Idea Garage Sale: The Poltergeist Problem Novel

So, let's talk about poltergeists, because I've been reading books about them - non-fiction books, because that is the only decent kind, generally speaking.

All generalizations are false, but the odds are good that the only good fictional poltergeist stories I've ever read are ones you haven't heard of or, if you've heard of them, didn't know had any supernatural element. Like, The Almost Year, by Florence Engel Randall, which was published in 1971 and is about a poor black girl living for nine months with a wealthy white family, and that was where the focus was in its promotional material. This was a huge mistake - it was promoted as a problem novel and I didn't go for those in 1971. And as a problem novel about a black child written by a white woman it was and is problematical - but as a poltergeist novel, it is flawless, precisely because it is problematical.

The thing about poltergeists is, they happen - don't make any mistake about that! I don't know what they are, and neither does anybody else. They needn't, even, all be the same thing. The word applies to a configuration of disruptive events, involving physical effects with no obvious or even probable physical cause. Any given one might be hoax, fairy, repressed emotion breaking out as telekinesis, hysterical misperception, series of mindbogglingly improbabl accidents, or all of the above - or, none of the above, given the unliklihood of our finite minds framing the question correctly to recognize all the possibilities. So they are a frustrating, but flexible, set of phenomena, able to produce almost any effect your fiction might require.

And this is why the most famous depictions of them - Poltergeist the movie, most notably - are so unsatisfactory. They treat the phenomena as the important, interesting problem, and the solution as a dramatic fight against some external force. And that is just not so. A poltergeist is not, in itself, a problem. It is a symptom of a problem.

Because the other thing about poltergeists is, they don't happen in happy families. They don't happen in loudly, obviously, blatantly dysfunctional families. They happen in families where somebody (or multiple somebodies) is under a little too much stress and the problem is being skated around.

The parapsychological theory of RSPK - Recurrent Spontaneous PsychoKinesis - was dreamed up to account for this. The idea is that psychological tensions are released, by people who happen to have a lot more psychokinetic ability than most people, through unconscious psychic tantrums. Since most poltergeists have one "focus person" on whom most of the phenomena center, and who is often actively persecuted by them, the theory is that the focus person is unconsciously engaging in attention-seeking, acting out, or self-harm that she refuses to engage in consciously, for the very same reasons that attention seeking, acting out, and self-harm usually happen.

I'm not being blithely feminist in that choice of pronoun, by the way. According to the literature, the most common poltergeist focus is an adolescent girl. This meshes nicely with the RSPK theory, since girls are so much more likely to be encouraged to repress the kinds of "energy" (i.e. sexual feelings, anger, and resentment) that the theory assumes fuels the RSPK.

The problem with the RSPK theory, of course, is that the best evidence that psychokinesis even exists involves the subtle non-random behavior of random things like dice and subatomic particles. It's a huge leap from rolling a statistically unlikely number of sixes to starting fires, throwing rocks, levitating beds, or creating a vocal apparition of a talking mongoose. But it does focus attention where it belongs, in fiction - on the unhappiness and tension in the house, underneath the phenomenon. Resolve those issues, and the poltergeist resolves itself, whatever its mechanism; and this is why so many true poltergeist stories peter out with no climax. The people involved are willing to talk about the phenomena; they are not willing to talk about the personal situations that created the conditions that enabled the phenomena. Many family members may not even know them - with nineteen children and servants, the Reverend Samuel Wesley was unlikely to be aware of all the stresses at large in his home at Epworth Rectory, or the measures taken to relieve and master them, and even less likely to record them for posterity at the same time that he was recording the disruptions caused by "Old Jeffrey," the poltergeist that both tormented and amused his family for some months.

Another way that real-life poltergeist stories end is with a failure to resolve. The problems become more and more overt - exacerbated by the investigation of the phenomena, to the point that a focus may feel obliged to produce phenomena. That way lies the full range of coping syndromes; the abuse of recreational substances; the making of poor decisions; even, in the most spectacular poltergeist ever, The Bell Witch, in murder by poltergeist.

