I want to write about werewolves, but at the same time I want to branch out and explore other supernatural creatures that haven't been in the spotlight for a while. I was thinking angels but then I have no intention of writing about religion of any sort and that is kind of inevitable with angels. Really I just need to brainstorm other supernaturals. Does anyone have a list in mind or have any supernatural beings that they think I should look into?
Werewolves are cool and I am happy that you are writing on it, please do write on them. If you are looking for more humanoids then like Half-man Half-wolf(Werewolves), you can go for other animals too..like Half-man Half-lion(Narsingh), Half-man Half-snake(Naga or Medusa), Half-man Half-Bull(Tauren or Minotaur), Half-man Half-horse(Centaurs), Half-man Half-ape(Orcs). But yes, you want a mix of popular and not so popular creatures then I have some suggestions for you in contexts of spirits forms like you are doing with werewolves. Yaksha: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakshas Brahmarakṣasa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmarak%E1%B9%A3asa I will tell you more when I will be able to find them...
I've been researching other mythological and supernatural creatures but I can't find any that I really like, like werewolves. Honestly, are people really over werewolves? And what kind of werewolf stories generally fall flat and which ones keep the reader interested? I know I'm supposed to write for myself and blah blah blah but knowing what people want to read and don't want to read is helpful.
If your priority is making money and fad genres I would just skip the theatrics and focus completely on Romance Novels. That is where the money is.
Well it is not my priority to just make money. I want to write a good story. All I'm saying is that it's not a bad idea to figure out what people do and do not want to see. But in the end I think since I've had the werewolf idea since before Twilight and all of the other books with werewolves that have become popular recently, then I should stick with it. But I just want to know what people don't like to see with werewolves.
It's easy to hate on bandwagon-jumping and many people picked the stupidest hole with Meyer- regarding her depiction of Vampires. Thankfully, Vampires are not real and as such there is no real border when 'designing' a mythical entity. Personally I believe fantasy altogether needs to be given a while to lay fallow, but that's just me and if you have a new take on fantasy that provides a fresh thought, then by all means, do it.
Although you'll want to write something that will please and entertain others (and maybe give you a little bit extra cash), you should write for yourself. If you enjoy what you write, then someone else is likely to as well. It would make no sense to write something you don't enjoy writing about with content you don't want to write about, because it'll be no good. If you want to write and enjoy writing about Werewolves go for it and by the end at least one person will definatlly enjoy it, even if that one is just you. I'm sure I read this tip (or something along these lines) in the writing Sci-Fi and Fantasy book my parents got my for Christmas (or it could have been somewhere else...) I'm just a novice, but I'd say write about Werewolves if that what you want to write about and pay no mind to others who say you shouldn't because there currently too popular or whatever. Write about what you want to, would be best I think. Oh and about the Angels, have you ever seen the TV sereis Supernatural? It's got Angels in but it has nothing to do with religon (God has apparntly disappeared)... The Angels in that are rather corup actually. When they first came into the show, they were working to ensure that the appocolipes happened! The main characters stopped it, but half of the angels want to set it off again and half want to prefent that... But the one leading them isn't so pure and angelic either, with what he's been doing to prevent it! So there's a twist on beings that are meant to be pure! Take any supernatual/fantasy creature you want and throughout whatever rule book there maybe for them!
As a fan of werewolves and vampires, they can never be overdone. Then again, if there is not a market for such stories then there is not a market. However, right now, werewolves are big.
"For all the minor werewolves prowling the supernatural genre, are we not in a werewolf vacuum? Don't we lack a true romantic werewolf hero, a charming, witty, conscience driven man wolf who retains his full mental faculties during the transformation, and his voice? I think so. We'll see what the world thinks when The Wolf Gift is published, and Reuben Golding makes his entrance on the stage. " This is a quote from Anne Rice from her Facebook page. Yes, it's a plug for her book that will be released in a few months, but it's also more than that. It's her pointing out what she saw missing in the flood of werewolf novels, and doing her best to fill the void. I, for one, am looking forward to reading it, as I would look forward to reading Holo's version if there was something fresh and new brought to the table. I say go for it!
The best werewolf lore comes from the world of darkness. The popularity surrounding the twilight movies has given people a bad taste in their mouth when it comes to werewolves and interpretation that movie series has for them. I like a more traditional werewolf story. Packs, violent transformations - inhuman strength when transformed. I really enjoyed the Wolfman movie, its faults aside it was a genuinely good film in my eyes because it took it back to a more traditional kind of werewolf. My advice would be to write it anyway you wish to. Just do it for the right reasons. Because it's interesting to you, because it has a twist you can throw onto it to make it interesting to others. Not because werewolves are popular right now or because you just finished a twilight/underworld movie marathon.
I agree. You do need a twist. I mean look at Teen Wolf. That movie wasn't hilarious because he was a Werewolf, it was because he was awesome at basketball and van surfing. Make it unique.
As has already been said, if you want to write warewolves, do it. Seriously you're going to write better about something you want to write about than if you wrote about Kelpies or Red Caps. Also, I doubt that the idea you have allows warewolves to be easily interchanged with some other supernatural creature. Doing so would probably be to the detriment of your story. That said, I'm also a fan of exploring underused folklore and mythology. I like Trolls. Ugly, smelly, non-sparkly, goat eating trolls. I'd love to have an idea where I could use trolls to a large extent in my story, but I just don't right now. But hey, if you're really looking to branch out, research. Go to a library, you'll get much more relevant information than you will on the net. Look up Mythology, Folklore and Fantasy Encyclopedias. You can't swing a cat without hitting one, and they've got a wealth of relevant information in them. Hopefully you can find something that grabs you, and might even work with Warewolves.
