Storytellersunplugged

THE SMOOTH LEVEL – AND BEYOND

David Niall Wilson

This isn’t my day (yet) but we don’t have a special guest for the 31st of this month, and rather than let the site remain untouched another complete day, I’m posting this now – a bit ahead of time. Before I begin, let me say our hearts and positive thoughts are on Mississippi and Louisiana, and all the victims of Katrina.

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I wrote this article a long time ago, just found it, and have reworked it extensively. The central theme is something that has itched at the back of my thoughts for a long time – the concept of creativity on various levels. You find these levels in everything you do, and writing is no exception. I studied the cello when I was younger, play the guitar now, and the levels are never more evident than when viewed through artistic accomplishment. There are songs I used to watch other guitarists play, my eyes wide in amazement that I can easily master now, and much more beyond. I feel the same about the words I write, and I’m always looking forward and a little up for that next step.

Earlier in my career I believed that the level to shoot for in writing was what I called the smooth level. This is the level where you have developed a consistent and professional writing “voice”, the point where the words flow easily and the technical becomes automatic. At this point I believed that only the plots separated different authors. If you subscribe to the theory that writers are conduits of creativity, reaching the “smooth” level is like fine-tuning a receiver. Once you have a clear signal, you can switch channels, but the fidelity is the same.

Now I believe that what I saw as an end in itself is, in fact, only another beginning. The smooth level is as far as many successful writers will ever get. Commercially speaking, it is not necessary to go beyond this level. Artistically speaking, if you want to be a great writer, you have to expand. Creativity is never stagnant. Complacency is the great killer of brilliance.

Here’s an example. When I first read The Throat, by Peter Straub I didn’t expect much. Something inside me had written him off, along with Stephen King, as commercial and uninspiring. Of course, at that time I had limited exposure to either author, both of whom I consider major influences in my writing these days, and whose work I treasure. When I read The Throat, I jumped over Mystery, the second book in the series he began with Koko, and I wish now that I’d read them in order. Still, they stand alone well enough, and I have since read Mystery and several other books involving some of the characters in both.

Anyway, as I read The Throat, I began to realize that when you write like Peter Straub, the plot is secondary. I don’t mean that his plot was bad, in the case of that particular novel it’s nothing short of brilliant, just that the quality of the writing, the insights he offers into himself and his characters, are enough to carry it— for me.

When I finished the book I had that familiar sensation of wishing there was more to read, and satisfaction that the story had resolved itself well. Not only did it end as I expected it to, but it managed to do so and still surprise me several times in the process. This brings me back to the subject of new levels.

The protagonist of this novel, Tim Underhill, is also a novelist. He writes himself into his characters, in this case that of a molested child. Of course, in his own real world, Underhill is facing that same character in a sort of parallel time-flux relationship that causes him to question his own sanity and that of almost everyone around him. All of Underhill’s novels have been about aspects of his childhood, taken on tangents or magnified, but built solidly on the minds, words, and deeds of characters that might have been himself.

This is the single most significant point, I believe; The Throat is a multi-level novel.. You can read it on the surface level, enjoying the hunt for an elusive Green Beret gone serial killer and be thoroughly entertained. On a completely different level, the story is not about a serial killer at all. It’s about Underhill himself, his search for meaning in life through his characters, his development of those characters through personal insight and the unlocking of sealed images from his past. It is about relationships between people and places, and the subtle differences between their reactions to shared events. There are stories within stories here.

The plot reminded me of a picture I saw once in a tattoo parlor. In the foreground was a large, detailed hand wielding a tattoo gun, inking the image of a smaller, identical hand holding a smaller tattoo gun, on and on ad infinitum. On different levels, the details of The Throat strike different chords.

The true beauty of this book, from a writer’s point of view, is that it is the miracle novel. It doesn’t so much cross the genres as it spans them. There is horror. There are several mysteries. It is satisfying on each level, more so as you delve deeper, and it will stick with you.

How much of all this comes from Straub’s own past is questionable, as such things always are. No one will ever know, probably. Someday I may be lucky enough to be able to ask. The few times Peter and I have talked I had other questions, mostly about his novel “Shadowland,” which I love. If his answer is not much, then I’ll have to believe that the brilliance of his character Underhill is only another step upon which Peter will launch his skills to an even higher level.

The point of all this is simple. No matter how smoothly the words flow for you, and no matter how wonderful the reviews are on your latest work, don’t grow complacent. There is always something more important just around the corner, and if there isn’t – what’s the sense in going?

DNW

Just for kicks, I’m going to swallow whatever pride I might have and share a few things I’ve done in my time that sensible people ought to avoid when producing work for an intelligent public.

These mostly go back several years, but the memory of them reinforces the idea that it’s a good thing to laugh at one’s self from time to time. I like to think I might have learned something from these, but then . . . some of us are quite incorrigible.

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From deep within the DEATHREALM vault . . .

Once, long ago, I received from a particularly cocky author a cover letter that extolled in detail the merits of his accompanying vampire tale; this innovative narrative, I was assured, would impress me as had no other work in the bloodsucker genre, and the author would be anxiously awaiting my affirmative response. Thus forewarned, it came as no surprise to find the tale akin to just about every other vampire story that had ever crossed my desk, and I summarily rejected it — politely, of course. But soon afterward, what should appear in my mailbox but an irate letter from the author, proclaiming me a clueless twit for having denied my readers such a monumental work of fiction, and would I please reconsider my verdict?

Now, everyone knows the proper thing to do in such a situation. But I reckon I was feeling belligerent that day because, instead of ignoring him, I wrote the fellow a similarly snarky little missive and posted it immediately.

That, of course, was mistake number one. Mistake number two was putting the letter into the wrong SASE and mailing it to an altogether different author.

Yes, and very soon, I received from the altogether different and understandably bemused author a note that read as follows: “I honestly don’t see what any of your comments have to do with my story, and furthermore, you are a very mean man.”

