Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story. by Steven Harper Read Free Book Online Page A

marriage, sex partners, treatment of children, religious rituals — all these and more are dictated by spirituality. There's oft en overlap with government.
    Finally, you'll need to know your individual character's attitude toward spirituality. Fundamentalists follow every spiritual rule and law with terrifying zeal, and might even kill in the name of spirituality. At the other end of the spectrum are characters who scoff at the very idea of a spiritual world, even in the face of the sort of evidence only a paranormal novel might provide. Most characters will probably exist somewhere in the middle, but you need to know where they land.
FAMILY AND COMMUNITY
    A paranormal novel is an excellent place to explore alternate family structures and the impact they can have on people. True, your paranormals may very well come from a family structure similar to humans, but there's no reason they have to.
    Families have pecking orders, divisions of labor, customs, traditions, in-jokes, rivalries, oral histories, black sheep, and in-laws, and all of them can benefit from a supernatural twist. Tanya Huff took the idea of a wolf pack and merged it with a human family to get the very strange Heerkens clan in Blood Trail , for example. In her book, brothers and sisters grow up with a close, near-telepathic bond. But when the girls reach sexual maturity — and go into heat — the boys have to be sent away so their relationships don't become incestuous.
    And family doesn't have to mean birth family . It can mean any group of people that interacts as a family would. Humans form family units through marriage, adoption, deep friendship, and even circumstance. When your main character wakes up as a vampire one evening, she may discover she's joined an extended clan of undead, whether she likes it or not.
    Families band together to form communities with extended customs, traditions, conflicts, and friendships all their own. In a modern setting, these communities can keep in contact with each other easily enough through electronic means. Octavia E. Butler created a wide-reaching vampire-and-human community in Kindred . Her vampires both feed off and safeguard their humans, physically and financially, while maintaining an intricate set of relationships with each other. The entire book revolves around the main character's relationships within her community.
ART AND RECREATION
    When people have spare time, they play around and make stuff. Supernatural people, especially the immortal ones, have a lot of spare time. What do they fill it with? Bored people with power become … dangerous.
    Supernatural people who live within another culture might continue to use the recreation of the normal people around them, but how much fun can it be to play basketball against normals when you can jump fifteen feet into the air? Paranormals also may feel that the social boundaries laid down by mortals are unfair or simply don't apply to them, which has an impact on the sort of art they produce and the kind of recreation they enjoy. Art and recreation can be a piece of the background, such as the terrifying vampire theater in Anne Rice's novels, or it can become the center of the story, such as the magical wine making in Laura Anne Gilman's Vineart War books.
FOOD
    Any foodie will tell you how culture and food feed each other. People eat what's available to them, which shapes their culture. The culture, in turn, shapes attitudes toward food. When new sources of nutrition show up, cultures integrate them according to already established cultural norms — or the people may simply refuse to eat them, based on their culture. Grasshoppers, for example, are perfectly edible for humans. Yet few Americans, who see insects as disgusting, are willing to eat them, while they're routinely enjoyed in Africa and Asia, where insects are seen as little snacks with wings.
    Supernatural characters are famous for having rarified diets. Many of them hanker after human flesh or blood.