It’s amazing just how much you forget about your childhood. My mum brought over some of my old schoolwork a few weeks ago and I just had to flick through it. We had to do regular book reports. I suppose they used them as a way of making sure that we read a lot. I must have been no more than seven or eight when I had written these reports and some of the comments were hilarious. What struck me most was the fact that I seemed to find a lot of the books boring… except every single story that had a paranormal twist. I don’t recall a lot of the stories and poems, but the ones about vampires, ghosts, witches and fictional characters such as Dracula and Frankenstein made a big impact on me and were duly rated as brilliant, although sometimes the pictures were boring.
I hadn’t realised just how far back I had been interested in the darker side of fiction—the demonic creatures and paranormal or fantasy. I had always thought it had started later. Looking back now, I realise that it is little wonder that I turned out the way I did.
When I couple my reading choices with my more formative years as I hit double figures, I can see where my passion for crafting characters and stories has come from.
When you’re young and you walk to school, spend time at school, or just time at home, with a bunch of vampires in your head, you think you’re a little abnormal. I had a whole world going on in my head and can still remember it vividly. There was a leading man, a vampire of course, with longish black hair and a penchant for black clothing. He could walk in daylight with me, but wasn’t strong then, much like Dracula, or my hero in Arcadian. He had blue/purple eyes. Of course, there wasn’t a heroine back then—just me. I guess my inner heroine was assuming the role. I built a world for him, with other vampires, all with names that were foreign and exotic at the time but probably quite standard in the world now. He was called Xavier. He had friends called things like Zachary and other quite normal names for these times.
Of course, I never told anyone that I had such a world going on in my head. My parents wouldn’t have minded. They’re very supportive and probably would have encouraged me rather than sent me to a shrink for being a teen with a mind full of vampires that had been with her for the past couple of years.
I guess you could say I’ve always had a very active imagination, a powerful one. (Which is why I just can’t watch horror paranormals where things nastily go bump in the night, or alien films where they come to Earth and are a bit creepy—I’m still freaked out because my husband made me go and see Signs at the cinema!)
I told my husband about my fictional world just the other day and he wasn’t surprised. He said it was just my inner writer coming out and I know that’s the truth.
I have all sorts of characters in my head now. There’s pretty much a waiting room at a train station in my mind, albeit a rather plush comfy one, and they come and go as they please. Some are pushier than others, and others just like to lounge around waiting their turn on the stage, watching the others perform. I think that to write well, and to create characters that seem real to people, they have to be real to you. You have to converse with them, know them, and have them locked in that waiting room unable to escape, so you can quiz them when you need to about what they are going to do to get out of the terrible situation you’ve written them into. You also have to be able to bend with them. Sometimes a character is going to put his foot down (I say his because it’s normally a bloke for me) and say that he isn’t going to fit the mould you’ve assigned to him and do what he’s told—he wants to be something different, do something different. You just have to roll with it, give him his way, and figure out how to make his new shape fit into your story.
You have to care about your characters or your readers won’t. You have to laugh with them, cry with them, and fall in love with them, or your readers just won’t react the way you want them to. Oh, and you have to want your readers to react. You’re writing a story with the intent of sucking them in, giving them a fantastic perfectly created world and characters, somewhere they can lose themselves for a while. Doing that but not thinking about how your reader should feel at certain points makes all that work redundant. If they’re not laughing, crying or smiling with happiness at the right points, you’ve fallen short of the mark. I always strive to hit the right emotional note with my readers, and I hope they see that. I want the characters in my head not to live on the page for them, but to move into their head and speak to them through the story, like a movie in their mind.
So, yeah, I feel a little crazy sometimes when characters are popping into my head for a quick catch up or long heart to heart, but I think it’s worth it. Besides, I get to meet some great people and you haven’t read all their stories yet, but they’ll be making themselves at home in your head and heart soon enough.
Miss Paranormal-From-A-Very-Early-Age signing out to continue her work on Forbidden Blood.