The apology went out the same day, and when I actually did get to the story by our altogether different author, I found it an exquisite yarn about werewolves. It subsequently appeared in DEATHREALM magazine and, more recently, in the anthology DEATHREALMS from Delirium Books. Fortunately for me, Mr. Hank Parnell is a forgiving soul.

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Everyone makes boo-boos, right?

Well, I always proofread DEATHREALM as thoroughly as my bespectacled eyes would allow, but that never stopped me from screwing up someone’s carefully composed story or poem. Sometime in the early 90s, enamored of my relatively new ability to cut and paste text and slap it down anywhere my exuberant heart desired, I once cut the body of a poem and pasted it right beneath the title and byline of yet another altogether different writer.

Guess when the error was caught. And by whom.

Thoroughly humbled, lesson learned, with the next issue, I did manage to place all text and bylines precisely where they were supposed to be. I proofread every word — on the computer screen — with more than utmost care. But my old, monstrously large and unwieldy HP Deskjet printer apparently had editorial aspirations of its own. At a glance, the printed page looked perfectly normal, and at the time, that was good enough for me. However, for reasons I can only attribute to malice, the dastardly machine had amputated the last, rather crucial verse of the bottom-most poem on the page.

Guess when the error was caught. And by whom.

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One should always look before one leaps . . .

Whenever a new issue of DEATHREALM came back from press, the first copy out of my box of personal copies always went to my wife. I would inscribe within it a nice little heartfelt message, and on an occasion or two, it was the kind of note intended for a certain someone’s eyes only. We’ve always kept Peg’s copies separate from all others, and both of us figured that one of us would have the sense not to go digging through them when he needed a copy of a certain issue to fill a late order.

Somewhere out there, someone has the whole story of that particular Friday night, and I’d seriously like to thank him or her for refraining from blackmail. I do hope he or she was amused rather than traumatized by the details.

There are times that I really miss editing DEATHREALM. And occasionally, times that I do not.

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Speaking of looking before leaping . . .

This is not DEATHREALM-related, but since it happened as a result of my attention being focused on the plotting of my newest novel, I suppose it could count as a horrible writing accident. (As an aside, if you read the Shocklines message board, this is a rerun, and you are free to leave now.)

I’m sure anyone who has met me in person would think me as graceful as a bounding deer whilst making my way through a forest. Or perhaps not. But anyway . . .

Just the other day, I went hiking through the woods on the trail around a nearby lake to find some inspiration; it’s a regular thing I do on pleasant afternoons. It had rained earlier, but the trail didn’t appear particularly wet. Apparently, though, the one place where I decided to turn my attention from the trail to the scenery around me was still pretty dadblamed slick.

Woops! Looking up, I see — way up there above my head — my feet. Yes, I’m tumbling down this steep hill and before I know it . . . splash! Right square into the lake. Along with my cell phone, my wallet, my not-quite-waterproof watch . . .

So here I am, lying on my back in a couple of feet of water, frantically pulling things out of my waterlogged pockets. At one point, I discovered I was clenching something tightly between my teeth, and thinking it might be important, I held onto it stubbornly. (Subsequent examination identified it as a leaf.) Anyway, somehow, I managed to salvage my possessions intact, and apart from getting a little bruised by some rocks, I came out more or less undamaged.

If I was looking for inspiration that day, I got it; just a bit more forcefully than I anticipated.

There. All pride has been swallowed, and I feel like I’ve put on ten pounds. As for learning from my mistakes . . . well, if nothing else, I tend to be more careful where I puts my little feets.

Cripes, that was my haaand . . . !

–Mark Rainey

The craft of writing video games – I won’t dare call it an art, not until people in the industry finally get over their fixation with Floyd the Robot in the text-only adventure Planetfall – is a very young one, though it has already managed to acquire its own impressive list of techniques, clichés, and incomprehensible lingo. At this point, there’s not a lot of training out there, formal or otherwise, on how to do it. Most people simply get thrown into the fire, based on tight project deadlines, an ability to string three words together, and a willingness to do it on the cheap.

(No, the money in video games is not in writing them. It’s in owning the company that produces the ads for them. But that’s a whole other story.)

Writing is still very much the kid that gets picked last for kickball in the great schoolyard of game development. Everyone knows what good graphics are – they can see them right up on the screen. If the guy who’s supposed to be a terrifying ninja instead looks like a beanbag chair, you know that the graphics need work. Features, likewise, are pretty easy to detect. They’re either there or they’re not, and if they’re there they’re implemented either well or poorly. Behind the scenes, it works much the same way. Modelers and engineers and animators have recognized tools to work with, a baseline of work that theirs can be judged against. There are known baselines to judge their stuff against, and processes in place to get the material to where it needs to be in order to make a professional-quality game.

But with writing, not so much. In many cases, the writing of a game is at the tail end of a chain of dependencies, and it can’t be done until all of the other pieces have been dropped into place. Or, to put it another way, one of the big roles that game dialogue has is to tell the player what to do next. If the level artist and the game designer and the engineer responsible for the particular feature that a section of gameplay is based on haven’t nailed down what they’re doing yet, the writer is merely whistling in the dark if he puts anything down on paper. Every game writer who’s been in the industry longer than fifteen minutes has gotten emails which read, “By the way, the three-headed cannibal Cyclops on level six is now a friendly alpaca that you need to give a cheeseburger to in order to get it to show you where the magical Frammistat of the Gods is located. I hope this isn’t too big of a problem?”

Well, maybe they didn’t read exactly like that, but close enough. I’ve gotten six of them myself.