A good poltergeist book is not a special effects horrorfest. Movies can do that if it needs doing. A good poltergeist novel would illuminate the personal parts, the dynamics of the household, the stresses and coping mechanisms that investigators only guess at. We can invade the privacy of fictional characters as we would never dare invade that of real people. Are poltergeists and drug abuse the same behavior at their cores? To face up to your poltergeist, must you face up to yourself? What if the focus is a shared one (the Bell Witch murdered father John Bell, tormented daughter Betsy Bell, and was kindness personified to mother Lucy Bell) - does this indicate a codependency? And what happens, in any relationship born of stress, if one party is making a strong effort to resolve the problem everyone else ignores?

I can't think of a single problem novel that wouldn't be improved by plopping a poltergeist into it and seeing what happens.

Idea Garage Sale: Redirect

So I'm going to be lazy this morning, but you'll thank me for it.

The blog Disability in Kidlit addresses subjects of vital literary interest, and in particular the recent post Discussion #3: What Would You Like to See More of? is chock-full of brilliance. Like for example, from S.E. Smith:

I don’t want to see the disability version of the whitewashed form of diversity sometimes seen with authors trying to write characters of colour where a one-off mention is made to a character being Black or Latina/o and it never comes up again, depriving characters of cultural context–I want to see a character’s disability mentioned and playing a role in the narrative, but not as its own character. (A wheelchair user who’s a hacker, for example, and gets frustrated with the stairs at the local hackerspace. A schizophrenic character who thinks her meds need adjustment when she really is seeing ghosts. A D/deaf or HoH teen witch who’s pissed about uncaptioned YouTube videos. Get imaginative!)

That bolded bit is brilliant!

Of course, you'd have to know quite a bit about schizophrenics and schizophrenia, and by that I don't just mean library research. Knowledge can be acquired. I've known a few schizophrenics, but not intimately. Enough to know that they can be annoying to be around, if they don't accept or understand their own condition, but that if they're on top of their illness, the accommodations others have to make around them are no more onerous than adjusting to someone with mobility problems: i.e., not onerous enough to make a fuss over. A writer with schizophrenia (Virginia Woolf was, remember, so don't try to tell me that having this condition is enough to disqualify one as a writer!), who works with mental and emotional conditions, or with a close family member with the condition would be in the best position to do so. But it's not impossible for a sufficiently dedicated researcher with no direct experience, yet. After all, a person with a disability is simply someone who doesn't mesh perfectly with the world around her - and who hasn't felt that way at least occasionally?

And it could be awesome.

And enlightening.

And completely mutilated in the blockbuster Hollywood movie adaptation; but of what awesome and enlightening work is this not true?

Anyway, you the reader or I the blogger may not be up to carrying out some of the specific ideas presented, but this should be enough to get you thinking. Because these are reasonable desires and the road to fulfillment is wide open. And creativity springs from limitation.

(And bookmark or follow that blog while you're about it.)

Idea Garage Sale: The Busybody Ghost

I do not by any means confine my idea intake to the Fortean Times, nor to recent nonfiction; nor,heaven forfend, to nonpartisan nonfiction. This week I've been reading one of the older books in my collection of Forteana: Unbidden Guests: A Book of Real Ghosts, by William O. Stevens; Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1945. Mr. Stevens was an English professor and author, with an axe to grind about survival of bodily death. He's for it, and in this book mines the literature and his own acquaintance for cases he feels are persuasive and interesting.

