Storytellersunplugged

by David Niall Wilson

(This is posted a day early - we had no new essay on the 30th, and I didn’t want us to go another full day without a post…)

Every day, it seems, I read an article, or see a news item on television about something that stirs or outrages me. I can’t imagine the number of times I must have said, “God, if that was ME I’d have…” Our ancestors had the leisure to read much more occasional and distant news, discussing it over coffee, or whiskey, or gathering around radios to soak in the details that were carefully chosen and presented to them before launching into lengthy diatribes of their own. Our world is much more immediate, and so much smaller, that most of our opinions are glossed over, hurried past, or ignored, but for me they still simmer beneath the surface, and for that reason, among many, I am thankful to be a writer.I recently finished re-reading John Grisham’s first novel, “A Time to Kill,” and I believe he feels – or once felt – the same. The protagonist is that elusive, mythical beast, the ethical, honest lawyer. He is a man confronted with questions who knows his answers and lives them. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said in “The Great Gatsby,” – “I believe all men suspect themselves of at least one of the Cardinal Virtues…” In writing, we have options that life doesn’t always afford us.

How many times, I wonder, have lawyers, judges, district attorneys and police officers heard the question, “What would you have done?” How many times, when asked, is that question answered honestly? Very seldom, I suspect. We live in a society that believes a set, mutually agreed upon set of rules is more important than any individual’s beliefs, ethics, or personal honor. That’s a harsh way of putting it, and it sounds a bit communist, when expressed in this manner, but it’s true. What we believe to be right, and what society expects and enforces as right are very seldom similar.

In “A Time to Kill,” Carl Lee Hailey, a black man from Clanton, Mississippi, is faced with the question of how to react when two drunken, red-necked white men torture and rape his ten year old daughter. This is a brutal, no gray area situation, and Carl Lee reacts honestly. He shoots the two men before the “justice system” can lock them away for a few years and set them free. Most of the men of Clanton (in the novel) – when confronted with that eternal question, “What would you have done?” admit they hoped they’d have the courage to react as Carl Lee did. They also admit that, had it been a white girl, and black assailants, the case would never even make it to court.

Of course, in our society, and even in the society of Clanton Mississippi back in the time period of this novel, shooting a man because he richly deserves it is not the correct answer to this situation, or to any situation. There are rules, and there are laws, and we are taught that “right minded” folk will abide by, understand, and even agree with these laws. But do we ever agree? Really? I don’t think so. I will never, for instance, believe that in the situation described in the book that the two rapists should get anything but the death penalty — or if they are in a more liberal state, life in prison. If confronted with the same situation, I have to side with the men of Clanton Mississippi and hope I’d have the courage to act on my convictions, because in the end, that is the only reaction that can make you feel right inside. If you see something you truly believe to be wrong, you must react, or live with the result of your inaction, and that is where this windy, opinionated essay veers in the direction of writing.

In stories and novels, we create characters and situations that — while they may seem complex — are actually simple, clearly defined slices of the world. We people these slices with characters who act exactly as we picture them acting – or who teach us how they would act as we interact with them. Our protagonist may not do the right thing in a given situation, but if we write him honestly, we will convey his awareness of what he has done, or left undone. We will lay bare the emotion behind a right decision, and a wrong one. In prose we have the liberty of slipping around, under, over or through the rules of society and reacting to the situations we create with honesty, ethics, dishonesty, cruelty, or any other emotion we hope to convey, and we have the opportunity at the same time to open doors into the minds of the characters and divulge the thought processes, the pain, the joy, the ecstasy and the humiliation those reactions cause.

Our drunk drivers may still kill people on the road, but they won’t do it in a vacuum. They will do it, take the consequences, and open their thoughts to readers, and if this is an issue the author believes in fiercely, the answer to the question “What would you do?” is clearly answered through the character. What would you do if you had too much to drink, ran a red light, and killed a young couple on their way to the prom, or their wedding — or ended the life of someone who’d managed to avoid such accidents for seventy years? Going into writing about such a thing, you may believe you know exactly how you would react, but if you write honestly, and well, by the time you are done, both you and your readers will know more about that answer, and the question that spawned it, than you might have believed possible. You will look at it from the perspective of the victim, the victim’s family, the driver and his family — the situation behind it all and the situation that follows.

As writers we create cowards and anoint heroes. We create fictional problems a notch more intense than whatever news story invoked them, and we pit ourselves, through our characters, against the temptations, dangers, rewards and possible repercussions of those situations without society’s threat of reprisal dangling over our heads.

