An original supernatural tale for readers of this website. In “The Spa” a terminally-ill journalist investigates a story about the murderous ghost of a local businessman.
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Writing
Choosing From The Word Pool
“All speech acts are goal-oriented.”
That phrase lodged itself in my brain during a linguistics lecture I once attended.
Every thing we say, every word, is to achieve some kind of goal.
I’ve found this idea particularly useful when writing dialogue.
When someone speaks there is a pool of alternative words they can to dip into to describe something.
Let’s say a character is talking about children.
They could choose use a variety of descriptions – for instance kid, brat, squirt, rugrat, tyke, urchin or munchkin.
Each choice has a different psychological effect – brat, for instance, has negative connotations – it implies a child is badly behaved.
Of course a character can choose to speak in a responsible, measured, neutral way. But if they are angry, sad or manipulative there are plenty of charged words to scoop out of the vocabulary pool.
Each choice they make is a way of achieving that goal – and laying bare their soul.
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What Our Monsters Might Tell Us
There are monsters around this time of year.
Creatures of folklore and horror fiction.
All of them presumably had creators at some point -people who had to puzzle and make creative decisions about their monstrous imaginary progeny.
Which made me ask a few rhetorical questions to myself, starting with this one – what kind of monster would you make, if you were writing a story?
What everyday fears would it exploit in your readers?
Would you start by calculating what would scare you the most?
Did something make them a monster? A tragedy, a mistake – or were they just born bad?
Would it be male or female? Why?
Living, dead or undead?
What horrible things would the monster do to its victims?
Would they be guilt-ridden after a bad deed – or so implacably evil they don’t care?
How does this monster kill people – maybe in the way you would be most afraid to be murdered?
Or are they human, a villain with monstrous qualities – maybe based on a person in your life who you don’t like – a bully from your childhood perhaps.
And would this villain have the surname of a teacher you didn’t like at school – or maybe an annoying work colleague?
Does this person live in a near-derelict house on the outskirts of town? Or a white picket-fenced house in the leafy suburbs?
I’ll stop now – but you get the drift – the monsters we create in our own imagination tell us a lot about ourselves.
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