You know when you have a book you love, I mean really love. You know all the creases on its cover, you can recite the thing cover to cover, you have a familiarity with the smell of the pages. Maybe you don’t and I’m just obsessed with books. But if you do, doesn’t it just break your heart to think of someone coming along and separating you from your beloved treasure? Well, fear no more because this wonderfully monstrous and creative knit book cover is here to frighten away anyone who has untoward thoughts for your book. You can check out the site and order your own book monster and have the piece of mind that comes from knowing your books are safe and sound.
No doubt most of you have seen the 1979 masterpiece Alien by Ridley Scott. If you haven’t you really should. If you’re a fan of scifi and horror, especially slow-burning Lovecraftian horror, I can’t recommend this film enough. So when I heard that Scott was returning to the universe he and the amazing H.R. Giger had crafted thirty years ago I was stunned, excited, apprehensive, and somewhat confused. I was stunned because this would be like James Cameron returning to the Terminator franchise after all these years. I was excited because Scott has been going all out on historical dramas recently and hasn’t done much scifi which is a pity since he has an amazing talent for creating detailed, believable future worlds. I was apprehensive because it sounded like a prequel. Not only that, the Alien franchise has been very poorly served in recent years. I know that this is Ridley Scott we’re talking about here but I couldn’t help but wonder if I wanted to go back into this universe again considering the mess others had made of it. And I was confused because when asked about the project, Scott consistently gave tantalizing hints that the film would involve the world of Alien yet he adamantly refused to elucidate whether this was a prequel, a sequel, a reboot, or what. It seems now that it is indeed a prequel to the original story and this point is only hammered home by the trailers that have finally come out. So why am I excited?
Well first of all, this may finally inject some much needed dignity into the franchise. The Aliens vs. Predator series has really removed anything frightening or ominous about the Xenomorph and replaced it with a well-lit, boring, by the numbers elimination game. The original Alien was cleverer by far, playing with our fears of bodily integrity and violation (raped or made host of a foreign organism). The second film took this and turned it into a well-honed action, sci-fi film that played with conceptions of gender. Our hero Ripley does what an entire platoon of Space Marine bad-asses can’t. The third and fourth films began slipping (The third can’t really be blamed on the director, David Fincher, since he was forced to start filming even as the script went through multiple rewrites. It’s a miracle or a testament to his skill the film turned out as well as it did.). The fourth wasn’t bad but retread the same waters without adding anything to the mythology. A fun film? Oh hell yes (plus really great cinematography in the style of Delicatessen and the City of Lost Children which strangely enough also starred the always awesome Ron Pearlman.) but maybe not a necessary one. Finally though, we have the return of the visionary who started this horrible, slimy, face-hugging ball rolling. I know that sometimes having someone come back to material they made a while ago doesn’t always end well (i.e. Star Wars) but I have a feeling that Scott really could tell an interesting story with this material. Is it a story that really needs to be told? We know that the Nostromo responded to a strange signal on a dead planet and that hell breaks loose soon after. Do we need to know what happened before that? How critical is it that to our appreciation of the film and the already established mythology?
If this were any other situation, I’d think that this film may be giving us information we don’t need. But you know what? Because this entire back-story had already been in mind when the first film was shot, I am really curious to see what this universe would have looked like if Scott had had the opportunity to put all his ideas to celluloid. As you can learn here, a chunk of the xenomorph’s origins was intended to make it into the very first film but had to be cut. Additionally, I appreciate when someone takes the time to create detailed, consistent worlds and I’m curious to see where this film will take us and what it will show us. In a way this feels like a film for the fans who want to experience more of the world as Scott had originally intended it to be. I’m sure that’s part of the reason I’m so eager to see this film. The original presented just a slice of what felt like a complete, complex, and believable world, one populated with horrifying and brutal monsters and creatures of mystifying origins. I’m looking forward to diving back into this world of unknown and dangerous cosmic knowledge and learning what else may be hiding in the shadows of this barren, but not lifeless, planet.
Plus, who doesn’t love alien wing-wong?
Nothing says love quite like- hurk-glurch-glurch-arrrrgh! All rights belong to Scott Ramsoomair.
One of the questions that has popped up in my head while planning my novel is whether or not a villain is still a viable character archetype. In this morally ambiguous world, can we truly suspend our disbelief for these figures who are single-mindedly malicious and seem to either be in short supply or devoid of positive attributes? I can only speak about my reactions to villains though I will try to discuss my perceptions of the masses reactions to and acceptance of villains. First though, I’d like to take a very short detour and talk about what the villain is and what s/he does.
In essence, the villain is the antithesis of the hero and serves to create situations that hinder the hero from accomplishing his/her goal and thus allowing us to understand more about who our hero is, his/her resolve, and even his/her short comings. The villain really is the impetus for the story, either because what s/he has done or threatens to do. For example, a classic villain is Darth Vader. Without him, our heroes would have nothing to do. It is his unyielding desire to crush the rebellion and hold the galaxy under the yolk of the Empire that spurs our protagonists on. Thus the villain is our hero’s polar opposite and serves generally to make a mess of things. But there is something that takes what would normally be just an antagonist and turns him or her into a villain. The villain must be, for lack of a better term, evil. This doesn’t mean that the villain should eat kittens for breakfast but the villain should be reprehensible and be definable as not just an absence of good but by the presence of a tangible wrongness and viciousness. So this briefly gives a sense of what the villain does and the villain’s main, even defining characteristic. Their motivations may be different but the thing that binds all villains together is their almost sociopathic lack of empathy for others and their willingness to do anything to reach their goal. So how well do these archetypes hold up?
