Fleshing out characters can be a lot of fun. One popular choice, particularly with horror/suspense writers, is to give the character a particular fear that plays into the story. For example they might have a fear of flying and the big confrontation with the glowing aliens from Mars has to happen on the outside of a racing spacecraft over Manhattan. Or they are afraid of the dark, but to confront the villain they have to go down THOSE stairs into the pitch black basement. This often works well, but can also seem a little contrived if the latter scenes are not woven together convincingly.
But there are plenty of other options. One that is a bit of fun is to incorporate a superstition. This got me thinking about superstitions in general and I thought it might be fun for people to post their own superstitions or those of friends and relatives. Having something from real life like that adds a real element to fiction.
In terms of my family, the one I remember most distinctly is one of my grandmother’s. She used to cover all the mirrors in the house during a thunderstorm. She also used to live in fear of birds flying into windows – it would mean that someone in the family was going to die.
The one I experienced at first-hand was the Irish Catholic practice of dosing children liberally with Holy Water as they lay in bed ready for sleep. You cannot put a price on chasing away the nasty Devil. I kind of liked it actually. Dad used to get his holy water from the St Benedict’s font, and kept it in a little glass bottle. He would pour a bit of Holy Water into his hand and cast away. He had a good technique by the time I came along at number eleven.
There is the old salt over the left shoulder ritual to hit the Devil in the eye if you spill the salt, but that’s never been too convincing for me. What’s the Devil care about sodium chloride anyway?
For myself – I have one that I have never been able to shake that was passed onto me by my mother. If your ears are ringing, it means someone is talking about you. If it’s your left ear it’s something bad – if it’s your right ear it’s something good. You might say I live in fear of left-sided ear infections. This is totally crazy, and yet I can’t shake it. It has a spooky king of logic. If my tinnitus worsens I could be in for permanent paranoia.
What superstitions do you have? Or interesting rituals – the more bizarre the better!
Cross-posted at chrismcmahons blog.
Mad Genius Club 
29 responses to “Characterisation – Fears & Superstitions”
There is the old salt over the left shoulder ritual to hit the Devil in the eye if you spill the salt, but that’s never been too convincing for me. What’s the Devil care about sodium chloride anyway?
Salt’s a preservative– highly suitable choice, given it’s use in kosher food, too– and getting some in your eye hurts.
Sorta like vampires and the purity of silver, even in a mirror?
Salt also used to be a very precious commodity. Salt is at the root of salary – the basis for wages. Without it, preserving food and otherthe aspects of civilizationthe are pretty hard to do. So to spill something expensive, precious, heavily taxed, and hard to replace was a much bigger deal a thousand years ago.
See also the arab superstition that if someone shared salt with you, it made you bound in non_aggression. So, stories of thieves mistaking salt for sugar, trying a taste, and then leaving the intended victim in peace.
My apologies for funny formatting and “the” after words. Autocomplete and I are not friends this morning.
In one Arab tale, the leader of a group of thieves requested a salt-less meal because he was planning to murder his host.
Salt is a nutrient needed for life (especially in the desert, see above), it’s a preservative, and it purifies things (ie, brined food generally won’t give you any diseases). Salt is white and cube-shaped and comes from inside the earth, or from the ocean, or from salt lakes. So there’s an association with holiness in many cultures.
Holy water used to be made with a pinch of blessed salt in, btw. Still is, in EF parishes.
Fascinating stuff guys. Didn’t know salt was usedin holy water. Cool.
Have a nightmare about someone–call them in the morning. Or, if it’s a family member who that would freak out, call the sibling/cousin closest to them.
I also practically sleep with my hand on the baby’s chest. Doesn’t matter how old my baby is, thus far– if they’re asleep, and I can’t see it (even if I can HEAR them) I have to make sure they’re breathing. No, nobody I know has just stopped breathing while sleeping and died.
Highly understandable. I think every parent is paranoid about their child:) Physical contact can’t be anything but good for a baby. There is one theory that’s why they wake up so often – this need physical touch.
“Hero must overcome personal fear to save the world” has become such a cliche that in Hollywood movies you know that as soon as you see a character recoil in horror from a spider in act one you know that the final battle will be against a giant spider, or take place in a room full of spiders.
That doesn’t mean that writing a character with an odd phobia or superstition is necessarily cliche, just that we should be aware of what audience expectations are being created.
Personally, I enjoy confounding audience expectations. (I’m kind of a jerk that way.) I think it might be fun to introduce a character with a paralyzing fear of, say, clowns, and then never use the word “clown” again for the rest of the book.
Careful how you do that, though. As a reader, if you make promises to me you don’t keep, I’m going to be frustrated by the end of the story. If you layer it in well with other red herrings and the true clue, that works. On the other hand if you promise a buddy story and end with a character study of one guy, or promise a funny comedy and deliver a noir thriller, or make a big deal about guns and then have the hero carry a knife and never get into a gunfight, talk aboutclowns a lot at the beginning of a whodunit and never mention them again, I’ll feel cheated.
Which may explain my dismal sales…
The hero who fears spiders might have to work with a spidery alien. Or maybe with a town full of both good and bad spiders.
I personally get a bit irked by stories that don’t deliver on early promises – I feel let down. Mind you, building up to a clever twist is always appreciated!
Also, there are only so many concepts that can be attached to a character per unit time. You’ve got to attach a phobia early to make it worth joking about not using it, which means that it is competing with other traits that one will use. It may simply be a method that tends to be less effective and efficient.
