This handy literary terms website defines a meme as “an idea or pattern of thought that ‘replicates’ like a virus by being passed along from one thinker to another.”  Everyone is familiar with Internet memes:  the squirrel vacation photo, the Star Wars kid and all the spoofs that followed, and LOLcats.  Like television commercials, they get overexposed and people get sick of them.

I think the definition of memes should include current slang and topics as well; you often see a spate of novels about the same type of character—for example, a reluctant superhero, or aliens, or currently, vampires.  Television is overrun by issue-of-the-week movies.  Memes fall in and out of fashion incredibly fast, and before you know it media has moved on to the next.

Writers who include memes in their stories run the risk of dating them.  Publishers and agents are looking ahead in terms of what they think might sell.  Given the time it takes to write, edit and print a book, this is merely practical.  Agents and acquisition editors don’t have crystal balls (at least I don’t think they do), but they have to know their market well and be able to spot a potential trend long before it actually becomes one.   They probably won’t want something so loaded with current memes that it’ll be dead before it ever gets out of the gate.

Slang is a special case.  Used as part of a period setting, it can work.  A character in a novel set in the 1980s might say “Gag me with a spoon!” in Valley-speak, a remark that tells us her sex, age and possible geographic location.   If the slang is peculiar to the time period and well-known, it brings the period to life, establishes character and lends color to the writing.  But don’t rely on just that.

If you don’t know current slang, please don’t use it.  Your teenage character can make do with cleaner dialogue and we’ll still know it’s a teenager by speech patterns and the things he/she says.  Kids don’t talk in slang all the time anyway.  Similarly, business-speak has phrases and words that are popular one minute, passé the next.  You’re risking dating your book by using them.  And it makes you look clueless to use them wrongly, or have a contemporary kid say something only someone from the 1960s would have said.  Unless he’s  a time-traveler, it won’t fly and readers will roll their eyes.  If your story even gets into their hands, that is.

I have a character in a WIP (work-in-progress) who is from the 1970s.  He says things like “ya dig” and “groovy.”  I remember people saying those things when I was a kid during that time so they are at least authentic.*  That’s not all he says, of course.  He talks like a normal person the rest of the time, just like most people back then.

A book could take years to land in the bookstore.  Techno-thrillers have to not only keep up with the times but be slightly futuristic and innovative.  The genre relies on reality-based technology’s advantages and failures to create and maintain suspense.  Future is always better than past because it’s the great unknown.  If you wrote your book three years ago, by the time you find an agent and a publisher and go through the whole process, your computers could be hopeless dinosaurs.

Enjoy memes for what they are, short-lived cultural fads.  They’re like cotton candy, fun while they last and gone before you know it.

*Yes, I’m old; so what!!!

Thanks to leviathan12 for this topic suggestion!

People love lists.  They make lists to keep themselves organized, to categorize stuff, to weigh the pros and cons of things, even for entertainment.  A popular website, Listverse, publishes lists related to all kinds of trivia.  When I was a kid, there were similar hard-copy books of lists.  And everybody loves David Letterman’s Top 10 Lists.

I like to make lists to organize things.  When I edit, I write one of all the scenes in a book, in each chapter, like this:

Chapter 1

1.  Batman kills the Predator.

2.  Everybody panics because there are more of them.

Chapter Two

2.  The Mayor calls for action.

3.  Joker and Batman team up to fight the army of Predators.  (Hey, it could happen.  Batman would do it to save Gotham; Joker would do it for fun.)

Doing this when I start a book gives me a rough outline to work from.  Since I tend to write haphazardly rather than chronologically, reordering the list helps me divide the book into chapters that make sense and are a good length.

I can also make notes on the later list so I know what revisions I need for each chapter or scene.  Then it might look like this:

Chapter Four

1.  Batman and Alfred invent a gas machine to kill Predators with.

a. Make Alfred have to get a part for it from some underground supplier that will enable it to work without backfiring on the user.

2.  Joker breaks into the Batcave and steals it, intending to use it on Gotham’s hapless citizens.

b. Since Joker doesn’t know he can’t use the machine without it backfiring, he is in danger.  Make Batman try to save him because he can’t technically kill Joker.  Moral quandary here!

