I don’t necessarily start out a novel with teenage main characters in mind. My first four books (three already published – Birth Offering, Dead Works, and The Disembodied) have a total of 7 adolescent central characters – 5 boys and 2 girls. Dead Works and The Disembodied did not start out that way, but the direction of the narrative shifted with the writing process. In both cases, early segments were scrapped or revised as I began to realize what the stories were about.
Undoubtedly, my career as a psychologist working with and studying adolescents informed my writing. I also found that kids provide all kinds of benefits when writing horror:

1. They’re a cheap (manipulative) scare. When a kid is involved in a terrifying situation, the tension in enhanced more than if it was a couple of adults.
2. A writer gets to play with a wider range of emotional and behavioral reactions with kids. Young characters can make mistakes based on immaturity, poor decision making, or self-centeredness and get away with it in the eyes of a reader. That is, readers will (generally) not lose empathy for these characters like they would for an adult acting in the same manner. An adult would be judged cowardly, selfish, or obnoxious. Typically, kids would not be judged the same way.  One exception that comes to mind is the whiney little kid who gets eaten in the Walking Dead and putting everyone else at risk.
3. Developing cognitive and emotional awareness also gives a writer a number of degrees of freedom in creating their characters. That’s why I like the age period of early adolescence – the middle school ages. This is a very difficult age group for adults – think of your own middle school experiences and your heart probably skips a beat – because hormonally-based emotionality is in overdrive. In addition, middle schoolers have difficulty putting into words their rush of emotions and are more inclined to act them out. The latter is often displayed in childlike antics that drive parents crazy. At the same time though, these kids are on the threshold of sophisticated cognitive processing. The expression of adult feelings and conversation becoming really possible—not to mention the consideration of abstract principles. The result is a series of potentially complex characters.

The portrayal of teenage characters is often risky however. The older authors get, the less likely they can make them sound real. That’s the subject of another conversation.

​Write what you know.
That’s what everyone tells you anyway. Sadly, having a psychologist or a professor as my main protagonist in each of my books would be a drag. Although, now that I look at it, there is a mental health professional in many of my novels (published and unpublished). Oh well. Still, some peripheral characters were “requisite” psychologist in my books which meant I had to learn about other occupations – and work that I’ve never done.
How should a writer learn about other occupations? Research of course. Here are a few ways to make your characters be realistic…

1. Ask. Yes, ask someone who you know that does that kind of work. You’d be surprised how many people would love to chat about what they do – and outline ways that their occupation would lend itself to a storyline.
2. Online research. This is simple of course, but make sure you’ve got reliable sources. Career counseling websites, Professional Association websites, and even blogs by certain professionals would often describe their day to day lives.
3. University libraries and departments. You probably don’t even need to go to campus. The university websites for various programs will explain the preparation and training for particular majors and also state licensing requirements.

In one of my novels, I needed to learn about FBI investigations beyond what I knew from watching TV. Did you know that the FBI website has a section called Resources for Specific Audiences? Under that are numerous links – one of which is for “Researchers and Students”. Want to learn how they FBI investigates serial killers? Well, it’s there in that section.
For my novel, The Disembodied, I checked multiple sites for their take on Depersonalization Disorder. Now, as a psychologist, I was familiar with it. But, not as much as you’d think. I never encountered a case of it. I wanted to see how it was portrayed on the internet. I found a great description on the Mayo Clinic website, I even included the reference in the novel.
Writers can avoid looking like they don’t know what they’re talking about by checking out these available sources. They’re huge, and they’re right at our fingertips.

“When I’m home for the weekend, do you want to see the remake of Poltergeist?

This text was heartwarming news for a 61 year-old father whose daughter was planning to visit us a particular weekend in May – the same weekend that the remake was releasing. I worked hard during her childhood to make her into an honest-to-goodness horror aficionado. Our daughter is now in her twenties and I am pleased to say that my efforts have been fairly successful. While she isn’t drawn frequently to the genre, she has her favorite movies and is appreciative of certain formats and horror sub-specialties.

