Using Paranormal in Your Story
AUTHOR: Jennifer Dunne

(excerpted from speech given at the SWP Mini-conference in Chicago)

The first dividing point is whether or not you personally believe in the reality of the paranormal elements. Some people insist that you can't write about things you don't personally believe in. I find that to be a very limiting attitude -- after all, we write male point of view without having been men, or set stories in locations we've never seen.

But if you're uncomfortable with a concept, such as reincarnation or psychic powers, you have two choices. You can have the character be a skeptic -- in essence, representing your viewpoint -- or you can be inconclusive. The character may believe she or he has magical powers, but nothing happens in the book which does not have a more mundane explanation. Readers who believe in the character's magical powers will interpret the facts one way, while disbelieving readers are free to believe in chance coincidence, without destroying the story.

We'll come back to that in a bit, but I wanted to address what to do if you do personally believe in the paranormal element you're adding. Aside from those authors who write for the inspirational market, you can not assume your readers share your beliefs. You need to give enough details to explain the paranormal element to someone who may be seeing it for the first time, yet not dwell on it so much that it seems like you're trying to convert the reader, or worse yet, take the tone that the belief is self-evident, and anyone who does not believe in this element is a misguided fool. Your characters can think that, certainly. But you, as the author, must always be careful to remain respectful of the wide range of readers' beliefs.

So, now, you're going to add a paranormal element to your book. Say, the hero is the reincarnation of someone who lived in the 1920's, because you think that's a cool time period and you could have fun with it. And the heroine is psychic, so she can sense his previous incarnation. We need a conflict, so the hero doesn't believe in psychic powers. And we need a romantic complication, so let's have his wife from the 20's be a ghost, who recognizes him and wants him back. What would we have?

We'd have my first attempt at a paranormal romance, but we wouldn't have a very good book. Let me go thorough why my choices didn't work, so you can see how you can make great paranormal romances that fly off the shelves.

First of all, I had a ghost, a psychic, and reincarnation. For each paranormal element, I needed to explain the rules. Did I have the kind of ghost that was invisible, visible only to some, visible under certain conditions or at certain times, tied to a place or object? Could she affect the material plane? The same with the psychic. What were her powers? Were they reliable? Could she use them at will, or did she get unexpected flashes? Were her insights exact, or disturbingly vague? And for the hero, the reader needed to know my ground rules on reincarnation (Did everyone reincarnate? Just some people? How much would they remember?) and also, the basics of his previous life. That's a lot of backstory. Did I mention this was category length?

You've probably already guessed the problem. So much of the book was devoted to explaining the paranormal elements, I had no room left to develop the characters and their mental and emotional backstories, which resulted in a flat, cardboard relationship. She fell in love with him because he was the hero, not because two idiosyncratic human beings met and meshed so that their individual strengths complimented and compensated the other's weaknesses, enabling them both to grow.

Remember I said I'd get back to the idea of belief or disbelief in a paranormal element destroying a story? This is what I meant. If your characters are defined by their paranormal elements -- if your heroine is a psychic, your hero is a reincarnated master architect -- and your reader doesn't believe that premise, you've blown your story. If the reader doesn't accept reincarnation, she won't accept your story's resolution based on reincarnation. On the other hand, if you have rich and detailed characters, with conflicting powerful drives and desires, one aspect of which is the paranormal element, you'll have hooked your reader and the paranormal element in question will be included in your reader's general suspension of disbelief.

Which neatly gets me back to the second flaw in my story. The conflict between the hero and heroine was her psychic powers. If the reader believes in psychic powers, or adamantly disbelieves, she'll have the resolution worked out as soon as she sees the premise. Where's the suspense? The edge-of-your-seat, nail-biting fear that the couple won't be able to live happily ever after?

Finally, what about my ghost? If she had driven off her husband, and was now trying to take back something that was never hers to begin with, that would have worked. But I wrote a sad and tragic woman who had waited all these years for her husband's return. I broke the reader's sacred trust. The hero's and heroine's love should not hurt anybody else (or at least, no one who doesn't deserve to be hurt). It's why we don't like stories about adultery, or why there are very few stories with two worthy heroes competing for the heroine's attentions. We don't want anyone to suffer -- except, of course, the hero and heroine, as we torture them on the road to happiness. Paranormal elements give you a much broader spectrum of ways your hero and heroine can make others suffer. You need to be mindful of them all, and make sure you don't hurt any innocent characters.

For Jennifer Dunne's second novel, DARK SALVATION, she restrained herself to two paranormal elements, and the hero's first wife remains decently dead throughout. But most importantly, she allowed herself almost 100,000 words to tell the story. www.jenniferdunne.com