Fiction is both truth and lie. It’s one of those paradoxical things in life. Writing requires that you take from the world around you and process it then put it back into the world according to your own vision. Then when we read, we look for a reflection, on some level, of life in art. It’s something of a cyclical process. Life to art to life. We want that tangential point where the world of the story touches for a moment our day to day existence. However, there are very few people (thankfully) out there who would be considered a villain in the strict sense of the word. And yet this becomes the central conceit of some stories: the villain and his/her villainous deeds the protagonists must struggle against. And now, possibly more than ever before, the world we inhabit is multi-faceted, contradictory, paradoxical, and baffling. We are accustomed to considering multiple sides of every story and to taking into consideration extenuating circumstances. In such a climate, a simple “bad guy” may have trouble garnering our credulity. Can we really say that these characters relate to our own life stories? Despite the ways the world and our psychology have changed, I think that the villain still has a place in literature. I think this for several reasons. The first is a purely personal, visceral reaction. When I read a story or watch a story, in the case of a movie, that features a villain, unless s/he is of the obvious mustache-twirling variety, I still become absorbed. I do not think that it would be more interesting to learn why the villain is like this or try to find ways to, if not condone, then understand the villain. The only thing that matters is seeing the hero succeed. On the personal level, the villain still has traction. But why and is this just a personal thing or is there something to the villain that just won’t let us go?
As I said, most people don’t have first hand knowledge of villainy, opinions of your boss not withstanding. However, for much of human civilization, our myths have been populated with characters and figures who display greater than human traits and abilities. Even though we may not regularly or ever encounter such super-human individuals, we have a reference point for them in our human history, even if they are only fictional or fictionalizations of real individuals. I suspect that this may have something to do with the archetypes shared between much of human kind. We can all, as living things, understand threat and the villain provides pure, concentrated danger. In effect, the villain is an archetype that affects us on more than the conscious level. The villain archetype engages the primitive instincts that keep us enthralled in suspense as we wonder if and how our protagonists can deal with the villain. In this way, realism or a connection to reality is both irrelevant and satisfied. It is irrelevant in that the villain comes to be seen as something of a fantasy construct. However, the reality clause is satisfied in that we can all identify with threat. No matter what, we all have felt the throbbing of adrenaline when we were scared. The villain comes to be identified with this threat. But that doesn’t mean that the villain has to be simple. For example, a villain who wants to kill everyone for no reason is not a terribly compelling villain.No one said just because the villain can be interpreted as an archetypal representation of danger and threatening forces, the Big Other, that the villain has to be generic or cookie-cutter. This bring me to the next reason I think the villain isn’t done for yet.
When a villain is done well, we should be able to have a clear understanding of his/her motivation. What does the bad guy want? A clear motivation is what makes a villain unforgettable. If we run with the idea that a villain is a sort of archetype, then we can use that to explore certain aspects of human nature. Greed, lust, hatred, cruelty. If a villain represents a certain worldview based on destructive or negative characteristics, we get to see what happens when certain emotions or ideas are taken to their logical and most extreme conclusions. It is this kind of villain that I think we’re drawn to as well because there is an inherent fascination with the extreme. Part of this may come from the fact that the extreme is mysterious. Since it goes beyond what is considered normal human experience, we have little experience with it and are thus vulnerable to it. The villain allows us to explore these most excessive regions of humanity and that is something that is intrinsically attractive. By going overboard it also makes us question the abstract nature of the trait the villain displays. In this sense, the villain becomes mythical as s/he provides, if not an explanation, then a representation or incarnation of a particular worldview which then allows us to deal directly with an issue that otherwise would remain abstract. By incarnating a particular thing such as brutality, treachery, or the like, we also make the inconceivable conceivable, thus giving us all a greater sense of power over such forces.
Finally, there is the fact that there are some people who really do qualify as villains. People who do not care about who they harm and may even enjoy the sense of power they gain from harming others. It is these people whose existence makes a strong case for there being evil in the world with a capital “E.” While not every story requires or is best served by having a villain, I think that stories containing well developed villains can still capture us for the simple reason that we suspect that there are people out there who are as bad as or worse than what can be imagined. Again, we get to vicariously experience something we would much rather have no personal dealings with. If you don’t believe or resist the idea that such individuals exist, I present as evidence serial killers such as Ted Bundy and Andrei Chikatilo.
Literary styles have changed along with the world we inhabit. However, the darkness continues to call to us and we can’t help but be intrigued by its perversely interesting song. For this reason, I think the villain will continue to interest us and grab our imaginations by the heart for years to come.
I just finished Christopher Moore’s amazing book A Dirty Job and I got to thinking about the horror genre. One of the thoughts that ended up developing was how the book managed to both make me laugh and at times descend into horror territory. I won’t say that it’s a scary book. I can’t really think of any times where I was really feeling the glacial drift of ice slowly filling my veins. However, there were parts that could certainly be said to be uncomfortable. Still, the thing that got me was just how well the two seemingly opposed aspects fit together. This got me thinking about the 80’s again (though that isn’t all that hard to do.). What struck me was that many horror films in the 80’s managed to pull of being genuinely scary while being humorous. And I’m not talking about the camp-tastic Army of Darkness either. I’m talking about genuine frightfests like Dawn of the Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and to a lesser degree In the Mouth of Madness. These films, while certainly not comedies, brought forward material that managed to provide us with a giggle, even an uneasy one. But why mix such diametrically opposed tones into a single work? Could it be that maybe they are more alike than they seem and that they may even complement each other?
The obvious and I suppose you could say calculating reason to include humor in a horror story is to disarm your viewer or reader. Often horror is like an arms race. You bring out a scare. The next one has to be bigger, otherwise, the emotional impact will lessen and then stagnate then the reader or viewer will totally lose engagement. So the ante has to be constantly upped to keep the audience enthralled and frightened at what will come next. However, if you frighten the audience then disarm them, the next jolt will seem as powerful as the first since they won’t expect it. They will go from a low anxiety state immediately to a high anxiety state and the shift will be very jarring. This isn’t as easy as throwing in a joke or a clown in the middle of a scene though sometimes the characters can lampshade the events of the story and try to crack a wry remark. It’s risky but if done right it has the potential to give the audience a moment of levity before rubbing salt in the wounds again. So this tactic is used in conjunction with scares to keep the audience afraid. The risk of course is that the addition of humor in an otherwise straight-faced horror film can call attention to itself like a beacon and draw the audience out of the world of the story. But this is not the only reason horror and humor cooperate.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an absolutely terrifying film in my opinion. It’s a demented odyssey into realms of twisted human psychology. But it maintains a perverse sense of humor that is just as entertaining as the scares. So how and why? How do we not end up taken out of the film? The answer to that I think is that the humor and the horror grow organically from the situation. The humor is not forced into the situation but is a direct result of it. The main psychopaths are funny themselves. But they aren’t funny in the way that a genuine comic relief would be funny. Instead they are funny as a result of their absurdity. While they are undoubtedly insane and dangerous, their instability and exaggerated personalities allow for the very stuff that humor and horror are made of: exaggeration. And that is why I think that, when done well, humor and horror may actually be great partners.