As I said in a previous post, please please SAVE YOUR WORK AND BACK IT UP.  If you save multiple copies, make sure you update everything at the same time, too.  Once I copied and overwrote a previous save, accidentally deleting a big chunk of my notes, which I hadn’t copied over to my flash drive during the last session.  GAH!!!

Now you’ve seen a little bit of the inside of my brain.  I hope it helps you.  If you have any useful tips about lists and how they help you, with writing or anything else, please share them in the comments.

There’s something inherently satisfying to us about watching people get what they deserve.  When the movie bad guy gets skewered by the hero and falls screaming over a cliff to his death, we cheer, even if we aren’t violent people in our ordinary lives.  In fact, in our heads, the bad guy might stand in for some slight, real or imagined, and to shout and clap at his demise is cathartic.

Simplified, the concept of karma is better known to us as what goes around, comes around.   In stories, especially on television, the cops solve crimes in record time.  They always find the perp, he gets the maximum sentence and the victim has closure.  People do the right thing and their actions are rewarded.  Those who do wrong receive retribution.

Real-life cops and victims know this hardly ever happens.  Sounds like great material for a story, huh?

If your readers are accustomed to everything working out in CSI-perfect fashion, a messy or incomplete real-life ending could turn them off.  Does it serve your story?  If it does, go right ahead.  Readers are important, yet you have to consider your writer’s karma and satisfy your soul.

“But,” you may cry, “the rules of my genre say I have to have a happy ending!”  Okay, maybe they do.  Read books in your genre.  Do all of them have happy endings?  I bet not.  The point is, there are times when rules can be broken, if the protagonist can satisfy his goal.

So your hero, with his last dying breath, delivers the medicine to the Native Americans on the other side of the hills and saves the tribe, who then rally together and ride forth to help the settlers fight the corrupt army general and his troops who want their gold.  Maybe the readers have grown to love the hero but it’s not important whether he lives; what’s important is the rescue of the settlers, because that’s what’s important to the hero.

Make the story end so that the beautiful chief’s daughter, apprentice to the shaman, heals the hero and he can lead the charge to save the settlers, and it won’t necessarily suck.  That would be a Hollywood ending.  The hero’s death, however, would lend your story a poignancy that makes the settlers’ victory all the more bittersweet.  It would have emotional resonance.

If it makes sense, both you and the readers will likely be satisfied.

I’ll use a couple of cinematic examples, because they are relatively rare in homogenized Hollywood, and because they were beautifully written, especially the second.

[SPOILER ALERT!]

The Good Son is a typical thriller where the protagonist learns a terrible secret and no one believes him.  The film ends with the mother hanging over a cliff, clutching both her nephew (the protagonist and good kid) and her own son (a psychopathic monster whom she has just realized killed his baby brother).  She can’t save both.  What to do?  A compromised ending would have had someone come running up from out of nowhere, grab the mother’s legs and haul everybody back over the cliff to safety.  The psycho kid would go to a shrink and all would be well.

Nope.  Mom makes a choice.  She drops her own son.  When she did that, my movie buddy and I actually cheered.  We were so happy we didn’t care that we were in the middle of a crowded theater.  FINALLY, a movie that ended as it should have, without a cheat!

Another example is District 9, a sci-fi thriller about space aliens living in a shantytown in Johannesburg, South Africa.  The aliens are treated terribly:  heavily regulated, confined to their area and derided cruelly.  Our protagonist is Wikus, a bureaucrat sent to evacuate the aliens to another area that has been prepared for them.

When we first see Wikus, he’s a jerk.  He teases the aliens and throws his weight around.  After an accident turns the tables on him, he becomes more sympathetic.  His new alien friend promises to help him if he can only get him to the ship stranded high above the area and back to his own planet to seek help for his fellow aliens.  As the movie ends, we see the transformed (literally) Wikus waiting as patiently as he can for help that may come in three years, or not at all.

What happens to Wikus is deserved, brought on by his own boorish actions.  It is decidedly not a happy ending, especially since he does learn his lesson.   But it fits the story, it makes sense and it accomplishes the protagonist’s goal.  If he helps his friend, his accidental transformation could be reversed and he can go home.

Characters get what they deserve, mostly.  Fiction likes tidy endings unless you’re planning a follow-up.   Readers might like the Hollywood cheat.  They might want the dying hero to be saved at the last minute.  If he isn’t, there had better be a reason, and it had better be good.

