrors:  A friend’s sudden loss of her teenage son.  A story from a shaman about a demon gone wild.  A bizarre newspaper story about a man who drowned his son in front of his playmate.

Most of all, I was grappling with intense feelings of isolation during the six years I first moved away from my family, job and friends in Miami to live in the Pacific Northwest.  I expressed my own sense of rootlessness in a character with similar feelings, only amplified.   It’s no coincidence that I wrote my first supernatural novel, The Between, after experiencing 1992’s Hurricane Andrew.  (And that hurricane later showed up in my novel The Living Blood.)

3.)    Create a real world.

On one level, your readers are daring you to scare them.  They’ve hunkered down into a mindset that says I-know-this-isn’t-real-so-there.  A short prologue that introduces your supernatural element or gives them a tastes of the horror to come is a fine hook…but after that, slow down and take your time.  Ground your story in the mundane aspects of life we all know and recognize…and then slowly begin to show your supernatural hand.  By the time your readers realize you’ve roped them into believing the unbelievable, it’s too late.  They’re stuck on the ride.

Also, give your characters—and your readers—time to breathe.  One thrill-ride after another will desensitize them for the moments you really want to count.  Slow down.  Add some levity.  A quiet dinner.  A love scene.  Then…gotcha!

4.)    Steer clear of movie clichés.

The Good House has elements of both a traditional haunted house novel as well as an Exorcist-style demon…but I didn’t set out to imitate anything I had seen before.  My challenge was to try to re-imagine familiar concepts and make them my own.  In her last novel, Fledgling, Octavia E. Butler delved into vampire mythology with her own unique interpretation, drawing on her skills as a science fiction writer.  In my view, far too many writers set out to write horror fiction because they’re inspired by movies rather than the route any good writer should follow—reading a lot of good literature and developing a unique voice and perspective.

If you’ve seen it a million times before, so have your readers.

Don’t watch horror movies, except for fun.  Read, read, read.

Note for screenwriters:  This applies to you too.  If you want to write horror scripts, READ horror scripts.  And Oscar-nominated scripts.  And any quality scripts you can get your hands on.

I wrote three drafts of a screenplay adaptation of The Good House for Fox Searchlight with my husband and collaborator, Steven Barnes. My creative breakthroughs as a screenwriter during that time came after reading scripts like Josh Olson’s A History of Violence, Alex Garland’s 28 Days Later and 12 Monkeys, by Chris Maker & David and Janet Peoples.

Watching the films is cool too, but I learned far more from reading the screenplays before and while viewing the final product.

Where’s the movie version of The Good House?  So far, still on paper.  In my imagination.  Like most film projects, it fizzled out, awaiting a new home.

But meanwhile, Steve and I are collaborating on our first horror novel together—a zombie novel called Devil’s Wake.  (It originated as a short story, “Danger Word,” we published in an anthology called Dark Dreams, recently reprinted in The Living Dead 2.)

And yes, it’s going to be scary.