The Reality Sniff Test

The comic urban fantasy started out fun.  The heroine had been a demon slayer in her teenage and early adult life, then she’d put aside her slaying tools and become a wife, then a mother of two small kids.  She’d never told her husband about her Buffy the Demon Slayer days.

Then a demon shows up at her home and tries to kill her.  She dispatches him.  Another, more powerful demon threatens her children’s lives, and he’s also in her home.  

At this point, she decides not to tell her husband about the demons after their kids or about her past because it would be awkward.

This is the moment when I stopped reading.  The author had failed my reality sniff test.  

Sure, this is a comic urban fantasy, and readers know that the kids will be okay, and the heroine will win against the demons, but the heroine has done something that, in the real world, most of us would find selfish, stupid, and unforgivable.  She is risking the lives of her young children.  

Books aren’t bubbles that have nothing to do with the real world.  Yes, we will accept wild premises like ghosts, vampires, and demons, but most of us enter a book’s world with our own beliefs and views of the world, and the author who errs in those common beliefs because she thinks that we will put them aside in her book is often wrong and loses a reader.  

When you are writing, consider the reality sniff test.  Do your characters act the way someone in the real world would?  Is that behavior acceptable in the real world?  Does your world building make sense in comparison to the way the real world is?  Does your world/society fit a society from our past, or can it be imagined as real?  If the answer is no to these questions or other reality sniff tests, then you need to do some rewriting.

Choosing the Traiits of Traditional Monsters

When you write a story about monsters, legends, and myths, you have to decide whether you’ll use the traditional information or not.

Part of your decision will be determined by the choice of magic or reality.  Are your creatures real in the sense they make scientific sense and follow the rules of the real world, or are they magic based so they can break all the laws of science and the real world?

Another part of your decision is whether you embrace all the “facts” about your creature or not.

Take vampires.  Some of the common folklore traits are

• They are undead humans.
• Bright sunlight kills them.
• A stake made of a specific wood will kill them if it goes through their heart.
• They prey on humans by drinking their blood.
• They have fangs.
• They turn into bats or some other creature.
• Their reflection can’t be seen in a mirror because they have no soul.

In a reality-based story, some of these facts can be worked with.  Vampirism could be a type of blood virus, for example.

Other facts like shape changing won’t work without some serious fudging of science, and the matter of changing mass must be considered.  If a vampire can change into a bat, the bat must weigh the same as the vampire so the bat would need wings as big as a small plane’s to get off the ground.  

And then there are facts that make no sense whatsoever in the real world or a world with magic.  

If a vampire can’t be seen in a mirror because it doesn’t have a soul, does that mean that your clothes, toothbrush, and the wall behind you in the bathroom mirror have souls?  

I don’t think so, either.  

In defense of those who came up with this silly vampire notion, until the last two centuries, most people didn’t have a mirror, and the mirrors that were around were tiny and blurry.  

If you decide to change any of the important facts about your vampire or other creature, you need to give the reader some reason for your decision.  Your vampire can tell his new ladylove that he’s perfectly capable of walking in the sunlight, and the belief that he can’t has been a standard misinformation campaign by vampires for thousands of years so they can walk among humans without discovery and can take prey during the day without the prey being aware of the danger.

Whether you use the traditional traits or not, be sure to think very carefully about them so they make sense within the world you have created for your creatures.

Magic in the Real World

If you are writing fantasy, you can do things that won't work in the real world. A person can levitate or fly, change shape and mass, or anything else as long as you stay within the rules you've created for that fantasy world.

However, some real world rules apply. Magic use should take a physical toll on the human wizard since it uses physical and mental energy. You can decide just how much energy is needed in your world, but you'll have to make sure your user has to eat and rest at a certain point.

Many recent novels with vampires, werewolves, and other creatures have presented these creatures as real, not magic. They are genetic mutations, or victims of a virus, or something like that.

If your creatures are real, not magic, then you have to think carefully about their special abilities, their energy requirements, etc., because you can no longer get away with saying that it's magic and doesn't have to make sense.

Creating a Psychic Character

 Are you psychic? Do you see ghosts?

Me neither. But I have written these characters.

One of the ways I try to get into the head of characters like this is research.

A great resource is a nonfiction TV series called PSYCHIC KIDS. Real life kids with psychic abilities are brought together with an adult psychic and a child psychologist who specializes in psychic kids, and they are helped to come to terms with their gifts.

The parents are also helped.

Most of the kids are terrified by spirits who have harassed them for years, and they are afraid to sleep. Some are physically ill from anxiety and stress. Yet they have nowhere to turn except for parents. They are afraid to talk to friends because they will be ostracized, and parents warn them not to talk to other adults. They tend to be loners.