But there is still so much about the werewolf culture that is left untapped. You know how people associate vampires with old, clever, handsome, aristocratic lads -- the werewolves are the underdogs (no pun intended) and usually are characterized in a rawer, more savage way. Why can't werewolves come out on top, for a change? Why are they the minority and why aren't they quite as seductive (I mean interesting and drawing to the reader) as vampires? It's all about the take you have on it. Let's not talk about Twilight. I don't know what gender that belongs to, because I read the four books and I can't seem to be able to believe one word in them. My fiction has to make sense for me to like it, and Twilight is just full of loopholes. It doesn't work for me as a vampire novel, and even less as a love story.
Just a few angles you could write your werewolf story from: 1) Go sci-fi. This sounds really hard, but try to write a story with a (pseudo)scientific explanation for lycanthropy. I read somewhere the theory of evolution finally killed werewolf beliefs, since from a evolutionary perspective a human-wolf hybrid makes no sense and since then people have focused more on sightings of ape-like creatures(Bigfoot, Yeti etc.) Write something about how the werewolves evolved. I'm thinking something about a story where researchers discover humans(or early hominids) used to have sexual relations with wolves quite often in the past and these relations sometimes produced live offspring and this hybrid may have survived to this day. May have to give up the transformations and use a creature constantly in a werewolf form. 2) Go psychological. The story is not really about being a werewolf, but maybe about a guy who wants to be a werewolf, thinks he is one, or he is a werewolf with some other psychological issue. Like a lot ghost stories have subplots of the main characters suffering from some trauma or something and sometimes that's even the main theme instead of the ghosts. If you wrote about a guy who thinks he's a werewolf(look up clinical lycanthropy) that could be a nice excuse to use all the werewolf cliches in a new way. Or make it ambiguous whether or not the transformations are just in his head. Or maybe this has been done also. 3) Something totally different. I always like to think the best idea is something I haven't thought of yet.
Do people write horror stories about werewolves and vampires anymore? I mean true horror stories where the vampire/werewolf isn't something that you wished you could be. True monsters that prey on humans and don't fall in love with them. Their immortality is a true curse because they've completely lost their humanity.
Slight hijack of thread: Thinking about werewolves reminds me of the fact that a while ago I had an idea for a YA gaslight fantasy set in the American South, based on a legend about the Breton Saint Triphine, who was a young noblewoman married to the sixth-century Celtic chieftain Cunmar (or Conomor) the Accursed, rumoured to have killed his wives when they became pregnant because of a prophecy. He's said to have been one of the inspirations for Bluebeard, the fairy-tale character. There is (or was) a tradition in Brittany that he was turned into a werewolf who eats human flesh as divine punishment. The protagonist is a free young man of colour originally from Haiti but living in Louisiana, whose White ancestry included a slave-owner descended from Cunmar the Accursed. (And he, that's the protagonist, is even called Cunmar Miliguet- "Miliguet" is the Breton word for "accursed" ) I've shelved it for the time being, because I couldn't get it off the ground. But I plan to return to it sometime in the future. Now I'm wondering, after reading every post, including cruciFICTION's, which I feel makes some very good points (and ones that I agree with), even if werewolves are overdone, (and I have seen heaps of books on werewolves on my school library shelves), would the fact that I thought about this after reading a retelling of the legend and a book online on Bluebeard make any difference? (Given the inspiration, there is a horror element in it- the curse is a never-ending excessive hunger for human flesh. And a Triphine is the female lead and Cunmar's sort of love interest.)
Werewolves are only overdone if you leave them roasting too long. They are best served simultaneously rare and well done.
I believe this is Stephen King's criticism of the Twilight books - that Meyer took something frightening and turned it into something about dating, essentially.
-The thing is not what you use so much as how you use them.Example,I'm writing a vampire novel but the vamps are beings of pure darkness from space and more ghost-like than walking corpses that you're use to .I'm actually working with were creatures in my novel ,I just decided to do things my way because I'm not really into the norm. Try to use your wolves differently.Also,maybe you could present some other creature that isn't used often along side it if you want.Also,do NOT copy what you've read.You can have influence,but throw something original,uncommon into the mix so your book would stand out.Like pack politics and the Alpha Wolf thing.Since actual wolves (and other animals) don't quite work that way,you can do some research on animal behavior and incorporate that into your novel.
I don't know my idea for werewolves has alway's involved gothic setting although since they are monster's I see them as unable to change. However with my idea of them they retain intelligence but are still blood thirsty killer's but needless it leads to some complicated politic's in my fantasy world.
I am like you how I am just drawn to these creatures so much, that I don't care if others think they are overdone. I don't think it'll ever run out of things to write about in this genre, because you can make up whatever you want. A unique mix of variables & a talented writer can make all the difference in making your world a new one for your readers to lose themselves in!
Vampires, Werewolves, ghosts and demons they have all been written about in various forms for centuries and they are merely metaphors for reflecting on society and our basest fears. Currently the Werewolve is basically a superhero - bigger, faster, stronger better looking - it is all too much. Maybe a return to the slavering beast controlled by the moon would be nice or something completely different as long as the characters are well drawn and the obstacles/ plot requirements are not overcome easily by overuse of convenient super powers then there is still much you can say. I am still interested in the genre have been for 30 years as a reader and will continue to be. If you have your own interpretation to add to the mix then go for it there will always be readers.
