How dull would speculative fiction be without a few monsters to spice it up? Literature has always been full of memorable monsters that appear in a wide variety of genres and forms.
They’re products of our fears and imaginations—primal forces that influence our thoughts and actions. When we’re manifesting monsters, we’re escaping reality and confronting our darker sides in a fictional, and therefore safe, space.
Writing Believable Monsters
Depending on how your story goes, a monster can be a horrifying force of destruction and hopelessness, or a strange and simply misunderstood creature.
Whatever direction you take, it’s not easy to bring a monster that’s believable and relatable to life. Do it wrong and you end up with an element that’s more of a nuisance to your story.
Here are a few things you can keep in mind when creating effective monsters for your stories.
1. Decide if your story needs a monster.
Ask yourself first if your story will benefit from having a monster, or if it’s better to relegate its role to another character instead. Stories must always have threats that your protagonist needs to worry about, but the threat has to fit into a story.
There needs to be a purpose for throwing in a monster. It doesn’t need to be a complex reason—character improvement, moral provocation, or sheer terror will all work well. The important thing is that your monster does something to further the plot.
2. Define your monster.
Think about it. You can’t reason with monsters, nor communicate with them. They’re almost unstoppable forces of terror that solely react to base instincts and emotion.
But insert some intelligence, and they become closer to being a species and exhibiting more human-like behavior. They might start conforming to social norms and culture.
Animals, on the other hand, are numerous, while monsters are often one of a kind. When you keep monsters extremely rare, it’s easier to make them a hidden or mysterious element to your story.
Of course, these are only basic guidelines for differentiation. There’s nothing wrong with breaking these “rules” or combining them. In fact, I encourage you to. The more you push the boundaries with your concept, the more unique and puzzling your monster will become.
Well-formed monsters have an origin and reason for acting as they do. Sometimes you don’t need to tell your readers about this information, but it’s always easier to write about something when you know more you know about it.
Monsters can be the results of magical or scientific accidents, or some other mysterious phenomena. Or maybe someone created them on purpose for whatever reason. Did they become what they are by choice, or by some other context?
Consider the novel Frankenstein. A scientist creates a full human being by stitching together different human parts. But the result is a hideous, gray-skinned creature that barely looks human. Disgusted and frightened, Frankenstein abandons it, which starts the creature on its path to vengeance.
So the creature is not only a monster created by science, but by its circumstances. By making the creature human-like in behavior, author Mary Shelly has created one of the most beloved monsters in literary history.
3. Find your monster’s motivation.
Continuing with Frankenstein’s creature, what motivates it most is not its hatred for humanity and its creator. It’s lonely and believes that a bride of his own will alleviate that loneliness. But Frankenstein denies that hope.
That denial pushes the creature into fully embracing its hatred. He begins making his creator miserable by stalking him and killing any person Frankenstein loves. This is when it truly becomes a monster.
Whether it’s food, revenge, peace and quiet, or any other reason, knowing your monster’s motivation will determine how it behaves and acts. It’s entirely believable for a monster to attack a human settlement because it’s hungry. After all, it doesn’t think as humans do. Or, it might feel threatened from your character’s hunt for it, so it decides to go on the offense.
4. Find real-life inspirations.
A lot of excellent monsters are based on real creatures. The Kraken was inspired by the giant squid, Nessie the Loch Ness monster is believed to be a living plesiosaurus, and the Dragon could have been inspired by alligators, crocodiles, or the komodo dragon.
Using existing creatures as a base for your monster means you’re able to study their inner workings. By taking note of and expanding on their biological and behavioral traits, you’ll be able to make an extremely functional monster from their appearance to their living habits.
5. Define the monster’s strengths and weaknesses.
The thing that makes monsters so scary is that they’re seemingly impossible to destroy or hurt. Nothing affects them, and if there is a substance that can, then it’s usually rare and unavailable, so your protagonists need to desperately think of other solutions.
Think beyond sheer strength, claws, and fangs. Can your monster learn and adapt? Can it communicate through some means? Does it possess special powers?
Do remember that no matter how powerful your monster is, it should still have a weakness that your protagonist can exploit to defeat it. Having no weakness means the reader is already certain about the ending. Your story loses its tension and mystique.
Try coming up with a clever weakness that will lead to some clever maneuvering from your heroes. The harder your protagonists work to defeat the monster, the more tension there is to hook your audience.
6. Give your monster a name.
Give your monster a title or sobriquet that a majority of characters will call it by. This will further solidify your monster by making it more life-like and tangible. Call it something that sounds scary, destructive, or ancient, and that captures the readers’ imaginations.
“Godzilla” sounds ferocious and powerful, while “The Thing” sounds more ambiguous, making it mysterious for the reader. Having a great name to call your monster just enhances everything you’ve written into them so far.
7. Let your reader’s imagination do the heavy lifting.
Don’t fall into the trap of giving your readers so much detail that your monster’s mystery is canceled out. A person’s imagination can and will conjure a more horrifying creature than the one you’ve created.
Leave some room for your readers to fill the gap. This may result in them projecting the worst things they can imagine into your monster, making it scarier and more personal.
The Importance of Monsters
Monsters are a projection of our darker thoughts and emotions. They’re created as avatars of all the things that bring you fear, doubt, anxiety, and all the other complexities that come with being human.
They remind us of the potential dangers of giving in to our urges, and help us to ponder right and wrong. Monsters inspire us to be the heroes we dream of being. Because when there’s no hero in sight, what’s stopping you from becoming one?
I focused more on the scary side of monsters for this article, but your monster doesn’t have to be horrible. There’s a lot of literature and media out there depicting lovable, yet still strange and imaginative monsters.
We have Sully and Mike from Monsters Inc., The Grinch from How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, and Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas. These are just some of the more notable monsters that aren’t all about terror and gore.
What literary monster scares you the most? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
If you enjoyed this post, then you might also like:
- 25 Mythical Creatures and Where to Find Them in Literature
- Exploring Speculative Fiction: Your Guide to this Super-Genre
- Cosmic Horror: Your Guide to Incomprehensible Terrors
- Worldbuilding Tips for a Better Novel
Cole is a blog writer and aspiring novelist. He has a degree in Communications and is an advocate of media and information literacy and responsible media practices. Aside from his interest in technology, crafts, and food, he’s also your typical science fiction and fantasy junkie, spending most of his free time reading through an ever-growing to-be-read list. It’s either that or procrastinating over actually writing his book. Wish him luck!
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