Storytellersunplugged

One of the sad truths of writing is that one cannot simply write.
That’s the high school lit class fantasy, of course – someday you’ll
write the Great American Telepathic Talking Horse Novel which will
sell millions, make you rich and famous. This novel will, of course,
be so well written that editors will be magically drawn by its
goodness to your house, and will beat each other senseless with large
bags of money in order to obtain for themselves the privilege of
publishing it. Fame and fortune will naturally follow, all without you
lifting a finger – other than to type this magnum opus.

This is, of course, pure poppycock. There’s so much more a writer
needs to do these days beyond producing manuscripts that-

Err.

Hang on one moment.

Hmm. Apparently the update on my web site is overdue. Give me five
minutes, folks. I’ll be right back.

Well, maybe ten. Fifteen at the outside. Bloody Dreamweaver…

Ahem. Sorry about that. Now where was I?

Oh, right. The stuff you have to do above and beyond writing. The sad
truth is that even the best writers need to work their fannies off in
order to make sure people know about them and their work. The book,
after all, is a book. It just sits there. It relies on someone else –
in a perfect world, the PR department, but who among us lives there –
to let the world know that it exists, has a great personality, and
likes long walks on the beach and listening to the Bee Gees.

To the art-for-art’s-sake crowd, this is called “marketing” and
“selling out” and all sorts of other ugly things. To those of us who
enjoy receiving renumeration for our writing so that we can go on
writing, it’s called “basic common sense.” There are umpty-million
things competing for the reader’s eye, time, and dollar out there, and
expecting that people will simply find you without any effort on your
part is pollyannahood of the first water.

What this means in practical terms is-

Oh, crud. Hang on. Apparently there are six more fields to fill out on
my Amazon Connect page. This won’t take long. I swear it.

Right. I’m back.

Anyway, as I was saying, there is a great deal of writing about
writing, specifically your own writing, that a writer needs to do
today. These days, odds are that if you’re writing professionally, you
have a web site. You’ve also got a profile on Amazon, a presence on n
mailing lists and message boards (where n=some number large enough to
fill half your allotted writing time with email and postings), and if
you’re lucky, other regular presences like, say, a monthly essay at a
prestigious writers’ blog site.

All of these are wonderful things, and on a certain level, important
ones as well. Time invested in letting people know you’ve got a story
coming out in a magazine will hopefully drive traffic to that
magazine, boosting its sales and hopefully preventing the editor for
setting any of your future submissions on fire immediately.
Maintaining a dedicated forum on a highly trafficked message board
gives you a constant stream of eyes on your updates, helping to make
people aware of your work.

On the other hand, if you don’t do this, you run the risk of your work
getting lost. Let’s face it, there are a lot of books out there, a lot
of magazines and web sites and video games and God knows what else,
all competing for a very narrow slice of shelf space and/or bandwidth.
Even those folks who are actively interested in your work need to know
where to look for it, or the odds are they’ll never find it.

Now, I’ve had folks tell me that it’s okay not to promote your stuff
because the publisher will do that for you. If you’re lucky, that’s
the case, but relying on others to direct people to your writing is
risky at best. For one thing, they don’t have the vested interest in
your work that you do. Odds are you’re not the only author they’re
working with, so the odds are-

Hang on, what’s that? Interview questions to answer by email? Sixteen
of them? All right, this might take a while. Back in a bit.

Whew. Now, back to the topic at hand. As I was saying, the odds are
that you’re not the only author that publisher is working with, so
you’re not going to be the only one getting their attention. There’s
nothing wrong with this, as they need to pay their bills, too, but it
highlights the dangers of letting someone else bang the drum for you.

So that means that as a writer, you need to spend a lot of your time,
not writing, but rather writing about writing, or writing about your
writing, or letting other people know that you’re writing. That means
ultimately divvying up your writing time into essentially production
and marketing. The best book in the world won’t go anywhere if nobody
knows about it, while the best web presence out there won’t mean boo
if there’s nothing to back it up. Like, say, a book, or a story, or a
game, or something that actually proves that you’re a writer.

So get writing. And writing about writing. If you want to do this,
you’ll need both.

–
Richard E. Dansky
Writer, Game Designer, and Cad
(Not necessarily in that order)

by Janet Berliner

As writers, shouldn’t we want everyone to read?

A whole lot of years ago, I got into a bunch of trouble giving schoolbooks to the son of a woman of color in South Africa. Not satisfied, I gave schoolbooks to a girl of thirteen who was working as a nanny for people I knew instead of going to school.

When my oldest daughter was almost five and I was pregnant with my second, I helped set up and run an Outreach center over a bar in New York. In case you don’t know about them, they’re places with books and tables where kids can go after school. They get books and juice and Band-Aids. Older kids read to younger ones.

It’s all good. The kids are off the streets and nobody loses.

There are so many places to donate books. For example, I’ve donated thousands of them to military bases, here and out of the country. Discovering that the homeless plead for books, I started giving cartons of them to shelters. You could even give your own; no law against that. Or is there a law against giving of ourselves.

Here, in Las Vegas, I became involved with the “Gala Benefit for the Children of Heroes,” which is about children and heroes and was founded by one of our very own at Unplugged. (He’d be mad if I mentioned his name, but I can say thank you, Eleven.) He was (I’m about to steal from his bio) “…the mind and the soul behind the children’s gala organized by The Special Operations Warrior Foundation (SOWF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing college scholarships and post secondary education to ALL the children surviving Special Operations personnel who are killed in a training accident or operational mission.”

