OK, this is weird. I’m working on that horror story I mentioned here a few days ago, which is going pretty well btw, and on Sunday night I wrote the following scene: The elevator dinged. Wayne pressed forward but the elevator doors hadn’t opened yet. He heard a smashing sound, looked again toward the end of the hallway. The glass in the doors there was starred with cracks, and even as he watched one of the monkeys swung a rock again into the glass, smashing a gaping hole. Rats poured through.
The story is set at a university so I’m using my university and my particular building as the model. The glass doors described above are exactly like the doors in my building, and they open onto the parking lot where the attack comes from.
Now for the weirdness. I came in Monday morning to work, and in the afternoon I had a chance fiddle a bit with the above scene, and I also wrote another scene with a window being smashed. As I leave the building about 6:00 that evening I see that the bottom glass panels on both doors into the parking lot are badly cracked and starred in reality. It’s only the lower panels, the same panels I envisioned being smashed through by the monkeys in my scene.
To top it off, the story takes place on a Monday, the same day of the week that this happened. Now, I’m not much of a one to believe in weird things so I’m pretty sure this is a coincidence. But it is certainly one of the strangest coincidences I’ve ever experienced. Strange enough that I’ve been telling everyone about it.
Cue the Twilight Zone music.
Showing posts with label just plain weird. Show all posts
Showing posts with label just plain weird. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Surreal Corner
I'm off school today. No grading to do right at the moment. Washing a load of clothes and cleaning up around the house a bit today, and I hope to get some good writing work done as the day progresses.
In the meantime, for a rather surreal experience, I post something I located on the net this morning. At least it seemed surreal to me. It apparently occurred in 1940.
Carole Landis, lush, blond cinemactress whose ambition is to graduate from cheese cake pictures to Bette Davis roles, played the outraged woman in an offset drama.
A man broke into her dressing room, announced himself as "Grimmick, the attorney," started in a businesslike way to unzip her black tights. Her screams brought suave Cinemactor George Sanders, a gatekeeper and a studio policeman. Later, in the Hollywood police station, Carole pointed an indignant finger at smirking Attorney Charles Gramlich, a former mental patient, and undramatically said: "That's the guy."
Monday, September 24, 2007
Exotic Writing, Part 2
Are these the rules and principles for salting your stories with exotic imagery that works? Let me know what you think.
1: The exotic is anything that readers haven’t directly experienced, but given the expansion of the media in everyone’s life the exotic is getting harder to find. A decade ago a burkha would have seemed exotic to most Americans. Much less so now. Modern writers must work harder to find the exotic. This may mean turning established imagery on its head. For example, vampires began in literature as villains, but increasingly have become heroes.
2: Any scene must be primarily realistic and not exotic. Just like a small child wants to know where its mother is before it begins to explore, so a reader needs to have the comfort of the familiar before being introduced to the exotic. In horror fiction, the monster is typically depicted as coming out of a realistic setting. People know what woods look like. They know what an old house looks like. The monster is the exotic element.
3. The more realistic a scene is in general, the greater the impact the exotic element(s) will have.
4. The exotic quickly becomes the familiar. There was a time in America where men found the sight of a woman’s ankle terribly erotic. There was a time when any sexual position other than missionary was considered terribly kinky. That time is not now, unless someone is having sex with someone else’s ankle in a bathroom.
5. Although magical realism may be an exception, the exotic works best when it has a logical explanation, even if it is a slender explanation. I wonder, however, whether this is more something in me than in the average reader. To this day, for example, I can’t buy Kafka’s Metamorphosis because the guy just wakes up and he’s a cockroach. I can buy a shape shifting alien, a demon from Hell, a vampire far easier. There is at least some conceivable explanation for such things, although they require the assumption of things that we have no scientific evidence for. There is no possible explanation for how a guy living in a normal everyday world would wake up as a giant cockroach. Thus, to me, the Metamorphosis is far less realistic than any other fantasy I’ve ever read.
Well, I think there are more principles/rules but this is all I have time for today. Will there be a part 3? Who knows. Maybe one will magically appear on my computer overnight while I sleep.
1: The exotic is anything that readers haven’t directly experienced, but given the expansion of the media in everyone’s life the exotic is getting harder to find. A decade ago a burkha would have seemed exotic to most Americans. Much less so now. Modern writers must work harder to find the exotic. This may mean turning established imagery on its head. For example, vampires began in literature as villains, but increasingly have become heroes.
2: Any scene must be primarily realistic and not exotic. Just like a small child wants to know where its mother is before it begins to explore, so a reader needs to have the comfort of the familiar before being introduced to the exotic. In horror fiction, the monster is typically depicted as coming out of a realistic setting. People know what woods look like. They know what an old house looks like. The monster is the exotic element.
3. The more realistic a scene is in general, the greater the impact the exotic element(s) will have.
4. The exotic quickly becomes the familiar. There was a time in America where men found the sight of a woman’s ankle terribly erotic. There was a time when any sexual position other than missionary was considered terribly kinky. That time is not now, unless someone is having sex with someone else’s ankle in a bathroom.
5. Although magical realism may be an exception, the exotic works best when it has a logical explanation, even if it is a slender explanation. I wonder, however, whether this is more something in me than in the average reader. To this day, for example, I can’t buy Kafka’s Metamorphosis because the guy just wakes up and he’s a cockroach. I can buy a shape shifting alien, a demon from Hell, a vampire far easier. There is at least some conceivable explanation for such things, although they require the assumption of things that we have no scientific evidence for. There is no possible explanation for how a guy living in a normal everyday world would wake up as a giant cockroach. Thus, to me, the Metamorphosis is far less realistic than any other fantasy I’ve ever read.
Well, I think there are more principles/rules but this is all I have time for today. Will there be a part 3? Who knows. Maybe one will magically appear on my computer overnight while I sleep.
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