Writing the monster

There was a demon-baby in my dream the other night. 

Baby was an adorable, angelic-looking two month-old… with a mouth full of sharp, sharp teeth (#uncannyvalley).

She also had a complex telepathic vocabulary, a fierce appetite, and an inclination to be obeyed by her human carer – ie, me.

But that was only the start of the dream. By the time I woke up, I had encountered rampaging dino-monsters, aliens, virtual-cyborgs, witches and plenty more besides.

(No, I didn’t eat any cheese before I went to bed).

The hungry demon-baby wanted her mother. And I was keen to relinquish my demon-caring duties, so we set out across the countryside. 

Directed by people we met along the way, we came to an ageing mansion, where we were certain there were answers.  It was dank and dreary, the kind of place where night falls early and the wolves are already howling before the last rays of daylight are gone.  And while the owners still resided in its sparse rooms, the servants had all recently fled – on account of the bones that the dogs had started digging out of the base of the crumbling, damp-effected walls.

Yes, bones in the walls. Lots of them. Thigh bones. All of them were human. 

   

Even the demon-baby found that distasteful, and commanded that we leave immediately.

But as we were beating our retreat under a purpling sky, we heard a crashing coming through the pine-trees on the ridge behind the house. Enter the larger-than-trees dino-monsters, preceded by a wave of wolves, strange pale lumpy sharks-with-limbs and every other type of fell creature, all of them fleeing in terror.

Caught in this tsunami of terrified and terrifying, we too fled – running until we were exhausted. We sought refuge in a grove of poplars, where we were befriended by the lumpy-shark-beasts, who were both intelligent and friendly, and a formidable Baba Yaga-style witch.

   

Sadly, Baba Yaga did not live in the house with chicken legs. (She hadn’t been able to get it through Customs quarantine). Instead, she took us home to her small council flat, where she made us tea in tall glasses, and offered us the use of her Mini-Minor, provided she could come along for the ride and mind the baby.

Is there a story in all of this? Absolutely. This increasingly random-seeming series of monster appearances was sewn together into a coherent plot by the details that were furbished by each of the speaking characters we met along the way. We discovered that the strange events were happening everywhere. The escalating series of supernatural disturbances were symptomatic of a disruption in the fundamental universal fabric, the boundary between fact and fiction, threatening the end of existence as we know it.

(Is there any doubt left in your mind that I have a twirly-whirly brain full of story? Go ahead, psychoanalyse that, if you can).

Why am I sharing this?  (Apart from free laughs at my expense?)  Because the dreamspace gives us clues about the powerful psychological drivers of story. Dreams arise from the very centre of our psyches, which is, of course, the place that monsters have their origin.  

And in this story, all of the monsters were complex and ambiguous characters. A bit like people. 

While each terrifying in their own way, they all had their own powerful drives, motives, and goals:  love, hunger, sex, territory, tribe, vindication, access to power – all blown out to their most extreme, most ravening expression.

And while lumping all of them together into a single plot line steers this story into the realm of unpublishable, individually they reveal the essence of monster, which we harness when we are writing. And the essence of monster is this: our own drives, our vulnerability, and our fear, made large. 

Our monsters work best when we understand the core of their monstrousness – human weaknesses, amplified by our fears until they are all-consuming, unstoppable.

And, yes: I have all of that inside my head.

And that is why I understand people.

And that is why I write.