“The divine is no less paradoxical than the vicious,” said Eric in The Crow and there is a lot of truth to that. Both humor and horror develop when the universe drinks too many whiskey sours and ends up flopping on its ass. Both take what is expected, what our lives have so far told us is possible and to be expected, and subverts it to the point where we can either react with mirth or terror. For example, the dead coming back to life can be played for laughs since the idea is so absurd as to be unthinkable or we can play it as horrifying since it takes something that shouldn’t happen then slaps you right in the face with it. It all depends on what aspect the creator wants to emphasize. But by recognizing that both horror and humor are both a result of roughly the same process, the creator opens up new avenues to explore the idea. How far can you push until the horrible becomes laughable or the humorous horrendous? What does that say about the subject or our reactions to it? How can it just switch emotional textures? We also have to consider that both laughter and horror can be used as defense mechanisms. Sometimes something can be so horrible that the only way to respond to it is with laughter. Like when people suddenly laugh at a funeral. The more accepted or predictable response to something frightening are the typical physiological reactions we usually associate with fright. But both are ways of reacting to uncomfortable stimuli therefore, playing with both reactions can be very powerful for the audience especially since it can potentially lead to cognitive dissonance where they are no longer sure what they should be feeling. This ties nicely into the feeling of being trapped in a dream or rather a nightmare. Without any rules or land marks, the audience is totally at the mercy of the story. This takes the horror and elevates it to the level of a subconscious assault where the audience may be uncomfortable and not even know why. And the unknown is always scarier than anything any author or director can com up with. Thus, using humor in horror is a way of snaking into the audience using a method they may not be aware of and thus have no defense against. As an audience, we no longer can say what is safe and what is dangerous. Is there any safe place at all? Can anything in this insane world of the story be trusted? The humor here only heightens our apprehensions so that the world of the story becomes one massive dangerous labyrinth.
To wrap up before I go on for too long again, humor and horror, seemingly of the good twin evil twin dichotomy may not be so at odds as they seem. Both play with what we expect and subvert our expectations. Because of this, both can be deployed in the service of creating more tension and unease in the audience. When done well, the audience is stripped of a sense of knowing what will or what ought to play out. This thus a fantastic way of keeping the audience of balance and constantly wondering where you’ll take them.
This should be short and sweet. What do you enjoy reading? I’ll give you a second to think that over. Got the name of the genre in mind? Good. Go write that. Oh if it were to be so simple. But no. No it isn’t so simple because we live in a complicated world and writing is often a complicated business. So if it’s not so simple as just writing what you like to read, then what’s it all about? What’s the score? Also why is it so damn important to have a genre?
Want to write the next great piece of literature? Want to be the next Anton Chekhov whose work will be read in college lectures for generations to come? Well, I have some good and bad news for you. The good news first. There is a genre for everything. I mean that. If there isn’t a genre, there is a subgenre within a larger genre umbrella or tree. If you can dream it, there will be a spot for it in the Barnes & Noble shelves. Also, there is the option of combining several genres all at once. That is quite common, especially in science fiction, horror, fantasy, comedy, romance. Really, I could go on but the important thing to latch onto is that the it is very unlikely any one of us will write something so crazy and revolutionary that it will not be in a genre. There are only so many stories to be told. If we listen to Ronald Tobias, there are 20 plots that are found throughout all literature. These are the essential stories that seem to persist as a matter of universal unconscious. We somehow shape our stories into these patterns. George Polti pegged the number of stories out there as around 36! So don’t worry, I’m sure there’s a genre for you. But now the bad news, or at least the less good news.
I don’t remember which source I picked it up from, but literature doesn’t sell as well as you’d hope. I’m pretty sure it was in Betsy Lerner’s book The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers. But in any case, what sells is genre fiction. While this doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to sell your book or short story since there are still magazines and publishers that publish that kind of work, it does mean that your readership will be much more circumscribed, probably to professors and academia. But that doesn’t matter. I’m going to assume you write because you have to, not because you want to win popularity contests. But in any case, the reason for this can probably be found in the way we consume our entertainment. Since everything is so fast, so streamlined, we want to know what we’re getting before we get it. When you go to the romance, the mystery, or the biography section, you go there because you are in the mood for that kind of entertainment. You know what you want and where to get it. The genre thus serves as a way of making things much easier to not just locate but to find that particular literary burr that will scratch the itch you’re feeling. This really isn’t a bad thing in my opinion and it’s served me just fine. But being a consumer and being a creator are two very different things.
This post could very easily tie nicely with my previous post about finding your voice and you’ll find similar themes in this post but while the former was a bit more ethereal, this has major implications for your writing. Again, a major component is self-awareness and I’ll tell you why. I’m going to assume you enjoy music. For some of you, I’m going to go so far as to say you’ve got a bit of the ol’ Charles Manson in you. As he said, “My relationship to music is completely subliminal. It just flows through me.” For you people, music is like a part of your soul. But do you want to make music? How about those times you picked up a book in a genre you were unfamiliar with and you ended up really enjoying it? Did you think, “I want to write this kind of story!” then run to your computer and start spraying words? The point here is that consuming and creating are different and they are different in that creation is all about what comes from within. You could really love a particular genre, even be so enamored that you want to write in that genre but getting through a story is just impossible. There may be a reason for this. As Lord Vader helpfully recommends, “Search your feeling, you know it be true!” Yes, finding a genre really depends on what the marquee for your internal movie says is playing.