The cheat dumbs down the story and compromises credibility.  It’s not good karma for the writer.  When a writer has to kill off a popular character or leave an ending ambiguous, it’s mostly done to serve the story, as it should be, because the story comes first.

This post is a bit of a cheat; I actually wrote it for an undergraduate English class. I apologize in advance for the length—I did edit it quite a bit—but it says exactly what I want to say about today’s H word, Horror.

What makes horror in a story work?

Stephen King is one of the country’s best-selling writers.  Most of his past works are horror, in short fiction and novels.  In  1981’s Danse Macabre, a nonfiction analysis of horror in print and film, he wrote regarding substance:

The melodies of the horror tale are simple and repetitive, and they are melodies of disestablishment and disintegration…but another paradox is that the ritual outletting of these emotions seems to bring things back to a more stable and constructive state again.

King essentially stated that by scaring ourselves, we gain control.  In subsequent chapters, he detailed what scares people in various time periods.  When examining different works by authors from Bram Stoker to Richard Matheson, he focused on the elements of horror.

These vary through different times, according to what people perceive as a threat.  If one examines the themes, they are remarkably similar; the foremost issue is the fear of death.

During the emergence of the Gothic novel in the late 1700s and early 1800s, the primary threat came from outside victims, in the form of vampires and other monsters who acted upon people.  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, brought a futuristic element of science fiction into the horror story.  Mary Shelley was fascinated with the latest information on galvanism, or the animating of dead flesh by means of an electric charge.  Her scientific interests and a stormy night of ghost stories with her peers in Switzerland in the summer of 1816 combined in her imagination to produce a nightmare that has become an archetype.

In the twentieth century, the blend of science fiction and horror became the creature from outer space, as in Jack Finney’s marvelously creepy novel The Body Snatchers and the film The Blob.  The monster is still an outside threat, however.

The Victorian era, named for revered Queen Victoria of England, encompassed her reign from 1837 to her death in 1901. It was an age of manners and morality.  Social codes were incredibly strict.  With the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and the vast amounts of money to be made from it, the gap between the haves and the have-nots increased.

The Victorians were also extremely religious.  Their devotion to morals, correct social behavior and the improvement of oneself is reflected in their literature.  In horror stories of the time there are plenty of ghosts and other entities that come at a whistle, or leer around the neighborhood “haunted” house.  But the inner evil of man was beginning to emerge as a frightening element.

The scariest thing to a proper Victorian was losing one’s place in society or in heaven.  In Bram Stoker’s1897 novel Dracula, the evil Count threatens not only the protagonists’ lives, but their afterlives.  He dooms the hapless Lucy Westenra to a soulless existence as a parasite, until her fiancé Arthur Holmwood frees her with a well-aimed wooden stake.  Interestingly, Dracula proved so popular that in over a hundred years, it has never gone out of print.

Changes in lexicon over the years date a piece of literature.  One could look at Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” with its elaborate prose, and definitely say that this was a writer of the nineteenth century, while Robert Bloch’s story “Floral Tribute” would be obviously of the twentieth.  The Poe story sets its reader in a murky, gas-lit world of dark, musty corners, black cats and eerie mystery:

During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.

And Bloch’s matter-of-fact language is more like the brightly lit, modern parking lot in a suburban mall, spare and revealing:

They always had fresh flowers on the table at Grandma’s house.  That’s because Grandma lived right in back of a cemetery.

“Nothing like flowers to brighten up a room,” Grandma used to say.  “Ed, be a good boy and take a run over.  Fetch me back something pretty….”

Both writers have created atmosphere with words; both opening passages tell us where we are immediately. The difference is in the use of the language.  In one, circumstances are labeled; in the other, they are not.

Poe used many descriptive and emotional words to establish the setting – dreary, dull, soundless, oppressively, melancholy.  Bloch did the same thing with fewer words.  All he tells you is that it’s a cemetery. Your mind fills in the rest.

Would Bloch’s minimal prose be difficult for a Victorian reader?  “Floral Tribute” is a story so subtle I had to read it several times before I understood that the main characters, except for Ed, were dead.  The house behind the cemetery would scarcely be imaginable to a reader used to being told exactly where everything is, what it looks like, feels like, smells like and so forth.  Without the help of the lexicon he was used to, the Victorian would be lost.