But wait. There’s more.

Fourteen years ago I became part of the Childreach Program. I adopted two beautiful little girls. One lives in Malawi, the other in Zimbabwe. They write to me and send me photographs and bring me much joy. What have I and others like me brought them with our small monthly contributions–the equivalent of a half-a-dozen fancy coffees for each child?
A village well, medicines, and a one-room schoolhouse.

Hadija and Brenda may not wear shoes, but they can read, and both of them want to be teachers.
And there’s more-more.

When I was Pres of HWA, I initiated an outreach program. I accepted slave wages to teach hundreds of beginners in the Writers’ Digest Writing Course.

Why, you might ask, is she telling us this? Does she want us to tell her she’s wonderful?

DEFINITELY NOT.

Don’t send gifts; don’t send flowers.

Do, please, read on.

I tore something out of a magazine at a doctor’s office. (Yes, I asked first.) It was a letter to the editor from someone in Illinois. The heading read, Novel Ideas. Here’s an excerpt: “I loved the Navigator item on hotels with book collections [”Book Me a Room”] and have another to suggest: Country Inns and Suites has a lending library in each of its North American hotels. If you haven’t finished your book by checkout, you can return it at another member of the chain, which then makes a five-dollar donation to a literacy organization. Last year Country Inns raised $15,000 through its “Book it and Return” Program.

There are a lot of hotel chains, not just here but around the world. How do we approach them and try to get them to do the same thing? Gem, in Grenada, West Indies, does the same thing. Why not the Hiltons, Holiday Inns–name them?

Perhaps we can think of a way that this can be done. We could work through the organizations with whom we’re affiliated. Or we could each do what we can do ourselves.

Maybe that’s too specific, in which case may I ask you to believe with me that there’s a way we, as writers, can make a difference in the fight for literacy. Please do what you can.

Thank you.

THE FILTH AND THE FURY

“Why do you write such filth? Nobody wants to read that.”

So said my mother after reading the opening chapters of my first novel, The Unwelcome Child. Initially I was perplexed. What filth? I hadn’t realized I’d written any. Okay, there’s some cursing. But some of my best curse words I learned from my mother. My very first was bullshit — which my mother pronounced as ‘bowl shit.’ I never understood why she used to scream about bowls of shit whenever she was angry, but I thought it was so funny that one day while washing dishes with my brother I handed him a bowl and said, ‘Here Billy, have a bowl of shit.’ That was also the first time I had my mouth washed out with soap.

But I digress. You may be wondering why I’ve chosen to bring such a charming bit of family history to this blog. It’s because I imagine that I’m not unique in feeling that as a writer, having your family, parents especially, read your work can be a loaded endeavor. When strangers in the world hate your writing, it’s not that difficult to brush off. To each his own, everyone has different tastes, that kind of thing. But parents are a different matter. After all, these are people who have known you your whole life, think they know you better than anyone else and will, to varying degrees, always think of you as extensions of themselves. But the truth is, at least in my case, is that my parents know absolutely nothing about me. Based on their reaction to my novel I think they must still see me as the girl who was crowned Little Miss Springtime in her dance recital, won the Golden Tennis Shoe Award for being the highest stepper in my High School marching band, and while other teenagers where getting turned on by sex and drugs, I was in the dance studio working on my turn out. This is not to say I didn’t live on the wild side for some time, but that was only once I was out of their radar.

Upon reflection, though, I realized that besides the cursing, the passing reference to fellatio with a decapitated head, lesbian love and more, what really was upsetting my mother was that she probably sees the novel as some kind of condemnation of her. After all, the title of the book alone doesn’t reflect well on the mother/child relationship. I’m sure that when she read the sentence, ‘For the first time in her life she realized how much she hated her mother,’ she felt those words as strongly as if I’d said them myself. Well, I don’t hate my mother and although our relationship has been a complex one, I swear I have never dreamed of swinging a bucket at her head. The monster-mother has always been an archetype in fiction, and always will be. Unfortunately, I will never convince my mother otherwise, not only because she’d rather focus on the ‘filth,’ but because there’s nothing an author can do if someone identifies with one of their characters, either for the good or bad.

Anyway, it’s a good thing I haven’t told her about the novel I’m currently working on, where a character with a life-threatening condition is very much like her. As yet I haven’t decided whether to have her live or die. My decision will depend on what serves the story best, of course. But for those of you who have a tendency to see yourself in characters created by authors you know, you might think twice about insulting their work.

– Jeffrey Thomas

I have respect for Elmore Leonard. Let me say that first. But man…I don’t have much respect for rules. (See Joe Nassise’s essay of February 15, dealing with Leonard’s ten rules of writing.)

The first rule of Write Club is: there are no rules.

How dismal the reading experience would be, if every voice were the same. Imagine every song sung by the same singer – even if it were a great singer. Every character played by the same actor. Even a Robert De Niro would become tedious, after a while. Rules are too much like conformity, to me. Limitation. I’m not suggesting that Leonard is advocating limitation! But I think inflexibility can sometimes become a byproduct, when must-do’s start to set in concrete. And I’m not saying people shouldn’t make a list of rules to apply when writing…but I feel they should apply to one’s own writing, and not be presented as a system that other writers need adhere to. Writing and reading are matters of personal taste. Of personal opinion. The rules Leonard extols – well, if they make his books effective, that’s swell! But maybe I’m writing a different kind of story. Not better. I’m not as well known as Leonard…ha! Not by a long shot. Never will be. Still, whatever greatness they might lead him to, his rules don’t necessarily work for me.