In the real world — in the real small-town Mississippi where such a trial may or may not have taken place many times — I doubt that young Jake Brigance would have stood against all he faced. The judge in the town is not bright, and refuses to change venue. The District Attorney has political ambitions and wants nothing more than a death verdict for Carl Lee so he can further his own dreams. The Ku Klux Klan re-forms in the town, burns Brigance’s home, threatens his family, beats and shaves his young law clerk and ties her to a pole in a field, causes the husband of his secretary to have a stroke that kills him, and finally kills the informant who has helped keep Jake (and others) alive. Jake faces crooked preachers, several slick, big-city lawyers who want to the case for themselves, a lack of any real pay for the job he is performing, and the NAACP. His wife is on the verge of leaving him because of the danger he has put their family in, and Lucien Wilbanks, who owns the building that houses Jake’s offices, and who is a disbarred attorney himself, continually attempts to “fix” the trial.

This is what I mean about fiction. These odds are stacked incredibly. When you think things can’t, or won’t, get worse, they do. In the face of this, we get a clear view of Jake’s thought process. We see that his ethics are sound, that his beliefs are stronger than his fears, and that he is a lawyer who will do what he believes to be the right thing regardless of the odds. Jake almost loses heart when a young National Guardsman is shot and killed by a bullet meant for him, but he shakes it off, and he doesn’t quit.

And he wins. That is another gift we have as writers, and one that is too often ignored, I believe, in modern novels. We can create the people we wish we were, and the people we wish we could kill. Through our words, we (and vicariously, our readers) can become those good people, and those villains. We can live, love, sacrifice, and experience the myriad emotions associated with each situation. We can answer over and over the question, “What would you do,” and we can answer that question from every possible angle through characterization and caricature, putting truth to the lie that we call society over and over again and reminding people of the depths extending far beneath that social veneer.

As a reader I’ve grown disillusioned by authors who can’t seem to leave a character happy, or on top in the end of a novel. Love affairs always go south, lives are ruined — and when things seem to be looking up, they fall apart. This attitude seems to me a cop out, imposing more the veneer of the author’s own bleak reality onto a landscape of events and characters meant to take the reader away. Perhaps I’m a bit too romantic in this respect, but I think heroes should be allowed a moment of celebration when they save the world, and that villains should be dropped into deep, dark pits and sealed safely away until the next crisis — or novel –occurs.

In short – it’s what I’d do.

DNW

There are day jobs and then there are day jobs. Many of us storytellers have them (even if they’re at night), and writing time must be stolen from whatever leftover hours we can scrounge. Jeff Thomas recently posted a terribly perceptive essay about the tradeoffs and sacrifices involved in living such a double life; consider this one something of a corollary.

Many is the time that I’ve wished I wasn’t just another cog in the machinery of corporate America; that I could essentially be my own boss and set loose my writing demons at will, or at least on my own timetable, rather than one dictated by the demands of my primary employer. Deadlines imposed by publishers, the need to adjust my workflow to get a project in on schedule, the sad fact of having to surrender an unreasonable share of my income to Uncle Sam — I think these things would be a wee bit more palatable if they occupied the top tier of my vocational responsibilities, rather than one just below. As it is, I — and many of the writers at Storytellers — have to do these things in addition to paying our pounds of flesh to da man.

Then there’s the other hand…

Almost all the writers I know who don’t have day jobs are scrambling to pay the bills by hook or by crook, often having to devote themselves to projects that are patently unappealing and/or every bit as taxing time and energy-wise as packing up and going to the salt mines. Still, many, if not most, happily accept that tradeoff because these things are just what dedicated professional writers do. Simple as that. I’ve personally considered damning the torpedos and attempting that big leap into the unknown so many times it makes my head hurt thinking about it.

To date, I’ve had to choose otherwise. For one thing, I’ve got a wife with serious health problems, which often affect her ability to work, so making ends meet even with a regular biweekly paycheck, insurance benefits, and paid time off is far from an easy task. When we got married, I signed on for better or for worse, and in this relationship, there is no me. We are a we, and I am not only unwilling to leap into a world of even greater financial uncertainty than we already face on a daily basis, I think doing so to fulfill my own desires would be irresponsible.

But there’s more to it than that. The day job I currently have, and have had for seven years, has changed my thinking a little bit; it’s modified my ideas about what I want to do with my life.

I work for a company that produces educational magazines and workbooks for teachers of preschool through intermediate grades. (It’s called The Mailbox, in case any of you have a teaching background and are familiar with it; The Mailbox is the number one magazine for teachers in the country, and our book line is both prodigious and indispensable for an awful lot of educators.) Ever since I got out of college, with a degree in Fine Arts, I’ve been drawn to the education field, and in the 80s, I taught art at a community college and at the local art center. Primarily adults, which I enjoyed; some children, which I friggin’ hated. (The job, not the children. Well, mostly.)

The career I have now allows me to contribute to education without actually having to put myself in the classroom with young ’uns or interact with the public in general — for which I am more grateful than you can imagine. I work primarily with former teachers, so the level of intelligence and integrity is far higher than in any company I’ve previously worked for — in fact, I can safely say there’s virtually no dead weight on the staff. That’s not to say I don’t have any issues with people at work, or always agree with company management, or that I don’t pretty regularly want to shoot somebody. But a whole lot less than with previous jobs. To me, that means a lot.