But I digress. The sad truth of the matter is that in many cases, the writing of a game – the dialogue, the briefings, the in-game text, the narration, and whatever else is required – is viewed as a secondary task, to be conducted with equal amounts of disregard and urgency. The disregard comes from two places. One, that the gameplay and graphics get 98% of the attention when it comes to polish and production. Two, that there aren’t a whole lot of people out there necessarily qualified to judge, edit, and help polish game writing. The vast majority of games have, at most, one writer on them. They do not have an editor, a writing team, or someone in a position to work with the writer to polish the text. More frequently, they have a deadline – We need the dialogue by June 25^th because we go into the recording studio on the 28^th, and they need two days to format it before they actually inflict it on the actors – and like everything else in the video game world, deadlines mean “the arbitrary date set when by we take whatever you have and run with it.”

Now, getting the audio recorded as early as possible is sensible. You’re probably looking at a couple of thousand sound files which need to be recorded, edited, packaged, and placed in the game, and all of this takes time. The problem is that if you need as much time on the back end as possible for the sound files, and you get crunched on the front end by dependencies and arguments over the placement of Shecky the Magical Alpaca, then you don’t have a whole lot of time for writing. Throw in the fact that the guys doing the gameplay and levels are at least as overburdened and time-crunched as the writers and don’t necessarily have a whole lot of time to sit down and talk about character motivation, and you realize that it’s a very interesting sort of pressure cooker that game writers voluntarily sauna in.

Bad things can happen on top of this. Vital dialogue can be forgotten or missed. Late gameplay changes can render dialogue embarrassingly incorrect. Bad voice acting can render even good dialogue risible, and not all game dialogue is good to start with. The list goes on and on, and it can get ugly, fast.

So how do game writers survive, and in many cases do their jobs well? And yes, there is superb game writing out there. Dig up Tim Shafer’s Grim Fandango, for example, or the glorious cheese of the sword-and-sandal epic God of War, or Bioware’s sprawling epics, or dozens of other examples. How, then, does the good stuff get done despite all of these constraints?

The honest answer is I don’t know, exactly, because every company has their own arcane ritual and process. But I know what I have to do in order to get the good stuff out there, or at least the good enough stuff – I know better than to try to rate my own work.

The most important thing is to remember that it is in fact game writing. It’s not a movie, it’s not a novel, it’s not even a choose-your-own-adventure. It’s a video game, and the writing is part of an experience centered on the player. If you want to tell a story, it has to be a story the player can experience and be central to, not something the player is supposed to sit back and marvel at. The second you turn your player into your audience instead of your protagonist, you are in trouble, because people play games to play them. If they want a movie, they’ll rent a movie. So making sure that your writing encourages the player, leads them to new experiences, and never talks at them, is absolutely vital.

The bulk of a game’s writing is often dialogue. That dialogue has to be recorded, crammed onto the disc, and listened to by the player. That means it has to be short, punchy, and informative. Rhetorical tricks of the Bradburyian school of description simply don’t work in a video game. The player doesn’t want to sit there and hear the characters talk. He wants to do things that he can talk about. Game dialogue can do a lot to enhance the game experience – it can tell the player what to do or how to do it, it can deeper character and interaction, and it can make the player feel cool to play the main character. What it can’t do is replace the gameplay. No matter how glorious your verbiage, a twelve-line conversation to deliver one tidbit of information is overkill, and it will have the player champing at the bit.

The other key to game dialogue is making sure it sounds like people talking. (OK, people or elves or galactic zorg-biters or whatever). Because so much game writing is expository, it is easy to fall into the trap of the Deadly Declarative – “You seek the Wizard Pittsnogle. He lives in the forest past the deadly troll bridge. Bring him a sacrifice or he will not see you, err, thee.” And yes, that information has to get across. Otherwise, the player doesn’t find the Wizard Pittsnogle, who gives him the Sword of JibberJabber which can then be used to slay the evil Tegyrius who guards the…well, you get the idea. If instead he gets great characterization but no useful information, he wanders around the map for a while, killing orcs and getting increasingly bored, until he finally decides he’s had it and heads off to try to do something politicians don’t approve of on the latest iteration of Grand Theft Auto.

And then there’s the ritual. Video games do have their codes and expectations, shorthand that the player expects even if it can seem a bit odd to the outsider. Boss fights work this way, cut scenes happen like this, powerups and healthpacks and all of the other artifacts of gameplay are important to take into account in your writing. Yes, the idea of magical box of medicine on the wall that restores you to perfect health without even a co-pay is ludicrous, and God help the writer who tries to stick that into another media. But because it’s a game and the player expects to be rewarded after surviving a tough fight, you need to deal with healthpacks. And that means you need to deal with lines about finding health packs, and explaining how the healthpacks work, and nine million other details. If you fight it, you lose.

In the end, when you are writing games you’re doing part of something very, very big. It’s a visible part, it’s a part with high expectations and not much in the way of a safety net, and it’s a part open to a lot of frustration. It also means that your job is helping people to have fun – last time I checked, that’s what most games were about, and certainly most games on video game consoles. It’s a sustaining thought, and it lets you give the alpacas healthpacks with a smile. And God knows, after the last boss fight, the alpacas need them.

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Richard E. Dansky

by Janet Berliner

An anonymous someone wrote to my website. He/she said that our blogs were fun, but could we please do more in the way of practical advice for those not yet published.

I don’t generally take much notice of people who don’t sign their emails, but this made sense, so I started to write a new essay. On that same day, I tripped and broke my foot. While that doesn’t entirely mean I can’t type, it does slow down my output. For that reason, I’ve decided to contribute a piece I did per request of the editor of an anthology. Scott, you’ll probably recognize most of it.

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In my not always humble opinion, there is no more challenging task in the writing of fiction than the crafting of a memorable short story. That’s largely because the rules of good writing have to be obeyed within a framework which allows little margin for error.

As a traditionalist, in form if not subject matter, I believe in the imperative of knowing the rules before breaking them. Until we have learned to dot all i’s and cross all t’s, we have not earned the right to veer from convention which dictates that you should–

Have a working skeleton that includes a beginning, a middle, and an end. Give the reader a sense of time and place as early as possible. Show what your protagonist looks like. Make sure that the story contains conflict and that the protagonist changes in some way. Provide layering and foreshadowing, build the story from its skeleton, and make every word count.