My efforts over the past twenty plus years proceeded along certain lines. First, I made good use of Disney movies. There are horrific elements to most of those films, and I always made it a point to comment on my enjoyment of the “bad guys/women” characters. Second, all kids like dinosaurs (myself included), and it isn’t too much of a leap to generalize from dinosaur movies (especially those portraying prehistoric creatures destroying Tokyo, London, and New York – all from my childhood in the 50s and the 60s) to other kinds of monster movies. Third, Harry Potter was a godsend. The first novel in the series became popular when she was in the first grade. We always read to her at bedtime, and I started with Sorcerer’s Stone at that time. She was hooked immediately – and the rest is history. When there wasn’t a Harry Potter story to read, there were other books with similar supernatural and thrilling themes. They didn’t have to be horror; there were plenty of thrillers, dark fantasy, and suspense books for kids that kept her on the edge of her seat. When she became adept at reading “chapter books” on her own, she chose comparable stories. (It wasn’t until college that other girls introduced her to chick lit. Sigh. I was hoping to keep her from that stuff forever. But, alas…)

There were a few mistakes along the way. I tried to introduce movies that were developmentally appropriate. For monster films, we tried the rampaging dinosaur movies from the 50s and 60s: Gorgo, Godzilla, The Giant Behemoth, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms…I even showed her Reptilicus. The latter was a weak moment, and capitalized on our Danish heritage. Unfortunately, my biggest mistake was showing her Jurassic Park too soon (I believe she was in the first grade). It was dumb, I know. For two weeks she kept waking up screaming thinking that there were Velociraptors in the basement. My wife had no sympathy for my plight and forced me to deal with every nightmare. The fears gradually subsided, and now Jurassic Park is one of her all-time favorites. We have our favorite passages from the movie over which we’ve bonded: the lysine contingency (she is a micro-biologist in training and has done research using lysine), I hate being right all the time (my favorite line which I repeat at every opportunity that she doesn’t take my always correct advice), clever girl, and a few others that aren’t coming to me at the moment.

Another bump in the road along the way: She also read and enjoyed all of the Twilight novels. I am not sure where I went wrong to foster this…

We are hit and miss on my favorite sub-category: supernatural tales and ghost stories. But, she will watch some with me – hence Poltergeist. We both felt it was so-so, by the way, not bad – just unnecessary.

A few weekends later she came home again for a visit which coincided with an appointment. It just so happened that it was the same release weekend of Jurassic World. We saw it together of course.

And we loved it. 

Anyhow, I digressed slightly in the previous blog. (Notice how I am continuing as if there wasn't a day and a half between posts?) What has the origins of Collection got to do with my thought not another kid?

Well, I started considering my next work, and damn if it doesn’t look like another kid will be a main character.

If I can “blame” anybody, and I really can’t, it would be my doctoral students in my Psychotherapy Interventions class.

This spring 2015 semester has been an examination of different interventions from around 10 different theoretical orientations. I set up the class so that textbooks reflecting these ten orientations were potential reads. The students had to choose two as their readings for the class (in addition to two other texts that everyone read).

There are multiple assignments in a variety of formats (believe me, they are complex – and I have to grade them all). One assignment involves selecting a subgroup of 5-6 students to serve as an expert panel to describe how they would work with a particular client. There is no preparation for the client, the panel will be informed about the client and then they had to start providing a case conceptualization and a treatment plan based on the theory in one of their selected texts.

Now, here is where the kid idea came in…

Their clients were to be YouTube bloggers. Many people suffering from mental illness will make multiple presentations about their symptoms and related personal issues. Most of the YouTube bloggers are young in their twenties. I spent a lot of time searching for clients who would be diverse. With much effort, I found some ethnic diversity, but not much age diversity. I only recently found a male who was in his fifties, but too late to be used in the class. The only age “diversity” I could find was downward – and I found a handful of teenagers who were articulate enough to serve the needs of the class. One was a young guy, somewhere in the 12-14 range who was exceptionally eloquent for his age and who professed to have a rather unique disorder.

This particular kid mentioned that he has Depersonalization Disorder – a condition where the individual has a persistent sense that he is observing himself or herself from outside his/her body. These feelings of unreality are quite disturbing, and the person wonders whether they are even alive.

As this kid described his experiences in a graphic manner, I began to think there’s a novel in this. Nearly simultaneously, someone in the class yelled out, “Hey Dr. Hains, this sounds like a plot from one of your books.”

The student was right of course (after all, I was thinking that very thing at the same time). So, I started plotting and organizing. Nothing is written yet other than a short outline. But, if I pull this off, I think the narrative will be exciting.

Only thing, though, is that it will involve another kid. 

When I finish a piece, I usually put it away for at three months before I look at it again. So, with a solid draft of Sweet Aswang tucked away out of sight, I began Dead Works. As I indicated in a previous blog, Dead Works was not supposed to be about kids. I wanted to think like an adult for long periods of time, and I had a working mental outline for Dead Works. The story revolved around a psychologist and ghost hunting. I just couldn’t get it moving, however. The big reason, I think, is that I had become consumed by a minor subplot involving one of the psychologist’s cases – a boy who is in therapy because he thinks he sees ghosts. Push came to shove and I jettisoned the original plot and focused on this aspect of the narrative. I realized up front that at first glance this sounded like the movie The Sixth Sense. My plot, though, was considerably different, so I wasn’t worried about pursuing something that would sound really familiar to potential readers.

