If You're Going Through Hell, Keep Going (And Do NaNoWriMo While You're At It)

by Gigi Pandian

The first half of this post's title is a quote from Winston Churchill. I get sent a lot of quotes these days, what with the whole cancer thing and all. That quote is one of my favorites. If you're going through hell, keep going.

I'm not especially going through hell (truly, modern medicine is fantastic) but it's a great reminder than when you face challenges, it's ridiculous to stop and give in to them.

It's true you can hear me for miles around as I whine about how I can't drink coffee for another six weeks. But aside from my coffee deprivation whining, I think I'm doing a good job not only keeping on going, but stepping up the pace.

Now that I've done the grunt work to make Gargoyle Girl Productions official, it's time for an ambitious November: Turning a messy, overly complex YA novel into a brand new trilogy of novellas that each takes one of the original overlapping story lines.

Yup, I'm signing up for not only the National Novel Writing Month promise of 50,000 words, but I'm aiming for a total of 75,000 words this November. Three 25,000 YA mystery novellas.

Can I do it? Definitely. I never set out to do anything if I think I'm going to fail.

Am I crazy? Probably.

So why am I doing 50% more than the already arduous NaNoWriMo goal? I'll be done with chemo by the end of November. What better way to make the month fly by than throwing myself into a big project of literary abandon?

NaNoWriMo begins next Tuesday. Who's with me?

Martha Goes To Hell

I grew up Catholic, which meant one thing.

I was probably going to hell.

Sinful thoughts? Going to hell.
Disrespecting my parents? Going to hell.
Lying? Going to hell.
Stealing? Hella going to hell.

Doubting God? Totally. Going. To. Hell. (although if one doesn't believe in God and then one doesn't believe in Hell, this gets a little meta)

Point being, there were so many ways to hell, I really saw no way out. So by the time I hit six or seven years old, I'd accepted the inevitability of spending the afterlife in eternal, painful hellfire.

(Granted, this was after sitting around until the second coming.)

What shocks me as an adult is how okay I was with it. How I made peace with hell. Even though I tried to be a good person just because being a bad person sucks, I never thought I could do anything to be perfect enough for Heaven.

And to be honest...I kind of figured everyone around me was going to hell, too. I'd catch a friend cheating on her homework. Hell. Parents took the lord's name in vain 24-7. Hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell. Everyone seemed to be working on Sunday, despite it being a holy day. Soooo much hell to catch.

I couldn't understand people who felt they were going to see the Lord one day. Who talked about how excited they were that one day they'd be in the loving presence of the Father.

But uh...I'd think...don't you remember coveting my color pencils a while back? That's a hell offense if I've ever seen one!

For some reason, the fact that everyone was going to hell made it okay. It was going to be one big hellacious party. We'd burn together.

Because trust me, if I'm going to hell, I'm taking ya'all with me.

Hell: How the Devil (or Author) Works

The most fascinating thing about our perception of Hell is that everyone's idea of Hell is different.

This SNL skit with the Devil talking about his newest member of Hell makes the point perfectly.



The best and worst thing we can do for our characters is to put them through hell. Although this usually involves putting ourselves through hell while writing their story, the emotional resonance when they overcome their worst nightmare is worth every second of agony.

Each character's Hell is going to be different. It's our job as the author to find the most specific and detailed method for torturing our character so that they come out on the other side as newer, more improved, and hopefully happier people.

Lisa

Musings on Hell

L.G.C. Smith

When I was a little kid, I totally bought the Santa thing. Completely. Never questioned it until the boy who sat behind me in second grade sneeringly informed me of the truth. Even then I didn’t believe him. But I asked my mom. And she told me the Truth. That was hell. However, I never for one second bought the Easter Bunny. That was clearly a crock, and while I was happy to go along with it because egg hunts and candy were part of the deal, I was nobody’s fool.

I had something of the same selective cognitive malfunction with respect to heaven and hell. Heaven? Okay. Sounds good. Kind of boring, but I’m on board. Hell? Are you kidding me? That’s obviously a story designed to manipulate the gullible into behaving in the here and now. I couldn’t believe that whole swaths of my own religion had a much more detailed and personal relationship with the torments of hell than the gauzy, vague-but-pleasant heaven. How screwy was that? (First person to reference that pun gets a free copy of one of my estimable and long out of print books.)

So now, with all these demons and angels in popular fiction, does it strike anyone else that these books are usually completely devoid of religious affiliation of any sort? I find that interesting. We get demons and some sort of spruced-up and/or reimagined Hell. Maybe it’s an alternate reality or another dimension. Sometimes Hell and various demons and angels are engaged in a nebulous war with Heaven, but Heaven is rarely well defined.

That seems to be a recurring fate for conceptions of Heaven. It’s like the very notion of a place where everything is good and true and pure is too alien for our minds to grasp. Hell is far more accessible. We all get Hell. And it’s interesting. Full of the stuff we need in fiction. Lies. Sin. Vice. Popular fiction prefers a fallen angel to a righteous one every time.

This may be a failure of imagination to some extent. Hell is, as one or two folks have pointed out over the centuries, probably the easier path. It certainly lends itself more readily to popular fiction. And, contrary to my youthful religious thinking, it’s far more real to most people than heaven.

Hellbound Friday Nights

--Adrienne Miller

When I was in my early teens my friend, Mandy, and I had a weekend ritual. Friday night was horror movie night.

Mandy had the best house for horror movie watching. Her parents had a thing for weather-beaten farm antiques. Rusty scythes and pickaxes hung from the wall like a bad movie set. They also had one of those second garage freezers stockpiled with frozen pizzas and tv dinners. Put all that together with a pull out sofabed in front of the tv, and her place was heaven as far as my thirteen year-old self was concerned.