The writer’s task is to set the imaginings down in such a way that the reader is able to recreate his imaginings easily.  By using elements of style and themes aimed squarely at the state of mind of the reader, the writer can touch the emotions and leave an impression that may stick around long after the lights are out.

So settle in bed and read W.W. Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw” or Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows.” After lights-out, you may lie awake, staring into the dark, visions of resurrection and haunted groves of trees clashing through your frightened brain and wait for dawn, or sleep, or whatever comes first for you…

Share your recommendations for scary books or short stories, classic or contemporary, in the comments.

Why are people so dumb?

We have dumb criminals, dumb politicians, and dumb kids.  Our bosses are dumb, and so are our coworkers (at least in our opinions).  Other drivers are dumb.  There are ridiculous books, dumb movies and idiotic TV shows, which dumb people purchase and watch.

How many times have you seen a news story detailing someone’s ill-thought-out mishap and said to yourself, “What a dummy!”?  How many times have you heard the same story and said “What could I do with a character like that?”

A very enjoyable film, Idiocracy, came out in 2006 that showed the protagonist, a time-traveler of normal intelligence, transported 500 years into a future where everyone was hopelessly stupid and he was the smartest man in the world.  It was an attempt at lampooning the dumbing-down of American society and the corporate intrusion into every aspect of daily life.  People are using it as an example of where we’re headed.  The writer/s got a lot of mileage out of the concept and created some memorable stupid characters, including Frito Pendejo (Spanish for dumbass), the protagonist’s reluctant sidekick, and the hilariously over-the-top U.S. President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.

Not everyone in life can be a rocket scientist.  A mix of characters adds variety to your story and can even be the catalyst that drives your plot forward.  Here are some ways stupid characters can be played in your fiction:

• For laughs.  Take Idiocracy.  We laugh at stupid people or situations because it makes us feel superior.  The humor in the film tempers the warning that our society is allowing our brainpower to diminish by letting dumb things take over completely.  Because we’re laughing, we keep watching and the message sinks in.  Without the silliness of Frito and the President and the exaggerated Costco store the size of a city, a book with the same message would be heavy-handed and unpalatable.   In this case, it’s sort of a double entendre.  The dumb characters are stand-ins for our future selves but since they are funny, it doesn’t sting.

• Dramatic effect or pathos.  [WARNING! SPOILER!] John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men is probably the best-known literary example.  George and Lennie are traveling companions, migrant workmen who go where the jobs are.  Lennie is “simple,” and George worries over him constantly.  When Lennie does something horrific, George must deal with it harshly and decides to kill Lennie both to save him from vengeance and to divest himself of the responsibility.  Because we have grown to like Lennie and his terrible deed is truly an accident, George’s solution is heartwrenching.  We feel as bad for him as we do for the hapless Lennie.

• Contrast.  A really dumb character makes everyone else look smarter.   A sidekick who always gets in trouble gives the hero a chance to preen as he saves his buddy.  A stupid assistant will blindly help his evil scientist master and never realize what he is about to do.  In books and films involving child protagonists, adults are often seen as useless, lumbering fools, blind to their children’s predicaments, or absent entirely.  Stephen King’s IT is a good example of this, although the adults are as much victims of the Pennywise character as the kids.  As the child protagonists grow older, they forget much of what happened the summer they battled Derry’s evil sewer-dwelling clown.  Although this can be attributed to blocking out traumatic events, King implies that adulthood comes with a lessening of the purity and power they possessed as kids, which helped them defeat the monster.

• To advance the plot.   The old guy who pokes the meteor with a stick and inadvertently becomes the Blob’s first victim is a classic dumb character.   He’s the one you love to yell at in the movie theater: “Get away from there!”  Of course he never does, and the beast is loose in the innocent small town.

It’s fun to write a MacGyver-like character who can get himself out of any spot with an encyclopedic brain and a Mythbuster’s inventiveness.  What a great hero that is.  A less likely hero would be someone whose knowledge is limited, but whose spirit is unconquerable.  Experiment with the dumb character, who might not be so dumb once he’s become your own.

If you have any examples of enjoyably silly, annoyingly hilarious or heartwarmingly triumphant dumb characters, please share them in the comments.