The parents are terrified, as well. They are unable to protect their kids from the ghosts, and the normal routes for help -- doctors, teachers, and ministers -- are closed to them because they fear their children will be labeled as mentally ill and medicated into zombies. They fear that their children could be taken from them by social services who won't believe the child's true problem.

The psychic helps the kids come to terms with their gifts and teaches them to take away the fear, and the psychologist teaches the parents how to cope with their psychic children. The children also develop relationships with the other psychic kids so they no longer feel alone or like freaks.

How would I use this information? A child character is easy enough to create after watching these children. So would a parent of a psychic child.

Now let's extrapolate this information and imagine an adult who had a childhood like this. Fear of discovery would often be a major influence on an adult. She wouldn't trust easily because most people who find out about her gift consider her a freak. Authority figures would automatically be distrusted. Trust and the need to be accepted for what she is would be the central emotional issues in a romantic relationship.

But what if the child grew up being totally open about her gift or if she "came out" as a psychic as an adult?

This character would be very comfortable in her own skin. She'd know herself very well. Her sense of being apart from others would manifest itself in a certain flamboyance -- a look at me I'm different and I don't care what you think attitude.

She would probably see her abilities as a gift rather than a curse, and she would use that gift to help others.

In a romance, she would have problems thinking of changing to help the relationship work because she's worked so hard to be who she is. "Me" has always been more important than "us."

This extrapolation isn't the only way to see adult psychic characters, but it does give you a start on writing a character different from yourself.

If you have no reality source for your character's background, you will have to find a real world analogy.

For example, a child who knows he's gay at an early age would be an analogy of a psychic character. Many in society view both with alarm, and secrecy is often the choice made. A writer would research the problems and emotional toll of being a gay child then use that information to understand a psychic child.

No matter how unusual or magical a character is, the author must use her knowledge of what makes a certain kind of person tick to make that character believable to the reader.

How DIfferent Should Your World Be?

 QUESTION:  Here’s what I'm wondering as I'm setting up my “alternate earth.” If the reader’s suspension of disbelief is necessary to enjoy your writing, how do you know what kinds of things might be too much for your readers? Might pull them out of the story as they puzzle over why someplace that’s earth-yet-not-earth has *that*?

If your world has internal consistency and follows its own logic, most readers will accept that world.  Readers want to believe your world.  That's why they buy your story.

Things like dogs, cats, and pine trees are just simple shorthand to make that world comfortable for the reader as well as make it easier for him to connect with it.  

If the reader has to learn everything from the names of the trees to the five different kinds of six-legged beasts of burden, and they really have nothing important to do with the story, he will be seriously put off.  Readers like comfortable, shorthand things like pine trees and horses.

Touches of the strange will liven up a scene to give it a sense of elsewhere, but there need only be touches.  In a scene where the hero and his friends stop at a staging inn to rest their horses and get a meal, you can have the usual things like the tavern, the stablehands, and the horses, but you can also mention a corral filled with hippogriffs who are fluttering their wings and snapping their beaks as one of the servants tosses them dead rabbits.

But detail for the sake of detail will delay the action and cause the problem you mention.  For example, the hero is walking through the woods, and a tree of living flame stops him in his tracks because of its beauty.  It begins to sing of the glory of the wind and the majesty of the rain.

The hero finally moves away and promptly forgets it, and it has nothing else to do with the story.

The reader will wait the whole novel for that scene to make some sense with the plot, but it never does so the reader gets angry.

If, however, that singing tree gives the hero a riddle he must understand to achieve his victory, then the scene is very important, indeed.  

Somewhere along the way, it would probably be best if the reader learns why the tree gave him that clue so the plot has some internal logic.

You also need to decide what your story is really about.  If it’s about the unusual political situation in this world, then most of the extra details and information should help focus on that.  If it’s about the world’s magic and how it is failing, then that’s where the details and the weirdness should be focused.  

Most of this boils down to not overwhelming your reader and avoiding info dumping to show off your incredlbie worldbuilding skills.  

Resources for Writing Psychic Characters

In recent weeks, I’ve come across a free ebook and a podcast interview that offer idea fodder and information for writing a psychic character or plotting a novel with psychic characters. The Kindle ebook is free at this moment, but it may not be when you check it out.  

