Mental Illness in Horror

The Horror Writers Association's monthly newsletter has started running a column about the treatment of mental illness in horror fiction -- how it's been done wrong in the past and how to do it realistically, sensitively, and compassionately. Too often in such stories, neurodivergent people or sufferers from mental and emotional disorders have appeared as stereotypically monstrous figures such as deranged serial killers. Yet it's hard to imagine the genre without Poe's neurotic or perhaps delusional narrators, Renfield in DRACULA, Lovecraft's protagonists driven mad by cosmic terrors, Robert Bloch's PSYCHO, and works such as Theodore Sturgeon's brilliant SOME OF YOUR BLOOD (a short epistolary novel featuring a rather pitiable blood-drinking sociopath, who, with only two exceptions, kills only small animals he hunts in the woods). THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS presents the sociopathic genius Dr. Hannibal Lecter, more of a fairy-tale monster with almost magical powers than a realistic criminal, and the serial killer "Buffalo Bill," murdering women to sew a "girl suit" out of their skins. The latter has been criticized for giving the toxic impression that transgender men are inherently unstable and probably dangerous. Lecter explicitly says "Bill" isn't really transgender and has been rejected by more than one sex change clinic (as the procedure was labeled at that time); nevertheless, the impression lingers.

There's little room to doubt that the innumerable fiction and film portrayals of people suffering from psychosis and other mental or emotional disorders as insane killers have negatively affected the public's distorted perception of actual human beings with similar problems. Also, the pulp fiction and horror film trope of the "mad scientist" probably reinforces too many people's distrust of real-life science nowadays, often with potentially disastrous real-world results.

As the panel discussion articles in the HWA newsletter point out, horror writers don't have to stop including mentally ill and neurodivergent characters in their works. Those characters can be drawn as three-dimensional figures with credible virtues and flaws, even if they're sometimes the antagonists in their stories.

I recently read Stephen King's latest novel, HOLLY, which I enjoyed very much. Like King himself, I've been fond of Holly ever since her first appearance in MR. MERCEDES. Through the rest of that trilogy, the spin-off novel THE OUTSIDER, and the novella "If It Bleeds," she has believably evolved as a character. When we first meet her, she's nervous, shy, perpetually anxious, and at least mildly obsessive-compulsive. Even then, her suppressed intelligence shines through. She also seems to be high-functioning autistic, although the texts never explicitly state that diagnosis. As seen in HOLLY, she has grown in confidence, competence, and bonding with people she has come to love, while her core personality remains the same. She still displays the same quirks, including that touch of OC, exacerbated by the need for COVID precautions. She's a well-rounded character whose strengths and weaknesses we can empathize with, yet a true hero when circumstances require. She strikes me as an outstanding example of a non-neurotypical protagonist done well.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Character Brainstorming with AI

Here's a WRITER'S DIGEST article about how an author might use ChatGPT as an aid to composition without actually having the program do the writing:

Using AI to Develop Characters

The author, Laura Picklesimer, describes her experiment in workshopping character ideas with the help of generative AI. She began by asking the program how it might be able to help in character creation, and it generated a list of ten quite reasonable although not particularly exciting possibilities. She then implemented one of the suggestions by requesting ideas for characters in a thriller set in 1940s Los Angeles. The result consisted of "a host of rather stereotypical characters." When she asked the AI to suggest ways to subvert those characters, she was more impressed with the answers. Reading that list, I agree something like it might actually be useful in sparking story ideas. Her advice to writers who consider using such a program includes being "as specific as possible with your prompts, making use of key words and specifying how long ChatGPT’s response should be." She also points out, "It may take multiple versions of a prompt to arrive at a helpful response."

I was intrigued to learn that a program called Character.AI can be set up to allow a writer to carry on a conversation with a fictional character, either from literature or one of her own creations. The article shows a couple of examples.

Picklesimer also cautions potential users against the limitations of systems such as ChatGPT, including their proneness to "hallucinations." When she asked the AI about its own limitations, it answered honestly and in detail. Most importantly for creative writers, in my opinion, it can easily perpetuate stereotypes, cliches, and over-familiar tropes. It also lacks the capacity for emotional depth and comlexity, of course. If an author keeps these cautions in mind, though, I think experimenting with such programs a brainstorming tools could be fun and potentially productive -- just as a search in a thesaurus might not turn up the word you're looking for but might surprise you with a better idea.

It's worth noting, however, that this essay links to another one titled "Why We Must Not Cede Writing to the Machines" -- which Picklesimer, of course, doesn't advocate doing.

Do Not Go Gentle

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Round and Flat Characters

Here's a very lucid essay from WRITER'S DIGEST about the differences between flat (two-dimensional) and round (three-dimensional) characters:

Flat vs. Round

It defines the two types with lists of the principal traits of each, followed by analyses of several well-known examples from literature.

This article brings up a few points I hadn't thought of before:

An archetype is often a flat character. Although the article doesn't say it in so many words, this type of character's larger-than-life traits lend themselves to the "flat" treatment.

A flat character can be a protagonist. "Generally, the main characters are round, and the supporting ones are flat—but you’ll soon see this isn’t always the case."

"Round" and "flat" are not identical to dynamic versus static. Not all rounded characters change over the course of the story.