Take this article for example. I was asked to contribute a maximum of 1000 words about writing short fiction. Seems simple enough, yes?

No. I could write a book on the subject and have material left over.

How then do I approach the process of distilling a book into about three printed pages?

The answer is with great difficulty and much forethought.

You have a concept, an idea, a character or set of characters who are demanding your attention. Now you want them to command the attention of readers. If you are going to achieve that end within the constraints of what is, in the writing lexicon, a few bold strokes, you are going to have to appeal swiftly and equally to the reader’s intellect and viscera and–here’s the rub–you’re going to have to bring all of your skills to bear in using the right words to draw your reader in so that he brings to the story his own related experiences.

The boundaries of the short story allow none of the luxuries of novel writing. Subplots are out; digression is out. If you’re going to Paris, you’d better not go via Versailles. There simply isn’t the time. You have to travel the straight road from point A to point B.

That straight road is the skeleton of your story. The passing scenery is your layer of flesh. Still, you think, how much more interesting it would be to travel the side roads too.

So what do you do? You provide spaces for the reader to fill. Signposts that say, “Versailles this-a-way.” The reader who has been to Versailles enhances the story with that experience; the reader who hasn’t enhances it with the desire to go there someday. The signpost adds thousands of words, not one of which is actually on the page, and there is no avoiding the side trip.

This is the true skill of the short story writer, the one for which we should all be reaching.

One of the writers who most ably achieves this unwritten texture is Edward Bryant. He has certainly been my teacher. Read any one of his short stories, think about it, then go back and examine how much of what you thought was on the page is actually there and how much has been drawn in by careful omissions placed in such a manner that you were forced to create texture out of your own experience. That is Bryant’s art, his particular skill. Learn from it.

Read advertising if you want to fully understand how to make each word count. Ask yourself about the overt message and about the subliminal message.

Go back to the last draft of your most recent short story and apply the same test. If each sentence and every thought isn’t there for a reason, it’s time to apply some tough editorial surgery.

Since I am now approaching my allowable word count, let me add some practical advice about paring your story down to its bones. I started my writing life as a journalist, which gives me an edge. If anything, fearing my editor’s wrath, I have always written too tightly. I start a short story with my crux sentence. Then I begin the process of opening up what I hope is a rosebud into a fully blooming flower. For those of you without that training, I offer the following advice. It has never failed me.

I look upon the editing process as a party where I go to meet old friends and make new ones. The words and phrases that make my authorial heart pound are the party guests. They all look and sound beautiful just the way they are and I cannot conceive of excluding any of them, yet among the most attractive of the party-goers are those who don’t belong. Perhaps one day they will join the party, but not here, not now.

Sadly, I bounce them, but not before I note their names and addresses.

Telling them that they will have to wait for “another time, another place,” I take them–those words, phrases, paragraphs–and put them in my writing address book, a file of 3×5 cards that I keep ready and waiting for that other place, that other time…that other story.

I’ve cut and pasted, I’ve written and rewritten. Is it soup yet?

Not quite, at least not for me. I have to let the soup simmer in the pot while I find a taster, a reader–a bouncer with a practiced eye.

How I choose that person and how I do or don’t implement the advice I get will have to wait for another article. I’ve run out of space. Not words. Not ever words. But I am constrained by rules, by the boundaries of this article which is not a book. I will respect those boundaries, even when it is not easy, as I hope you will respect yours.

The more you do, the more you’ll succeed. And when you do, break all the rules. That’s why they’re there.

Be reading you.

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Next weekend I’m going to a horror convention in Toronto. Festival of Fear. What goes on at such an event? I have this vision of people walking around with rubber hatchets sticking out of their heads. From what I remember of the itinerary, Clive Barker and Linda Blair will be there signing autographs. Although I’m sure Mr. Barker is a very nice person, I’ve never watched any of his movies (too gross) and other than The Exorcist (again, never seen) the only other movie I can remember seeing Ms. Blair in was the one where she’s raped with a broom stick in prison. Crispin Glover is going to be there, showing a film of his, I believe. I do hope I get to meet him. If not just to find out if he’s as creepy in person as he is in the movies. Plus, I think he’s cute, which annoys my husband to no end because he thinks my lousy taste (his opinion) in men somehow reflects on him. Unfortunately, as charming as I believe Mr. Glover to be, I probably won’t be seeing his film. And it’s not because I was too cheap to not get the Deluxe Pass. Although I have complete access to the Screaming Screening Room, films that usually feature everything from cannibalistic zombies to chainsaw wielding psychopaths are not for me. And since Mr. Glover’s film is entitled ‘What is it?’ I’m pretty sure I’m not going to want to find out.

By now you must be asking yourself why on Earth did she sign up for this? Well, for one thing my book is coming out in December, and as I understand it, it’s a good way to network. If you’ll remember from my previous blog, I’m the reluctant self-promoter, so I’ll probably end up just slyly slipping my book cover postcards into people’s shopping bags when they’re not looking. But to be honest, the real reason I’ll be there is to escape something I find much scarier than any Clive Barker movie: a baby shower. I can’t tell you the dread that comes over me when I’m invited to one of these things. I’d rather waltz with Freddy Crueger at the Festival of Fear’s Masquerade Ball than be trapped in a room with a bunch of hens clucking ecstatically over breast pumps and animal-themed jammies. Because when it comes right down to it, babies terrify me. I can’t say for sure, but this fear probably stems from my mother’s descriptions of childbirth in all its technicolor gore when I was still a child. Years before the Alien series became a hit, I already had the idea that a baby’s exit from the birth canal was just like the creature’s explosive exit from that first unsuspecting astronaut’s midriff. Her vivid rendering of giving birth, plus likening babies to tiny incubuses’ that sucked out not only the life force from you, but the calcium from your teeth as well, pretty much put the cabash on any little girl yearnings I may have had to be a mommy one day.

