Write about what disturbs you

From Writing Down the Bones


Write about what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about.

Vampires have become something bloodless and glamorous.  I just watched Being Human and was reminded that they aren't bloodless at all, and that they are very brutal.  Somehow Elizabeth and Thoby need to have their brutal sides, too, and Nell (though I think I know how Nell will fall).  It's fine for them to have retractable teeth and daytime existences and to be able to sip rather than kill, but they are still going to have to get intimately close to the people from whom they feed; they're still going to have to pierce the skin and hold them still and take without permission.  In Elizabeth's case, the taking will also involve knowing intimately, since she will have the ability to discern what she is tasting and relate it to the character of the person from whom she is feeding.  I haven't decided about Thoby yet.

What that basically means is that I'm going to have to get very good at writing very intimate physical encounters, and I'm going to have to give each one meaning.  They're going to be sort of promiscuous, in that there's a new partner for Elizabeth each time she feeds, and yet each one will have to be differentiated.  She'll be sensitive enough to discern the difference between each one, and to experiment with creating her system, as Nell has done, but she's also going to have to be brutal and demanding enough to push through whatever empathy she might have for these people and do what she's going to do.  There will be no hesitating for her; she is going to feed on human blood without apology.  What she'll be uncertain about is how that impacts her own character.  Then the question of soul, etc., if she's working towards redemption some then there has to be a determination about whether that's a worthwhile pursuit. And am I a good enough writer to write these sorts of scenes seriously, so they come out well and not laughable, or meaningless and trite, or melodramatic?

Guess I can only wait and see.

And then Rasputin.  What am I going to do with him?  Of course Ivan is going to leap out the window, and somehow Rasputin will teach him to renounce what is left of his human life and quit treating that as such a big deal (so that's why I've been reluctant to finish that story -- I wasn't sure how I was going to do it)...  So what is going to happen to Ivan?  Of course he's going to have to feed off a woman, since he already denied he was going to do it.  But which woman? How? And what does Rasputin do with Ivan once he gets him to fly through the window?

Duh, no wonder I sat down and didn't know what to write.  I haven't planned this at all.

OK, so I'll take the Hero's Journey with Ivan and figure him out.  Remembering to keep all the brutality and selfishness of the vampires of Being Human and of Vampire Tapestry while also retaining Ivan's unfulfilled human desires (like a ghost).  He's power mad and paranoid; he sees chaos and fears it, and so he desires to bring it into order.  He lost his mother to a poisoner and his wife he thinks he may have lost that way as well.  He killed his son by accident as a result of an argument about his daughter-in-law; he married five other women and was worse to them than Henry VIII was to his wives.  He's not above the odd torture, and he relishes dramatic gestures. And now, on top of all those problems he had as a human, he's a three hundred year old vampire with rather the appearance of the bobcat Julianna Cleaveland saw, that has never missed a meal in its life and thinks very highly of its territory.  But he also is required to be discreet, because of the whole villagers with pitchforks problem (although really, if vampires are so all powerful, what do they fear from humans? we really could just be cows to them, as what's-his-name says in the Charnas book) -- no, not because of the pitchforks, but because he misses things he remembers about being human.  Because he misses the thrill of a great horseback ride, the charge against an enemy, the thrill of unexpected victory.  Because he misses feeling all the way to his fingertips and his toes, and he misses the thump of his heart, and there is a certain unacknowledged compassion that restrains him without his appreciating it.

All this Rasputin gets.  To a certain extent, Rasputin was a kind of vampire in human life and the gift that Ivan has given him is basically just to liberate him from one set of rules and shackling him to a set rather more to his liking.  He sees Ivan shackling himself to an imagined throne and thinks he has never seen anything more asinine ever.  He... ah... he is newborn, so he doesn't understand the importance of there being Others out there, he thinks it's just him and Ivan.  He sees the world as his playground and dining room (larder, John Mitchell called it in Being Human -- love British English), and he sees the women in it as all potentially his, because that was how he saw the world before.  He has gifts of healing and foreknowledge that he doesn't appreciate (vampires do have souls, in my universe, but they have to figure things out for themselves and act in a state of uncertainty, just as humans do)

(man I hate how noisy this street and the house are, they make me so anxious)

and they have to risk, though how they risk is different; their gifts are greater and therefore the path is more difficult to find.  Anyway, Rasputin can make use of these gifts but he does so irresponsibly and without appreciation for the source, and this eventually will lead to his downfall.

In terms of the Hero's Journey, Rasputin is both Mentor and also Antagonist.

http://www.thewritersjourney.com/hero's_journey.htm

1.  Ordinary world: Is kind of skipped in my story, glossed over real quick and told to Rasputin by Ivan
2.  Call to adventure: Ivan makes Rasputin
3.  Refusal of the call: Ivan walks down the stairs and interrupts Rasputin, tries to bring him to heel
4.  Meeting with the mentor: Rasputin turns the tables
5.  Crossing the threshold: Ivan leaps from the window after Rasputin
6.  Tests, Allies, and Enemies:  The saggy middle that I have to figure out
7.  Approach: Ivan prepares for the major challenge in the new world -- by finding a woman from whom he's willing to feed
8.  The Ordeal: Ivan feeds from people Rasputin chooses for him
9.  The Reward: Ivan realizes there is no point in returning to his former ambitions as tsar; there is no one left to conquer, and no one who cares enough about him to want to poison him.  All his former importance is gone.  Moreover, he has experienced the sort of people who make Rasputin feel alive, and it makes him miss his humanity even more.
10.  The Road Back: Ivan must invent a life as an ordinary vampire.  But he finds he can't, there is no blueprint for that kind of life; he was a tsar from the time he was three years old, he has no concept of how one maps out a life when nothign particular is demanded of it.
11.  The Resurrection: Having separated from Rasputin somehow, Ivan goes to make his first self-selected feed, but finds that he can't, his new-found understanding of what is appealing about humanity prevents him.
12.  Return with the elixir: Ivan doesn't; he finds himself a starving zombie vampire who ultimately is exterminated by his own kind (possibly led by Rasputin).