Some points not explicitly discussed that are worth emphasizing: Flat characters aren't necessarily stereotypes or cliches. A flat character can still be a believable individual. Not all the people in a work of fiction have to be rounded; trying to accomplish that goal in a full-length novel would be not only exhausting for both author and reader but, in fact, unrealistic. Most of the people we meet daily in real life remain "flat" to us. One typical trait listed for flat characters is that their responses and actions are predictable, a premise I'm dubious about. Sydney Carton's self-sacrifice at the end of A TALE OF TWO CITIES, for example, would probably come as a surprising plot twist to a reader unfamiliar with the story. Also, the two types may be seen as falling on a continuum rather than fitting into a strict binary distinction. Sydney Carton, while "flatter" than Charles Darnay in that novel, is "rounder" than Madame Defarge. David Copperfield's great-aunt Betsey is less rounded than David but more so than Mr. Micawber or Uriah Heep.

One classic literary figure presented in the essay as an example of a flat character is Sherlock Holmes. As the central figure in his series, he's fascinating, but without the complexity and depth of a fully rounded character.

Can a character transform from one type to the other? It could be argued that Hannibal Lecter is mainly flat in RED DRAGON and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS but becomes a rounded character in HANNIBAL and HANNIBAL RISING (a shift many readers and critics consider a change for the worse).

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Going Deeper

A few weeks ago, the associate rector of our church delivered a sermon sparked by the question, "What do you want?" Beyond and beneath the superficial needs and wishes, what do you REALLY want out of life? As a recurring motif in the talk, she repeated several times, "Go deeper." The admonition to "go deeper" applies to writing, too.

In the January 2020 RWR (the magazine of the Romance Writers of America), Shirley Jump's regular column "Your Writing Coach" dealt with the topic, "Creating deeper motivation: The rule of six." What does your protagonist want and why? We have more than one motivation for almost everything we do, and in creating a believable protagonist, the writer should delve deeper. Jump recommends digging down for six layers of motivation, hence the title of the article. By the time the writer gets to number six, she says, the process should become hard. She also notes that the character's true, deepest motivation is not the one he or she recognizes on the surface. The first motivations that come to mind are likely to be external factors, while the last layers uncovered tend to be "the deeper internal motivations." One of her examples imagines a character who wants to save her grandmother's farm because that's the wellspring of her happy childhood memories. The deeper motivation not recognized by the character herself, however, is that the farm serves as her "security blanket" because she doesn't want to leave her familiar community.

Jump demonstrates the technique by analyzing the character of Shrek from the first movie in his series. First, he wants to get the intruders out of his swamp. To accomplish that purpose, he has to confront Lord Farquaad. Shrek is angry and "helpless to fix this himself." He's angry because he wants his sanctuary (the swamp) back. The root cause of this desire, according to Jump, is that he withdraws from other people and creatures to avoid pain (as demonstrated by his preemptive rejection of Donkey). She refers to "layering in" the characters' deeper feelings and motivations and also recommends making sure each scene conveys some aspect of those motivations.

Her "saving the farm" example brings to mind GONE WITH THE WIND. In the beginning, teenage Scarlett thinks she'll attain complete happiness if she marries Ashley. She barely hears her Irish father's passionate speech about the importance of land, the only thing that lasts. Her obsession with Ashley lingers until the very end, when she wakes up to the realization that her alleged love for him has been only a girlish fantasy all along. Meanwhile, though, a newly discovered motivation dominates her actual behavior and decisions—saving Tara. All her major choices (except marrying Rhett, and she admits she does even that partly for the money), such as tricking Frank into marriage and becoming a hardheaded businesswoman, are motivated by the need to support Tara and her family. The deeper motivation for that need is the role of Tara as a symbol of stability and material security. The deepest motivation breaks out in the iconic mid-point scene when she fiercely vows, "I'll never be hungry again."

The "layering" image strongly resonates with me, because that's how I tend to revise my fiction. Many writing experts advise that proper revision consists of cutting, that later drafts should be shorter than the first draft because rewriting should trim extraneous material. Well, not my revisions; my second drafts are almost always longer than the first. That's because I start with dialogue, action, and necessary description and exposition. The emotional, sensory, and to some extent descriptive elements of scenes are always on the "thin" side the first time around. I need to expand and enhance those elements to make scenes and characters come to life. Sure, I often cut on the micro level, since my sentences are often unnecessarily convoluted or wordy (maybe a side effect of having produced so much academic nonfiction over the years). On the macro level, though, the total word count nevertheless increases more often than it decreases. In my current WIP, the heroine faces the certainty of losing her job in six months because the business (an independent bookstore) is going to close. Therefore, it becomes vital, not just a pleasant prospect, to sell the graphic novel series she and the hero have created to a major publisher, so she'll have a financial cushion. Digging to the next layer down, getting that cushion is important to her not only for practical reasons but for emotional ones. Because her father's gambling addiction almost destroyed her parents' marriage in her teens and young adult years, she's obsessed with financial security. Her unhappy memories of those years also make it hard for her to trust the hero and lead her to leap to negative assumptions whenever it seems he might let her down. Those don't quite add up to six motivations, but the general idea is the same.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Personality Types... More Fun Than A Horoscope?

There are many ways to build a character, and one might be to do a 16 Personalities test on behalf of your nascent alien romance hero or heroine.

Try this one:  http://www.16personalities.com/intp-personality

You will have fun, and at the bottom of the page, you may see whether or not your own protagonist has a lot in common with a Game of Thrones or The Matrix or LOTR or Hunger Games character. You'll also find enough predictions to suggest a life story.

For myself, I used to be an INTJ, but now I am an INTP... or perhaps I lie online. That is always a possibility.

What are you?

All the best,
Rowena Cherry