There's more than one way to skin a basilisk, and if your characters do, never fear, a professional basilisk skinner will read your book and tell you how wrong you were. But there's a way to use paranormal elements while still keeping all your readers happy.

By Jennifer Dunne, copyright October 2000


On one of the listserves I'm on, someone wanted to write a vampire story, and was looking for a concise explanation of vampire legend and lore so that she could "get it right." To which the short answer was, "You can't."

Like historical fiction writers, who struggle to make sense of incompatible second- and third-hand accounts of their time period, writers who wish to include paranormal elements in their stories must compare and contrast layer upon layer of mythology, hoping to uncover core truths, or at least a reasonably consistent subset of beliefs.

Vampires are one of the most complex paranormal creatures to include in your story. (Shapeshifters would follow a close second.) But the same problem of layered, incompatible beliefs holds true for the most simple and straightforward of paranormal elements.

Let's say you wanted to include a Banshee in your story. Everyone can agree on what a Banshee is, right? Wrong. :-) Turns out a Banshee might be a fairy, might be a demon, or might be the ghost of a woman who died in childbirth. She might appear in tattered rags, or have a specific gray and green dress code. She might be invisible, look like an ordinary woman, look like an old woman, or look like a misshapen hag. She might scream, shriek, wail, moan, or say nothing at all while washing out the cursed person's burial shroud or the clothes he/she will be wearing when he/she dies. She might be visible/audible to everyone, or only to the person about to die. She might announce the deaths of any important people in a region, or be restricted to a specific family. A death might be announced by one banshee or by a host.

It's impossible to get these details "right," because the various legends and traditions contradict each other. So long as you can find some justification for your choice, you're okay. And there is at least one core truth -- Banshees warn of an impending death. You couldn't have your character making birth or wedding announcements and still call it a Banshee.

The same principle applies to non-character elements, such as magic or time travel. There are so many different beliefs, many of which conflict, your goal as a writer is to find ones that work for you, and which have internal consistency, then go from there.

Of course, once you've determined the rules of your paranormal element, you need to explain those rules to your reader. Nothing long and drawn out. -- "Malcolm tensed as a long, warbling wail echoed through the hills. For a moment, the stories of his nurse captured his heart, and he thought the Kilcullen family banshee had appeared to warn him away from his ancestral home. Then the moment passed, and he dismissed the notion with a laugh. He was not going to die today. First he had to reclaim the lands that rightfully belonged to him." -- That tells the reader what kind of banshee it is (a wailing woman attached to a single family) as well as the limit of its power (it predicts death within the day).

I'll just touch on one more point. Because you're picking from among different legends and traditions, the odds that you'll do something that disagrees with your reader's idea of the paranormal is pretty high. In our example, maybe you didn't think banshees had time limits, or that he would die immediately after hearing her. In order to make the reader buy into your particular vision of the paranormal, you must be scrupulously realistic in the other areas of your story. Note that this doesn't mean you have to dwell on unpleasant aspects of realism, such as a lack of bathing in a time travel, but you shouldn't disregard them. One of the classic authors of juxtaposing the fantastic with the real was the Jazz Age author Thorne Smith -- the movie "I Married a Witch," the TV series "Bewitched," and the movie and TV series "Topper" were based on just two of his many novels. Anyone whose books are still selling more than 50 years after his death is obviously onto something.