Hello. I’m Bob Pastorella, co-host of the This Is Horror podcast, website manager for This Is Horror, and writer. I’m the author of Mojo Rising, They’re Watching (with Michael David Wilson), and have numerous short-stories and non-fiction online and in print in various publications.
Previous newsletters can be found here.
Updates:
January 21st, 2022. Writing this part today for a PSA. I’ll be 55 years old this year, and my G.P. informed me it’s time again for another colonoscopy. The last few years flew by; I’m still relishing the pleasure of fasting and drinking a gallon of nasty crap to cleanse my plumbing from the last time. Oh joy, I get to do it again, can’t wait!
Sarcasm, obviously, but if you're over 50 years of age, you NEED to get a colonoscopy. Besides drinking the nasty crap and fasting, the procedure is painless, and it helps with the early detection of colon cancer. No cancer is good cancer, but colon cancer is quite dangerous. Early detection can save your life! Do it!
End of PSA.
I have been digging in deep on Turn Up the Night, my WIP. The soundtrack is Dio-era Black Sabbath. I was kind of leaning to Nine Inch Nails for this project, but it’s different enough from a previously abandoned project to let the Nine Inch Nails playlist stay put for now. Using Sabbath for TUtN fits the main character better. As I’ve mentioned before, this is another vampire story, this time focusing on the ghostly, or revenant, aspects of the trope. Early folklore vampire tales read as though the victims were experiencing a ghost, and I really want to tap into that vibe. Think The Hunger meets Relic (2020) in the vibe of Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. Literary influences are Straub’s Ghost Story and King’s ‘Salem’s Lot. It deals with dementia and Alzheimer’s and it’s going to go in some rather unpleasant places with Father/Son relationships and abandonment from both ends of the spectrum.
For the record, this story is NOT about my Dad. I’ve used his artistry and art for the father character, but my Dad didn’t abandon me, or my sister, or my Mom, ever.
Once more … with feeling
I said a while back I was toying with a writing craft essay. Craft can take on many forms; mechanical, grammatical, even conceptual, and these crafts overlap and intersect by design. This time I’m going to take on a conceptual craft: writing emotions.
Emotions are sometimes a little difficult to pull off on the page. This is when it pays to have the concept of “show don’t tell” down. Telling me a character is experiencing rage is nothing compared to showing me that character completely demolish a wooden crate with their fists because they can’t remember their Gmail password. Trust me, we want to see the character destroy that crate. We want to feel the wood as it splinters and cuts into their knuckles. We want to smell the blood from those cuts. We want to hear the grunts of the character and the sound of the boards cracking. We want to feel the sting of the sweat getting in their eyes.
We don’t need to go on and on about it. It can be short and sweet. Handled right, it adds depth and nuance to your characters you can’t get by “telling” the scene.
It’s also important to know how our characters react in certain situations. Not every character is going to have a short fuse, or react the same way other characters do when triggered. Consistency is important, but there is a time when characters do have a full-blown meltdown. Some characters fly off the handle with the slightest infraction, some hold it inside and let it build. You may have a character who is cool like a cucumber in nearly every scene, unfazed by everything that crosses their path, and while there are people like that in real life, they never stay that way. Sometimes they take out their frustrations in private. Sometimes they self-harm or destroy inanimate objects. Sometimes being sarcastic or cruel to others masks the pent-up turmoil going on inside their minds.
Sometimes it’s not a negative emotion that’s affecting them, but elation or surprise. We all know someone who always seems to be giggling and laughing at everything. Notice how they find things funny, how they don’t take anything too seriously, nothing really holds them back. Are they like that in private? What do they do when they are alone and life grabs them by the balls? Some remain in character, others express themselves in ways others rarely see in public. While it’s good to maintain consistency, it’s also good to let your characters slip off the rails to show their vulnerabilities.
Something I think a lot of writers miss is how we tend to mix our emotions, especially when dealing with grief. Merriam-Webster defines grief as “deep sadness caused especially by someone's death”. Sounds simple enough, but we all experience grief differently. There are all kinds of ways grief can bubble up to the top. Some may fall into a deep depressive state, nearly catatonic, barely or unable to perform the everyday functions of life. Others may hit the other end of the scale and not display any emotion at all. Not everyone cries at funerals. And then others may feel the depression, but it manifests and turmoil, anger, and rage. A good example of this is Annie in the Ari Aster film Hereditary. Already feeling depressed and troubled from the death of her mother, Annie begins to express full-blown rage after her son’s accident that results in the death of her daughter. Of course, we don’t know exactly what’s going on at this point in the film, but her character motivations remain true and stay the course until it’s too late. Another example is Rebecca Hall’s performance as grieving widow Beth in David Bruckner’s The Night House. Here, Hall conjures up the pent-up frustrations of a widow questioning everything about herself, and her dead husband, exhibited by numbing herself with wine and chastising one of her student’s mother about her “personal matters.” Beth isn’t a mean person, she used to be happy. But now everything she’s ever wanted is gone and this is how she deals with it. She doesn’t hold anything back and presents the audience with a realistic and very relatable portrayal of grief and loss.
Some writers avoid emotion as much as possible, and if that’s your style or the way you write, and it’s working for you, then yes, please continue. For others, we need that emotional connection, and we need to get it right. The more we care about the character, the more we can drag them to the gates of Hell and back again. Suspense works in every genre, but especially in horror. Suspense is what makes us scared because we care about what happens to the character(s), and emotion is one of the most important ways we can relate to, and give a damn about, our story characters.
As much as we try to avoid the “drama” in our personal lives (not everyone avoids it … there are some people that thrive on drama) skimping on the emotions of the characters isn’t the place. We read the story because of the “drama”, and if used effectively, emotions can help us relate to those pesky “unlikeable” characters, and forge a bond with those characters we would crawl to the ends of the Earth for.
Music: Heaven and Hell, Dio, W.A.S.P., Crowbar, Nine Inch Nails.
Films: Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched. Documentary about folk horror that is absolutely amazing. Highly recommended.
TV: Archive 81. Holy shit, this series is amazing. Three episodes in and I’m jonesing for more.
Books: Still The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte (again). Straub’s Ghost Story (again and again forever and ever), King’s ‘Salem’s Lot and The Shining, Good Samaritans by Will Carver.
Next Issue: who knows. Might do a poll on Twitter … watch for it.
peace&love
Bob.