We would scour the video stores for titles. We went through what the big chain store had to offer quickly-- big name slasher film series and a few mainstream flops. The little local independents had better titles--everything from the campy B-movies(I was thirteen when I first fell in love with Bruce Campbell) to Italian art house horror.

I learned a lot from those late night vhs double features. Scene structure has to be tight in a horror story, more so than in other genre, for it work effectively. Don't be afraid to start big and end bigger. Make your protagonist relatable. If I don't care about them, I'll spend the whole time rooting for the killer.

Sometimes it's inevitable. Take Pinhead from Hellraiser, my favorite movie monster.

He's not even the real bad guy in the story. Frank is, but very few people remember him at all. Frank is a one-note character, all bad. He's necessary, but not interesting.

But, Pinhead? He's got pizzaz. He's not strictly a villain. He comes from another place where the code is different. He's even reasonable, in his own freaky way. Sure, he'll "tear your soul apart", but only cause you asked him to. Don't want "your suffering to be legendary even in hell"? Well then, don't open the freakin' box. Simple as that.

Chiaroscuro

--by Juliet

I was flipping through a book of Italian paintings the other day, pondering chiaroscuro. (Seriously, this is the sort of thing I do for fun. I don't have a working television.)

Chiaroscuro, literally "light-dark", is an art term that refers to strong contrasts between light and dark in paintings or drawings.

Our eyes are attracted to the light, to what is easily seen, but our minds are intrigued by the mysterious darkness. And it is the darkness that makes the light shine as it does. Without shadows, there is no contrast. Each item fades into the next, until you can no longer see.

Is hell just such a concept? Without hellishness, how can we aspire to heaven?

And after all, are people really happy when they experience nothing but happiness? If all of our needs and desires are fulfilled, aren't we left with blandness, saddled with an unbearable lightness of being?

Painters use chiaroscuro to achieve a sense of volume when modeling three-dimensional objects. As writers, we can use that same idea to round out our characters. Put them to the test. Intensify the contrast between the light and the dark. Hold their feet to the fire, metaphorically speaking. See how they react to tragedy, fear, loss.

Put them through hell.

It's worth noting that most belief systems don't send sinners straight to hell upon their death. Rather, the deceased usually face a number of judgments and/or challenges they must triumph over before their final fate is sealed. They might have to climb obsidian mountains, be reborn in a lowly position, or endure pits of fire or ice, but they might still manage to atone and claw their way to heaven. Often, hell is seen as a place of intense shame and regret for one's misdeeds, a staging area for suffering and repentance...but ultimately, for redemption.

If that’s not a recipe for a compelling character arc, I don’t know what is.

So go ahead: embrace the chiaroscuro, and give those characters hell.

Ikea Hell

Hell is Ikea.

Really, Hell is any space occupied by:
1) a lot of people I don't know and probably wouldn't like if I did know and
2) large things for purchase piled the ceiling in dizzying quantities and colors with
3) open, echoing space in between these things.

So therefore, Hell can be defined as Office Max, Costco, or any other big box store.

But Ikea is a special kind of hell. I mean, really, what kind of store purposely confuses you? It's like they rub their hands together in glee and say, "Yes, we are trying to turn you around and around like the lines at Disneyland but there is no magical ride at the end! There are no fireworks! There is just you and a cart full of things you never knew you wanted and a line that winds almost all the way back to your house!" Then the maniacal laughter starts and it doesn't stop until you cry.

Or until you buy a car.

The first time I ever went to Ikea, I went alone. I was excited! A twelve dollar nightstand? Sure! I threw everything into my cart: pots and glasses and plants and tiny clear magnets I couldn't imagine using, but with the life I was creating with my New Ikea Things, I knew they would come in handy.

It wasn't until I standing in the back of of the interminable line, totting up the purchase price of my now-towering cart, that I started to panic. The child in line behind me, whom I'd seen entering the store, a cherubic blond with blue eyes, had taken on a demonic appearance. He gaped and screamed at me, all red-faced with bulging eyes. The demons were entering him, and I was next, I knew it!

I didn't need a single thing. Not one hanging photo frame or fuzzy floor pillow. But I was completely stuck. Once in the line at Ikea, you sign their contract: You are theirs. They own you. Look at everyone else's faces; admire the portraits of bleakness and despair. You must shuffle forward, always forward, fumbling for the credit card they will demand in exchange for your stuff and your soul.

There's no way out. You can almost feel the flames, can't you?

That day, I ran. I ignored the sticking-out tongue of the child-devil behind me, and I pushed my way past a man who was chuckling diabolically over a set of pleated polka-dot valances. I left my cart right where it was, in the middle of the line. I didn't care.

I ran out into the lot, got in my old beater Ford Fiesta and drove away blindly, still panicked, trying to calm my heart rate. I drove past the water into the heart of Oakland. Then I passed a used car lot. In the front row sat an older white convertible with a low sticker price. I pulled over, and within thirty minutes, I'd purchased a new-to-me car and had left my old car as a trade-in.

Let me repeat: Buying a used car was easier than buying popsicle sticks at Ikea. Less stressful. More fun.

So I know this: if I'm a bad person, when I die I will be trapped on aisle K-16 trying to lift pallets of porch swings with a broken forklift for all of eternity. The back up beep beep beep will never end. Therefore, I try to be as nice as possible. I'm hoping for the top-down on the convertible kind of afterlife, if you know what I mean.