When you daydream, what do you daydream about? What is it that preoccupies you and keeps you from doing your work? When you look to that, you will find your genre. If it involves machines, nanobots, and other technological things, you can bet it’s science fiction. If it’s swords, elves, dragons, and orcs, it’s fantasy land for you. But be honest with yourself and just as importantly, be willing to experiment. I’ve gone through many transitions and I have a feeling that I’m not done yet. You could wonder if maybe you just haven’t developed enough skills. This could be the case and you shouldn’t stop trying. But I think that deep down, there develops a sense when you’re not saying what you want to say, what you really need to say. When you get that little nudge, you’ll know it and the trick is not to resist it.
So why would you resist writing what you want? There are too many reasons to list. But I’ll try to give a few. The first that comes to mind would be fear. Yeah, that old chestnut. In this case, an old moldy chestnut that gives off noxious effluvia. But fear is very easy to give in to. The reasons for fear are numerous and if this is true for you, then you will know your own particular reasons in more detail than I could describe here. But fear is an obstacle that must be overcome if you hope to enjoy what you write. Writing may not always be fun or easy but it can be made infinitely more tedious if you resist what comes naturally to your mind. Another reason to resist what you want to write is shame. Books have a long history of dealing with subjects others would prefer to leave untouched. Sometimes books upset people so much they want them banned. A favorite of mine, William S. Borrough’s Naked Lunch, was reviled as pornographic and banned by many. If you don’t spark the ire of the congenitally small minded, you may run afoul of your friends and acquaintances. It is common knowledge that writers should write what they know. In other words, we’ll use snippets of people we’ve known or their stories to give some kind of real world traction to our own. But sometimes, the fictional representations aren’t quite far enough removed from the people we’ve based them upon. Essentially, books are not always harmless. They can be weapons or they may peel back layers of our masks we wear and reveal something perverse underneath. Some of us just go for that kind of stuff. We are ghouls who revel in that muck of human wretchedness. But it’s not always comfortable to write about these things. Here, it’s important to remember that the writing and the writer, while occupying the same space, may not occupy the same persona. The characters you release onto the page may be monsters but that does not mean that by writing it you become monstrous. And if you should find yourself with a little spark of glee in your heart while writing these twisted passages, just remember, Jeffrey Dahmer didn’t write about killing people, he did it. If you explore some of your darker impulses through writing then you are rerouting, successfully, impulses that were there anyway and using that potentially destructive energy to create something. Most people would probably better off if they could learn to do something constructive with their negative impulses. But now I’m getting into the archetype of the shadow that Carl Jung discussed. I do suggest reading about it though since it is quite interesting. So, now here is the last reason that I’d like to examine. Be assured, as I’ve said, there are many more than these. We all have literary heroes, people whom we admire and to whom we attribute the initial love of reading and story telling. Sometimes these people don’t exactly match up with what’s inside us and though we may enjoy their work, it doesn’t reflect what we are drawn to create. Finally admitting that what you may want to write is not what your literary heroes have done is a bit like leaving the safe and structured oversight of a teacher to go out and learn the rest of the lessons that they couldn’t teach. Moreover, it may feel like a renunciation of your allegiance. After wanting to be like someone for so long, you finally acknowledge that you want to be you and do what comes naturally to you. All you can do is to proceed and realize this is the process of writing. It is one of constant discovery and adaptation. To resist it is to stunt your own development. Besides, your heroes have imparted all they could through their writing and you’ve doubtlessly picked up on many techniques while you read and enjoyed the stories they had to tell. It is part of the evolution to take this and apply it to what comes naturally from within you.
So how do you do that? As I said towards the beginning of the post, the best way to determine what you want to write to pay attention to where your thoughts naturally lead you. What do you day dream about? Who are the characters and what are the places? Take note of what is going on. Can you place your fantasies in a genre? This isn’t saying you should just record what your idle day dreams are. It takes a bit more than that to make a story that will get published. This is just a (hopefully) way of learning what you want to write about, what really sparks you and, more importantly, sustains you. When you write what comes naturally, you will find that you are able to constantly generate new material. The grunt work of writing it may still be the same but you will have a far easier time in actually creating the world of the story and the characters that populate it. There will be, ideally, a greater sense of continuity and flow that will be a result of working in a territory that you have explored extensively yourself: your own internal world.
One of the incredible things about writing is how much introspection it requires. There certainly is an aspect of the Eastern philosophical tradition to it. But that is a post for another time. For now, my advice is to ask yourself what it is you have to say, what it is you want to say, then to belt it out on paper, not letting anything hold you back.
I didn’t want this blog to go political but sometimes you have to talk about these things. Sometimes these issues sink into the ground like radioactive isotopes and threaten to poison the very ground you stake your home and livelihood on. The SOPA bill (Stop Online Piracty Act) is just one of those occasions where we have to look beyond the niche topics we cover and see the quagmire of under-the-table corruption, cronyism, and insidious fascism that continually assault us. These are mad times we live in boys and girls. Mad times plucked by the atrophied, gnarled fingers of old ideologues who can’t begin to envision a world where their rules are considered quaint and hokey yet utterly irrelevant. Of course I’m referring to Lamar Smith and his buddies. Our good friend Lamar is Republican House Judiciary Committee Chair from Texas. He’s the quisling who sold out rights out to the movie and record execs with the introduction of the SOPA bill. There has been a lot of talk about SOPA and a bit less on its deformed cousin PIPA recently. You might have heard about it. Or you might have noticed that your favorite websites are looking a little different today. Wikipedia has taken itself down for 24 hours as protest to the bills that would take an acetylene torch to everything good about the internet. The internet really is one of the last places we have that is truly free. With the Patriot Act and wire tapping that might have even made that naked mole rat Nixon retch, this republic is collapsing into itself like a geriatric who’s been clocked in the diaphragm. But never mind our national nightmare and let’s concentrate on this most recent affront to our dignity as members of the so-called free world. SOPA will create a firewall around the US pretty much. Sites based in foreign servers can be blacklisted and made inaccessible if there is any indication of copyright infringement. So you better pray your web content providers are paranoid bastards who only use public domain photos and pictures of their own kittens (which will have a watermark under the fur of course). And if you should be so daft as to upload a movie clip to youtube or facebook, you can expect Uncle Sam to bust down your door with a machete in one hand and a strap on in the other. You can look forward to luxuriating in Club F*ck Your Rights for up to five years. Yeah. That’s right. If an exec wakes up one morning and decides he wants a gold plated speed boat that can fly across the surface of the sun and he doesn’t quite have the cash for it, he’d going to send his good squad’s greasy little tentacles through the web, find some poor granny who thought it would be cute to put a clip of 101 Dalmations on facebook, and send her senile ass to prison for half a decade. Because her and her verminous criminal ilk deprived him of the money he needed for his solar boating expedition! Yes! I know this sounds a bit crazy. I seem to have gone off the rails a while back. If you’re still unsure of what all this is about, check this video. I am feeling more than a bit frigging crazy with this thing but we can do something about it. This is the important part so listen closely.
