It's all about the timing...

[deadpunk]

Curiousity at work; when writing Zombie Fiction, which of Romero's time frames do you tend to dwell in? I personally prefer to write stories that take place with a first night type of feel. (Although I would have to admit to posting more stories that took place in the Dawn time) I find first night stories to have more of a suspenseful feel to them. For me, these are the stories that tend to be less repetetive and offer fresher ideas. They tend to carry more emotion and drama than a Dawn or Day/Land style story, where the characters all seem hardened and only intent on surviving. Thoughts?

[capncnut]

I generally write in the first week or so of the war: people still have their homes, streets protected by police and the military, etc. Somewhere between Night and Dawn. I like to balance the overall desolation by still being able to add/draw from a pool of characters if need be. It's important for me to keep it as humanly active as possible. If one goes for a story in the Day era, there's a lot of space to fill, if you get me.

[deadpunk]

I generally write in the first week or so of the war: people still have their homes, streets protected by police and the military, etc. Somewhere between Night and Dawn. I like to balance the overall desolation by still being able to add/draw from a pool of characters if need be. It's important for me to keep it as humanly active as possible. If one goes for a story in the Day era, there's a lot of space to fill, if you get me. Exactly. By the time you hit Day, your options get fairly limited. You're either left telling a story involving Cabin Fever or wasting pages describing a new societal breakdown that usually isn't that plausible to begin with.

[rightwing401]

Personally, I'm more of a Day man myself. I've kind of felt that the first night/days (at least for me) have been overdone. But I will freely admit that writing a story/novel from the perspective of years having passed since the dead rose is a tricky business. It is true that by that time, all the characters have hardened to the fact of the dead walking, which in a way cuts down the fear factor of seeing a bloated, decaying corpse shuffling towards you, fully intent on eating you. The only way I found to work emotions into such a tale was to show a sort of death of humanity in the survivors. Kids that have grown up in the world of the living dead, and can't remember a world before that one, show absolutely no sympathy towards the walkers. They kill them with no more thought than stomping a cockroach, never once making the connection that these things were once human beings. The older ones recognize this loss of humanity, but they themselves have also been hardened to sympathy. Example: They had only entered the outlying buildings of the desolate town when they began to see the signs of horror that had happened so very long ago. Old, withered skeletons dotted the landscape. One here or there had discarded and rusted guns nearby. All of the skeletons had holes of one kind or another in their skulls. As the men moved down the street, they crossed a small skeleton pinned under a rusty bike. Only the few strands of tassels hanging from the handle bars identified it as a girl’s bike. The bones of the skeleton were not all in one place. Both leg bones and the ones for the right arm were strewn about everywhere, dented all along their length by the only thing that was capable of doing that, human teeth. Whoever the child had been, she had met a very unfortunate and grisly painful end. The soldiers crept past the remnant of shattered innocence with little more than half glances. It was nothing that they hadn’t already seen, and had long since desensitized themselves to. They continued on, ducking lower and moving more silently as they began to spot the slowly moving husks that had once been people. CapnCnut is right though, with less running/hiding/shooting, it's very tricky to make a story or novel that takes place in the Day aspect of the living dead world. The problem I've found is that (in my work) I have to focus more on the tensions among the survivors rather than the dangers posed by the living dead, because they have long since become more of a nusance than a threat. But I can say the one thing I absolutely love to write about is the landscape of the aftermath. To just picture a crumbling, and in many senses dying, remains of human society can be just as scary and depressing as seeing the walking dead. The opening scene of Day, where Shara and Miguel are standing in that dead city, and you see how everything is withered and crumbling long before you see any zombies has always set the mood of humanity as dying and on the verge of extinction better than all the time spent in the bunker.

[krakenslayer]

I like the far future era - beyond Day and Land - simply because there's more scope for imagination, the world can be anything you want it to be and you're not hampered by having to worry about, for example, accurate representations of civil, police and military operations, which I know nothing about and have very little interest in. ---------- Post added at 01:42 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:27 PM ---------- I don't see a problem with "lack of fear" in this timescale, either. Use your imagination. Lets see... what about a story set maybe ten years after the outbreak. Our main character took to the hills at the first signs of trouble a decade previously, and he's been living a tough but sustainable existence in an extremely isolated and inaccessible location in the Rockies or the Alps. He has not seen a single living human, or even a zombie, since the beginning. No planes in the sky, no TV signals, no radio traffic, no movement on the twenty miles-distant mountain highway he watches everyday through his telescope. The isolation, the sense of being utterly and completely alone, is consuming his soul. He begins to believe that he is the only living human left in the country, maybe the world. He looks up to the star-filled sky at night and imagines himself as the last lonely spark of sentient consciousness in the universe. The solitude drives him to the point of suicide. To save his sanity he decides to strike out for the nearest town, not knowing what he will find... I think you do a lot with a story like that.

[deadpunk]

But I can say the one thing I absolutely love to write about is the landscape of the aftermath. To just picture a crumbling, and in many senses dying, remains of human society can be just as scary and depressing as seeing the walking dead. I often feel this is an area I struggle with. I sometimes feel that my stories are more heavily dependent upon characters than on the setting. I'd like to read something you've written rightwing. Could you reccommend a title?

[rightwing401]

Try 'The Legend'. It's not a zombie apocolypse, but the principles of a world destroyed are there. I would certainly say that is my best example of landscape incorporation. But I get a pretty good first hand example of apocolyptic looking landscapes. Living close to New Orleans, I go into the city from time to time, and there are whole areas that have been abandoned by people. It is kind of freaky going through neighorhoods that people used to live in that have been neglected for years. Lawns look like jungles. Homes are hollow and desolate. Large clumps of grass shoot up all along the streets. Just one look at those places, and you can easily picture corpses shambling around. Setting an overall mood of hopelessness through surroundings can have just as upsetting effect as horrors suffered by likeable characters, and in my opinion, enhance them in many ways.

[deadpunk]

I'll check out the story next chance I get.

[deadpunk]

I read The Legend. Good stuff. It certainly created an apocalyptic feel. Loved the ending.