Once again, my professional life contributed source material. The psychologist character became a graduate student in counseling psychology who was working on his PhD. The young therapist is doing his practicum placement at the university counseling center and he is assigned a teenage client who is seeing ‘things’. Since I teach practicum classes at both the Master’s level and the PhD level, I have a pretty good idea what the process feels like for trainees. I decided early in the process that the entire context for the novel would take place within the counseling relationship between the teen and the student. I found I couldn’t hold myself to this given the complexity of the plot, but I managed to keep all points of view outside of the therapy to the graduate student.

As life tends to be unpredictable, my third effort, Dead Works, was published after Birth Offering. I was still messing with Sweet Aswang, and was pleased when Damnation Books accepted Dead Works. Anyway, with Sweet Aswang still in the wings, my first three books were shaping up to have teenage protagonists.

So, I was sick of kids.

Then I started work on my next piece, tentatively titled Collection. This took nearly two years to finish, but I am pleased to announce that the first complete draft was saved to multiple files last week. This will remain untouched for three or four months before I go back to begin the revision process. I am excited to say that the point of view is entirely from a 60-year old female sheriff. Quite a departure from the usual stuff, but a refreshing challenge. I had to put myself into a mindset of the character, and I started by engaging her inner dialog without swearing. Now, I realize that 60-year old women these days do not restrict themselves to the king’s English (I know plenty of women around that age and many curse like sailors), but I felt that Lacey would not do this. So, that was my initial effort for that point of view. Teenagers have more range when it comes to naughty words, but a more limited vocabulary. However, my 60 year old sheriff was ended up being a refined thinker. We’ll see how she holds up after my three or four month hiatus from the manuscript.

In preparation for writing Dead Works, I watched a couple of those ghost-hunter themed shows on TV. I convinced myself that this counted as in-the-field research. Well, in the final analysis, this was a waste of time. Quite frankly, I found these shows ridiculous.  Granted, I was not anticipating solid science. I fully expected the shows to be rather lame (full disclosure: I’m skeptical of all reality TV and suspect these shows are script-driven).  Still, I was rather taken aback at how awful these shows were. I couldn’t understand how these “experts” (who, after all are in this line of work and who have supposedly confronted all kinds of strange occurrences) yelp, squeal, and scream at the slightest noise or the tiniest flickering shadow (“Did you see/hear that!!!” – well, no, to be perfectly honest). In addition, hours of footage must be filmed to find something remotely eerie (like a piece of dust floating before the camera lens). The edited version which purportedly shows this unconvincing “evidence” (and which viewers cannot see or hear) is packed into 60 minutes of silly nonsense. These shows only convinced me that the entire ghost-hunting industry is a giant hoax. Sadly, none of these shows were at all helpful in my efforts to gather data to inform Dead Works. So, multiple hours of time wasted….

One of these shows did strike a chord with me, however. Since I work a lot with kids, and since my fiction efforts typically involve adolescent characters, I was drawn to a show called Psychic Kids. I never saw it when it was on the air, but did watch a couple of episodes via Netflix. My initial reaction was that these episodes were heavily scripted and used child actors. The “host” was a guy who had a reputation for producing schlocky paranormal TV shows. If I’m not mistaken, I think he also identified himself as a medium, or something paranormal-ish.  He’d escort two or three older children or adolescents around a supposedly haunted house and ask them if they felt anything. When the kids invariably said no, he would ask leading questions about energy or a presence of spirits, and the kids would get the hint to reply “Oh, yeah, I do feel that…” Then this host would fill in the blanks and ask more incredibly leading questions such that the kids would “report” seeing a ghost who, when alive, lived/visited/rented/owned/died in the house. Of course, the kids and the hosts would gasp or shriek at the right times when the lights are off. And the viewers would end up shaking their heads and thinking wtf?

This show was all in good fun, I suppose, if it was scripted TV. However, the producers swore up and down that the kids were legitimate. If that is the case, then, this takes on an entirely new meaning.

