Post-mortem: writing Accommodating Mr Landown

What choices did I make while writing this short horror story?

Photo by Delia Giandeini on Unsplash

Today we’ve the latest in the ‘post mortem’ series, where I dig into the writing choices and techniques used in the previous week’s story, Accommodating Mr Landown, with the aim of giving you inspiration and critical insight as a writer and reader.

I’m going to focus on two things:

• (Not) naming characters and the story

• Queerness and likeability.

As always, this post contains spoilers, so now’s a great time to jump back and read the story if you haven’t already:

Okay, onwards!

(Not) naming characters and the story

Mr Landown

The antagonist of the piece needed a name that would appear many times in the text, so it needed a few features:

• It would be used often, so that ruled out anything too long, such as a double-barrelled name like… Haggis-Burridge.

• It needed to be something that wouldn’t sound comedic…. like Haggis-Burridge.

• People shouldn’t stumble over it as they’re reading, e.g. Lord Kathybloopsy Filintresque.

• I didn’t want something that was typically ‘rich person’ sounding, such as Rochefort.

• I knew this character would be an awful person, so I also preferred to not have a name that might stoke ethnic stereotypes and tension. In my head this story is set in the UK and uses British spellings of words, so I wanted a name that would complement the British-feel.

• The character is miserable, so I wanted something short, blunt, and perhaps a bit grim-sounding.

I’ve been lucky a few times recently, where a good name just pops into my head. I generally run a quick check (e.g. Googling) to check I’m not likely to get sued for using a name, and I give myself a moment to ‘feel’ the name. Does it feel like the character? Could I imagine someone saying the name with the emotions I want to evoke in the story?

So, let’s test:

“Fucking Landown’s car is blocking the road!”

Yep, I can work with that.

Except… The first version of this that popped into my head was just a little different. It started off as ‘Mr Landowns’. Why did I drop the ‘s’ from the end?

Try that previous sentence with an ‘s’:

“Fucking Landowns’s car is blocking the road!”

That apostrophe ‘s’ on the name gets awkward — this breaks the ‘shouldn’t stumble over it’ rule I had for the character.

As I wrote the story, I hit a few of these awkward apostrophe ‘s’ moments, and so dropped the final letter to make the easier ‘Mr Landown’.

As a name, it felt right because it embodies his character: he jealously will not share his land (even when he legally should), and his behaviour drags down the village.

While I went for something short and blunt, it’s worth bearing in mind that sometimes you should use a name that’s longer or more complex, e.g. for reasons of setting or background.

Characters from Greece or India may have names that are longer and more complex to a Western eye, but a posh English-sounding names can also be wordy and present a literary tripping hazard for readers, like ‘Fortesque-Smitherington’.

There are definitely places to use these, depending on the needs of your story. If you get stuck, consider your vision for the narrative and the needs of your readers.

Finding the right name is a powerful tool for conveying character. I think ‘Mr Landown’ does a pretty solid job. It’s not up to the genius of ‘Heathcliff’, but few things ever will be!

The unnamed protagonist

Names are powerful, but, like physical description, they’re tricky to add in a first-person narrative.

I don’t think to myself:

I, Mata, walked down the stairs and made tea.

I could include a name into the story via another character:

“Hey, Mata,” my partner’s voice called from downstairs. “Do you want tea?”

Adding a name can give a lot of clues about a character, such as likely gender presentation or ethnicity, but these aren’t always necessary. There are whole books written without naming the viewpoint character, but at that length of writing it becomes a strong authorial choice. Usually a novel’s character will be named through some external contrivance.

In short first-person stories, there’s simply not much space and you don’t want to waste it on unnecessary detail. If it doesn’t help the narrative, leave it out.

It’s okay to leave things for your reader to imagine.

We know Mr Landown is an arsehole, so who is our avenging and cold-blooded protagonist? Are they non-binary, a woman, or a man? Are they black, brown, or white? Short or tall, stocky or slim? Do they walk with a limp, stride with youthful confidence, or slink like a cat stalking a bird?

The first-person perspective limits what detail we can naturally add.

On a daily basis, we don’t think about our personal characteristics unless the context forces us to do so. In a typical moment, it simply doesn’t happen. I might write:

I sat at my keyboard, inhaling the scent of Golden Chai tea as I waited for inspiration for an example sentence.

It’s a bit writerly to add the sensory detail about the scent of the tea, but that brings the scene to life in a reasonably believable and unforced way.

Compare that additional sensory detail to adding additional physical detail:

I sat at my keyboard, my six-foot-one frame quite comfortable at the well-adjusted desk height. My white-skinned fingers hovered over the keyboard soon clattered in a staccato rhythm, uncertain about why they were being described in such an overtly racialised way.

(Also, why do my fingers have opinions?)

It’s just awkward.

Like naming Mr Landown with a name that didn’t trip up the reader, leaving the protagonist unnamed also helps the narrative move along without forced or unnatural detail.

Naming the story

As I began writing the story, I didn’t have a title in mind.

About 75% of the way through, I gave it the working title ‘Mr Landown’s Cruise’.

I liked this name because it gives a very different promise to the antagonist’s journey than the one he actually takes. It sets up an expectation for the story which is undermined: the cruise is a smokescreen to hide a much darker destination.

However, on the first edit, I changed it to ‘Accommodating Mr Landown’. Why?

The antagonist’s life survival depends on the community accommodating his needs. Sure, someone could punch Mr Landown’s lights out, but you can bet he’d call the police and press charges. The village is stuck in a place where all they can do is accommodate, tolerate, and mitigate this horrible man.