I like Merchant-Ivory type films. And I like PULP FICTION. But I would not want to see Quentin Tarantino direct THE REMAINS OF THE DAY in his customary funky style. I’d be fascinated to hear what rules Q.T. sets for himself, but I wouldn’t want every film maker to think that he or she should apply Quentin’s approach to their own vision. (Haven’t we groaned over the overabundance of Tarantino rip-offs? I know I still groan over the Stephen Kingisms that are as rife in horror stories now as they were in the 80’s.) Yes, read a Quentin Tarantino’s rules. Take what you can use. He’s brilliant. He’s experienced. But disregard what doesn’t work…for you.

I find that many times when absolute writing rules are given, it comes down to a kind of fear of the word. Okay, maybe a fear of every other word. As if the embrace of words is something a writer need be wary of. Huh? (Yeah, like a bird should apologize for having wings.) Of course, there has to be a careful application of words – yes! They must be laid down like bricks, to hold the story up. You should fear those bricks falling apart. But that’s not what I’m saying. In the no-frills philosophy, the fear seems to be that we have to get to where we’re going fast, fast, fast. We should gulp down our meals rather than savor. How much paring should I do to tell my story most concisely? Here’s OLIVER TWIST, streamlined: An orphan gets in with some thieves, but he ends up living with a rich dude. The end. Yeah, I’m being facetious. But hey…I’m exaggerating to make my point. And I haven’t even started yet. I’m taking the looong road. Sue me.

I particularly had a problem with Leonard’s rule #9, that places – hence, settings – should not be described in great detail. If you’re writing about L.A., okay, we have a good sense of it from movies and other fiction. You want to keep things snappy – sure, gloss over it. If it matches your tone, your style, no complaints here. But when China Mieville is taking me into New Crobuzon, as he did in his novel PERDIDO STREET STATION, I want to do a little exploring. I’ve never been there before. Let me see the sights, get the feel, soak up the atmosphere. The atmosphere in some books is half the story. New Crobuzon is the main character of PERDIDO STREET STATION. If you find Mieville’s heavy layering of detail exhausting, that’s cool; then it’s simply not the book for you. But personally, I eat up books set in rich, palpably exotic and unusual environments. Recent books of this stripe are Jeff VanderMeer’s CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN (his city of Ambergris) and VENISS UNDERGROUND (his city of Veniss), Michael Cisco’s THE DIVINITY STUDENT (San Veneficio), Kristen Bishop’s THE ETCHED CITY (Ashamoil), my brother Scott’s stories set in the world of WESTERMEAD. I feel like a tourist venturing to another country, when I crack the covers of books like these. Yes, the balance can be tipped, even for me. I loved the descriptive passages in Ian R. MacLeod’s THE LIGHT AGES, his sense of place was tremendous, but there were just too many of these passages even for my taste. Those are the words I stress again: for my taste.

A punchy, cut-to-the-quick style might get us through a jazzy detective novel, but if we’re in Lovecraft country, I want to see the cobwebs blowing. I want to see the moldering floorboards. You don’t have to tell me what Grandma is wearing in her scary portrait, but you can tell me that it’s hanging on the wall. AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS is a masterpiece of eerie setting. It will make you cold. It will fill you with cosmic wonder. But a snappy read it is not. One book is a loud carnival you fly through on a roller coaster. Another book is a quiet museum of fascinating oddities to be explored more slowly. I like to visit both kinds of places.

I have a very personal reason for my stance; much of my work involves the intimate relationship between people and place. I revisit my worlds of PUNKTOWN and LETTERS FROM HADES again and again, building further upon them, trying to make them textured and tangible. These settings affect the characters that move through them. In reading Thomas Hardy’s TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES, set in a beautifully evoked British countryside, I was struck by how Hardy used the changing of the seasons to reflect Tess’s emotional state. In the summer, Tess – a kind of pagan Earth Goddess in a patriarchal world – is happy, optimistic, in love. By winter time, she is rejected, alone, suffering. I’ve consciously worked to achieve similar effects in my stories. In a recent novella of mine called THE MASK PLAY OF HAHOE BYEOLSIN EXORCISM (from my collection THIRTEEN SPECIMENS), the protagonist doesn’t discover his true nature until he is displaced to a foreign country (Korea). I tried to give the city of Seoul real…soul. It isn’t a scary city, and I didn’t portray it as such. But as an American, this oriental city was disorienting to me when I visited it, and I tried to recreate that effect in my story, to set the character off- kilter, to make him feel alone, an outsider, a person in need of doing a little sight-seeing deeper inside himself.

Right now, I’m reading James Webb’s post Viet Nam War novel, LOST SOLDIERS. It captures that country in lush, minute detail. Is it overkill? If you stripped out the travelogue, you might lose a quarter of this book or more. Would that fact make it boring to another reader? I’m sure it would, for some. To me, I’m eating it up. The detail is vibrant. The country’s fractured, wounded state is a mirror of the fractured, wounded characters. Like I say, in something like Dan Simmon’s SONG OF KALI, the place is the story. What is extraneous to one reader is pertinent, indispensable, to another. What would Leonard make of the other novel I’m reading right now, Chinese author Han Shaogong’s A DICTIONARY OF MAQIAO, a mock dictionary of interrelated vignettes that challenges the very notions of narrative flow and what constitutes a novel? No zippy and simple point A to point Z here.

