A New Gothic Revival

Wow, last post was my 200th! That was cool, and I haven't even been writing exclusively in this blog, either. One of my life mottos is that I'm a member of the Chip-Away tribe. I just keep chipping away. $10 every week pays off a credit card. One paragraph a day builds a novel. One jog around the block every day trains for a marathon. One kiss a day creates a relationship; one hug heals a lifetime. It's amazing what tiny things done consistently over a period of time can do.

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But, I digress. What I've been thinking about today has a darker twist - a new Gothic Revival in literature. The original Gothic Revival took place between the years 1770 and 1840. Publications like "Frankenstein," "The Vampyre", "Jane Eyre", "The Castle of Otranto", Poe's ouevre, and other Gothic works stirred the emotions. Jane Austen pokes fun of Gothic novels in "Northanger Abbey", finding them quite ridiculous. However, these Gothic novels are the birthplace of the modern horror genre and also lend themselves to some dark fantasy ... which you see today. I think we're in a second Gothic Revival phase, at least in regards to literature.

J. K. Rowling started it, by making her ever-popular Harry Potter series darker and darker. She used many elements of the Gothic novel - an enchanted/haunted castle (Hogwarts), magic and magicians/wizards, an atmosphere of mystery or suspense as Harry tries to figure out strange things, an ancient curse connected to someone (Harry's lightning scar), and supernatural events. The Dementors and the Death Eaters are based on Gothic creatures and archetypes like the Grim Reaper. However, Rowling eliminated the lover aspect and made her Gothic hero a teenage child. The moody atmosphere and fantastical elements are the perfect setting to display the hormonal mood changes of a teenager, something not really familiar to Gothic readers of the 19th century. Teenagers weren't protagonists; men and women were.

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"Twilight", whether you love it or hate it, is another obvious throwback to Gothic novels. The night that Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein," the doctor, John Polidori, that was with her group also wrote the first vampire story - "The Vampyre". Lord Ruthven is a suave nobleman and Ianthe a beautiful woman. Sound familiar? "Twilight" is also a teen version of "Beauty and Beast", a Gothic tale readers of the 19th century would have been familiar with. In fact, while watching "Twilight", I was struck by how the story was so closely aligned with the fairy tale. It helped explain, for me, why it has such universal appeal!

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So, if Harry Potter and Twilight are representative of a new upswing in Gothic literature ... then why has it become so popular lately? I think I need to take a look at larger events outside of literature to discover the answer. Literature is representative of the culture it comes from, and our culture hasn't had such a great time the past decade. So here's my theory:

With the economic recession, a war in Iraq for seven years, and real-life tragedies like Hurricane Katrina, earthquakes, and global warming, people want to read a story that allows them to feel their pain and anguish through fantastical escape. Fantasy and historical fiction are booming genres right now; both allow the reader to escape into a different world but also connect deeply with their own repressed emotions about what’s happening in their lives. When people suffer, they don’t want to read happy, truthful, or gory stories. We just want to turn off reality and escape for awhile ... but not to a place where everything is fine and hunky-dory.

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Now that we are in a new Gothic Revival, if you're a writer you can take advantage of this. If you have any darker or fantastical story ideas, now is the time to pitch them. Especially if they contain the traditional elements of Gothic novels, myths, and fairy tales. I'm basing a new historical fantasy story on the darker aspects of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and the myth of Persephone's kidnapping.

What Gothic story idea would you come up with?

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Plotting Act One

Working on my next novel today, called "The Heart of a Lie." I have this fantastic book called "The Writer's Journey," by Christopher Vogler, that helps me with plotting. Act One (the first third of the book) is coming along rather nicely, and I'm especially intrigued by the Mentor I've chosen to guide my Hero, Esther, into a new life and a new place.

Here are the steps to the Hero's Journey, as outlined by Vogler, expanded by Joseph Campbell in his mythic books, and based on the ancient Hero's Journey from Greek and Roman mythology:

Act I:

• Ordinary World
• Call to Adventure
• Refusal of the Call
• Meeting with the Mentor
• Crossing the First Threshold

These four steps comprise the first act of my story, as I followed the journey in "Daniel's Garden," too. That story had several mentors - Daniel's dead father who guided his thoughts and inner decision, his father's law partner Mr. Gage who provided Daniel with a glimpse of the soldier life he was to undertake, and his mother, who proved to be an anti-Mentor, trying to keep him from going forth to be a soldier.

In my new story, "The Heart of a Lie," Esther Perry's ordinary world is a farm in Bayview, Maine. It's October 1868, three years after the Civil War has ended, a war that claimed her exuberant father's life. Esther and her sister Lara are just finishing with the last of the fall harvesting before winter, when her mother succumbs to a long-term illness.

On her deathbed, her mother issues a "call to adventure" by asking Esther to post her obituary in the Portland Press Herald. Esther is confused by this request, since she's never been to Portland, but in the next stage, "the refusal of the call," her sister convinces her to do it. Esther's refusal is rather slight, but Daniel's refusal was huge and required an enormous shift in his consciousness. He was scared by war's costs and didn't want to fight, to begin with.

After their mother's death, the two Perry girls - Esther and Lara - find themselves orphaned and burdened with massive debts on the farm. Their greedy neighbor and his slimy lawyer want the farm, but Esther lets go of servants and sells furniture to get some money. While cleaning out the house, she discovers a small strange wooden box with no markings or way to open it. Intrigued, she decides to keep it.

Two weeks after the funeral, the "meeting with the Mentor" stage occurs when haughty Lucia Curtis shows up on the doorstep proclaiming to be their mother's sister. She read the obituary in the newspaper and has been encouraged by her husband to offer a new home on a temporary basis. The girls have six months to live rent-free until they must secure their own shelter. Esther reluctantly accepts and sells the farm to her neighbor.

Thus, Act One concludes with Esther packing meagre belongings (including her beloved leather music folio) into a carpetbag and joining her sister and new aunt on a journey to Portland.

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Novels are not random - they adhere to basic storytelling guidelines set down by Aristotle three thousand years ago. But the trick to writing a great novel is to balance this ancient formula with strong characters, sensory-rich settings, and deep motivations. Otherwise, the reader simply won't care. And a reader not caring spells death to writing. Boredom is the enemy I fight against.

The Hero's Journey takes the daunting task of plotting a new story and breaks it down into a road map for me to follow. Charting the course of a new novel becomes exciting, since I get to accompany my characters on their journeys and decide what becomes of them. Except for some minor plotting details I need to tweak in Act Two, I know how this story will end ...

But that is for another time. :)

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