Boycott the fiend intelligences who are mainlining money into the stenosed veins of congressmen to support this bill. Groups like Sony, Viacom, and Marvel. Also, write to your representative in congress and tell them that this is unacceptable. Do not let these twisted people carve up the internet. It isn’t perfect but they are going to use a scorched earth policy then sow salt in their wake so nothing can grow. The internet has irrevocably change everything. It is a dreamscape where innovation and ideas can lead to amazing things. It’s a small wonder these people are so fervently trying to kill it. It’s like watching elk in rutting season bellowing and scrapping the ground with their antlers. They need to perpetuate the comfortable way of life they have been accustomed to, just blindly following the cycles. They may only be able to articulate these lizard brain needs through belches and grunts but you don’t want to get in their way because like the dumb beasts they are, they have only one setting. The internet has gotten in the way. It is unprecedented in human history and so those who have depended on locking information down are feeling a distinct chill march up their spines.
Now, stop reading this and write to your congressperson. Don’t let them erode our rights any more than they already have. And don’t let them carve up the vast, amazing dreamscape of the internet.
So, what am I spending my time on now? I warn you, this is going to be a bit of a selfish post since it’s dedicated to ME! Me, me, me! Well, hopefully that won’t be a bad thing. I’m writing this article to let you into I guess what goes on in my head as I’m working on something. I’d consider this a very brief and hopefully candid version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Punk.
First of all, what am I writing? That’s simple. I’m finishing a short story, I have another one with the tentative beginning in place, and I have a third that is at the second draft stage. For now, I am struggling with making sense of the story that is at the center of my attention. It’s an odd feeling of… I don’t know if there is a word in the English language to describe it and unfortunately my German friend informed me that the word unheimlich is no longer used in the way that Heidegger used it. But if I could use it, then it would mean “not being home,” or unfamiliarity but in a subtler way than in just coming across someplace new. This is almost a feeling not of a strange place but of being out of place. And I feel this with my most recent story, possibly because of the fact I am way over the word limit most magazines will accept and I have yet to get to the climax and possibly because there is just something slightly amiss. There is a good chance I will rewrite the entire story and try for an entirely different feel, a different texture. One of the worst things you can do is write for publication. I am not joking. I know some say that as soon as you put a word on the page you are writing for publication but if you find you are going down that path, stop yourself. However, sometimes writing with a word limit in mind can be very useful. It helps constrain your story and forces you to choose your words carefully and make every one of them count. The other issue is something you really do need to deal with directly and that I am trying to figure out. The problem is that I can’t really point to one thing in this story and say, “This is the culprit. Take this out and it will all fall into place.”
Then there is the much more insidious possibility that there isn’t anything inherently wrong with it but I am interpreting and making a problem where there is none. This is much more problematic and is more an issue of perspective. A piece of writing can be modified in rather short order but perspective takes a while. It takes time away and usually something novel as a catalyst. I’ve often said one of the best ways of ditching writer’s block is to do, go, or see something new. Is this strategy effective here? I’m not sure. I’ll be finding out soon though. One thing I can be fairly certain of is that I need to make my central character stronger. Perhaps my central character is to blame. He may just not be that interesting. I fear that this may be the case and I suppose that can be attributed to something that I now, as I write this, acknowledge I do. In trying to make my characters seem more realistic, I try to make them like the average person. We all have little quirks and stuff but many of us are nondescript, just trying to go about our business. We worry about our relationships and our future. Will we be able to pay the bills? Are our jobs secure? Does the roof need mending? But in fiction, we want more. I think we want someone who is a bit larger than life. While he doesn’t need to be Achilles or some other demi-god, we do want our characters to be interesting. They need to reflect us just enough for us to identify with them but be grand enough for us to want to follow them.
So with that sorted out for the moment and a new plan to make right this set back, I’ll let you in on what kind of stories these are. Big surprise, they are horror but they are different takes on horror. The completed work is much more of a hybrid that includes science fiction, body horror elements, drama, and tragedy. The one I am working on is a straight Lovecraftian affair with cosmic monstrosities beyond the boundaries of space and time. The third is a psychological horror dealing with murder and guilt. I generally enjoy playing around with these different ways of exploring fear and the human condition. Plus, different ideas and intentions come from the experiences that inspired the stories. For instance, I got the idea for my current story from the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. There was an incredible and very ornate shrine and the story just came from nowhere. The structure and major plot points was born in the blink of an eye. However, as I’ve found out, the construction process can be vicious even when everything seems to be already in place. Sometimes the bolts don’t go into the holes you thought they would or there is board at a bad angle that makes the entire structure unstable. These are things that I’m still learning to deal with. Revising not just your completed first draft but your entire way of going about writing is proving to be a valuable if hard-learned skill. Hopefully reading this will help some of you as much as writing it has helped me.
One of the truly difficult things about writing is learning to disregard the pressure one feels about writing and having an eventual readership beyond oneself. It’s those times when one realizes that one would like to see one’s work published in some form that one becomes acutely aware of one’s limitations and deficiencies as a writer. Every word seems insufficient. Every metaphor or simile seems too precious and you get the distinct feeling that you’re just spinning your wheels. However, this isn’t always the case. When you’re writing something that you know will never see the light of day, whether it’s a poem or a journal, you don’t hesitate.Instead, the words come at a pace that is almost too much to keep up with. There are suddenly too many ideas. But that is because you are writing for yourself and yourself only. The only person you need to entertain is you and you know what you like. But start thinking that you’d like that bit of writing to find a larger audience and all of a sudden, the fear sets in and sits on your fingers so you can’t write anything.
