I’ve recently been working a lot with my story The Unheard, and it kept bothering me that the monsters I created didn’t have a place or point of origin. They were just there. It bothered me that I didn’t know where they came from? I had a legend in the story itself of their creation, but I didn’t want it to be the truth. It’s kind of the same as with Zombie-movies; what caused the zombie outbreak in the first place? I sat there with the same issue.
Now, normally I come up with incredible complex ideas of how it all happened, terrified of face-planting into a cliché(although I probably do so more often than I am aware of from time to time), because surely, monsters don’t just rain from the sky(although that might actually have been an interesting twist too…!).
But I couldn’t bring anything up to a boil in that black pot of ideas I have in my head. I kept obsessing about where the monsters came from since they are central to the story. All I knew was that they could not always have existed as it would damage the storyline.
Then, my penpal, who has no interest in writing, suggest something so incredible simple, yet it solved all my problems. A curse. Simple and straightforward, and everyone knows how a curse works.
This idea didn’t just solve the issue of creation, it rose more questions which had to be answered. Who cast the curse? Who did they cast it on? Why were they able to do so? Why did they do it?
And thus, the story thickened. It was like adding salt to a watery porridge:)
theivorypen 