The fact that I’m able to go to the office and be assured that the job I’m doing is having a positive effect on others, especially kids, makes up for a lot of the emptiness I sometimes feel for not being in a position to more closely follow the dream I’ve had for a most of a lifetime. Fortunately, I leave my day job behind when I clock out for the day; it’s not something I have to bring home with me. I can forget it and dive right into my fiction or whatever project I have going at the time. Another advantage is that my coworkers, even management, see my outside vocation as a fascinating endeavor and tend to be supportive rather than condemning — the latter of which seems to be the more common, sad state of affairs for many I know who struggle under a corporate yoke. Shortly after I started working at The Mailbox, I got an email from a woman in another department who asked if I was the same Mark Rainey who’d written “Somewhere My Love” in B&N Books’ 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories. When she learned that I was actually me, she ran screaming, which I confess to enjoying. (Okay, so it was not entirely like that.) Not to mention that quite a few of my coworkers were Dark Shadows fans back in the day, and many of them are proud owners of autographed copies of Dark Shadows: Dreams of the Dark. This makes me smile.

Yeah, trying to juggle life this way can be thoroughly exhausting. I can’t produce nearly as much of my own work as I’d like to, and many is the time I feel like slamming my head against a wall when I consider some writing opportunities I might have had if the better part of my waking hours wasn’t otherwise engaged. But frankly, I don’t think I know anyone whose life doesn’t exhaust them in one way or another. That’s pretty much the nature of the beast. Trust me when I say I count my blessings — though sometimes grudgingly, if it’s been a bitch of a day at the office.

Still, life changes daily, so who’s to say what’s going to happen next week, next year, or sometime down the road? Ten years ago, I doubt I would have foreseen where I am right now. The tradeoffs and compromises I sometimes have to make have been heartbreaking. On the other hand, I rarely have to devote more writing time than I’m willing to spare on projects that I dislike just to pay the bills. If writing were to become merely another chore for me, sorry, I’d just as soon have the day job. Down the road, I will have other choices to make, and the options may be very different than they are today.

My writing is for me and whoever chooses to read it. My primary vocation, for as long as I have this one, is about a lot more than just me.

I really like the closing of Rick Steinberg’s Storytellers essays — “Believe.” As broad and general as the world is big, but as focused as you want it to be for your own world. For my closing, I think I’m going to add “Balance.” Life is a high wire, and sometimes it swings in the wind. If you’ve got good balance, you’re less likely to have to grab on for dear life when the gale picks up.

–Mark Rainey

by Richard Dansky

E3 (or “The Electronic Entertainment Exposition”, as absolutely nobody other than the show’s laywers call it) is the biggest video game show on the North American continent, and possibly the world. It sucks up all of the Los Angeles Convention Center – yes, even the morlock-haunted caverns of Kentia Hall and the meeting rooms up in the aeries where nobody ever goes. Well, nobody below management level, anyway. The show floors are a thundering carnival of 60 foot television screens, noise, and scantily clad women enticing journalists to come check out video games that neither party has ever heard of. It’s Las Vegas for nerds, when the video game companies roll out their brightest and shiniest toys for the media in hopes of building that ever-elusive buzz among the pwnz0rati.

There’s a programming track, too, what feels like a little slice of GDC tucked in amongst the marketing-driven madness. It’s small, and the speaker list is generally limited to those who can be considered “names” of one sort or another. For my part, I’d been going to E3 for years before I even knew the programming track existed, and so it was an immense surprise to me when I ended up seated on a panel.

The one I was selected for was lengthy in title and heavy in star power. David Jaffe, the lead designer on God of War and the man of the hour at GDC, was on board. So was Marc Laidlaw, IHG winner for The 37^th Mandala but now better known as the man behind the best-selling Half-Life games. Neil Young, head of EA Los Angeles. David Cage, the driving force on critical darling Indigo Prophecy. And oh yeah, me. Shepherded along by Dr. Ian Davis of Mad Doc Software, the panel was compared to (and I’m paraphrasing here, so bear with me) “the Justice League of game designers” or some such. But instead of being gathered from the cosmic reaches of the universe to fight evil, we were there to talk about creativity, immersion, and story, and how the heck to get it into video games.

As panels go, it was a good one. Ian did a fantastic job of moderating the ebb and flow, building up conversations between the panelists and generally not letting anyone ride their particular hobby horse over a cliff. If you were there in the audience, you learned that Jaffe is disillusioned with story in games at this point, and that Cage is trying to push the boundaries even further. I’m sure someone, somewhere has done a better online writeup than I can, seeing as I spent much of the panel praying that I wouldn’t sound like an idiot when my turn came to speak, and the rest of it wondering if I’d done so.