One of the things about writing is that it is extremely personal. When you write, you are committing your thoughts and fantasies onto a page or into a computer where it will be recorded and visible to others. But only if you wish it to be so. Keeping a dream journal (as I try to do) or a regular journal does not require one to think about what an audience or a publisher wants or expects. I guess you could call these personal written records unbounded writing space. Whatever you’d like to write is fine. There are no expectations and no limits. Be as crazy as you’d like. When you’re writing for yourself, the only one who can judge you is you. It is freeing and refreshing. But it seems that, at least for me, as soon as I decide I’d like something to eventually be intended for an audience, the fear and uncertainty bites down hard. It’s at this moment of becoming aware of my own intentions that I enter bounded writing space, a place you don’t want to get stuck in if you have any intentions of enjoying the writing process.
I think part of the problem is that once you start writing to get published, you stop writing for yourself. Once that happens, the focus shifts from what you want to say and see happen in your story to what you think the publisher wants. I think that resisting this urge to concentrate on publication rather than just writing is one of those skills that one never completely masters. For many of us, getting published is a life-long dream. We want to share our stories with others. We want to connect with others through our work. I think that many of us also want to be accepted and not just accepted for publication. We want to know that people like what we think and what we have to say. Some of us don’t want to have people like what we say and we aim to shock and displease. Whatever the case is, when we write for anyone other than ourselves, it is a form of communication. But to get to that point, we have to pass the gate keepers who are the editors. The thought that we must impress them to get to our audience can be terrifying. To go through all that work then still not be able to project your voice is a frustrating experience. Maybe the best thing to do is to fail.
Yup. Get half-way through a story and realize it’s not working. Send a story to a bunch of publishers and don’t get it accepted. I must be crazy, you are probably thinking. Doesn’t that make it worse? Doesn’t that strip away all hope and expectation… oh. That’s the point. The harder you try, the more you will stifle the creative energy you have in you. When you realize that all attempts have failed you can return to that state before aspirations of being published took over your mind and turned every word you put down a committee meeting in your head. As Tyler Durden said, “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.” And this is true for writing. One has to learn to stop worrying (not easy for many writers since we do tend to be a very detail oriented lot) and just let the words come to you. The best way to summarize it is to be Zen. Don’t think of what might happen in the future. Don’t worry about whether what you’re working on will turn out well (that is something that can be dealt with in the editing process). Simply concentrate on having fun. Is the story not entertaining you yet? Throw something into it that you think will entertain you then enjoy the hell out of writing about it. If you have passionately written, that vitality will translate to the readers and to the editor. If you can’t have fun with your story, who will? And the thing about having fun is that it isn’t a conscious decision. You can’t say “I’ll have fun now” then just magically have fun. Fun will come when you let go. That is one of the most challenging things I’ve found about writing. Technique and style can be learned and practiced. But being able to let go and simply let your story take on its own life is incredibly difficult because we have to put to rest all of our insecurities and fears and concepts of self. With the ego in the way, writing becomes a set of manacles. You are compelled to write because writers simply have to write. But you are restrained by your ego and all its fears and preconceptions. Therefore, when you feel yourself slipping into bounded space, where it is all about the end result, put your head back and try to think of nothing at all. Or listen to music and slip away. Only after you’ve calmed down, go back to writing. Repeat as often as necessary. But for best results, fall down a few times and learn the difficult lesson that you shouldn’t worry about getting from Point A to Point B but should enjoy dancing in a circle to your own music. In time, others will join you.
Dawn of the Dead, Zombi, The House by the Cemetery, Brain-Dead (or Dead Alive in the US), Suspiria, The Last House on the Left, The Thing, Videodrome, The Fly. These are all films that I enjoy. And they are all films that pack in the gore, violence, dismemberment, and evisceration. I do not consider myself a gorehound but there is no denying that watching a zombie get its head cut off, especially if it’s by Tom Savini, is particularly gratifying. But the main question that these films pose is where do we draw the line with violence, gore, and sex. All of these films had almost all of these elements in spades and there are many books that are just as, if not even more, brutal than some of these films. So the question is, where do we draw the line? Is there a line?
When it comes to writing a horror story, there is usually an element of physical danger. Not always. Sometimes it is a purely psychological threat of madness but most of the time we get some form of physical threat. I believe I can say with some level of certainty that feelings of fear and horror are inextricably tied to the body and our sense of bodily integrity. A good example is Roman Polanski’s Repulsion which is a psychological horror film that we could say is mostly about the main character’s mental break down. There is a bit of violence in it but the main source of horror is the protagonist’s increasingly loose grasp on reality. But if we break down the protagonist’s problem, we find that at its root, is the fear of sexuality. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the main character develops a fear of heights after his partner falls from a great height. In the fantastic Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (seriously, check this movie out) we are treated to a romp through a dreamscape where everything seems to be metaphorical which is why this could be considered a psychological horror. But there is still the issue of the titular character’s coming of age which is of course tied to the body again. So the use of violence and gore can be justified in general. Our sense of self is deeply tied to our sense of body and when it is harmed, we react strongly from instincts that are in place to keep us alive. But the films I presented at the start of this post do more than vaguely hint at bodily violation. They dive in up to the elbows! So how can those films be justified?