Much in here is familiar, or at least routine; and how persuasive anybody finds any of it will vary quite a bit, but that's neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned. The story's all I care about; and in Chapter IX, Postscript, Section II "Immortality Proved by the Testimony of Sense," he gives me one that's entirely new to me. He's got hold of a pamphlet by a late 18th/early 19th-century Baptist minister describing (with a variable amount of theoretically checkable detail) a very odd tale of something that happened in an unnamed "Maine seaport village, which, one may guess from internal evidence must have been near Machiasport." The pamphlet reprinted a bunch of affidavits with first-person accounts of the phenomena, interspersed with a lot of theology, but the story Stevens extracts from what is probably a tedious read is bizarre enough for anybody.

In August of 1799, a spectral voice announced that the speaker would appear soon. On January 2nd (not what I would have called "soon") the voice returned, addressing the family of Captain Paul Blaisdel, identifying herself as the late Mrs. George Butler, and asking that her father, David Hooper, be sent for.

This kicked off a series of over 25 visitations, witnessed in many different places around the village by many different people, including the Baptist minister, who saw Mrs. Butler appear to him as a brilliant light in a field while he was on his way to debunk this obvious superstitious hoax. Some people heard her, some people saw her faintly, and some people saw her clearly; believers and non-believers saw and heard her; her friends and family received proofs that convinced them; and Mrs. Butler high-handedly ordered people about, held court in the Blaisdells' cellar, popped in on folks in other families unexpectedly, made predictions that came true, arranged a marriage against the wishes of everyone involved, arranged to be seen up close and personal by masses of people at once, responded to local gossip, insisted on the exhumation and reburial in a different location of a baby's grave, and generally was a nuisance for about half a year.

And then stopped. As these things eventually do; for believe it or not, Mrs. Butler is not the only discarnate entity ever to set an entire community on its ear. The celebrated Bell Witch Case is even more bizarre (so bizarre that the movie a few years ago toned down phenomena and left out most of the really good bits), and lasted even longer, and incidentally the Bell Witch also interested herself in the marriage of a member of the family she chiefly manifested among.

The heart of the supernatural novel to be derived from this obscure case, I think, lies in that marriage, which Mrs. Butler insisted on arranging between her husband and Lydia Blaisdel, a daughter of the family in whose cellar she liked to meet visitors. Local skeptical gossip explained the entire series of events as a hoax got up by Lydia to get her a husband; about which Stevens (relying for all this information, remember, on a single source, his pamphlet) says:

The girl protested tearfully that she would never marry a man who was scared into matrimony by a ghost. Her parents and his joined in opposing the idea. Once that summer Lydia tried to board a vessel lying in the harbor bound for York, where she had friends with whom she could stay. But it was all in vain. Somehow, in the end, the various parties came together in agreement and Lydia Blaisdel became George Butler's second wife. Within twenty-four hours of that wedding the Specter came to the husband and said, "Be kind to Lydia, for she will not be with you long. She will have but one child and die within the year."

I don't know about you, but the urge to rescue that poor girl, even if only in the pages of a novel, rises in me at once! Or her tragic story could be the background of a modern tale in which Mrs. Butler attempts to boss around a new generation, and the ghost of Lydia joins forces with the living girl to keep history from repeating itself.

Even Mr. Stevens, who is well-disposed towards his ghosts generally, admits that the whole affair seems pointless and even counterproductive. Mrs. Butler frightened and bullied people, made predictions without any helpful hints on how to avoid undesirable fates, arranged a marriage for her husband that ended well for nobody, caused considerable inconvenience for the Blaisdel family, possibly improved the local tourist trade, and went away again.

Real life, of course, often is pointless and counterproductive. Fiction requires more structure than that. But there's plenty of material here. One need only arrange it to have a point and be productive.

It would have made a decent X-Files episode, come to think of it. Scully would've put Mrs. Butler in her place, count on it!

Idea Garage Sale: Red Owl

Here's an old, old, old-fashioned one from a page full of short story concepts I was playing with back when I was still selling them to magazines. I think I'd been reading Ambrose Bierce as well as Texas history and miscellaneous works on Plains Indians.