My own contributions were, I think, relatively well received. If there’s a banner that I wave in the discussion of game story, it’s that the unique difference between video games and other narratives is the identity of the protagonist. In a novel or a movie, it’s the hero. In a game, it’s the player, who uses the hero character to explore the world and thus create story out of the game’s implicit narrative. In other words, once I hand you the DualShock, the exact details of your game experience are up to you. As a game writer, I can provide the high points along the way and the shape of the narrative, the lines of dialogue and the setups for the fight scenes. What I can’t do is say exactly what will happen, because the very nature of the game means that you control the action. And slowly but surely, you’re seeing more and more games take advantage of this.

It’s an exciting thing to think, that we’re just on the edge of figuring out how to take advantage of this difference. The first video games were structured on novels, or more accurately, on choose-your-own adventures. Hell, I worked on a phone game not so long ago that literally was a choose-your-own – it’s the natural shape that text-only seems to fall into. Since the advent of graphics (and more importantly, game genres), we’ve been drawn to the Hollywood model, trying to make games more and more like movies. It seems to me, that we’re on the verge of moving past that, too, into a realm of unreliable narrators and immersive metagames and all sorts of other funky stuff that truly takes advantage of the fact that these are games.

And if I wanted proof, I ran into it in the form of some students from Camden County Community College.

During the panel, I was asked about techniques for applying personality to supporting characters in video games. My feeling was that you had to give them enough personality traits to make them seem like unique individuals, rather than walking gun platforms, while at the same time not giving them so much personality that it overwhelmed what they were supposed to do. This is a nice way of saying that the members of your Rainbow counter-terror squad should give you information in distinct voice but without asking for your advice on their love lives.

And then I brought up my favorite low-comedy characters, the guards from Far Cry. Far Cry, if you haven’t played it, is a first person shooter that can best be described as “The Island of Dr. Moreau with high-caliber rifles”, and part of the action involves lurking in various bits of underbrush and eavesdropping on the mad scientist’s evil guards. Now those guards had three purposes in the game. One was to shoot or be shot. Two was to provide useful information that the player could acquire via eavesdropping. And three was to be amusing enough that the player would want to keep eavesdropping long enough to get the useful info before blowing everybody’s brains out.

So I gave these guys what I hoped was funny dialogue, spicing it up with little personality quirks so that each guard seemed like a person, not “Guard #3”. That’s why the folks from CCCC found me.

One of the guards, you see, had been written to mention that he liked sand. Why? Well, for gameplay purposes he was patrolling a beach, and I figured what the heck, let’s say he’s from somewhere with a beach. My personal past supplied one – Ocean City, New Jersey. I spent a summer there once as a live-in mother’s helper (not that I was terribly helpful) and I just dunked it in to the dialogue without a second thought. It made the guy stand out, it gave him a little personality, and nothing more was needed because the player would inevitably shoot the guy before he got around to comparing the merits of various salt water taffy joints. That was it, just one line about Jersey. He didn’t need anything else.

It’s customary after panels for folks to approach the bench, as it were, with questions. One of the students caught me, and he mentioned the mook from Ocean City. His words were, I believe, “I know that guy.” He’d grown up in Ocean City, and had been about to pull the trigger when he heard the magic words. After that, he couldn’t shoot the guy. It was a neighbor, after all. There was a connection there. He told his friends about it, and lo and behold, they wouldn’t pull the trigger, either. They weren’t going to rub out the guy from Jersey.

Was it what the game designer intended? Probably not. Was it what I intended when I wrote the line? Definitely not. But it made perfect sense to these players, and because of it, the story of their gameplay experience became different and uniquely their own.

The mook wasn’t “really” from Jersey, of course. He had the same AI as all of the other guards, the same gun, the same set of pre-programmed instructions and animations and statistics that let him serve as one in an army of several zillion bad guys lurking across the various maps. There was no backstory detailing his misspent youth hustling quarters out of video arcade change machines in Brigantine ever written, no deeper intent other than “let’s give this guy a hint of personality”. He never even had a full name.

That’s one way of looking at it. The other is that there was enough there to hang a hook of imagination on, and that as far as those players were concerned, the story they made up for him was the real one.

One throwaway line. One big impression. There’s a lesson there, I think.

by Janet Berliner

Good thing I wrote my essay ahead of time because I’ve been basically sans computer for over two weeks. Given my particular limitations, that leaves me with little alternative but to read, think, watch television, think, look out of the window at the flowers, think…. I had just finished the rough of my next book when the computer quit. One of the things I think about is the possibility that the universe is telling me that the book sucks. Hey. I’m obsessive. Paranoid. A writer, for G-d’s sake.

In any case, my essay is the flip side of something I wrote about before: Interviews and how to keep them lively. The last time, I insisted that it’s imperative to do your homework. The exception to that rule is the opportunistic interview, like coming upon Sammy Davis, Jr. in a coffee shop in Waikiki and spending the weekend with him and his crew, or meeting Tom Jones, his son and his managers, in a diner–small d intended. At times like that, you take a flying leap and do what you can with the joys and pains of the moment. The worst thing you can do is to do nothing, to let the moment pass, because it surely won’t come again.

