14 Tips On How To Create Your Own Urban Legend

This would have been a great thing to do for Halloween! Oh well, better late than never. Today I want to talk about something that has fascinated me for ... well, for as long as I remember: urban legends.

As I’m sure you know, an urban legend “is a form of modern folklore consisting of fictional stories, often with macabre elements deeply rooted in local popular culture. (Wikipedia)”

Generally, urban legends spring up on their own, but there’s nothing to say that we can’t create our own! Why would we want to create one? Well, to scare the pants off our readers! And because it’s kind of fun. :-)

The Ingredients of an Urban Legend:

Antagonist: A proper villain.

Protagonist: An ordinary, more-or-less innocent person. Everyman/woman.

1. Fear of strangers. The bad guy is a foreigner, an outsider, a stranger.

This is a primal fear. The thing that waits in the darkness outside the ring of firelight. Closely related is the idea that one of the people huddled around the fire isn’t what they seem. They are a monster wearing a human face.

2. Importance of ritual and rule-following.

This is generally part of the moral: Follow the rules and you’ll be okay, break them and the monsters will get you. Or, which is more-or-less the same, behave morally, resist temptation and the boogyman will pass you by. Give in and you’ll be monster food.

3. The author is anonymous.

The event itself is said to have happened to a friend or a friend of a friend, but the author herself doesn’t give a name or any way to trace her down.

4. Vague. No specific examples are given, nothing that can be definitely traced.

Sometimes it’s said that the information came from “an advisor close to the president” or perhaps even a prominent person is named, but in such a way that it’s difficult to pin down anything concrete. Public officials say many things, do many things, and it’s not always easy to trace them.

5. Electronics don’t work.

It seems that whenever the supernatural is involved—and most urban myths I’ve read include some sort of supernatural element—anything electronic dies a spectacular death.

6. The protagonist is alone.

This is classic storytelling. When the protagonist confronts the Big Bad they are (almost) always alone. Let’s face it, if the protagonist had help the stakes wouldn’t be as high, it wouldn’t be as interesting.

7. It is said to be a true story.

We all know urban legends aren’t true, but they’re interesting precisely because a small part of us thinks, or wants to think, that it COULD be. That’s what happens when a story aggressively puts itself forward as being true, as being just another story about something that happened to a friend.

8. Event is said to have happened locally.

I think this point is connected to the fact that we tend to prefer the stories of our friends. What happens locally has the potential to affect us.

9. Event is said to have happened recently.

Events that happened a few years ago or last decade, even sensational ones, aren’t as interesting to us as those that happened earlier today, or yesterday, or a few weeks ago.

10. The event happened to someone the teller knows. Or a friend of a friend.

I think that, rightly or wrongly, we tend to put more weight in the stories our friends tell us, even friends of friends.

11. The event is macabre, horrific, sensational.

In your own life, what scared you the most? We’ve all been scared. When I was a kid I ate pizza too fast and started choking. Lucky for me my dad knew the Heimlich maneuver and I was okay. For a few weeks after that, though, I was terrified of choking.

In itself fear of choking is a bit tame, but I suppose it depends on WHAT the person chokes on.

12. Give it a moral.

I think this is implied by some of the above, but it’s so important it deserves its own point. Urban legends have a moral. For example, take the urban legend “The Hook.” From Wikipedia:

“The basic premise involves a young couple parking at a lovers' lane. The radio plays while they make out. Suddenly, a news bulletin reports that a serial killer has just escaped from a nearby institution. The killer has a hook for one of his hands. For varying reasons, they decide to leave quickly. In the end, the killer's hook is found hanging from the door handle.”

Here, since the couple left lovers’ lane, they get to live. If they hadn’t stopped their ‘activities’ and left, though, things would have turned out bloody.

13. I say this tongue-in-cheek: It helps if a blurry photograph is involved!

Self-check: Would your urban legend disturb you personally IF it were real?

Something to try if you’re looking for inspiration: Make your own urban legend by taking the beginning of one and melding it with the ending of another. Here’s a list of urban legends.

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Many writers have sung the praises of this book: Write Your Novel From The Middle: A New Approach for Plotters, Pantsers and Everyone in Between, by James Scott Bell. Personally, I start from the ending, but to each their own. Bell’s approach has been something of a revelation.

From the blurb: “What if, amazing as it may seem, the place to begin writing your novel is in the very middle of the story? According to #1 bestselling writing teacher James Scott Bell, that's exactly where you'll find your story's heart and heat. Bell's "Mirror Moment" is the secret, and its power is available to any writer, at any stage of the writing process. Bringing together years of craft study and personal discovery, Bell presents a truly unique approach to writing a novel, one that will stand the test of time and serve you all your writing life.”