So…anyway…this is just an example of why I scorn rules. (I took exception to some of the others on Leonard’s list, too, but maybe that’s fodder for further essays.) The only rule I would urge writers to follow is: spell correctly. So that’s rule #2.

Okay, and rule #3. Read, read, read. Read Leonard. And read me.

by Richard Steinberg

“We exponents of horror do much better than those Method actors. We make the unbelievable believable. More often than not, they make the believable unbelievable,” Vincent Price

We live in a too real world where ten-year-olds put babies in microwave ovens, where teenagers discover an injured man in a vacant lot and do nothing . . . except stop by from time to time to watch him die and decompose; where adults sexually abuse everything from children to livestock, and then bury the bodies in the basement.

What’s a horror writer to do?

Well, historically speaking . . . flourish.

1880-1900, 1920-1940, 1965-1980 . . . all periods where the Global Economic Index groaned in pain, when statute crimes were at their highest and arguably humanity steadily heading for its lowest, horror had Golden Ages.

1990 through the present: the same conditions exist.

A new Golden Age for horror writing doesn’t.

Why?

We can blame, with some validity, publishers and producers, marketing departments and editors, but in the end the blame – and the solution – lies with us, the horror writers.

We need to break bad habits, take deep cleansing breaths; channel the souls of Bram Stoker, Mary Shelly, Robert Louis Stevenson, Curt Siodmak, and the other bedrock Grandmasters of our faith.

And remember what it is that makes horror connect with audiences.

Our challenge isn’t to try to exceed the gore and carnage of real life – a task simply not possible – but rather to illustrate, illuminate, teach, or suggest answers to the problems of modern horrors. The horror writer, almost by definition, must be a Night Rider; a creature of horror that exists to bring terror to the real monsters of the world, and comfort to the torn apart victims they leave in their path. Horror (particularly supernatural horror) has always succeeded best in the worst times; when its escapism also served to illuminate problems or point to solutions.

But it’s turning into a lost art. The vampire, werewolf, witch, demon, ghoul, goblin, and multi-various other beasties that populate much of our work are just not connecting – for the most part – with a world that sees them as things of a past generation, of cartoons and laughability; and not of any real note.

Is the sound of leathery wings flapping just out of sight above us in a dark, moonless night, an endangered species? A pair of slightly glowing yellow-green eyes that might be regarding us from behind the bushes a thing of museum dioramas and ancient lore?

They are . . . unless we as writers of horror, fantasy, speculative fiction, and impressionistic literature return to our roots; the things which first gave these creatures (and this genre) life.

The world calls out for healing, for light to be shined, for questions to be asked, answers offered.

And what has the world received in answer? They get: Nightmare on Friday The Thirteenth Part 9

Films (and sadly, many books) that slap on the “horror” label, but are about nothing, try to be about nothing; that exist only to breakthrough the average 14 year-old’s ennui, with noise and violence and bare breasts.

Horror films – currently the loudest voice in horror – may have become a thing of special effects and CGI, violent deaths and one action sequence every 3.5 script pages, but horror literature must not. And that’s the trap many of us have fallen into lately.

We (the progenitors of fang and claw, tooth and bone) have forgotten that it is characterization, combined with allegory, that drives a horror work,

We (the conjurers of spirits and devils, beasts and fiends) have forgotten that it is blood flowing through the veins of a page (as opposed to splattered on top of it) combined with common mortal dreads that propel a good horror book.

The horror writer (more than say, the romance writer) needs to remember to write full-blooded characters that happen to be horror figures. Making a character a vampire, werewolf etc doesn’t make them interesting in and of themselves; anymore than making a character a Presbyterian does. Whether you directly put it on the page, or sneak it in through interpretative prose, YOU must know who these “people” are, who they’ve been, what they believe or don’t, what makes them “them.”

Then, there’s the issue of “evil.”

Whether you – as the horror writer – view a character as evil or bad, how does the character view themselves? This is a big deal and goes a long way toward filling them with the blood I referred to above. And, if you think about it, it’s the hallmark of most classic horror literature.

Edward Hyde didn’t think he was evil; he was just having a blast.

Frankenstein’s Creature saw himself as an abandoned child in search of love.

Dracula saw himself as an aristocrat and so not bound by lower norms of behavior.

Siodmak’s Wolfman saw himself as a victim of his curse, misunderstood and lost.

When you write the horror figure, don’t forget that whatever their gift/curse, they still must be approached no differently than any other character in your work. If you would endue a grocer or cop or priest or prostitute with real, recognizable traits; so too must you with the horror character. For them to succeed (and with it the rest of your work) they must be real. They have a place in the universe (found or searched for) so they must have literary width and breadth to go with that. They must stand defined not by their abilities, curse, or place in the Horror Social Registry, but by their actions, motivations, what they are doing, and why they are doing it.

Fail that – with your monsters or your merchants – and you have failed, period.

So now that you’ve created a living (or not) multi-dimensional citizen of horror, why have you created him/her/it?

