Control: Writing a Slasher, Part One…
(Teen Slasher Zero, a novel by Daniel Trump, will be available for purchase in late July.)
I, Daniel Trump, aka Dalton Lewis, am finishing a slasher novel. It took an overwhelming amount of effort to write it. I don’t know what to say except that I spent 72 days on it and will spend 28 more days on it and then I will publish it.
Slasher stories have rules.
You can’t write just anything.
I tried to follow the rules of the genre while elevating and turning the story into a work of literature by creating interesting characters that the reader could care about — and killing some of them and saving others. That would, I hope, evoke compassion from the reader.
I tried to follow some conventions and rules. There are teenagers who have sex and party, and there are some who are wonderful and others who are trashy and like sex and drinking. Some like sex and drinking and are wonderful in their own way.
Strong characters fuel this story. I really wanted to create people who are unforgettable and interesting and believable.
This is extremely difficult for me to create such characters, and let me explain why.
I don’t pay attention to the world around me.
I have paranoid schizophrenia, a condition which makes it harder to pay attention to the world around me. I talk to myself in my head all the time, and I don’t control all of the conversation. I don’t notice things very often.
In high school there was a journalism teacher. She was one of the best teachers I ever had. She taught us by giving us assignments and sending us out into the world to live. She told us to interview people and helped us to travel to far-away destinations and see the sights for journalism conventions.
I keep thinking that I don’t have enough of those experiences. I live too sheltered a life. I don’t get out enough and just live. I don’t pay attention to the world around me because I write with a crippling mental illness.
It’s hard to write about people because you have to understand and predict them. You have to create real-sounding dialogue and characters and scenes. This is crushingly difficult for me. I don’t do much talking in reality. I go to breakfast with my dad several times a week. I say half a dozen words to him, tops.
I go to Pokemon with a friend some Thursdays. I do make some conversation with him, but it’s mostly talking about geek culture and the like. I can’t project all conversations for my stories based on talking to one person once a week — especially one person I know well.
I text my sister a lot. She’s nice and texts back and gives tips for living a good life. I need to include her perspective when writing — I can’t forget that women are out there and represent fifty percent of the population.
People are also not alike. There are loud people and soft people, short people and tall people, and mad people and nice people. I have to remember that when writing about people. My circle of friends doesn’t represent everyone. It’s just a small microcosm of society.
I lack the knowledge to write about everything in society. I don’t know doctoring to write about medicine. I don’t know enough about cops to write a plausible cop show. I don’t know enough about life to write everything. I need to redouble my attempts to do research on my next books. That needs to be a priority.
To start to write a story I began to creating a diverse bunch of wonderful people and then threw them into scenes to see what would happen. It was a simple plan — let amazing people do wonderful things and cover it for the novel.
We’ll see how it works.
Thanks, and take care, friends.