So here, for your delight–or not–is my recounting of one such opportunistic meeting:

Barcelona, Spain, is synonymous with castanets, Paella, and sunshine; for me it is the city where I took my younger daughter, Stefanie, en route to meeting my mother in Nice. In Paris, I was overwhelmed by the avant-garde architecture of De Gaulle Airport’s Terminal One, a ten-floor circular structure that looked like a child of the Guggenheim. Our flight to Nice had been canceled, giving us a bonus day in Paris. On the flight, we had met a movie producer who wanted to make a star of Stefanie. He gave us his card, invited us to the Cannes Film Festival, and sent us on a tour of the city in his private limousine. In Nice, I met an Ethiopian prince who put jewels around her neck and proposed marriage–to me. He followed me around Nice until I took refuge in the protection of the Pimp of Nice. En route home, we went upstairs on the plane and were befriended by the Fifth Dimension. I fell in love with Nice and with my uncle who lived there, a Holocaust survivor married to a Spanish lady who could not speak English. We conversed in multi-languages. He had a wonderful mind but could not stay with one language for more than a sentence. He learned that in the camp where it helped avoid the danger of eavesdroppers.

Stefanie remembers the fish soup, eating pizzas at dawn sitting outside at street cafés, women sunbathing without tops, De Gaulle Airport.

What she remembers most is the night in Barcelona when we I met the petite, white-haired lady who was Walt Disney’s first official bird singer. Her name was Marion Darlington Maley.

“When I was a child we lived near a large flock of crows,” she told me, when I asked what led to her unusual profession. “For a long time I laughed like a crow. I guess that was when I became a ‘Bird Lady.”

That was in 1980. The following year, she told a panel on “To Tell the Truth” (Show No. 3421 for unbelievers) what she told me in Spain: “Next time you visit the ‘Enchanted Tiki Room’ at Disneyland or Disneyworld, think of me.” Her appearance was over in a few minutes; not so the continuing delight of the millions of children and adults who hear Marion’s realistic bird singing.

Marion was born in Monrovia, California, a town founded by her family. When I met her, she was living in Southern California, where she befriended parrots, startled cats, and fooled the world into believing in exotic jungles, wicked witches and romantic liaisons in the thick of the forest. “I was Cheetah in a Tarzan movie,” she told me, “as well as the birds, but doing bird singing is my true vocation. Sometimes my bird voice is only a signal call for Indians, but I was also the nightingale in Errol Flynn’s ‘Don Juan.’”

I asked her about the stars with whom she’d worked.

“Audrey Hepburn in ‘Green Mansions,’” she reminisced. I had seen the dress AH wore in that movie. I think it was a size minus three. “Also Sophia Loren, Anthony Quinn, Maureen O’Hara, Eleanor Parker, Robert Taylor, Clifton Webb. Oh and of course, Crosby, Hope, and Lamour.”

Her favorites?

The ‘True Life Adventure Series’ and everything she did for Walt Disney–’Snow White,’ ‘Bambi,’ ‘Cinderella,’ ‘Sleeping Beauty.” She also did a ‘Mickey Mouse’ radio show in the 1930s and ‘Flowers and Trees,’ Disney’s first color cartoon which won him his first academy award.

“Have you done any bird singing lately or are you retired?” I asked.

“I’ll never retire,” she answered quickly. “I’m still on call at the studios.” She had recently done the robin in G.E.s ‘Carousel of Progress’ at Disneyworld. “I’m always ready to do benefits and demonstrations,” she said.

I thought of Ima Sumac’s success and asked about recordings.

“‘Home Songs’ with Ethel Merman. ‘Tweedle, Tweedle, Tweet’ with Pinkie Lee,” she said.

“What about on your own?”

“I can’t sing on key,” she told me, laughing, “that’s why I took up bird singing in the first place. They wouldn’t let me into the choir at school.”

Seems reasonable to me, since I can’t sing in tune. I’ve been told by someone who purports to have gone to school with Barbra that she was once thrown out of the choir at school. I think it was because she wouldn’t sing like everyone else.

Hi.

And goodbye.

I have so much enjoyed being part of Storytellers Unplugged, especially getting to know the writer’s on this blog. However it’s time for me to move on. Fresh blood needs to be spilled. Thank you everyone for your comments and especially for your insights into the business of writing. I’ve really learned a lot, and even though I will no longer be an active participant, I certainly will continue to check in.

So long for now, and perhaps when my new book is finsished I’ll be back to regail you with more horror stories from the wonderful world of publishing.

All the best,

Terese Pampellonne

by JEFFREY THOMAS

A few weeks ago, one of my publishers made me an offer. Since they knew I’d be out of the country on vacation the whole month of July, and thus couldn’t afford another trip in August, they offered to take care of my expenses in bringing me to Los Angeles for the next Worldcon. They’d pay for my flight, my hotel for the week, even buy me dinner. This was how much they wanted to meet me in person, and have readers meet me, too.

Shortly after I write this essay, I’m going to let them know I can’t accept. The main reason is…I don’t think my boss would like it.