Seven teenagers go to summer camp and a hockey-masked undead fiend chops the ones who have sex to death.

Okay, fair enough; but I have a question: would Jason have succeeded better as the undead/undying disfigured ghoulie OR as a repressed former summer camp counselor? Which is more frightening, which tells the story better?

On the other hand, Freddy Kruger is an example of a contemporaneous horror figure that would not be better served by a non-horror character. The spiritual rape of dream invasion is a powerful image . . . it’s a shame they forgot about it in the fourteen sequels. David Loughery’s “Dreamscape” and Stephen King’s “The Stand” are also wonderful examples of choosing a supernatural dye to the benefit of the overall fabric of the story . . . which would’ve been ordinary and boring without it . . . despite neither story being a supernatural one at its core.

Dreamscape . . . a political thriller of institutional and personal ambition, executed with horror elements.

The Stand . . . a journey of men and women freed from all bonds to the past, forced to decided for themselves how they will live their lives, painted masterfully with a horror brush.

Don’t make the mistake of making the horror elements (by themselves) the central purpose of the piece. Use horror as allegory, as judge of morality, as a more flavored way of demonstrating a more conventional point. Use them as detached observers, as involved participants, but never use them unless they are the best way to accomplish that use.

And never forget that horror succeeds best, when it is the seasoning, not the main course.

Stoker wrote about Victorian sexuality. Stevenson about man’s innate self-loathing. Shelly about our ability to create technology without the ability to understand its implications on our lives. Siodmak about racism. All of them bedrock masters of the art of horror.

All of them using horror as the colors, but not the canvas.

“The Addams Family” was about the American immigrant assimilation experience to an extent it never could have been without the horror elements. Whitley Strieber’s “The Hunger” bespoke addiction in ways that Nelson Algren’s “The Man With The Golden Arm,” as good as it was, couldn’t. And can you imagine a stronger story of personal compromise than Christopher Marlowe’s “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.”

This is also the answer about how we change the buyers’ view of horror. Editors, publishers, producers, everyone who writes the checks are interested in only one thing: making money. And when they see the audience/readers’ reactions to horror with depth, they’ll come around. You want proof, that’s easy:

1971’s “Werewolves On Wheels” by David Kaufman can be argued as the low point of the modern era for horror writing. A motorcycle gang is terrorized by monastic werewolves and their buxom leader. Pretty typical of the period: not about anything, not trying to be about anything, simply putting werewolves on Harleys in the Carpathian Mountains with bare breasts, sex, and torn limbs.

But then just two years later, a novel about teenage angst, secularism, and teen tribalism; that asked serious questions about the definitions of “normal” and “popular” was completed in a horror motif. But the writer didn’t think a horror novel that was actually about something could make it, and he threw it out.

Luckily, Tabitha King pulled the manuscript out of the trash and convinced Stephen to submit it. And in 1974, “Carrie” reinvigorated a genre.

And that’s the gauntlet thrown down to all of us in the early days of a new century already replete with horrific images:

In creating worlds where reason is suspended, have strong reasons for that suspension; otherwise . . . don’t bother. There are enough slash and splatter, dead teenager, slathering beastie, or disguised porn works out there already. Don’t be a creative typist who thinks blood and monsters (by themselves) is interesting. They’re no more interesting (by themselves) than sheep lice.

Be a Night Rider of horror. Put in some time and effort creating three dimensional characters that have something to do, something to say; whose very nature impacts the story in a way less cursed/gifted beings couldn’t. Be a Night Rider who – like the grandmasters – cares deeply and passionately about the human condition, daring to comment on or try to improve who we are and where we are going.

“We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little,” Anne Lamott

And why, when they do, they don’t write horror.

Believe!

By Jeff Mariotte

I can’t remember which writer it was who said (or wrote) “I write the books I’d like to read, if only someone else would write them” (paraphrasing here; since I can’t remember who it was, I certainly can’t remember the exact words. But that was the meat of it).

It’s a good approach, though, whoever said it. Or as Rick Nelson put it in song, “You can’t please everyone, so you gotta please yourself.”

Another bit of writerly wisdom (albeit less sound) is: “write what you know.” We’ve all heard that one, and it’s true to a point—but only to a point. It’s true that a lifelong Manhattanite who has never left the city and whose entire understanding of the historical West comes from reruns of F Troop will likely not write a very good historical Western. It’s also true that, while very few of us have ever been serial killers, we have some things in common with them. We may never have stalked a human through a darkened, unfamiliar apartment, but most of us have walked through an unfamiliar space in the dark, even if it’s just a hotel room or our own house the day after moving, when we don’t know where anything—even the light switch—has ended up. We’ve also known anxiety that something we’re doing might go wrong. We’ve known desire—for a mate, a new job, a new car, a rare book—that we can translate into the killer’s desire. Writing what you know doesn’t have to mean that we can only transcribe our own life experience (how boring would that be?), but that we take aspects of our experience and apply it to different characters and situations.

I actually prefer to combine these two bits of received wisdom into one: write what you want to know. I bring this up now because of a couple of recent reading experiences, when things that I know slammed up against things that I read in such a way as to pull me out of the story, and that’s never a good thing. One was in a recent Jonah Hex comic, when DC Western character Bat Lash (full disclosure: both Jonah and Bat appear in a novel I just finished for DC Comics, called Superman: Trail of Time) was playing faro, and claimed a “full house.” In faro, however, players don’t have poker hands, and there’s no such thing as a full house. The artist researched and drew a proper faro layout, but the writers didn’t put the effort into knowing how the game was played.