If Psychic Kids was not a fictitious production, then the portrayal of actual kids was extremely bad taste – if not abusive. These kids, again if they were real (or portraying themselves), were troubled youngsters. They were struggling with something (and it wasn’t ghosts), and the network was exploiting them for entertainment purposes.  Did they have emotional or behavioral problems? There were hints that the kids had been struggling with personal problems (to make the urgency of the “haunting” more evident or to somehow add credence to the ghostly visions). For instance, the kids were breathlessly described as having issues with isolation, anger, anxiety, parent-child conflicts, and so on – often in response to being psychic. The episodes of the first season even employed a psychologist who served as co-star/co-host (or whatever you call it) and who took part in the “process”. I was especially irritated with her presence and her on-screen comments when talking with the kids and their parents. Psychologists should “first do no harm” – a basic ethical principle. Yet, she was earnestly trying to convince these kids that their emotional difficulties were the results of being haunted. How could this possibly be construed as doing no harm? Then, of course, there could have been other troubled kids who viewed the show on a frequent basis who may have been struggling with their own problems. What was the impact on them? Could this have diverted them or their parents away from the help they needed and pushed them towards an interpretation that was unhelpful? I hope not.

So, I certainly hoped the show was scripted with actors playing the roles of the kids. Otherwise, we had a disturbing portrayal of TV at its exploitive worst.

When it comes to ghosts and the paranormal, I have occasionally been asked, “Do you believe this stuff?”

People are often surprised to hear that the answer is “no”. I don’t believe in ghosts. I’ve not had any experiences with hauntings – although I have scared myself silly at times over the course of my life. The reason for this, of course, is that I love horror.

Ghost stories and supernatural tales are probably my favorite. Giant monsters are cool. Zombies and vampires…meh. Slasher tales? No, those are tiring and boring. For me, gore and vivid portrayals of flying body parts are not frightening. The imagination is more intense.

What? Love horror but not believe it ghosts (or monsters or demons or…whatever)? Why not?

Basically, I’ve been trained as a scientist – a psychologist, but a scientist nonetheless. Empirical support is important to the field of psychology.  You will see this perspective in Eric, the graduate student character in my second novel Dead Works (releasing soon). Like him, I believe much of the supernatural experiences reported by people can be described by natural causes. My goal is not to alienate or anger people with this comment (heaven knows I love horror tales), but this reflects my world-view based on the reliance of scientific evidence. Things like hallucinations, dreams, sleep paralysis, confirmation biases, errors in logic, memory and perceptual errors – these account for just about everything that is considered “supernatural”. I haven’t seen compelling evidence to suggest otherwise.

A fair number of supernatural claims are also hoaxes. I love looking at photos of ghosts and reading reports of possession. One of my favorite photos is a picture of a head of a youth looking around a doorway in the Amityville Horror house. This was supposed to be a picture of one of the kids murdered in the residence. Many of you have seen it, and it is downright creepy. I love it. However, it is actually a photo of a college student who was serving as a research assistant for Ed and Lorraine Warren who were conducting a psychic “investigation” of the house.  Too bad. (I still loved the movie The Conjuring based on one of the Warren’s cases.)

By the way, the stories behind such “true” accounts as the Amityville Horror and The Exorcist have been disclosed as hoaxes – sad but true. However, they remain dynamite stories just the same. I can – and do - enjoy them on that basis.

Dead Works is a psychological ghost story is about a teenager in therapy because he is seeing ghosts. I realize this sentence makes it sound like the movie The Sixth Sense, but the plot is considerably different. The psychologist character is a graduate student in counseling psychology who was working on his PhD. The young therapist is doing his practicum placement at the university counseling center and he is assigned a teenage client who is seeing ‘things’. 

I mentioned in my previous blog that I tried to make the therapy sessions between Eric, the doctoral counseling psychology student, and Greg, his teenage client, authentic as possible. However, while I think the portrayal is authentic, I wasn’t necessarily factual as I had to edit some of the more mundane components of therapy for dramatic purposes.  In addition, Greg comes off as more verbal and insightful than the average adolescent male, who tends to respond with monosyllabic utterances in these situations until feeling comfortable.

A critical skill all therapists need to display is empathy - which helps establish a therapeutic alliance and helps the client explore his/her problems. Part of being empathic involves being genuine and non-judgmental, which means accepting what the client says and not making critical evaluations of the person. Therefore, in Dead Works, when Greg talks about seeing ghosts, Eric listens and reacts as if he was talking about everyday adolescent concerns like problems in school or conflicts with siblings. He works hard at not judging or ridiculing his client.