The films at the top of the post do gore and they do it well and almost to excess. But what they do equally well is story and character. We care about the characters or at the very least, we want to know where the story will take us next. The gore is integral to telling the story since the story is about the body and the body’s destruction. David Cronenberg’s masterful remake of The Fly has as its subject the slow, painful transformation of a scientist into a man-fly hybrid. The Last House on the Left by Wes Craven is truly brutal in the depiction of the abduction and systematic torture of two young girls by a group of sadistic lunatics and what their parents do when they discover that the group of people who’ve sought shelter in their house are responsible for the rape and murder of their daughter. While the violence and sadism of the film are shocking, one can’t say that it is too much because it is no worse than what happens in real life. To deny the film as a cheap shock-fest is to turn a blind eye to the reality that we are embedded in. The Thing and Videodrome, while science fiction and extremely gooey, once again take body and its violation as its main theme though there are additional themes layer on top. The Thing deals with paranoia and, on a deeper level, is about the fear of contagion. Keep in mind that this film was made back when AIDS was becoming a real threat and people were terrified of this new and seemingly omnipresent infection. Videodrome deals with the question of where television and reality intersect. At what point does reality actually become subservient to illusion? How better to explore this than by looking at the body? Since the body is sort of the first thing we can say that we recognize and is the beginning of and filter through which we collect information about the reality, what happens when it is warped and remolded by fiction? How can we tell what is real anymore when the body becomes contorted by illusion? In these and many other stories, the body is the subject or the body plays a central role. In that case, there must be blood. We must be reminded that we are viscera machines. Soft, squishy, and vulnerable. But the gore serves the story. It is there as a mandatory condition. To sanitize it is to remove the story’s reason for being which is to explore our physicality and everything that goes along with it. But there is another type of entertainment that isn’t interested in these questions but just wants to slap us in the face with a bucket of giblets.
Back when I was doing a philosophy course in undergraduate, during my brief stint as a philosophy major, I wrote a paper about the ethics of modern horror films, comparing the use of gore in the films with earlier and equally graphic films. In the end, I concluded that many of these modern films go beyond good taste and presented gore in a less than ethical way. If only I had considered the implications that would have for grind house and splatter punk genres. Luckily, I’ve thought more about this issue since then and have reformulated my conclusion. I’ve also lightened up a bit and got off my high horse. Now, I all I can say is that if you enjoy it fine. While great entertainment may carry a deeper message about the human condition, sometimes fun is just fun. Planet Horror and Crank and Crank 2 were both violent, gory, and filled with sex. Both hearkened back to an era of film making that emphasized stupid fun over substance. These films knew what they were and didn’t try to be anything else. Compare The Toxic Avenger with something like Transformers. The former realizes that its premise is ridiculous and runs with it like a sugar-crazed bird with a gummy worm in its beak. The latter plays it way too straight, not realizing that we went to the movie to watch giant robots beat the living motherboard out of each other. I don’t really need much more beyond that. If you at least make the robots interesting or likable, like our much beloved Toxie, we won’t mind the absurdity. Now, The Toxic Avenger had some of the most outlandish gore out there. People were beaten stupid with their own severed arm! But if you went into it with the right mindset, you’d have a damn good time. Of course, these films had gore akin to a Saturday morning cartoon. It was so excessive that you couldn’t take it seriously. But then there are films like Hostel that require a bit of a different approach.
In a film like Hostel, the gore and brutality is played straight. You are not supposed to laugh. You are supposed to be uncomfortable and sickened. We as an audience are not supposed to enjoy what we see. But as we watch the simulated torture we become voyeurs to sick and twisted behaviors that, since they are already committed to film, cannot be altered. And we can’t claim ignorance either. We know going into a film like Saw or Hostel what is on the menu. Most of the characters in those films are not going to make it. They are squishy cannon fodder. We know that they will suffer painful, protracted deaths. But we still go and we still watch. I’d argue that these films do in fact push beyond certain boundaries. I don’t know if I could successfully argue otherwise when these films are doing everything in their power to push beyond the boundaries. But is it too much? In terms of censorship, I can’t say yes since I oppose censorship. But are they too much in that they shouldn’t have been made? Again, I can’t say I’d support that either. Movies aren’t always nice. They may show things that are deeply unsettling for no other reason than to provoke a reaction. Can I blame them? When trying to provoke a reaction, sometimes the cheap tricks are the best tricks. We are of course sickened and shocked by gore and violence and for different reasons. We are shocked by gore because we are not supposed to have an intimate, face-to-face relationship with the things inside our bodies. Our organs and blood are not to be seen and when we see on screen or read in a book that the intestines have come out to say hello, we react with a deep feeling of wrongness. Violence shocks us because we are empathetic creatures. We have a tendency to feel or at least understand what others are experiencing. So to see someone get stabbed or read about it, we take some of that into ourselves and experience a bit of that pain. But there is a bit more to the story of the modern “torture porn” flick.
One of the deeply embedded facets of human nature is the propensity to violence. We can run with the humanism thing all we want but in the end, we are animals like other animals and we have gotten to this point today because we were better at killing and destroying than anything else on the planet. That is not the only reason we have been so successful. Intelligence, farming, and tight-knit groups that cooperated helped a lot. But we can’t say that weapons and a taste for blood didn’t help. But how often do you kill someone or something these days? I think the last time I killed something was zapping a fruit fly. But young men are still full of primordial fury! This is why there are so many cases of aggression coming from teenagers and men in their early 20’s. It’s that urge to clobber something resurfacing in an environment that doesn’t allow for such behavior. These films allow people to experience something brutal without getting their hands dirty. Though of course, this suggests that some people, instead of identifying with the victims, are identifying with the torturers. This is a frightening thought but not surprising. We all have the capacity to do horrible things and these films allow for those who are more inclined to that sort of behavior to experience a vicarious thrill. And so far, I haven’t heard of a case where someone kills a person then blames it on Hostel. This reminds me of A Clockwork Orange, the novel, not Stanley Kubrick’s stunning adaptation. At the end of the original text, our faithful narrator Alex grows out of his violent behavior and decides that he wants to act like an adult. So if the thought that these movies creating a horde of testosterone leaking psychopaths is weighing heavy on your mind, don’t let it. Especially because my next point puts it into a bit of context.
In these days, manhood isn’t what it used to be even though we are still relying on software or hardware that is ancient. We still feel the need in many cases to earn the distinction of manhood. There are still many cultures around the world that have initiations in which young men become adults.
But we don’t have any such rituals in this culture. But with these films, we’ve found something like battle-testing ourselves. We challenge our friends to sit through these films and not throw up or run out screaming. In these films, we’ve found a proving ground to separate the men from the boys as the saying goes. Think about the demographic these films are marketed to. Young males who will go to other young males and dare them to sit through it. “Dude, I saw the sickest movie. A guy totally pulled another guy’s pancreas out through his ear!” They will talk about it and dare each other to sit through it. Since we can’t go into battle and retrieve an enemy’s head, we now come back with a ticket stub.