HOW TO LIVE WITH A PSYCHIC: YOUR GUIDE TO MAINTAINING A HAPPY RELATIONSHIP WHEN SOMEONE YOU LOVE GETS WEIRD, Crystal Hope Reed.  Nonfiction.  Free as a Kindle ebook.  The author is a traditional counseler who specializes in mental health and education.  She has a Masters in the subject.  Her husband is a noted medium.  The title pretty well tells it all.  It’s written primarily for those in a relationship when their significant other begins to manifest talent.  Topics include telling the difference between psychosis and psychic abilities, how to keep both of you grounded in the real world when weird stuff happens and the partner may begin to lose himself, how to care for yourself as well as your partner, the different types of psychic abilities, and how to protect yourself against darker energies. The final chapter is various psychics telling their own stories.  Nicely written and simple to read.  

PODCAST INTERVIEW WITH MEDIUM TYLER HENRY (The interview is at the beginning of the podcast): 

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/hollywood-medium-tyler-henry-explains-how-he-speaks-with-spirits

A Very Vampire Christmas

With the traditional vampire, writers know vampires’ relationship to Christianity.  Crosses and Holy Water make them shriek and back away because vampires are demonic evil.  

These days, that’s not necessarily always true.  In Tanya Huff’s series about vampire Henry Fitzroy, he pals around with priests, carries a crucifix, and is the most religious of all the characters because he has seen true evil and wants to protect others from it.  

Charlaine Harris’ Stookie Stackhouse stories tosses in a bit of religion, mainly Stookie’s, in with the vampires and werewolves.  One of Harris’ short stories shares the name with this article as Viking vampire Eric tries to figure out Christmas so he can please his human girl friend.

Fictional monsters come in all shapes and kinds with a moral spectrum from light to dark and everywhere in between as it fits the story and the genre, and readers and writers are fine with that.

Then there’s stories based on the Greek and Norse mythologies.  Here’s where things have been getting weird with some writers.  Most of the Greek myth-based stories I’ve read have ignored Christianity and focused on the secular aspects of the characters. 

Or, in the case of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, people go to the afterlife they believe in.

However, some writers using the Norse stories have been making some strange choices.  I just finished a contemporary paranormal story where Norse gods were Catholic and celebrated Christmas!  

Then there’s a story where every warrior or strong soul, no matter their religion or ethnicity, are taken to Valhalla when they die so they can fight at Ragnorak which is the Norse Apocalypse.  This essentially denies the truth of any other religion.  

Does this mixing or ignoring of the most prominent current religions work?  Not for me because it was so shocking that it knocked me out of the story.  Your tolerance may vary.

But it does pose a serious question you should ask in your worldbuilding.  How does contemporary religion and readers’ faith affect your story?  

The Yin and Yang of Worldbuilding

One of the fun things about worldbuilding for a fantasy or paranormal novel is that you can take bits and pieces of religions and mythologies to build your own world.  Popular writers like Kevin Hearne have had confrontations between their main character and the gods of Greece, the Norse, and the Celts as well as demons, angels, werewolves, and vampires.  

This mix and match can be as much fun as an a la carte desert tray.  

However, and this is a big one, you must include the light/good and the dark/evil elements of these choices so that the playing field isn’t ridiculously one-sided.

One of the most common mistakes I see is the use of only the dark/evil part of a pantheon or religion.

A recent young adult novel I read had Judeo-Christian demons invading this world with only a small number of magical humans to fight them.  The two most powerful humans were a couple of ten-year-old boys.  

I kept expecting some force from the light to make its appearance to help give these kids and the human race a chance, but none appeared.   Any major victory without help is ridiculous and unbelievable.

Consider the show SUPERNATURAL.  The universe in this series has both angels and demons in play.  The angels, for the most part, are “big dicks,” but a few offer some assistance in the constant struggle against demons and other monsters.  Sam and Dean, even though ridiculously skilled, have more than themselves in this struggle.  They are also adept at creating alliances including with the dark side like the King of Hell when what they face threatens both sides, good and evil.  

As writers we must stack the odds against our heroes so that their victories are sweet and hard fought, but we can’t make the mistake of making that victory ridiculous by offering no help from the the light side.

The Zombie as a Character

Zombies are the animated dead.  In their usual depictions in movies and TV shows, they are shambling, disintegrating, and mindless corpses who seek to kill the living so they can eat their brains.  

Sometimes, they are controlled by magic so they appear to be intelligent but are really robots of dead flesh.

The traditional zombie is most often a mindless threat, part of a massive hoard of stupidity and appetite which moves toward its victims who must find a safe fortress to fight against them.  

The creation of the zombie is as often a scientific one -- a pandemic virus or a scientific genetic experiment gone wrong as it is a supernatural one caused by curses, demons, or evil magic doers.  

The zombie also appears under a number of other guises including the failed/feral vampires in Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels and Davidson's Queen Betsy novels.  

