Metaphorical Writing Devices Used in SEETHINGS

Windows, doors, and a drenching downpour play important roles in the psychological thriller SEETHINGS. Two stand as metaphors for change—delineating opposing character traits (civil to evil); the third is set aside for a moment of extreme clarity.

They began as ordinary parts of the scenery. A window was something a character looked through. A door allowed someone to enter or leave. Rain was weather. But stories have a habit of taking hold of their furniture and putting it to work. The more I wrote, the more these objects gathered meaning. They stopped sitting in the background and began changing what happened.

That is especially useful when crafting character transformations in fiction. A character does not always announce that something inside them has shifted. Sometimes, the room tells us first. The light changes. A reflection appears where a face should be. A hand pauses on a door handle. The reader feels the alteration before knowing exactly what it means.

The writing changes whenever the narrative comes upon a door or window (and it’s about to rain). The characters’ roles alter, and the tension increases until the last raindrop falls.

Windows create distance. A person can look through one and remain safely separated from whatever waits on the other side. Glass offers vision without participation. It allows a character to watch, judge and imagine while staying protected. That protection is deceptive, of course. Glass appears solid until the moment it isn’t.

Doors are different. A door asks for a decision. Open it, close it, lock it or break through it. Someone must act. Every passage through a doorway changes the arrangement of the people around it. One character enters a room; another loses control of it. A civil exchange can cross that thin boundary and become something much worse.

Rain obscures the world, isolates the characters and removes the comfort of distance. Sound changes beneath it. Light alters. Familiar places become uncertain. The first drops announce that something has started, but no one yet knows how violent it will become. That is the invisible hand behind every thrill: a small atmospheric shift beginning a chain that cannot easily be stopped.

Writers use devices like these all the time. Sometimes, it leads readers to a flashback. A clock or a mirror moves us from one standpoint in a narrative to another. It’s often a clue.

There is a risk in using weather this way. Writers are warned away from the old dark and stormy cliché, and rightly so when the storm exists only because the author wants instant drama. Weather should not arrive carrying a cardboard sign that reads, Something Bad Is Coming. It must belong to the place, the characters and the pressure already building.

On this occasion, the clue is a door or window—but the tension’s catalyst comes from those first few drops of rain that fall ahead of a storm. There are several instances where they have been placed in the text, and although their meanings are easy to miss in the early chapters, they grow as the page count increases.

That gradual growth matters. If I point at the device too early, it stops being a discovery. The reader should notice the repetition somewhere beneath conscious thought. Another pane of glass. Another threshold. Another shower passing across the scene. Each appearance adds weight until an object that once seemed harmless begins carrying the history of everything that happened near it.

It reaches an obvious apex when a sliding glass door shatters! The door has its own identity, and it dies right in front of us, massacred by a creature made of pure evil.

Calling the door alive might sound excessive, but that was the effect I needed. By then, it had witnessed too much to remain a sheet of glass in an aluminium frame. It had separated safety from danger and civility from violence. When it broke, the division broke with it. There was no protected side anymore.

I had to rewrite that chapter several times to get it just right. The timing had to work, but so did the sound, the movement and the emotional change that followed the impact. Too much explanation killed the tension. Too little made the shattered door feel like meaningless damage. I needed the reader to understand it without stopping the scene to explain it.

After finishing it, I needed to leave the writing alone for a day or two to get my head out of the monster manifested on the pages that day. It felt so real that it frightened me!

That is one of the stranger parts of writing dark fiction. I know the room is invented. I know the storm, the door and the thing standing over its remains came from me. Still, a scene can linger after the file is closed. The imagination does not always clock off when the writer does.

So, what did I create? You’ll have to read SEETHINGS to find out!

—Michael Forman (Author of Dark Fiction)

“Forman’s writing style is artful, with the protagonist Mitchell’s warped thought processes masterfully exposed. The author has a powerful and vivid command of language and his word pictures are stark and disturbingly real.”