I’ve been procrastinating in telling them I can’t make it. Everyone I’ve talked to, myself included (right, Jeff?), has told me what a great opportunity it would be. And when might I ever receive such an offer again? I could be introducing myself to new fans, psyching people up for the novel I’m writing for this publisher. It would further my career as a writer! But it’s my career as a blue collar worker in a pharmaceutical company that has to take precedence. See, the company shuts down every month of July, and employees are pressured into taking their vacations then. Were I to take another vacation in August to attend this con, I’d have to take it as unpaid days, and these would count against me in terms of attendance – and in this company, if one takes more than six days off in a year for illness or personal matters, one is “abusing the system” and can anticipate closer scrutiny, a poor(er than usual) pay increase the next year, and possible termination. My boss especially has it out for me since I recently complained to his supervisor about his favoritism, his sexism, his racism. His last pay evaluation of me kindly reported that I have the “potential” to be a “good producer,” but I guess I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. I’m too busy crawling on hands and knees under machines (there are holes from broken glass in the knees of all my uniform slacks, not to mention the bodily scars I’ve received from glass, scalding water, and cranial collisions with said machines), sweeping up shattered vials and ampules, to take note of the practices of the “good producers.” I have at least noted that these outstanding performers tend to be of my boss’s same religious beliefs and/or to come from his region of the world, and also that they tend to sit or stand around talking for a good portion of every night while I’m apparently slacking off in my slacks-shredding pursuits.

There are two worlds that I live in. But one world too often eclipses the other. They are two versions of Mars, let’s say. One is the beautiful and melancholy Bradbury Mars…or better yet, the exciting and exotic Burroughs Mars. This is the world the writer Jeffrey Thomas escapes to, his spirit swept there through space like that of John Carter. But the Jeffrey Thomas who pays the bills to keep that guy’s internet service turned on, who puts the roof over his dizzy dream-filled head, is the Jeffrey Thomas living on the cold and airless Mars of harsh reality. This guy worked five years in a boot factory, went on to become a security guard, work in a sticky soda-making plant, a pocketbook factory, a plastics company. Fifteen years in a print shop. Now, going on five years doing his part to keep hospital patients high on morphine and the like. The two Jeffreys resent each other, in a way. Both resent when their twin steals away some of their too-precious time. But they also resent themselves, for how they cheat the other. The Burroughsian Jeffrey feels guilty when he takes his too-brief flights abroad. Shouldn’t he be doing something “practical” to help out the grumpy guy, like mowing the lawn, balancing his checkbook? The hard-nosed Jeffrey feels guilty when he can’t let his creative twin sit down to his keyboard for a number of days at a time, the same way he feels remorse at not having more time to spend with his young son or even giving the poor dog a longer walk.

How to reconcile these two worlds? Or is that like trying to reconcile matter and antimatter?

We don’t always hear what writers do when they’re not writing, because it can shatter the fantasy for reader and the writer both. It can be…humiliating. But for the vast majority, the truth is that this writing thing isn’t all (or at least, only) glamourous literary parties, book signings and readings, lectures and conventions. It isn’t all gigantic paychecks (those are reserved for the occasional teenage plagiarist). I know only a couple of writers who live exclusively on their writing – just barely. Well, fortunately a lot of writers are also journalists or technical writers or teachers, are experiencing less of a dichotomy in their lives, don’t have to hesitate so much when they talk about what they do when they’re not writing. I doubt I’m the only blue collar worker whose books are being read and respected; it can’t be so. I think it’s just that not too many people would want anyone to know about such a situation. It might discredit them as writers. If I’m so good, what am I doing punching a clock every night from 11 PM to 7 AM? My skills must be lacking, eh? It doesn’t look good on a dust jacket bio, does it? “Jeffrey Thomas is the author of the books PUNKTOWN, LETTERS FROM HADES and UNHOLY DIMENSIONS. He feeds over a quarter million dental syringes through a sanitizing tunnel every night. In his spare time he tries to keep his house from being foreclosed upon. He lives in Massachusetts.”

God…Ramsey Campbell had to work in a chain bookstore briefly, in order to make ends meet. Is that a story full of horror and tragedy, or what? At least he put this state of affairs to good use and wrote a novel incorporating the experience (THE OVERNIGHT). And that’s what I try to do, so that something more is coming of this than merely keeping my phone turned on. I’ve used my blue collar experience as the basis for many a story. My observations of my coworkers have bettered my sense of character, and exposed me to people from a greater range of cultures and backgrounds than I might otherwise have come into close contact with. (Not to mention that I met my first wife and several ex-girlfriends at work. All work and no play makes Jeff a dull writer.)

I’m proud to say that some of my books will soon appear in Taiwan, Germany, Russia and Greece in their native languages. Through the way I tell a story, through the way I give illusory life to characters, these faraway strangers will come to know me in a way that is actually quite intimate. They may in fact know me better than people I work beside every night, because those people might not read my books. Too many of my coworkers know me the way a mortician knows the body on his slab, not the way my family knows me.