Now that I’m an adult, I can see how warped my mother’s point of view was. Many of my friends have had babies, and have assured me that while my mother’s depiction of childbirth wasn’t all that far off, her viewpoint of raising a child is: Children fill you with life, not drain it from you. However, in spite of their sworn testimonies that children are a blessing, some part of me is obviously not convinced. Otherwise, I never would have written a short story collection entitled Ten Ways to Kill Your Mother, With a Few More for Good Measure (originally it was just ten, but the collection has grown over the years), nor penned a novel called The Unwelcome Child. Actually, the title comes from a pro-abortion pamphlet written in 1858 by Henry Wright. However, the premise — a house where barren women become pregnant but when they try to leave, the child always dies — is most certainly a metaphor for motherhood, inspired by an obvious although unconscious bias. So, just to be on the safe side, I think I’ll stick with birthing novels instead of babies, and attending conventions instead of showers.

This morning I finished reading John Steinbeck’s OF MICE AND MEN. Prior to this, I was familiar with its central characters of George and Lennie only through those cartoons we’ve all seen in which a big doofus mouse and a little smart-guy mouse get themselves into various troubles. A coworker taking a writing course began discussing the book with me, and gave it to me when he’d finished with it. Prior to OF MICE AND MEN, I had only read THE PEARL by Steinbeck several years earlier. I now have to rank him among my favorite authors.

Some writers – and readers – scorn the notions of subtext, deeper meaning. They dismiss such concerns as pretentious. Literature only fills your lungs with dust when you crack it open. Stories should read like movie scripts, pared down to the bare moving parts. The clean, stark skeleton sans the cumbersome flesh. Novels should play out like a video game; a spare plot stringing together endless scenes of action. But I don’t find fault with entertainment for entertainment’s sake. It’s why I prefer reading – and why I write – fiction instead of nonfiction. I like to mix it up, though. I’ll read a couple of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars novels with their flashing swords and scantily-dressed red-skinned women, then move on to something like Nabokov’s PALE FIRE. It’s all good to me. It’s the rich buffet of creativity. Sometimes I’m in the mood for peanut butter and jelly, and other times I want the filet mignon. Hell, I love peanut butter and jelly! To use another analogy, my taste in books is like my taste in films. Give me APOCALYPSE NOW, then give me AUSTIN POWERS. As long as I’m engaged. As long as it keeps me watching to see what happens next. Then, later, over my filet mignon, maybe I’ll ruminate on the movie’s meaning or maybe I’ll just chuckle remembering a funny line.

But I do savor complexity. Layers upon layers of it. I feel I get more bang for my buck that way. Whether it’s in rich, poetic, or idiosyncratic prose…or in the story’s symbolism, theme, message…or in an evocative atmosphere, a setting that comes alive for me…or any combination thereof. Thomas Hardy’s TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES could very well satisfy merely as an engrossing soap opera were it not for the deeper strata that elevate it to a higher form of drama. But you don’t have to know that the changing of the seasons are used to externalize Tess’s psychological state. You don’t have to know that the pool at the start and end of OF MICE AND MEN represents the Garden of Eden, or that the coyote and dog mentioned in the first scene echo Lennie and George. LORD OF THE FLIES works exclusively as a drama and an adventure story without one having to know what the Beast is all about, what Simon embodies, and so on. Read just as dramas, these stories are as moving or exciting as anything penned without a thought to subtext. That’s the important thing. The story itself is sound, and captivating. There is more there to enhance that story and enrich the reader, just below its epidermis, but only if the reader cares to linger a little longer. To me, this is the best of both worlds. I like video games, too. But I’ll stop after killing all the zombies in the room to soak up the beautiful details of that room, which some team of artists labored so passionately to create. And speaking of zombies: if you want to watch DAWN OF THE DEAD purely as a horror flick…damn, it’s one of the best! But if you also want to appreciate its sly observations on American consumerism, I call that a two for one sale.

OF MICE AND MEN is told in a very stripped-down style. It’s more a novelette than a novel, too. It’s the meaning that gives it its weight. And it has the weight of a collapsed star, compacted into a small and dense mass. But first and foremost, it’s a entrancing study of friendship and alienation, of dreams and reality, of cruelty and compassion, of…mice and men. Steinbeck’s THE PEARL has similar weight, the body of an iceberg looming beneath the slim but gripping adventure story that is its glittering tip. A more powerful ending to a novel is hard for me to imagine. These two novels can make you cry. They can make you outraged. They can quicken your pulse as you watch the shadow of inevitable doom stretch closer. So much for the dustiness of literature.

With OF MICE AND MEN completed, I’m reading two books now. My book for breaks at work is J. G. Ballard’s HIGH RISE. My book for home is an original NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET novel.

I have my buffet plate in hand. Give me some of that there filet mignon. And I might just come back for seconds on the peanut butter and jelly.

– Jeffrey Thomas

by Brian Keene

Note: Brian Keene was supposed to post on Saturday, and Michael Laimo was supposed to post today. However, both are recovering from this past weekend’s convention, where they sold out of books and drank a beer for each book sold. After the beers, Laimo beat Keene at arm wrestling, and as the loser, Keene was supposed to take Laimo’s spot today. Keene, however, hasn’t been feeling well, so we offer this classic reprint, which first appeared in Sympathy For The Devil. If you’ve already read it, why not go back and re-read Norm Partridge’s or Jeff Mariotte’s wonderful essays instead?

Another fun aspect of being a full-time writer is having the ability to work from anywhere—-especially the comfort of your own home. Have laptop, will travel. There’s something almost Zen about getting up, making a pot of coffee, and then sliding behind the computer and opening Microsoft Word. No traffic. No commute. No Road Warrior on the Baltimore/Washington Beltway.

No hassles at all.