Will Margraf comes home, invalided out of the Confederate Army, to find his family about ready to abandon their homestead (between and west of San Antonio and Austin) for fear of Comanches. A young war leader named Red Owl has led three successful raids in the area since the war began. Will swears he didn't beat Yankees to run from red devils, and vows to take the offensive during the next raid. He manages to keep his word, impressing everyone with his reckless courage by killing and scalping Red Owl himself as he is in the process of running off the Margraf cattle. His mother feels that the scalping is overdoing it, but he displays the trophy proudly at all opportunities, and has great prestige with his neighbors.

A screech owl that in a hollow live oak near the site of the killing begins to behave oddly. Will laughs at the notion that the owl's oddities (spooking his horse, spitting pellets at him, occasionally appearing in the daytime) have any significance. However, when it starts killing poultry, he decides to get rid of it. No one is more surprised than Will when it attacks him, pecking out his eyes (?) and tearing off his scalp.

See, very old-fashioned, plus there's a theme missing. Red Owl and Will would be a lot alike - brash, young, aggressive, and accustomed to solving problems with violence. They'd share a sense of entitlement and a lack of patience with anyone else's viewpoint, and both come from societies which wouldn't view any of these traits as flaws in these particular people. No ending that didn't bring out this similarity would satisfy me these days.

Since my own feeling toward such people is that most of them are fronting most of the time, I'd probably have Will claiming to have been invalided, when really he's just wandered home like so many Texas Confederates, particularly with families on the frontier, did. He may never have seen combat at all. Which would explain a lot about his behavior.

Successful countering of a Comanche raid was extremely rare, for good reason. They were experts of the lightning strike from the dark and had a good idea of how many men they needed to carry out a successful raid. They were also hard as heck to follow, which was what most rangers, home guard units, and informal posses who tried to deal with them were reduced to doing. So I'd have to stage Will's triumph carefully. It might be down to blind luck as much as courage.

I'd also want the screech owl to act both like a screech owl and like the vengeful spirit of a Comanche war leader, which would involve some research into screech owl behavior.

The pellet spitting is just petty and ridiculous. Which doesn't mean I couldn't use it, just that it introduces a layer of the absurd into an old-fashioned ghost story. Which could be fruitful.

Anyway, I've mostly given up trying to write short stories these days. They have to be really beating down the doors of my brain for me to even try, the markets are so limited.

(And nope, still can't edit, or even get a list of published posts. Blogspot upgraded recently, so no doubt that's the problem.)

Idea Garage Sale: Tour de Supernatural Forces

I dreamed several plots last night, but now key parts of all of them have melted (shame, too; one of them was to a bestselling cult juvenile novel that was already on the shelves and had generated support literature, a movie deal, and fanfic - just what my career needs!), so I dig back into the notes folder again and find a notion dating from way back; back when I thought I'd be writing for adults. It's not exactly original, but all the more reason to sell it at a discount.

A producer discovers an unproduced script by his favorite dramatist, which includes the dramatist as a minor character. He hires as many people as he can who worked with her in her lifetime, and finds an actress who, though inexperienced and not very promising in delivery, looks enough like the dramatist to be worth working with. He refuses to change a word of the script because he admires the dramatist so much.

The actress gets better as rehearsals go forward, and the people who've worked with her before find that the resemblance soon becomes uncanny. In addition to carrying the part well, the actress's behavior begins to shift and she gets more like the dramatist in daily life - her tastes change, she gets both more observant and more autocratic, doesn't drop the adopted accent, etc. Somebody - in the notes it's a costumer - recognizes that the script is a spell, and the dramatist is possessing the actress. The key scene would be the confrontation between the protagonist who realizes this and the possessing dramatist, who has a complex and impenetrable rationalization for why this isn't a wrong thing to do.

The protagonist manages to break the spell by destroying all copies of the script. (How? Fire + hard drive crash?) The cast is far enough along that they can reconstruct it pretty well, just not well enough for it to function as a spell. The actress playing the dramatist suddenly tanks, is replaced, and goes on to moulder in Hollywood talking about losing her Big Break. Presumably the protagonist is fired if her part in the destruction of the spell is discovered.