The other incident was in Stephen King’s Cell. As a preface, I think King is one of the best popular novelists the English language has ever had, and I love to read him. But in Cell, protagonist Clay Riddell has just been to Boston, where he sold a graphic novel to Dark Horse Comics for a substantial piece of change. As the city goes nuts around him, he carries his portfolio containing “…his Dark Wanderer pictures (to him they were always pictures, never drawings or illustrations)…”

What’s wrong with all this? (Besides the fact that six pages earlier, we had the sentence “All but a dozen or so of his Dark Wanderer drawings were in there, and it was the drawings that his mind seized on”—the drawings/pictures slip is a contradiction a copy editor should have caught, but it’s not what I’m here to talk about today.)

With more than 15 years of experience in virtually every aspect of the comics industry, I can say these things are almost universally true:

a) Dark Horse, located in Oregon, isn’t going to send someone to Boston to view a proposal by an unknown (or even a known). They’d tell Clay to mail it to them, or to come to a convention they’ll be at anyway. Most comics proposals are done via mail or e-mail, not in person.

b) Said unknown isn’t going to sell a “graphic novel” for big bank. Maybe he’ll get a commitment for a comic book miniseries, if the work is good enough. “Graphic novel” and “comic book” aren’t synonymous.

c) No pro artist—not even any artist who’s been around comics long enough to know what size to draw his pages—calls his pages “pictures” or “drawings” or “illustrations.” Clay would call them “pages” (which he does once or twice, but not consistently). That’s what they are, after all—parts of a whole, not individual stand-alone pieces of art. He might have a few drawings in the portfolio too—character studies, that kind of thing, to back up his proposal, but Dark Horse would want to see the pages, not the drawings.

How many readers, of the millions Steve has earned, will be bothered by these mistakes? A small handful. Those of us who are, though, will find Cell less real than many of his other books simply because we can’t believe in the initial motivation for the character to be in Boston when things go haywire, and that’s the set-up for everything that follows.

I’m not going to suggest that Steve did no research for that aspect of the book, but chances are he’s been around comics long enough to think he knew how to phrase what he wanted to say, and he was wrong.

Doing research is fun if you’re learning about things you want to learn about anyway, have a reason for doing so (which comes with a paycheck), and can deduct your research costs from your taxes. What could be better?

You might spend days, weeks, months or years writing a novel that a reader can get through in a few hours, so you’d better be interested in what you’re writing about. If you’re interested, you might as well learn what you can and strive to get the facts right. And if you’re not, that lack of interest will surely come across in the finished work, causing your reader to lose interest as well.

Knowing more about your subject matter can help you add the telling detail, the specificity that makes a book come alive to the reader. Writing about a comic artist, for instance, if you have her working on Blue Line Pro art boards, then you’ve got an amateur or a newbie, who picks it up at her local comic shop but doesn’t know that the word Pro in the name doesn’t mean it’s what the pros use, because they almost never do. An actual pro is far more likely to use DC or Marvel illustration board left over from her last job for those companies, because it’s better board and hey! It’s free! The handful of readers who are comics artists, or know one, will nod knowingly at this, because it rings true. It pulls them into the story. The rest of the world will appreciate the insight into the way that business works, because one of the fulfilling aspects of fiction is that it takes us into worlds we wouldn’t or couldn’t visit otherwise.

I get things wrong from time to time, too, of course. None of us are perfect. In my Andromeda novel, I apparently did my interstellar math wrong (although I was working from a map of the Andromeda universe, as determined by the show’s producers) and put too many parsecs between one point and another. More commonly, in TV tie-in work, things are revealed on the show after your book is done but before publication, or before a given reader sees the book, that contradict what you thought was true when you wrote it. So it’s wrong even if it was beyond your control.

For my next book (to be released by Pocket Books a week from today—check it out!), 30 Days of Night: Rumors of the Undead (written with Steve Niles, who created the original comic) I learned facts about FBI agents (which including asking questions of one as well as online research), details about Barrow, AK and its airport, where streetwalkers might stroll in Madison, WI (it’s amazing what you can find out online), incidents of disappearances of entire communities throughout history, and many other fun bits of knowledge. Doing so helps keep me interested in what I’m writing and helps keep the book real (even though it’s about vampires, which I hope are imaginary).

Learning new things is never bad. Learning them and applying what you’ve learned to your craft is something you owe yourself and your audience. So write the book you wish you could read, and to do it, write about something you wanted to learn anyway. There’s no down side.

by Justine Musk

Just back from the Southern California Writer’s Conference, where I led workshops and said things like, “You need to take us inside the physical experience of transforming into a giant puddle of metallic goo.”

After listening to people read and discuss, and chiming in thoughts of my own while wearing what I hope was an expression of serene wisdom, I heard certain points made more than once. For example:

Live inside the fictional moment, don’t stand outside and apart from it.

People have a natural tendency to write from the head instead of the senses: “He applied the tape across her mouth and then rendered her incapable of movement.” Lose the essay-speak. Remember this scene is from the woman’s point of view. So give us the sound of the ripping duct tape, the awful gummy feel of it. Don’t write…”…and then he died.” Give us that last gasping rattle in the back of his throat, the end of the light in his eyes. Make the moment live and sing, even when it’s dark one.

