Being in a loquacious mood I said to myself, “Self, why not write about writing? Narrow it down, explain how you come up with memorable characters.” Made sense to me; I bet my fans, both of them, would be fascinated at finding out where the depravity originates.
For an example I’ll use a recent series of short stories, the Stox Box series, and how it evolved. But first a little background on your humble author. As one might conclude from wading through the turgid prose of my catalog on Gromet, the majority of stories deal with dominant males and submissive females in a (this is unexpected) dominant/submissive theme.
It is no great leap of deduction to conclude, hey, this guy is some kind of control freak. Indeed I am, of the worst sort (warning, we may be talking toxic masculinity here). Since those in the law enforcement profession take a dim view of assault, kidnapping, false imprisonment, brainwashing and other assorted traits of the psychopath, I am forced to take the pragmatic approach and vent my irrefutable misogynistic tendencies (see, toxic!) through the medium of fictional accounts of what would otherwise be the subject of salacious TV mini-series and reality crime shows. Okay, background in place. We’ll leave the debate over which mental hospital is best suited for my new writing desk for another time.
On to the stories and characters; it all began one evening, in a galaxy far, far away. There I was, firmly ensconced in my comfy chair, mind wandering, considering what completely different idea might work for a story. Thanks to divine intervention (from above or below, hard to say) a glimmer of a notion began to grow like a festering wound.
One of Gromet’s categories is Packaged, Encasement & Objectification. I’d never tried to create a story like that, so naturally I assumed I’m an expert at it. Encasement, hmm, a shipping crate. Not a UPS Christmas package, something in line with the crates used for jet engines or turbine shafts. Something big enough to wrap around an adult, along with whatever else is necessary for the story. Objectification, reduce the protagonist to the helpless, the ‘lump on a log’, bereft of any ability to interact, doomed to lie in state in that crate, the object being encased. And finally packaged, all gathered together in a nice, neat bundle, with the functional bits hidden away from the outside viewer. To the casual observer, it’s only another wooden crate, one among thousands, nothing to distinguish it from any other. Only the unfortunate inhabitant on the inside has any reason to care about what happens to just one more package.
That’s the general idea, now to specifics. There has to be the control aspect. After all, it’s my story, that’s what I like to read about (yeah, unapologetic selfishness, disgusting isn’t it?). Wooden box, so wooden restraints, gotta keep to the theme. The prime example would be those lovely wooden stocks and pillories prevalent in earlier centuries. Puritan style stocks for wrists and ankles, cruel and often deadly pillories for the neck and hands.
Stocks were deliberately public, to humiliate the offender in front of the community. In my story the idea is turned around. Private penance where the victim is rigidly bound by planks with customized cutouts, all fixed in place inside the box. Immobilized from head to toe, trapped in the pitch dark interior, cut off from the world with no possible way to escape or draw attention in hopes of the cavalry riding to the rescue from the outside. The Stox Box is born.
The star of any bondage story, the prop, is in place. Now I need someone to experience it firsthand, and some idea of what that experience entails. Now I could throw someone in the crate, put it in the back of a truck and drive cross-country. No, there are plenty of stories in that vein. What about something a bit less commonplace?
The parallels between the Stox Box and a coffin are obvious, even if never stated explicitly. That looked promising. No, I never kill off characters, not that kind of a story. However, perception is reality when you don’t have much else to go on. I can work with that.
In goes a nameless character, no description, not even gender. I leave it to the reader to fill in those details. Add a supporting character, the equally androgynous ‘friend’, so that the story can progress. Our protagonist volunteers for the box, seeing it as a poor man’s isolation tank. The ‘friend’, our antagonist with a streak of cruelty, rounds out the little melodrama.
I won’t spoil the story by describing what happens next. Text is on Gromet, first in the Stox Box series. It was originally intended as a one shot story. I had no plans to continue it.
The story grew on me. No hate mail or death threats from the first installment; I took that as a sign that either no one read it, or it wasn’t that bad. Either way, I decided to steer a course for the literary iceberg by starting a sequel.
The box was still the star. My protagonist would return. The antagonist, ehh, not so much. We’ll get to the new villain in a moment. I needed a hook, what happens with the box and its resident?
Cramped, dark spaces, what lies deep in our subconscious mind that generates paralyzing fear? Of course, creepy crawlies, spiders, eight legged creatures hiding in the dark, brandishing fangs dripping with venom, intent on inflicting agonizing bites if the person inside moves. Perfect, gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.
How does the spider get in there? We’re going to have a third party show up with the cuddly beast, so let’s put the box on exhibit at one of those trendy bondage play parties. All night long our protagonist will remain tightly bound inside the box, a fun time for anyone into being controlled.
And now we come to the new antagonist. Again, I wanted to move out of the usual stereotypes. Even better turn a stereotype upside down, use it to build an image that was far from the character’s real personality.
What better than ‘the girl next door’? It’s a classic movie character: a young woman, rural, a bit shy, on the naïve side when it comes to the world at large. She always wears a simple dress, not unpleasant to the eye but not the height of fashion. In short, about as far from a threat as one can imagine.
And that’s how Psycho Sally came to be. She is all those things, if you didn’t look too closely. Behind the carefully crafted façade there lies the intelligence and cold indifference of a true psychopath, oblivious to human suffering, concerned only with getting as much from this world, and the people in it, as she can.
She isn’t violent. Too dangerous, society frowns on serial killers. No, she seeks out her victims with one thought in mind, crush their ego like a walnut in a nutcracker. Her greatest joy is seeing someone’s personality disintegrate before her eyes. She is precisely the type of person who would drop one of her pets into the box and close the lid.
Sally wants to help, because she cares. That’s her trademark, the phrase she repeats over and over to the poor soul trapped in her web, which just happens to be the box once she discovers it. The catch, she’s helping herself, because that’s the only one she cares about.
How does it all turn out? Well, I’ll leave that to those who care to read the stories. I will say Sally is someone I would never wish to encounter, be it on a dark street or a crowded public place. She is relentless.
So that’s my source of inspiration. I hope those two fans found it interesting….