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That’s it! I’d love to read your urban legend. Share it in the comments ... if you dare (cue scary music). Or post it on your webspace and leave a link. Whatever you do, good writing! I’ll talk to you again on Friday.

Cheers!

Six Ways To Begin A Story: Character Driven Openings

The Character Opening

The character story opening is my favorite kind of opening, though it’s arguably the trickiest to pull off. 

At the moment I’m on a Gillian Flynn reading jag. Her books, all but the first, start out with strong, shocking, character descriptions. 

Here’s the first few lines of her second book, Dark Places:

“I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it. It’s the Day blood. Something’s wrong with it.”

Dark Places is (or so it seems to me, I’m about 25% of the way through) a mystery wrapped in a horror story. But not supernatural horror, not the kind one can laugh off after leaving the theater. This is about something that feels real, the sort of thing we hear about on the news and are enraged by, or crushed by, for a few hours or days until the ebb and flow of our daily lives draws us back and makes us forget the evil that lurks beneath the skin. 

Gillian Flynn smashes off a chunk of that evil and forms her all-too-human characters with it.

But perhaps horror isn’t your cup of tea. (It would make a nasty cuppa, black and bitter and deadly.)

His jaw was long and bony ...

Here’s one of my favorite first paragraphs:

“Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.”

Yes, this is also a descriptive opening, but it gives us a peek (if I may put it like this) into the protagonist’s soul. It gives us a broad hint at exactly how difficult Sam would be to manipulate and how far he might take things. 

Why Do These Openings Work?

I want to write a longer post on why certain openings are effective but, here, I’d say that both openings surprise (perhaps even shock) the reader. Also, both openings have an intimate tone. And both these protagonists are, let’s face it, strange.

Most importantly, though, each opening raises questions.

In Dark Places the question is one of nature vs nurture. One asks: Why does the protagonist (Libby Day) have a meanness inside her? Is she correct, is it a matter of who she is, a matter of her blood? Is it the case that there’s something wrong with her and it doesn’t matter what she does, it’s always going to be there? Or perhaps something, something horrible, happened in her past, something that changed her, that warped her. Something that, perhaps, can be at least partially undone. And if so, what was it?

This is a terrific opener for the book because those questions form the core, the irregularly beating heart, of the story. They never go away, they just become more and more urgent. 

Character openings are infrequent

There are good reasons to not start a story off by looking into the soul of the main character. Many folks need their curiosity peeked first, they need to know a bit about the underlying story before they can be interested in a particular character.

The power of plot vs the power of characterization

I don’t believe there is any tension between characterization and plot; one can’t have strong characters without plot because plot flows naturally from the conflicts between strong characters. That said, I do think a story can be suspenseful in the absence of strong characterization. 

Don’t believe me? Read Stephen King’s retelling of “The Hook” (found in Danse Macabre), an urban myth that has a strong plot (that has narrative drive, suspense, etc.) but hardly any characterization. I wanted to reproduce it here but it was too long. If you do, imagine you and your friends are leaning forward into the warmth of a dying fire while one of you tells the tale. 

(Here is a link to The Hook over at Wikipedia; it’s not as good as Stephen King’s retelling but it will give you an idea what the story is if you’ve never heard it before.)

Here’s King’s comment:

“The story of The Hook is a simple, brutal classic of horror. It offers no characterization, no theme, no particular artifice; it does not aspire to symbolic beauty or try to summarize the times, the mind, or the human spirit. [...] No, the story of The Hook exists for one reason and one reason alone: to scare the shit out of little kids after the sun goes down.” (Stephen King, Danse Macabre)

And I think Stephen King would agree that the same could be said for most urban myths.

Why does The Hook work? Call it whatever you want, dramatic tension, narrative drive or suspense. 

My point (yes, there is one!) is that we often need whatever it is that the story of The Hook possesses, we need it at the beginning of the story to seduce readers into caring about the characters, to get the story rolling. 

Summary

I’m not putting this forward as a rule (there are no rules in writing) and as we’ve seen, some authors are brilliant at character introductions, so I would never try and discourage someone from starting their story off this way. It’s just, depending on the story and the style of the writer, more difficult to grab readers from the very first sentence.

Often writers reach for something shocking or contradictory or, failing that, something that frustrates our expectations and makes us think, something that gets us turning pages, something that gets us to care about the characters. Because, ultimately, it’s all about the characters.

So. That’s my take on why most openings are plot oriented rather than character oriented. Tomorrow we’ll take a look at humorous openings and try to pin down what makes something funny.

Photo credit: "Chihuahua" by kenichi nobusue under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.