I conceived this as a short story, but short story markets even in genre have dried up so much I don't know now where it would be peddled. It'd take a lot of padding to make a decent novel. It's natural habitat is probably movies or TV; it's a Twilight Zone sort of plot, and a knowledgeable writer could use it as a decent framework for a satire.

I of course am not knowledgeable and never had a hope in heck of pulling this one off.

Idea Garage Sale: Starting, Anywhere

Some days, you just start writing and see if it goes anywhere. Like this:

Once upon a time, a critter lived in a house beyond the edge of town.

The owner had abandoned it because it was too hard to heat, so the critter moved in and made himself comfortable. The area had plenty of things for a critter to eat, and he had plenty of fur to keep him warm when the northers came down, so he did fairly well. When something went wrong with the house - a rotting floorboard, a lose brick in the chimney - he fixed it. The fact that the water was turned off made no difference to him, for he knew where the old well was. He woke when the sun rose and went to bed when it got dark, so the lack of electricity didn't bother him. He saw no reason why anything should ever change.

The owner had the house up for sale, and once in awhile people came to look at it. This provided a change for the critter, following them unseen about the house and eavesdropping. When they said things like: "It's awfully far from the main road" and "You call this a heating system?" and "The plumbing is how old?" he did nothing. But if they started talking about where to put the microwave or what room to put the boys in the critter acted. He could make ratlike noises in the walls, create wonderfully realistic drafts by blowing through the right crack, and he maintained a loose board on the porch steps which, when twisted just right, was guaranteed to throw a person down and scare the daylights out of him.

But of course, someone will buy the house anyway; and everything depends on who.

No Dinosaurs in First Grade!

Actually it'd be kindergarten, but First Grade makes a better title, don't you think?

Rita's best friend is a ghost maiasaurus named Daisy, who likes raisins, salad, and Kool-Aid (or some other appropriate diet - we may as well be accurate). She's colorful, with speckles and stripes, and not full-grown, so she'll fit in the house. When Rita starts school she takes Daisy along, but having an invisible dinosaur in class proves too disruptive - she tries to fingerpaint and makes a mess, roars during the singalong, tries to join in the games and work and can't. Soon she has to stay home all day, bored - and Rita isn't always ready to play with her when she gets home, because she has to play with kids from school.

How to resolve this? Unsatisfactory if Daisy just moves on with no destination. Can she meet other dinosaur ghosts? Or get passed on to a baby sister?

I can't really write for kids this young - the voice always comes out too old. Also, I prefer mammalian megafauna. But mammoths don't work here at all.

And yes, I do mean for Daisy to be a real ghost, not an imaginary friend.

Idea Garage Sale: Caroline in the Friendly House

Old notes, verbatim, but with idiosyncratic shorthand deleted.

Caroline moves into the friendly house. She is an architect and can look up the house's history fairly easily.

The ghost is an analogous age and position with Caroline - young, married, pregnant, newly moved into the house.

Ghost miscarried, died.

Ghost assists Caroline - how?

Maybe if I knew more about miscarriages. Possibly ghost had bad husband, doesn't trust Caroline's? Caroline caught between.

This is going to be another of your slow stories, isn't it?

I was trying to generate short stories when I wrote this. I think I probably could write it now, as a short novel - but it'd have to be an adult book unless I lost Caroline and got a totally different, YA heroine.

I had a specific house in mind when I wrote "the friendly house," by the way - a bungalow near Brackenridge Park that was mostly sunroom, which we looked at when househunting once long ago and loved, but couldn't take for various practical reasons. Last time I was by there, it had an ugly big chain link fence all the way around and two dobermans wearing paths in the yard. Which suggests an entirely different, much sadder, story.

Yes, houses are a big deal to me.