I remember a character who I initially thought was a jerk, because the early concepts included things that suggested that his upbringing would have favored atrocity. The ‘actually fairly decent’ concepts were a little slower to attach. This impacted the overall story somewhat, as it was a multi viewpoint brawl, and the guy in question was one of the few potentially sympathetic viewpoints.
There is definately something to be said for that – most readers don’t want to have to work too hard:)
You mean Chekhov’s Blank.
(Warning: do not click on the TV Tropes link above unless you have spare time available.)
I hadn’t thought of superstitions – that’s an excellent idea! Two of the main characters in the WIP are actors – a notoriously superstitious bunch.
I already have a couple of little things each does that could be pushed a little further into supersitions – a little bit extra in characterization. Thanks! And one is religious, sort of, while the other is not – which will make it even more fun to torture them.
Great. Have fun with it.
Hmmm. Aside from an odd fondness for St. Michael (got a St. Michael’s medallion at Mont Sant Michel, always stop in at the Michaelerkirche in Vienna if I’m in that area) and liking the number 13 (it’s a pilot thing), I can’t think of any crazy superstitions or behaviors (touches wood).
In my WIP, a farm manager is always bemoaning how terrible things are (too much rain/too little rain/ harvest too good so no place to store it and will spoil/ harvest so bad they’ll starve) because it’s his way of staving off bad luck. The MC picks up some of his habit without realizing it.
Adding a superstition to a culture can also be effective. I did it without realizing it when I created the Azdhagi and suddenly discovered them making forefoot gestures to ward off ill luck. The average Azdhag also has ideas about ghosts and spirits that can be very different from the official religion.
I always like St Christopher – I was a bit miffed when he was ‘de-sainted’
This is kind of silly but there are two songs that if I hear them I am paranoid that something bad is going to happen or the rest of the day is just going to be awful. I believe it is because one was on a movie that terrified me as a child and the other my cousin used to listen to constantly and whenever I spent the night at my aunt’s house it would give me nightmares. I have walked out of stores before simply because one of these two songs came on the in-store radio. I will not listen to them if I can at all help it. It is sad because they are both good songs.
Interesting. Must be something in that somewhere.
Walking over graves. What I’d really like to know is where the hell I picked it up from, because nobody in my family ever mentioned it to me. I haven’t even been to a funeral. But when I visited Westminster Cathedral, where you really can’t go much of anywhere without stepping on a paving stone that is someone’s burial marker, I was quite skeeved out.
I hadn’t thought of it– my mom’s family took care of a grave yard for…well, since forever, so we spent a lot of time there as kids. It just feels wrong to walk over/step on someone, even if it’s just their body under many feet of dirt.
That never bothered me. I suppose that we Scandinavian Lutherans are natural grave walkers. Though we wouldn’t go have a picnic with our deceased loved ones on all saints eve (or whenever it is) like they do in Mexico.
When I was home a few years ago we stopped at a graveyard and walked around looking at the stones and inscriptions. It’s a small town so family names and whatnot and relatives… lots of History and stuff to muse upon. The habit was an enormous and expensive grave stone with the family name on it and then individual flat stones with a first name and dates. What caught my fancy was the stone for a fellow named Otto. The orientation of the name and dates at the foot of a 100 year old oak tree meant that the tree itself was sprouted from approximately his chest. The tree was huge, but as Otto had only died 100 years ago it couldn’t be older than that. But the tree was big enough that people who had actually known Otto must have either planted it or allowed it to grow on purpose. Whatever box and whatever bones must be long gone (I doubt anyone in that farming community was embalmed 100 years ago), but it was interesting to think that the physical essence of Otto is almost certainly in that tree.
This is reminding me of an Orson Scott Card story. Pretty weird.
I’m definately in the ‘don’t walk over the grave’ camp. Fasicinating though. In my case I think I picked it up as a child from stories of hands reaching up to grab ankles etc:)
Superstitions? I think magic doesn’t exist. Some of the psychological elements associated with that conviction on my part might qualify as superstition. When I was really young, I was more open minded, and didn’t have a reason to discard concerns about, say, spontaneously being transported to alternate worlds. (Note that I read Resonance well after having gotten past those fears.) I also, on top of that, choose to avoid practicing magic, so I do things like skip over the magic word’s in Drake’s Isles books. Treating things as if magic could exist is essentially a personal taboo.
Note that disbelieving in magic when there are few grounds for conclusively confirming its limits seems to be practiced as a general countermeasure to fuss. Note that the common law system, implemented correctly, seems to reject claims of the general form ‘for this situation I am owed damages from random entirely unrelated person B, because magic’.
Phobias? Dogs and Horses, for one. (I’m mostly blind to body language, and there isn’t the prospect of verbal communication to potentially resolve concerns about being around a large animal.)
Life struggles have helped me appreciate mental function. I have done so from a very early age. On top of that, by the age of ten or so experiences and formative stories had helped me develop an understanding of both the hazards of recreational substances, and of psychiatric medication*. To me, personally, the combination of poor discipline, bad choices and biological effects of recreational drug use seems a death sentence. I especially fear the mental impairment, but in general it seems like one of the worse ways to die. Preferring death by fire might be hyperbole. That I’d rather stick my hand in a blender is not.
*Yes, used under competent supervision they can be a wonderful thing. However, this is partly because the stuff they treat can be so very horrific. a) All medicines are poisons. b) Anything with a very strong effect on the CNS might do all sorts of things. Something that keeps someone alive for a extra decade or more might be a success if that came with 80% of original function, or some years off the life of an organ.
Drug use – legal and illegal – is a very recent thing for humans. It’s worrying, really.