Other writers lived inside a moment – usually one of panic or terror, which shows you the kind of stories that get attracted to my workshops – way too long. Entire paragraphs of physical fear: heart pounding, eyes bugging, thoughts racing, palms sweating. Trust your writing, I said. Trust the reader. We ‘get’ that the character is afraid. Give us one or two well-chosen, evocative details. Not ten. Less is more…when the ‘less’ is done right. Trust yourself to do it right.

Trust your writing.

People said they had already changed their story because other people told them how they’d broken ‘the rules’. A few of those rules surprised me. “No first-time novelist should ever use first person.” Huh? “ Never do prologues.” What? (My own published novel has a prologue. Sometimes they’re useful.) “Never use words the reader doesn’t know.” The last concerned a young doctor who was writing a genuinely funny chick lit novel about a third-year intern. By the time she got to my read-and-critique, she had been persuaded to remove all the medical terminology from her writing. So one patient was now described – through the first-person perspective of this intern – as a woman on a bed “with a tube down her throat”. People in my workshop didn’t find the intern believable – she seemed too much like an airhead. She didn’t seem educated enough.

“When someone like me looks at that patient,” I said, “I see a woman with a tube down her throat. Because I know nothing about that stuff. But when a third-year intern looks at that woman, she sees something quite different. She sees a woman with a…a…That thing.”

“Tracheostomy tube,” the doctor said pertly.

“Right. Shows like ER use terminology like that all the time – nobody in the audience understands what the hell those characters are talking about, but it doesn’t matter, because the context makes clear everything we need to know. What those words actually do is create an authentic and believable world for the reader – we believe in your intern, she seems authentic, precisely because it’s natural for her to use words which most of us don’t understand. So use them carefully, but use them. Like that trach – that thing.”

“Tracheostomy.”

“There you go.”

Look, I said. These ‘rules’ are not carved in stone. They are guidelines, and for the most part they’re quite useful, especially when you’re a beginner and need some protecting from yourself. “Show don’t tell.” Genius! But don’t forget to pay attention to the nature of your particular story. Part of learning to write is learning how to adapt those rules to your writing, instead of vice versa.

I also learned to ask the magic question: What is your novel about? Tell me in three or four sentences. People had been working on these things for a while, and many of them had scheduled private pitching sessions with agents and editors at the conference. So when I popped the question — after they had read their opening pages and were starting to receive comments — almost everybody had a proper answer.

Which often changed the nature of the comments. We would discover that their opening was going in a different direction than what their book was actually about. When I brought them back to the gist of their novel – to what I kept referring to as the ‘throughline’ — it was easier for them to make decisions about where to start, what to cut and what to change (and easier for other people to advise them). They were still listening to the criticism and being careful about ‘the rules’…but they were also listening to the story itself, which allowed them to better identify what they could apply and how they could apply it.

Several people said, “I have no idea where this thing is going.”

“I don’t really know,” one man said blithely, “if this is a mystery or a thriller or what.”

“But you should think about that,” I said, “because you’re talking about different forms.” Mystery and suspense are not the same thing. A mystery is when the reader discovers things right along with the protagonist. Suspense happens when the reader knows more than the protagonist. Two characters are playing cards, for example, but the reader knows – and they don’t – that there’s a bomb in the closet about to go off.

This guy was unfazed. “Maybe it’s a thrilling mystery.”

“A book can be both,” I allowed. Although it’s difficult. “But mysteries are often written in first person because that way the reader really is limited to what the protagonist knows, when the protagonist knows it. Thrillers are written with multiple perspectives so the reader can have more information than any of the characters, which is what accumulates suspense. You are writing in first-person, but if you want to write a thriller – if that’s the form you feel drawn to, if that’s what you tend to read – then maybe you want to rethink that POV, and do it now at the beginning, instead of six months and two hundred pages from now. You see what I mean?”

You need to make some decisions. You can always change them later. That’s what revision is for.

Besides, many writers – like my mystery/thriller guy – know a lot more than they think. They just need to have a little dialogue with themselves. What do I like to read? What kind of story am I naturally drawn to? What kind of story do I want and need to write? I suspect one sweeping glance at this guy’s bookshelves, for example, would be enough to tell him whether his fledgling novel is indeed a thriller or a mystery (or something completely different).

And, especially when you submit yourself and your novel to a series of workshops, never forget:

What is my story about?

That, my friends, is the million-dollar question.

So keep it in the front of your mind. Put it on endless repeat.

By Weston Ochse

I was thinking the other day about my friends.

Not those people I went to high school with, or old army buddies, but the friends I’ve made in the writing profession. It’s amazing really how close you can get to someone without spending any real time with them, and on some occasions, never having met them at all.

I started writing in the mid-90s. Very soon I fell into a group of troublemakers in the HorrorNet Chatroom (who have come to be known as the Cabal). Most of us (with the exception of Ray Garton, Tom Picirilli, Douglass Clegg and Paul Wilson who stopped in to harass us) were at the same place in our writing, struggling to find our voice and be heard over the great chorus of creativity. Honestly, every evening was like being a member of the Little Rascals. We were close friends, eager to speak with each other and able to tell secrets that we couldn’t tell those closest to us.