Except for the goddamned telephone…

As we’ve covered in previous columns, writing horror full-time barely provides necessities like groceries and rent (I would add comic books and DVDs to that list of necessities, but my wife disagrees with me). With that in mind, frivolous things like Caller ID or Call Screening are nothing more than pipe dreams. I can’t let the answering machine screen calls, because it broke and is now used as a doorstop.

So I have to answer the phone—-while writing—-all day long. To illustrate this, I kept a log today:

5AM: Wake up, shower, make coffee.

6AM: Check email, check message boards, and prepare for the day’s writing.

7AM: Begin writing. Howard Stern plays in the background but I’ve tuned him out. I’m in the zone.

7:05AM: The zone is shattered when Mom calls.

“Mom, I can’t talk right now. I’m working.”

“I thought you didn’t go to work anymore.”

“I’m writing, Mom. It’s a real job with real responsibilities.”

“Well can’t you talk and write at the same time?”

“No, I cant!”

“Well—-” (hurt tone)

(sigh) “What did you want to talk about, Mom?”

This could go on for hours, but I have a tried and tested formula for getting my Mom off the phone. I start telling her about what I’m writing.

“And then, the guy has intercourse with a zombie!”

“Got to go! Bye!”

Works every time.

7:10AM: Back into the groove.

8:00AM: A bill collector calls. I try to sell him a book, explaining that if he buys one, I’ll have some money and won’t be late with the next car payment.

8:12AM: A telemarketer calls. I spend five minutes toying with them and then hang up.

8:30AM: An editor calls. I spend half an hour toying with him and then hang up.

8:57AM: A fellow writer calls, wanting to talk about how she’s not getting any writing done. I explain to her that perhaps she should spend less time on the phone and more time writing. She fails to see the humor in this and hangs up.

9:25AM: Second bill collector of the day. I tell them Mr. Keene died in a horrible blimp accident over the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day and that my name is Mr. Pashwar Argleshwan.

9:48 AM: Wrong number. Somebody looking for Mr. Pashwar Argleshwan.

10:00AM: James Newman calls from his sound studio regarding the Talking Smack audio mix. We talk business.

10:25AM: Mom calls back. “Yes Mom, I’m still working.”

10:30AM: Another fellow writer calls, and wants to know if I’ve seen what somebody said about me on a message board. I explain that I have not, and don’t really care, at which point the fellow writer proceeds to read the entire thread to me anyway and demands that I give this person “what for”. I log on and go give the person “what for”. Hilarity ensues.

11:00 AM: A chirpy little telemarketer calls.

“Hello, sir, how are you today?”

“I am joyous because I have finally killed the White Lotus Chief who murdered my master, destroyed the Sun-Chi school, and violated my family. I used the Black Poison Palm technique to find his vital nerve and tear out his still-beating heart. Now I can raise the tablets over the school in honor once more and my vengeance is complete. Thanks for asking. How are you?”*

11:20AM: Geoff Cooper (the horror genre’s answer to Morrissey) calls to explain his latest theory on why life sucks and everyone should just frigging die.

11:52AM: Mike Oliveri calls to bitch about the fact that he can’t get any writing done, because Coop keeps calling to explain his latest theory on why life sucks and everyone should just frigging die.

Noon: I decide that life sucks and everyone should just frigging die. I call my fellow writers and tell him this.

Having decided that I will not get any writing done today, I turn off the computer and proceed to play Grand Theft Auto instead. As my little video game car tears down the freeway, I pretend that I’m commuting to work…

* Thanks to Tom Piccirilli for that very effective telemarketing rebuttal.

Last month, my turn came around as I was returning home from Comic-Con International: San Diego, an exhausting week spent in the presence of 104,000 people, sensory overload, long nights and early mornings. So I missed my deadline. Sorry, and I’ll try not to do it again.

Missing deadlines is something I’ve tried not to do, as a professional writer, and there has been no time when I’ve had control over a situation that I’ve done so. One of the functions of editors is to set deadlines, to remind the writer of those deadlines, and then to remind the writer of the consequences of missing those deadlines on the too-rare occasions when that happens. I’m currently in the midst of a big novel with a looming deadline, which I’ve promised the editor I will turn in on time.

With that in mind, a few thoughts about our friends, the book editors, if I may.

Many of us only think about editors when they accept something (in which case we love them) or reject it (in which case they’re blind, hopeless fools). But a working writer is going to be involved with many editors, over the years, and it’s helpful to know what, and what not, to expect in that relationship. An editor can be your friend, for instance—but at the same time, the editor works for the publishing company, not for you. If a decision comes down to making you happy or making money for the company, the editor has to side with making money, friendship or not. That company pays her salary, remember, and wants to remain in business publishing books by you and the rest of us for many years to come. You—any given author—is replaceable on a publishing house’s list, so always keep that in mind before delivering any ultimatums.

I’ve been an editor. It’s not an easy gig. For one thing, the pay, except at the highest of echelons, is not great considering the amount of time and effort involved. Most of them have to live in or near Manhattan, which is a pricey place to be. Most of them take work home, read manuscripts on the train, in the tub, on planes when they’re traveling. Sure, the hourly wage is still better than most freelance writers, and there are benefits. But not by much. Most editors are people who love books and reading, and yet rarely get an opportunity to read for pleasure, because their reading time is consumed by reading for work. Sometimes those overlap—they sign books by authors whose writing they enjoy, and then they get to read those. But there’s also a lot of close reading, line editing and the like, that is a far cry from reading for fun.

Besides the reading, editors have to juggle all the other parts of getting books out the door. Cover copy and art, copyright info, book design, page numbering, margins, copyediting, etc., etc. Any given book is a huge task—dozens a year, without losing sight of any single aspect, is monumental.

Worse, editors have to deal with those notorious flakes, writers. You’ve heard the cliché about herding cats? Controlling a bunch of writers is more like herding invisible cats. Greased invisible cats. High on catnip.