Since Dead Works is ostensibly a ghost story, much of the plot takes this “problem” and runs with it. It reality, Eric would have explored other issues or factors that might be playing a role in Greg’s life. With a little digging, Eric and Greg may begin to see the ghost issue as a byproduct of something else like trauma or abuse. The hauntings could actually “fall away” or become unimportant as other issues are addressed. In the case of Dead Works, though, I kept the ghosts front and center in the therapy process and had a blast doing it. For instance, I was able to weave in features of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as Eric helped Greg consider alternative explanations for the hauntings. Eric also considers Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as a possible intervention for Greg. Finally, Eric’s discussion of Greg in his practicum class also demonstrates how student therapists can explore difficult cases in a supportive atmosphere

Ghosts have not been a frequent occurrence in therapy sessions in my professional experience. My love of horror has not been fed by professional circumstances. That comes from my own twisted enjoyment of things spooky. The heartbreaking, disturbing, and sad experiences related by kids with whom I’ve worked (or discussed by my practicum students in class) are all decidedly human and earthbound. Trauma, abuse, poverty, dysfunctional families, illness, stress, anxiety, anger, depression… the list goes on and on – these are the topics of therapy.

My follow-up fiction-writing efforts after Birth Offering have resulted in two different novellas: Dead Works and Sweet Aswang. Both are around 50,000 words, but tell two completely different types of stories. Sweet Aswang, which was started before Dead Works, is an effort of mine to recapture the monster stories/movies of my youth in the 1950s and 1960s. Sweet Aswang is the first, as far as I know, Type 1 diabetes themed horror books.  I am still tinkering with SA, so it will probably not see the light of day until 2015 (if I’m lucky).  I will have more to say about SA when the time is right.

Dead Works is a psychological ghost story is about a teenager in therapy because he is seeing ghosts. I realize this sentence makes it sound like the movie The Sixth Sense, but the plot is considerably different. My professional life as a professor and a psychologist contributed a chunk of the source material. The psychologist character is a graduate student in counseling psychology who was working on his PhD. The young therapist is doing his practicum placement at the university counseling center and he is assigned a teenage client who is seeing ‘things’.  I regularly teach a Practicum course where the students are being supervised while they provide therapy. Much of the context for the novel takes place within the counseling relationship between the teen and the student therapist, the story is told from the graduate student’s point of view. The book was a lot of fun to write.

The original intent of DW was to describe a ghost hunting expedition in a local that does not go according to plan. I had the basic outline in my head, including a shocking ending – well, which seemed shocking at the time I thought of it. One of the characters had a backstory that involved him seeing a therapist when he was a child – in part due to his paranormal experiences (that is, seeing ghosts). I became increasingly interested in this detail to the point that this plot line took over and became the entire focus of Dead Works.

Once I gave in to the urge to make this episode a book in itself, I had to flesh out the story. I knew almost immediately that the bulk of the story had to take place within the context of therapy sessions. Now, conducting therapy is both a humbling and a challenging endeavor. The work can be exciting and interesting, especially for the client and therapist. But to a casual observer, or a reader, the process of therapy may often be as exciting as watching paint dry. Therefore, the dilemma involved finding a way to be accurate and authentic in describing the process, but not necessarily factual. Factually presenting therapy would drive most readers to boredom. I ended up only illustrating the plot-relevant portions of the therapy and not writing about the mundane stuff.

In addition to the “editing job” on the counseling exchanges, I also decided to provide some backdrop to the two main characters: Eric, the grad student psychologist-in-training and Greg, the teenage client. The vast majority of the story is told from Eric’s point of view. About 60% of the time he is in sessions with Greg. Eric’s remaining time is with friends and in class. Eric also needed a complex past for him to handle Greg’s difficult case – so this is covered at length.

The only time the point of view switches to Greg is during some of his counseling sessions. I decided that having him exclusively narrate his ghostly experiences ran the risk of emotionally distancing the impact of these events for the reader. So, to shake things up, the perspective often shifted to Greg as he is relating his accounts. This doesn’t occur all of the time, but enough to provide variety. I think it works well.

More to talk about in future blogs: skepticism, what therapy is like, impact of abuse, and who knows what else.

I probably do not represent the typical demographic of horror lovers (but really, who does - the fan base is more diverse than I originally thought). Nonetheless, I have found that the current trend in horror movies towards atmospheric chills instead of gore and torture porn is much to my liking. I watched Insidious 2 last night and loved it - as much as I enjoyed the original Insidious. Also this year, Sinister, Mama, Dark Skies, The Conjuring, and Jug Face were all pleasant surprises. I suppose you cannot call these subtle films, but they are creepy and spooky instead of blood fests. Anyway, they have been excellent examples of horror - great characters, fine acting and technically well accomplished. I hope to see more of these similar films in the future.