Here’s the sort of “they’ve got a holiday for everything now” celebrations I have no trouble supporting: National Encourage a Young Writer Day! Although no one seems to know the origin of this “holiday,” according to the National Day Calendar:
“Observed each year on April 10th is National Encourage a Young Writer Day. Do you know a young person who has a vivid imagination, maybe someone who likes to tell stories and reads a lot of books? These may be the signs of a great young writer. National Encourage a Young Writer Day would be a good time to talk to them about their ideas and dreams. Encourage them to pursue their goals and develop their writing skills.”
“Again, He Who Stalks” page 1
As I always say, everybody’s gotta start somewhere, and that’s true for writing as much as any other career. Want an example? Check out my first published work, “Again, He Who Stalks”—a science-fiction story I wrote for my high school’s literary magazine when I was 16. Take a look at that, young writers, and then get to work—you could only do better!
So, picking up where we left off in the February 27th post, we’ve been discussing influences on the writing of the first Pandora Zwieback novel, Blood Feud. Last time I talked about how the Horrorpops song “MissFit” became Pan’s anthem. Now we get to the introduction of her gothy friends.
There’s a scene in chapter 21 in which Pan and her friends do a little song-and-dance number for videographer Tim Merrick (whose day job is working as an assistant to David Zwieback, owner of the storefront museum Renfield’s House of Horrors and Mystical Antiquities). When I started writing that scene, the first horror-related tune that popped into my head was Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” A classic 1980s pop hit, with a good beat and lyrics, and Vincent Price rapping—what better song for Pan to launch into?
Yeah, okay, it was too easy a musical choice, and way too mainstream a tune for Goths, but I was trying to find a way to make a transition between a scene in Renfield’s, during which Pan has lovingly bullied her father into retrieving her makeup kit from his car, and the dance number on the museum’s basement steps. As originally written, it went like this:
The door swung shut behind him, and Pan turned to face Tim. He looked highly amused. “What?”
Tim shrugged. “Just couldn’t help noticing you got him trained well.”
“Of course.” Pan flashed a wicked grin. “And now, Timothy,” she intoned in her deepest, most ominous voice, “at last you know the true power of being Daddy’s Little Girl…”
* * *
“ ’Cause this is Thrillllerrrrr!” Pan wailed, head thrown back, as she and the crew sang along with Michael Jackson and danced on the steps leading to the museum’s basement floor.
In movie terminology, I saw the transition as a smash cut: an abrupt jump from one scene to the next—in this case, everyday Pan giving her best sinister smile instantly changing into glammed-up Pan singing her heart out as the “camera” pulls back to show her and her friends on the stairs. (If you’ve been following these posts, you already know how I tend to “see” the scenes I write in cinematic angles.)
But then one night I downloaded the latest episode of Rue Morgue Radio (a great online, F-bomb-loaded radio-style show that stopped broadcasting in January 2012 after seven years, but you should definitely check out their archives). One of the first songs that the host, Tomb Dragomir, played was a track from the Misfits’ 1999 album Famous Monsters: “Fiend Club”—and I suddenly realized that Pan & Co. had a much better song to perform:
We won’t pretend that this is the end
We’re not losers all of the time
We march and we fall
We’re one and for all
It’s just evil all of the time
All the time
We are the fiend club
We are the fiend club
We are the fiend club
Not you! Not you!
You dress so messed up
Your hair is too long
But I’m changing it all of the time
We march and we fall
We’re one and for all
It’s just evil all of the time
All the time
Evil all the time
We are the fiend club
We are the fiend club
We are the fiend club
Not you! Not you!
Evil all the time
We are the fiend club
We are the fiend club
We are the fiend club
Not you! Not you!
We are the fiend club
Not exactly a song you can choreograph a dance number to—well, not unless it includes a lot of violent head banging—but I thought, what a great anthem that would make for Pan and her friends: united in their weirdness, and proud of it. So, out went the King of Pop and in came a far more appropriate band (who are horror fans themselves).
FYI: The actual Fiend Club is the Misfits’ fan club. You can find it here.
“Where do you get your ideas from?” It’s the question every writer has been asked at some point in their career, and one that never has a set single answer.
I addressed a similar question, “What inspires you to write?”, in a recent interview at the book-review blog Fiction Fascination, explaining the genesis of a couple of scenes in Blood Feud, the first Pandora Zwieback novel: Pan sitting out in a rainstorm; how her dad gave her a DVD copy of the not-suitable-for-little-kids movie Watership Down (“But it had bunnies on the cover!”) for her fifth birthday. Writing inspirations can come from almost anywhere—it can be a book you’ve read, a conversation you overheard, a song that played on the radio…
They can even come from observations of the most mundane events. For example: this scene in the 1999 film American Beauty—written by True Blood creator Alan Ball—in which Wes Bentley’s character Ricky Fitts describes videotaping a plastic bag floating in a breeze:
In an interview conducted in 2000, Ball explained that the scene was inspired by “an encounter I had [in the early 1990s] with a plastic bag one day in front of the World Trade Center.”
One of my short stories, “Laundry Day”—about a group of people trapped while doing their wash on the eve of a zombie uprising—got its start from a toy ring that I bought from a gumball machine in a neighborhood Laundromat. What popped into my head when I first saw the machine full of rings was a scene of a guy presenting this crappy, 25-cent jewelry to his girlfriend as a romantic gesture, knowing they’d never have the chance to get married. The “camera” in my head then pulled back to reveal them huddled inside a Laundromat that had its metal security gates pulled down; beyond the gates was a full-on zombie apocalypse. (Yes, a lot of what I “see” when I write involves Hollywood-style cinematography.)
Initially it was going to be a three-page comic book story, with the zombie reveal on the final page. I never got around to writing it, though, and the toy ring (the one you see in the picture) sat in a drawer for a few years. Then, in 2006, I was invited by editor Vincent Sneed to pitch a story for his upcoming zombie anthology, The Dead Walk Again!—and it just so happened I had this toy ring in a drawer to remind me of something…
By the time I finished the story it had taken on a much darker—some have said incredibly nasty—tone. My rationale was that, in a zombie anthology, there’s no surprise in having your tale end with “And then he became a zombie, too!” and a happy ending would seem like a cheat. Thus, the bleaker tone, and an ending that literally took people by surprise—which is exactly the sort of reaction every writer wants from their audience.
(“Laundry Day,” by the way, was reprinted in 2010, in another walking dead anthology: Best New Zombie Tales 2, published by Books of the Dead Press. Warning: it’s not a story—or a book—for younger readers. The stories are gory as hell, and in “Laundry Day” I drop F-bombs so frequently you’d think I picked them up at a discount at Costco.)
Next week, we’ll look at some of the inspirations that worked their way into the first Pandora Zwieback novel, Blood Feud. Feel free to sing along with them…
But then one night I downloaded the latest episode of 
One of my short stories, “Laundry Day”—about a group of people trapped while doing their wash on the eve of a zombie uprising—got its start from a toy ring that I bought from a gumball machine in a neighborhood Laundromat. What popped into my head when I first saw the machine full of rings was a scene of a guy presenting this crappy, 25-cent jewelry to his girlfriend as a romantic gesture, knowing they’d never have the chance to get married. The “camera” in my head then pulled back to reveal them huddled inside a Laundromat that had its metal security gates pulled down; beyond the gates was a full-on zombie apocalypse. (Yes, a lot of what I “see” when I write involves Hollywood-style cinematography.)