My theory has always been that if I turn in a professional manuscript, on time, and the words in it combine to tell an interesting, entertaining story, then the editor I’m working with will want to continue that relationship. But if I’m late, sloppy, and need a ton of editorial fixing, the editor will decide that I’m just too much trouble. Obviously, some writers are brilliant enough to overcome those hurdles and get published anyway. Other writers think they are—Thomas Harris’s Hannibal comes to mind, a book that badly needed the editing that, word has it, he refused to accept. Now, I’m a huge fan of the Hannibal Lector series, and consider Silence of the Lambs something of a masterpiece. But reading Hannibal made me wonder how much of Silence’s quality is due to a really good editorial hand, keeping Harris from doing things like, say, changing tense in the middle of a sentence for absolutely no reason. Even so, he’ll no doubt be published again. For myself, and those of us who are not at his level of success, making the editor’s life as easy as possible is still, I think, a good business plan.

During my editorial days I worked with both kinds of writers (and artists, since I edited comic books as well as books). Some were professional and timely, others were late, unhelpful, and considered deadlines as suggestions of when to start work. This experience taught me that patience is a helpful trait for editors to have. Patience and a cat-o-nine-tails, both applied judiciously.

The best editors, of which I’ve worked with a few, have a knack for working with your book, improving it, while keeping the voice and the vision yours. They’ll suggest changes, not write them in. They’ll listen to your point of view, even when it’s wrongheaded. Ultimately, in most cases, they will let you be the final judge, because they know that your name, not theirs, is on the cover. But the suggestions they make are often excellent ones, based on long experience and a more dispassionate approach to your work than you are likely to bring. They didn’t give birth to your words, so it’s not as hard for them to kill your children as it might be for you. Their goal is to arrive at the best possible book that your book can be.

One reason that booksellers are hesitant about POD and self-published books (there are many good reasons, based on discount, promotion, etc., but we’re talking about the content here) is that there isn’t necessarily any indication that the book has gone through any kind of editorial process. A capable editor is a kind of winnowing device, keeping bad books from reaching being solicited to booksellers and making good ones better. The fact that an editor has worked on a book, and let it out the door, is solace to the bookseller facing the thousands upon thousands of books offered every year.

No matter how brilliant your book, a good editor can almost always improve it. Keep that in mind when considering any editorial comment or directive. You can decide that she’s wrong, you can argue the point. Just remember, even if she’s not always on your side in every battle, she is always on the side of the book.

And since few of us are perfect, we writers, our books need all the allies we can get. With that in mind, a toast to all the book editors out there—long may their red pencils wave!

–Jeff Mariotte

Note: Due to a series of deadlines, family matters and other time-devouring circumstances, I was unable to get my column done this month. Rather than just let the day go by sans installment, however, I invited my friend and mentor, Norman Partridge, to donate one of the essays from his forthcoming collection/recollection/writer’s handbook Mr. Fox & Other Feral Tales, which I believe is one of the best guides to writing and the commerce of writing I’ve ever read. Aside from thousands upon thousands of words of new fiction, there’s a wealth of advice for the newcomer and professional alike, all backed up with solid examples from Norman’s own past experiences. It’s a relaxed, conversational, and no-bullshit approach to this pothole-studded pursuit of ours. Here then, is a sample essay from the book, with many thanks to Norman for allowing me to post it on Storytellers Unplugged.

Kealan Patrick Burke

* * * * *

ON ZOMBIES… AND HUNGER

Only two of the stories in the original edition of Mr. Fox were reprints. The other five were originals—which, for the uninitiated, means they were stories that had never before seen publication.

That doesn’t mean that I wrote them specifically for Mr. Fox. Nope. Most of those stories had kicked around the small press a little bit without being accepted. Some were revised and buffed up for Mr. Fox, some I left alone. Of the others, one had been accepted but never published, and two had been rejected by theme anthologies published by the mainstream press.

For most of us who got our feet wet in the small press scene in the early nineties, getting a story accepted for a theme anthology was the first step in advancing to the pro ranks. There were a lot of books like that coming out of NYC in those days. Some themes were pretty broad (say, an anthology of ghost stories), while some were more constraining (ghost stories that take place in haunted houses), and some were damn near impossibly specific (ghost stories that take place in ranch-style haunted houses located five miles south of Possum Shit, North Dakota).

Quite a few anthologies focused on a particular type of monster (vampires, werewolves, zombies, etc.). Others focused on specific characters (the usual suspects like Dracula or Frankenstein, and once in a while some less expected choices like Elvis Presley or—gasp—magician David Copperfield). To be honest, some of the themes were pretty silly. Not quite as bad as my ranch-style haunted house example in the last paragraph… but close.

Anyway, landing a spot in the best of those anthologies could get you noticed. Everyone in the business read them. Publishers, editors, agents. If you were a new writer and you scored with a story in a top-flight anthology—say your piece was singled out for praise by reviewers, or earned a slot in a Year’s Best anthology, or was nominated for an award—you could get little bit of a buzz going. At the very least, editors or agents might recognize your name and give your work a little extra attention the next time they fished one of your manuscripts out of the slush pile.

Several of the stories I placed in theme anthologies helped me build a reputation as a newcomer worth watching. Like the early stories I had in Cemetery Dance, these tales introduced my work to editors who invited me to submit to their own books. More often than not, I followed up on those offers. But even in the professional market, the money for short stories wasn’t great. Most editors paid somewhere between five and ten cents a word, and God help you if you ever expected to see a royalty check. Still, every now and then you might catch a little lightning in a bottle. One example: my tale in Poppy Brite’s Love in Vein antho probably earned me more money than my first novel did. Love in Vein was originally published in 1994, but I still get royalty checks on that piece, and over the years I’ve even had a few nibbles on it from Hollywood.

Of course, not everyone saw theme anthologies as a good idea. I knew a few writers who refused outright to submit stories to any anthology of this sort. They preferred to follow their own artistic sensibilities. They disliked the idea of the marketplace directing their muse. In their view, any writer who wrote for theme anthologies was selling out.