The most I’ve made yet on a single book is $7,000 from a mass market publisher; a nice fee, in my experience, but not enough to live on. It’s usually much less than that. I’m not blaming small press publishers (except for a couple of assholes); these folks aren’t exactly bathing in champagne, either! If you really believe that’s how writers and publishers live, you’ve got a wilder imagination than I have and I find it hard to suspend my disbelief. Would those readers in foreign lands – even more removed, in a number of senses, from this author than English-speaking readers – be shocked to know about the job that pays my bills? Well, but then we all have two lives, don’t we, and the flip side of the coin isn’t always pretty. Tom Cruise sits on the toilet, just like I do. Angelina Jolie menstruates, just like I…well, you get the idea. But I don’t mean just people who to a great or humble degree express themselves through forms of entertainment. We all have our work personas and our home personas; our children know us as parents, our employers know us as employees. Maybe it’s just that a situation like mine heightens that contrast. Or maybe it seems that way because I’m feeling extra sorry for myself for having had an extra stressful day. And because I have to write that email to my generous publisher, soon.

I deeply appreciate their offer; I’m proud that it was made. Even if its like never comes again, I will remember it with fondness. It will inspire me; reconfirm that my kookier self must be doing something right when he’s playing around on the computer. Remembering their offer might help me find some sort of inner balance, the next time I am on hands and knees sweeping up those little shattered vessels, sparkling like the detritus of dreams.

by Richard Steinberg

“White shadow on a blackened wall.
Picture of young boy standing tall,
Pointing skyward where ashes fall
On nothing.

“Are we gone without a trace,
A burning ball in empty space.
Even God turns away his face
From nothing,” Amanda McBroom

Horror.

Dark fantasy.

They’re the words, to the right of this column, that in part define the contributors to STORYTELLERS. Words that immediately conjure slightly indefinable images as they’re read. Ideas with so many subgenres and corollaries that even the most dauntless forensic philologist would come away truly daunted.

But, for the sake of this column, let’s settle on the following definitions:

Horror; a noun.

Formal: Feeling of repugnance and fear.
Informal: Something unpleasant, ugly, or disagreeable.

All of the above being reactions not judgments.

Our reactions contribute to our judgments, certainly. But aren’t usually determinant. We factor in our unique moral standards, our sense of right and wrong, even how we’re feeling emotionally and physically at that moment before making our judgment. A judgment that is seldom final, if we’re to call ourselves human.

A judgment that we as horror or dark fantasy writers must initially withhold if we are to succeed.

Initially – because judgments will have no effect unless the reader is led to it on their own.

As with the Amanda McBroom lyric above: state a fact of horror, then add a judgment.

FACTS WITHOUT JUDGMENT

On August 6th, 1945 at 8:15 AM a metal tube 3 meters in length weighing about 4 tons was dropped from a B-29 above central Hiroshima, Japan. Approximately one minute later a fireball of 15-meters radius formed in 0.1 millisecond, with a temperature of 300,000 degrees centigrade, and then expanded to its maximum size (6,000 meters) and maximum temperature (several million degrees centigrade) in one second. The top of the atomic cloud reached an altitude of almost 56,000 feet.

Intense thermal heat emitted by the fireball caused severe burns and loss of eyesight. Thermal burns of bare skin occurred as far as 3.5 kilometers from ground zero. Most people exposed to thermal rays within 1-kilometer radius of ground zero died. Tile and glass melted; all combustible materials were consumed.

The atomic explosion caused an enormous shock wave followed instantaneously by a rapid expansion of air called the blast; these represented roughly half the explosion’s released energy. Maximum wind pressure of the blast: 35 tons per square meter. Maximum wind velocity: 273 miles per second. Wooden houses within 2.3 kilometers of ground zero collapsed. Concrete buildings near ground zero (thus hit by the blast from above) had ceilings crushed and windows and doors blown off. Many people were trapped under fallen structures and burned to death.

People exposed to the released radiation within 500 meters of ground zero died. People exposed at distances of 3 to 5 kilometers later showed symptoms of aftereffects, including radiation-induced cancers.

The death count reached 140,000 (plus or minus 10,000) by the end of December, 1945.

About a week later, World War II ended.

FACTS WITHOUT JUDGMENTS.

But even in their plain and unadorned starkness, they equal pure, unadulterated horror.

They are also only a starting point.

In Shigeru Kayama’s original story – Kaijû no Gojira – the monster (who became bastardized as Godzilla) rose directly from Hiroshima Bay, stepped onto the beach, literally sniffed the air and looked down on the desolation, then turned to the west to attack the American occupation fleet.

Judgment based on fact expressed through lead character actions.

Then, Tomoyuki Tanaka was attached to produce the film. Tanaka didn’t see the Americans as the enemy, but rather the militarists in Japan as the enemy, and turned our favorite T-Rex away from Hiroshima and into Sapporo where the last of the WWII Tojo militants still held power.