Other writers like Marjorie Liu in her "Hunter Kiss" urban fantasies used demons to infest the dead.

In most novels, the zombie is a threat, but it is rarely the main threat since it lacks the sentience that a good bad guy needs in a novel.  This lack of sentience doesn't matter in a movie, but it weakens a novel which is more intimate.  

An effective bad guy in a novel reacts to the main characters, he has snappy dialogue, and he threatens his minions and everyone else.    A zombie does none of those things.

Some writers have turned the zombie myth around by making the main character a zombie who is both sentient and blood-thirsty.  For example, Mark Henry in his Amanda Feral series had a zombie chick-lit heroine who was smart, witty, and a cannibal.  Black humor and horror are always included.

The zombie as a romantic partner in a romance has also happened which I find gross.  Your tastes may vary. 

NOTE:  Welcome back, iZombie, the only zombie show I’m a fan of.  

Defining Urban Fantasy

In the late 1980s, a number of fantasy authors began to write about the various creatures and tropes of fantasy like elves, other supernatural beings, and magic in contemporary times in big cities rather than the past or in mythic places.  

The Encyclopedia of Fantasy defined these urban fantasy novels as “texts where fantasy and the mundane world interact, intersect, and interweave throughout a tale which is significantly about a real city.”

Authors like Charles de Lint created stories where the real urban world and Fairy met.  Other writers during this period include Emma Bull and Mercedes Lackey.

The heart of these stories are folkloric in tone with a sense of a fairy tale being retold in modern terms.  The language of the novels is lyrical and poetic, and events from the main characters' point of view have a sense that something may or may not be happening.

This type of urban fantasy is now called traditional urban fantasy, and a current writer is Neil Gaiman.

In the late 1990s and beyond, a different type of urban fantasy began to appear.  These novels had their basis, not from fairy tales, but from the horror and mystery genres.  Other media influences included the TV show, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER.  

These contemporary urban fantasies were popularized by Laurell K. Hamilton with her Anita Blake novels.  They have a strong protagonist who has some form of supernatural power.  

The narrative is usually in first person, and the world has a strong sense of good and evil.  

The real world is the gritty reality of the big city where the natural and the supernatural mix, often to disastrous results.  The main character usually has a probable sexual and crime-solving partner who is supernatural and a forbidden sexual partner either by society’s or her/his own standards.  

The main driving plot is a mystery which the main character must solve to prevent chaos, whether it be preventing bad supernaturals from harming humans or some form of disaster from occurring.  

Most often, the main character is in law enforcement-- a police officer, a private detective, or a bounty hunter.  

Mysteries by themselves have many varieties including the cozy and the detective novel, the police procedural, the spy novel, and the thriller.  

Each type of mystery has an urban fantasy equivalent.   Here are some examples.

COZY:  An amateur detective solves a murder with minimal blood and violence involved.  (Think Miss Marple or MURDER SHE WROTE)

Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse/TRUE BLOOD novels.

PROFESSIONAL AMATEUR DETECTIVE:  A professional in a specific setting uses his insider information to solve a crime.  The Dick Francis novels about horse racing are a good example. 

Marjorie M. Liu's   "Hunter Kiss" series. The heroine's job is to kill demons, and she must solve mysteries involving them.  

POLICE PROCEDURAL: Think LAW AND ORDER or any serious cop show. 

Keri Arthur's Riley Jenson series

Anton Strout's DEAD series.  Paranormal NYC government agency which takes care of paranormal threats and covers them up. Hero Simon is an ex-thief who uses psychometry to read objects.

CE Murphy series. Shaman cop Joanne Walker.

PRIVATE EYE:  

Many of Kelley Armstrong's "The Otherworld Series."   

Kat Richardson's “Greywalker” novels.

Jim Butcher's "Dresden Files."

THE FORENSICS MYSTERY:  CSI:Magic Division.  

Laura Anne Gilman's HARD MAGIC.    Magic (the current/electricity) is seen as a science with spells.  A group of young Talents is brought together to create the first forensic magic investigative team. 

THE SPY NOVEL:

Simon R. Green's Eddie Drood novels.  

Some of these novels are marketed as paranormal mystery rather than urban fantasy.  Often, this is because the author is already an established mystery writer like Charlaine Harris.  

Fantasy Creatures in the Real World

Werewolves, vampires, and other supernatural beings have become a staple in current genre fiction. One problem I've seen in many of the fight scenes involving these creatures is created by a flaw in worldbuilding.