So where do we draw the line? As a writer, especially a writer of horror, this becomes a crucial question. My stories so far, don’t feature a lot of blood or overt violence. But that isn’t to say they won’t and I have some stories I’m planning that deal directly with themes of bodily violation. How does one balance the need to portray gore without going to the limits of excess? Or perhaps that is a false concern? Maybe the limits are not there. Take for instance, Salo by Pierre Paolo Passolini. It pushed every boundary imaginable. It is a film that I have not been able to watch through twice due to how unpleasant it is. But it was a good film. It dealt with the wretched excess that would be the logical conclusion of the fascist regime in Italy in World War 2. Morbid and perverse, it presents the fictionalization of an era’s ghouls who hid behind the mask of authority. So maybe it isn’t the question of how much is too much but what it is being used for. Is it to provide immature laughs, allow someone to experience deeply repressed urges, or reveal something about human nature? The amount of gore and violence is thus taken out of the issue of taste and propriety and put in the area of intention. What is the effect you’re trying to create in the reader or viewer? Shocks? Scares? Gross-out reflections on the vulnerability of the human body? I think this is why there is no line, only a sliding scale that you have to place yourself.
Have you ever had a dream that, the second you wake up, you want to write it down? “This would make a wicked story!” you think to yourself, imagining the potential plot. Especially if you write horror, dreams can be a wonderful source of inspiration. The feeling of being trapped in a nightmare, with something horrible chasing you, or something just wrong with the world of the dream and you can’t pinpoint it but you know it’s horrible. If you could translate these feelings into words, surely you’d be able to terrify readers. I sometimes turn to my dream for inspiration but there’s something I learned from repeated attempts at transcribing my dreams too closely.
A while ago, I had a dream that deeply disturbed me. I dreamed I was being pulled through a department store. I felt like something evil was growing inside me. I didn’t know what it was but I could feel it growing, taking over more and more of me. I struggled against whoever was tugging me. People stared in horrified disbelief at what they saw. We passed a mirror and I felt the horrible urge to look and see what was happening to me but I was too afraid. I kept closing my eyes and jerking away but somehow my eyes kept fluttering open. Each time they opened, I caught a glimpse of something monstrous squirming in the mirror. Finally, the terror reached a fever pitch and I woke up. Needless to say, I woke up frightened but inspired. I saw the potential for this story. In fact, I was sure that the story would write itself. This was December of 2010.
By May, I was still nowhere near completing the story. The story I had decided on was still based on the dream but incorporated heavy elements of Chinese mythology and the history of Unit 731. I suggest reading about it because it is one of the finest examples of how the atrocities of human beings will somehow always outdo the things we writers can imagine. The story was about a college student living in London whose family had somehow escaped the atrocities of the infamous unit. On the night of a particular festival that her family observes she goes to a concert instead of observing the ritual and begins to have horrible hallucinations and comes face to face with the thing the ritual was supposed to keep at bay. Now that I think of it, and with the distance of time separating me from the story, I can see where I went wrong and how to make the story work but, during those frustrated months, nothing I did seemed to be enough to get the story moving.
Since then, I’ve actually derived a short story I completed and a novel that is being developed from the raw materials of this one unassailable short story. In the process, I figured something very important out that has since helped me not just in turning my dreams into stories but with writing in general. My ideas went all over the place when writing that story. I was hell-bent on capturing the effect the dream had on me. I wanted the reader to feel terrified and confused. After two initial attempts, I had the confused part down. But with that version, there was a serious disconnect with the character and what was happening to her. She felt like a cipher. I didn’t feel connected to her and I didn’t know what she was doing or why. I also couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all just a bit too much to expect my readers to suspend their disbelief this far. The story was breaking down and I didn’t know why. The harder I tried to put it together, the worse it was coming. I came to the conclusion that I needed to change the setting. I changed the setting and powered through the story. I came to the end and I still wasn’t totally satisfied. What was wrong?
Now that I look back, it is obvious. I could have kept the original setting. I could have kept the original characters and the original story problem. What was wrong was much less tangible than the setting. The story lacked a skeleton. It wasn’t plotless but it lacked cohesion. It felt strained, like it was trying to be more than it was. I had crammed too much in, had too much backstory, too much of everything but a central narrative pillar. There is probably no story so crazy that it can’t be turned into a working story. What I had done was mixed the lines up between what works in a dream and works on paper. A dream works according to a unique, internally derived logic. By sticking too closely to the dream, I was trying to have both a nightmarish, dream-like experience while adhering to a story in which the rules of the real world mostly apply. If I had gone with a totally surreal set-up, that would have worked without nearly as much as the hassle but instead I mixed both together and kept tearing itself apart as quickly as I tried to stitch it back together. The root of the problem I think came not from even a lack of focus but too much focus on creating a certain emotional effect without enough thought to the story that would carry it. Sure it might be creepy at parts and I might get the result I’m aiming at, but without a narrative and characters to carry it forward that might as well be a description of a napkin blowing down the sidewalk. Sure it can be poetic but it’s still not a story. Because I was so single-mindedly pursuing my goal, I forgot one of the most important things about writing which is to tell a story with memorable characters.
Routinely, I have dreams and nightmares that I think would make good short stories or could be worked into a novel. However, I now realize that the important thing is not to transcribe the dream image for image or feeling for feeling onto the page but to think about what the dream was about. Sure one can incorporate those images and feelings but to concentrate solely on those aspects will probably lead to frustration. The trick is to analyze the dream and figure out what it was really about. The most affecting part of these dream experiences are how they reveal deeply ingrained, almost hard-wired fears and vulnerabilities. By looking at one’s dreams and learning to read them and thus learn why it was so deeply affecting, one can create a story that will haunt readers by digging into those liminal areas of their consciousness that they keep hidden.
So go beyond the image, dig past the outward horror to find what it is about the experience that is truly traumatic. That is where your story lies. I’d suggest keeping a dream journal where you record your night’s dreams. It will help you identify and zero in on the aspects of the dream that will work and that will create a great story.
Speculative Fiction Writing 