Then I discovered List Serves and subscribed to a few. Darktales, MIT Writers and HorrorWriters were my favorites during those days. The lists weren’t as interactive and lacked the immediacy of the HorrorNet Chat, but they served their purpose, allowing me to reach out to a growing fan base, discover new friends and enter into business enterprises. I became the editor of the online journal Bloody Muse because of this. I collaborated with this guy from Pennsylvania on what would become a Scary Redneck franchise. I met editors, I met fans, I met fellow writers and I met friends.

Know how you can tell which ones are friends? When you meet them in real life you’re smiling like a giddy school girl and find that you have nothing to say because they already know all there is to know about you.

I remember the first time I met my Cabal Mates. I was sitting in the bar of the Drake Hotel in Denver drinking a Fat Tire wondering what the hell I’d gotten myself into (my first Convention). Suddenly a bunch of inebriated ne’re-do-wells stumbled into the bar. After awhile, one came over to my table and asked if I was Weston. Five seconds later I was being introduced to the members of the Cabal and it was like we were old friends. The feelings of acceptance and friendship I experienced were those you usually felt only after years of terrestrial friendships; or after a traumatic or life-changing event.

Why was I so happy to see these folks?

I’m not the end all be all of knowledge, nor am I some great Buddha coming down from a Tibetan mountaintop to dispense wisdom, nor am I a Jungian psychologist who can tell you what dreams are made of, but I think I have this one figured out. I think it comes down to this. What we do in the backyard and in the grocery store and in our living rooms rests firmly in the realm of the normal and is a part of the lives of our friends, neighbors and family. But the out-pouring of our souls, the writing if you will, that we do in front of our computers is as personal an activity as there is. We interrogate our imagination with words and plots. We delve into the hoary depths of our fears and report what we’ve seen. Sometimes we are embarrassed with how our minds work. We don’t understand why we write what we do and we can’t stop.

Our family loves us. We have friends from high school and college and our jobs. We have our favorite checkout line at the grocery store. We know people in our towns and they know us. But for all the love and all the friendship and all the kum-ba-ya how ya doin’s that we exchange with our barber and the cute girl in aisle three, they cannot understand where the viciousness, the horror, the weirdness, the many-tentacled beasts, the vile murder, the unrelenting mayhem, the putrid grotesqueries, the rapes, the disembowelments and the just plain evilness comes from.

We’re afraid that they’ll associate what we write with who we are; and sometimes they do.

Leave behind whatever psychosis makes us do what we do. That’s for another article down the road. The fact is that we write this vile stuff and we love it. These friends I spoke of earlier, those who I never met, but felt close to– they all had one thing in common. They accepted me for what I wrote, gave me encouragement to keep doing it, and understood the catharsis inherent in the writing of it. I was able to get closer to these strangers about something very personal and dear to me than I was to my family or friends.

This isn’t an indictment on my family and friends. They’re normal people and should live normal lives, thinking normal things, doing normal tasks.

Who are we to try and make them understand what they can’t understand?

And guess what? We don’t have to.

Because of the magnificence of modern technology, we’re able to reach out and touch people of our ilk at any hour of the day or night, on message boards, chats, lists, MySpace accounts, Live Journals, blogs and instant messages. No longer are we alone in what we do. There are entire communities out there who accept and encourage us.

I wonder how writers communicated before the internet. My wife tells me of this thing called a letter. Days, sometimes weeks, would pass before a single thought could be conveyed. What a lonely existence it must have been.

So let me take a moment and thank all of my writing friends. Thank you for being there, for accepting me and encouraging me. There are those of you who I feel closer to than some members of my own family. And one day perhaps we’ll even meet.

Until next time…see you in virtuality.

I’d wager to say that developing a high concept premise is something all writers struggle with from time to time. Let’s face it—it’s not easy to boil down a four hundred page novel to twenty-five words or less. As difficult as it is, however, there’s nothing more valuable than having those precious few words readily available when someone asks, “What’s your book about?”

If done well, your premise can very well prompt an agent or editor to ask for your complete manuscript or send a reader in search of your book. But when it comes down to the actual book and getting readers invested in the story, the game of enticement has only begun.

The book market is extremely competitive, and a writer needs every advantage he or she can get. Great covers, luring blurbs, catchy titles help, but sometimes we have little to no control over them. What we do control, however, not only captures readers, it keeps them coming back for more. And that is the first sentence, first paragraph, first page of our story.

Living in a society that has the attention span of a gnat, writers are offered a minimal grace period (say three to five pages) before a reader will toss a book aside, declaring it boring.

With that in mind, I thought I’d try a little experiment. I chose a few books from my bookshelves to see how headline authors handled their openings. I limited the openings to the first paragraph of each book. In some cases , the first paragraph was only a sentence long….

1. Act One, Scene One, the Storyteller thought to himself and couldn’t hold back a dizzying rush of anticipation. The truth was that ordinary people committed perfect crimes and perfect murders all the time. But you didn’t hear about it for the simple reason that the killers never got caught.

2. The girl lay in bed determined not to go to sleep.

3. On the day I got the job, we celebrated.

4. Summer’s here.

5. Deucalion seldom slept, but when he did, he dreamed. Every dream was a nightmare. None frightened him. He was the spawn of nightmares, after all; and he had been toughened by a life of terror.

Given only these intros, which book would you choose to read further?