Consider this scene from a contemporary novel.  The vampire protagonist is in a dangerous part of a major city, and he's attacked by a large pack of demon-possessed humans. He fights them off until some of his vampire friends arrive, and all the demon-possessed humans are murdered. Fortunately, no normal humans saw the fight so the vampires' existence remains a secret. They stalk away into the night.

What's the problem? Simple. How can a race remain a secret for long with widespread killings and the sheer number of combatants on both sides? Wouldn't the police become a tad suspicious if the murders kept building up? Wouldn't a medical examiner suggest that someone with superhuman strength ripped these guys apart? And what about that weird DNA found on the ripped throat of one of the victims?

The fight itself can be perfectly choreographed and written, but at its end, when all the bodies are lying there, and the vampires are leaving the scene, some readers will go, "Wait a minute. What about the police? What about...." If you leave that kind of question, the fight scene has failed.

In a recent urban fantasy novel, the human-shaped demons spent the novel taking human prey while the vampires were killing the demons and the vampire hunters were killing the vampires, yet the humans and the police were apparently totally clueless about the existence of any of these creatures and unconcerned at a body count that fit a war zone, not an American city.

For a race like vampires or werewolves to remain secret, they must have very small numbers because a large number of anything can't be kept secret, or the race rarely makes contact with humans.

If they take prey, they must dispose of the bodies so no evidence of the deaths will ever be found. Their prey must also be on the edges of human society so that their loss won't be obvious. In other words, vampires should attack a homeless person, not the beautiful young countess surrounded by friends, retainers, and family.

Vampires definitely shouldn't attack tourists in a town which supports itself with tourism. Considering the incredible national coverage and outrage caused by just a few tourist deaths in places like Miami and New Orleans in recent years, it's highly unlikely that dozens of tourists becoming monster chow wouldn't cause a similar outcry and intense scrutiny.

Real world logic applies even to supernatural characters. Make the fight and its outcome logical, or you've failed.

Research or Make It Up?

My guilty pleasure is TV shows about the paranormal, and I love novels featuring mediums and ghost hunters.  

I finished a book about a medium a few days ago, and the worldbuilding and plot choices which were created without regard to the current research brought a question to mind.  When is it time to use the research on the subject instead of making everything up?

Science fiction writers really don’t have a choice.  When scientists realized that Mars couldn’t support human life, writers stopped writing about Mars with humans without space suits roaming around the planet.  Now, writers use hard science fact when they want humans on Mars.

Parapsychology isn’t an accepted science for many, and some scientists will never accept any form of proof that ghosts, psychic ability, etc., exist because it is against their materialistic worldview.  The same is true of some non-scientists and those whose religious faith denies the existence of the otherworldly that is not part of their faith.

Yet, many people do believe in the paranormal, and many watch shows like GHOST HUNTERS and GHOST ADVENTURES.  These shows and paranormal research have certain accepted facts in common like the kind of electrical energy that is generated by ghosts and the use of EMF meters to detect it and that spirit voices the human ear can’t hear can be heard on audio recording equipment.  

So, the question is should you make everything up or should you use the established research to write your paranormal story?  

The first thing you should consider is your readers.  Most people who read paranormal novels have a working knowledge of the current information on the subject, if for no other reason than they’ve read enough stories to pick up the basics.  There’s also the real possibility that someone who enjoys a good ghost story may also enjoy GHOST ADVENTURES or THE DEAD FILES. Making it all up may annoy these readers.

However, it’s your story so you can make it all up.  

If you decide to create your own paranormal world, your first consideration is that you must create a reasonable set of rules for your ghosts and their interaction with the living.  

If your psychic character is experienced, she should know those rules completely and not dotter around like an idiot.  

Most knowlegable readers will forgive you if you create your own understandable world of spooks and the people who chase them.  

They will not forgive you if you break your own rules for plot expediency.

A middle ground is to use most of the common knowledge then add elements that are strictly of your own invention, such as mediums can only see spirits from a specific period.  

This is another situation where it’s best to understand the rules/current common knowledge then decide the direction you choose rather than being a lazy researcher and doing it your own way.  

SOME AUTHORS WHO DO IT RIGHT USING CURRENT KNOWLEDGE OF THE PARANORMAL:

Victoria Laurie in her "Ghost Hunter” series.  (Author is a psychic intuitive.)

JL Bryan in her “Ellie Jordan: Ghost Trapper” paranormal mysteries.

AUTHORS WHO USE CURENT KNOWLEDGE AS WELL AS CREATE THEIR OWN RULES:

Robin D. Owens in her “Ghost Seer” paranormal mystery novels.  

Darynda Jones in her “Grim Reaper” comic urban fantasy series.