I’m writing a novella and suddenly I feel the muse telling me the story’s disenchanted circumstances are begging me to add a monster.
Why? I ask.
Comes the answer: Because these scenes are a bit mysterious, but not dark enough—or they’re a little spooky, but not scary enough. This story needs some tension.
Hmmm. She’s right. Almost nothing generates tension like the entrance of a monster that catches the characters off guard. “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” ~~ H. P. Lovecraft.
Okay, I reply, I’ll add a Monster to the cast. But what kind of monster should I create?
My mind considers monsters I’ve encountered in my reading. It could be a human “monster” like a psychopathic leader who drives such fear into his followers they injure others on his behalf. Or perhaps a sneaky, villainous murderer like Jack the Ripper or Mack the Knife. Human monsters are scary, sure, but writing one into a story might call for some complicated character background, likely involving time-consuming psychological research. No time for that right now.
How about creating an unseemly, inhuman monster with broad shoulders, buggy eyes, lumpy skin, and long fangs and claws? That’s been done, sure… but maybe I can conjure something different from I’ve already seen or read. Thus, in my distracted moments, I start to doodle some monsters with various physical characteristics.
Ultimately, I needed to consider what scares me. In many horror stories the author describes his monster in detail, making it easy for the reader to visualize every nostril, appendage, and eyeball. Yet the more outlandish, foreign, and improbable the description, the less apt it was to scare me. On the other hand, in the most tense, frightening, incredibly scary book I’ve read since puberty, the author didn’t detail the horrific antagonist. This book about a persistent, ubiquitous, powerful ghost was penned by none other than Michaelbrent Collings. It’s title: The Haunting. For me, that book attained the very pinnacle of fright. I couldn’t even recommend it to my friends for fear of scaring the pants off them and then they’d blame me.
An invisible monster was something to consider.
Then I had to consider another monster dilemma: How does this Monster enter my story? Well, my protagonist could uncover an inhuman, monstrous thing while searching places he should have left alone (but not an inherited old house, please). The monster could come from space… but this wasn’t a space or science story. It could escape from a lab (done many times) or it could just decide to let its presence be known. One day the monster isn’t in the town and the next day it is. That certainly worked for the movie Tremors.
The monster I create for this tale I’m writing needs to work inside the current storyline. In the end, I created a creepy monster that people could sense and hear, but which was not actually described (like some of Heinlein’s monsters). That certainly worked for him. Thanks, Robert.