And, of course, in the end, Mr Landown becomes permanently accommodated. He’s blocked into his own house, secured inside his own accommodation, setting the village free from his torments.

I liked this title because it emphasises the way the power is turned on Mr Landown — he forced the village to be accommodating, so then a villager forced a different kind of accommodation back.

I went back and forth between these titles, but stuck on the latter.

One of the reasons I considered sticking with the first name was the double-meaning of ‘cruise’. ‘Cruising’ is commonly associated with looking for gay sexual partners, and I was inspired to write this story by Pride month, but in the end the double-meaning didn’t fit the narrative as strongly.

So, let’s dig into that side of the story…

Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash

Queerness and likeability

Is the protagonist heterosexual? It’s never explicitly stated, but very much implied they’re not (they organise a Pride event is a village). What is their gender? Again, it’s left unclear.

A few years back, I read an interview with Charlie Brooker (writer of the Black Mirror TV series), where, to paraphrase, he said something along the lines of:

“I realised that I started every story with the assumption of a straight white cisgender man and only changed that if the story needed it. I didn’t like that, so instead I changed my process to begin every story with a protagonist who isn’t that.” (again, paraphrased from memory, don’t quote me/him on this)

I start with the assumption that every character I write is bisexual. It’s rarely ever a feature in the story, but it’s there informing a non-heteronormative worldview when I write. I also typically begin without gender in mind, and that only narrows down as the story progresses or, like in Accommodating Mr Landown, it’s simply left unresolved.

With everything I write, I could end up with a straight, white, cisgender man as a protagonist, but starting elsewhere means this isn’t the default. If I end there, it’s because I thought the story would be best served by that viewpoint.

Diversity is the default, not the exception.

I grew up during the 1980s and 90s, where being LGBTQIA+ could get you killed. I had friends who were assaulted — ending up in hospital — for being visibly queer. I had threats myself simply because my bisexuality has never been a secret.

Queer folk simply weren’t visible in any way comparable to how we are in the 2020s.

When queer folk were shown in fiction, we were often villains: think of Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, of the leather-daddy stylings of Lord Humungus in Mad Max.

Queer folk were marginalised and media used queerness as shorthand for antisocial and aberrant moral values. This created a feedback loop of exclusion.

When queer folk finally got the chance to represent ourselves in media, we played ultra-nice with straight society to counteract this exclusion:

“Look straight people! We’re just like you! We’ll be your sassy gay best-friend! I’ll tag along with an exclusively hetero group of friends to sprinkle gay dust on any heavy moment! See me sparkle! If you meet any other gay person along the way, I’ll automatically be compatible with them but it probably won’t be a long plot line! (Also, bisexual men don’t exist, because that’s too threatening to binary heteronormative thinking, despite bi/pan people being the majority in most LGBTQIA+ surveys! Lesbians will also be strangely missing!)”

… I may have lingering resentment… and that’s a point I’ll come back to…

Anyway, straight people were attacking us, killing us, and refusing us our rights. Trying to fit in with them was a protective strategy, but why should we try to fit in? Why wouldn’t we try to make society better?

This, for me, is what Pride is about.

I want to live in a world where queer folk aren’t just like the straight folk who oppressed us. I want a future where we’ve all moved on from there.

But, as hinted at above, there’s the residual anger to deal with.

The terrible, gaping unfairness of it all doesn’t just disappear.

It’s great that (some of) the world is moving on, but that doesn’t erase the past.

And so we get queer rage.

Yes, we were represented as perverts and serial killers and wicked witches a thousand things more, and we’re not those things.

Well… More accurately…

We’re definitely not only those things.

We can be, just like straight people can be.

In 2024, I hope we’ve reached a point in our media presence where queer people don’t have to try to be likeable all the time. Where we can write messy, disruptive, angry, or just dull queer characters without it somehow feeling like we’re letting down our whole community.

I shared Accommodating Mr Landown on a horror writers’ forum, and I found this reply interesting:

“Intentional or not, I went from despising Mr. Landown to feeling awful for him and hating the narrator.”

I wondered for a moment how I felt about that: Did I take the cruelty of the narrator too far? Did I make them too unlikeable?

Nah.

It’s okay that the narrator’s actions are not okay.

It is, after all, an incredibly atrocious thing that the narrator does.

But…

The queer rage is channelled in a way that it’s not in The Silence of the Lambs. Buffalo Bill’s queerness destroys innocent lives whereas, in Accommodating Mr Landown, the queerness and the rage heals the community.

The fight for equality is ongoing. There are political, cultural, social, and economic groups and people who would dearly love to roll back the progress of recent decades. I don’t want queer representation put back into a box of nicey-nicey gay best friends, with invisible bi men and lesbians. I that would be stepping backwards.

We can do that sometimes — there, after all, many gay best-friends in the world and they need representation too — but it’s about balance and it’s about diversity.

We can be heroes and we can be glorious monsters. We can be generals and accountants and prisoners and liberators and artists and lawyers and we already are.

Sometimes it’s okay to not like the hero, even if they’re queer.

Part of me does like this protagonist, though…

Queer rage is useful, sometimes…

I’m not saying “go murder people by blocking them inside their homes”, but dark impulses have always been part of horror, and us queer folk have a place in that darkness too. We’ve always been here. We’ve always been everywhere.

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This was a bit less structured than I first planned, but I hope you enjoyed the discussion of the deeper thoughts behind Accommodating Mr Landown.

Next week I’ll be back with writing tips or a new writing exercise. If you love horror, writing, or horror writing, don’t miss it!

Go be your wonderful selves. Be excellent to each other.

Love to you all, whoever you may be,

Mata xxx