I saw this as an exceedingly precious point of view, but then again I’ve never been much on muses. Mostly, I trust my gut. And when it came to theme anthologies, my gut and I saw it this way: some of these projects were opportunities, and others were disasters waiting to happen. I figured I was smart enough to know the difference.

It was really as simple as that. My goal was to be a professional writer. I wanted to succeed both critically and commercially, and writing for theme anthologies was a means to that end. Besides, crafting a story within the constraints of a particular theme could be a challenge. Writing those stories took me to places as a writer that I wouldn’t otherwise have gone. They made me stretch in ways I hadn’t expected. The proof of that is in the work I published in some of those anthologies. I’m thinking of stories like “Styx” in Peter Straub’s Ghosts, “Coyotes” in Scott Urban and Marty Greenberg’s The Conspiracy Files, and “Do Not Hasten to Bid Me Adieu” in Poppy Brite’s Love in Vein. Those tales are all personal favorites, and I doubt that I would have written any of them if I hadn’t been forced to “think inside the box” presented to me by those editors.

I wrote “In Beauty, Like the Night” as a submission for Skipp & Spector’s Still Dead: Book of the Dead 2, an anthology set in the universe of George Romero’s zombie movies. The first volume had gained a lot of attention, with stories by Stephen King, Ed Bryant, Robert McCammon, Ramsey Campbell, David Schow, Richard Laymon, and a host of others. The second volume looked to be more of the same.

I wanted to place a story in that book. Badly. First off, I was a huge fan of Romero’s zombie movies. Second, I was certain that I had Skipp & Spector’s number. Mailing my manuscript, I figured there was no way on earth that the splatterpunk boys could turn down “In Beauty, Like the Night.” I mean, I wrote a story about a Hugh Hefner-style impresario who was trapped on a desert island with a bunch of zombie centerfold girls. “In Beauty…” featured a lone wolf armed with a Heckler & Koch P7M13, airplane crashes, cocaine and Cuervo Gold and, well… zombie centerfold girls. How could a couple of splatterpunks turn down a story like that?

Guess what. They did.

And I was stuck with a rejected zombie story, one that had taken me three weeks to write. Ouch. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one paddling around in that particular canoe, and if those other writers saw things the way I did they knew that submitting a bounced zombie story to another market at that time would have been a waste of postage.

Now, I don’t want you to get the idea that a single rejection slip signs a story’s death warrant. Usually, it doesn’t work that way. In fact, one rejection wouldn’t much matter to me if we were talking about a story that wasn’t intended for a theme anthology—in that case, I’d simply give the piece a read-through, maybe do some revising, then get it out to the next market on my list.

But with a story that was written for something as specific as Book of the Dead 2, a single rejection could matter bigtime. One thumbs down and a story like that could end up the double-spaced equivalent of a busted flush, because any editor who put a letter opener to an envelope containing a submission that smelled of George Romero’s zombies would add two and two together and figure they’d just been sent a package jam-packed with damaged goods. They’d know that the story had already been bounced by Skipp & Spector, and that would probably be enough reason for them to bounce it, too.

And why would they do that, Norm? you ask. My answer is simple. No one likes sloppy seconds, pal. Especially editors.

There’s not much you can do about that. Sometimes things don’t work out. Your story bounces. You put that story in a drawer somewhere and you try not to think about it. Maybe a few years down the line you take it out and dust it off, submit it somewhere else. Maybe not.

In one sense, it doesn’t really matter what you do with that story.

What matters is that you don’t dwell on the rejection when it comes.

What matters is that you find yourself another market and write something else.

* * * * *

Just a few points that I want to reinforce before I finish up here:

First: always have your eye on the next rung of the career ladder. I started off selling stories in the small press. It was a great place to get rolling, but I didn’t want to make a home there. I was always looking for opportunities to break into the professional marketplace. Most pro anthologies were “invitation only” markets, but a few were open to anyone. When I was starting out, Charlie Grant’s Shadows was an open market; these days, it’s the same with Tom Monteleone’s Borderlands series. Quality markets are out there if you’re willing to look for them (try Ralan.com, or Kathy Ptacek’s Gila Queen’s Guide to Markets, or Judi Rohrig’s Hellnotes). Submitting to those markets should be a top priority.

And always remember to send your stories to the best markets first—the ones that pay the most; the ones with the highest circulation. It’s like an old pulp writer told me a long time ago: “When you submit a story, always aim high. Editors will be more than happy to tell you if you’ve fallen short.”

Second: an open professional market is an opportunity to earn your chops. Don’t take an opportunity like that lightly. Step up to the plate. Challenge yourself. Get serious and work hard.

I remember how it felt to write stories aimed at markets I figured were beyond my reach. I knew the competition was fierce, but I was hungry. It was a special kind of hunger, and it drove me to try things in my fiction that I wouldn’t have attempted if I’d decided to play it safe and write another story for a small press market I was sure I could crack.

Working that way was like trying to ride a tiger. At times I was convinced that I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, and I was sure that tiger would buck me off and maul me for trying to do such a damn fool thing. Sometimes I’d type “The End,” drop my story in the mail, and immediately wish that I could snatch my envelope out of the mailbox and bury it (pretty deeply) in a drawer somewhere. In the weeks that followed I’d walk out to my mailbox, fearing that I was about to receive a rejection letter nasty enough to destroy my confidence for life. But it didn’t work out that way for me, and seeing my efforts pay off with story sales that moved me up a notch made me want to aim higher, and having writers I’d grown up reading tell me that I was writing some damn fine stories of my own was a special kind of validation that made me keep trying just a little bit harder.

So, maybe you’re a new writer. I’ll bet that you’re hungry, too. Let me tell you, that hunger is a tool. Use it to drive yourself and your creative engine. Get it into your stories. Get it down on the page. Get those pages in front of editors.

Your hunger is a source of strength.

In truth, there isn’t one that’s finer.

–Norman Partridge