Judgment based on fact expressed through political machinations.

When Takeo Murata came on board as Writer #2, Sapporo was saved and Godzilla attacked and destroyed a UN Council debating whether or not to extend the occupation government of Japan.

Judgment based on fact expressed through choice of victims.

Ishirô Honda, who later directed the film, fine tuned the above message into an attack on Tokyo; which he saw as selling itself out to the West.

Judgment based on fact expressed through cultural revulsion.

Finally, Joseph E. Levine bought the film – found himself stuck with the footage of the destruction of Tokyo – and came up with a compromise. Levine personally felt that the Hiroshima bombing saved more American lives than it took Japanese, so Godzilla’s birth was shifted out of Hiroshima Harbor and moved to anonymous islands where nuclear testing had taken place. In part, because Levine opposed atmospheric nuclear testing. In part to make it more palatable to an American audience that still supported the bombing of Hiroshima.

And then the ultimate. In 1998 Roland Emmerich took the US totally off the hook – the testing had been done by the French, you see – and destroyed New York.

Judgment based on fact, expressed through marketing concerns.

Fact: nuclear explosion(s) create (or awake) mutated, pissed off T-Rex.

Judgment: depends on who you are and where you’re standing as Godzilla breaks the surface of the ocean.

Fact:

Man kills mother and various showering guests at family motel.

Eastern European Aristocrat with sanguine tastes seeks new life in England.

Central European doctor seeks ways to prolong life.

Old guy wants to attract hot young chick.

Judgments:

Psycho . . . Dracula . . . Frankenstein . . . Faust . . . but only after judgments are gently and liberally applied to a preexisting scaffolding of fact.

So start there. Decide what the horror in your piece is; remembering that the horror – in horror novels, stories, or scripts – is almost wholly ineffective if that’s all there is. Think it through, consider all angles of it. What is it that leaves a feeling of repugnance and fear in your heart? What is the thing that you find unpleasant, ugly, or disagreeable?

As in writing a biography – and I genuinely believe that horror is closer to biography than any other genre – define your subject. Who are they, what is it, why is it worth writing about?

But please, withhold judgments at this phase. Remember that your reader wants to make their own, so your job is to come up with that central scaffolding which will support their judgments or tear them all apart. But you can’t lead anyone without a strong leash . . . and a nonjudgmental horror at the core of your story is the strongest possible.

The vampire – who is either good or bad by their actions, not by their condition.

The killer – whose reason for killing is more compelling than the acts themselves.

The community – so like so many others in the world until the lights go low and no one’s looking.

So you have your strong core, your framework or scaffolding, now decide what your judgment is. Tougher than it might seem.

The Hiroshima analogy is one of the simpler ones; most people have already reached a one or zero conclusion in their binary logic on the event. But what is it that you have to say about what?

Again, horror for horror’s sake is a colossal waste of everybody’s time. Your story needs to be painted on a horror canvas, perhaps even with horror images, but the overall tableau must not be horror as well. As Dracula was about Victorian morality, and Psycho a fictionalization of a true story used to showcase the phony idyll that that the fifties chose to see itself as, what will your horror story say? What conclusions will you lead your readers to reach?

The evil horror destroyed by the symbols of the church symbolizes the power of Good over evil.

The horror performing good works destroyed by the symbols of the church symbolizes the tyranny of belief systems that cannot accept variance.

The horror who prevails over the symbols of the church represents man’s growth into a self-made heaven or hell without the gentle poetry of God.

The horror by which great power, insight, or tragedy is gained, represents the unwritten slate of a new born babe.

The horror of a nuclearly desolated landscape, with a single colorful flower forcing itself up through the ash and debris to bloom and bring a fragrance of something other than death to the place, well . . .

“When the night has been too lonely
And the road has been too long
And you think that love is only
For the lucky and the strong,” Amanda McBroom

The fact of too many of our lives.

“Just remember in the winter
Far beneath the bitter snows
Lies the seed
That with the sun’s love
In the spring
Becomes the rose,” Amanda McBroom

A judgment of those facts that I personally pray is the write one.

Believe!

By Jeff Mariotte

Writing for a living involves a lot of waiting, sometimes for things that you will never, ever get. We put a lot of ourselves down on every page, we writers, and often we’d like to hear from editors that they were moved, or amused, or scared, or thrilled, by what we turned in to them. Wait as long as you like, but some editors just don’t provide that kind of feedback. You’ll hear what’s wrong, you’ll see a copyedited manuscript in which all your mistakes are called out for you—you’ll even, eventually, get the delivery check, which is the best praise of all.

Once a book is finished, we wait to see it in print. This can take many months, sometimes a year or more. After that comes yet more waiting to see how the public will respond to it.

Other waits are even more exasperating, though (because another truth about writers—at least, many of us—is that we already believe what we wrote is worthwhile, even without hearing it from our editors or fans. If we didn’t, we’d never send it in, never expect strangers to be willing to shell out money for our tales).

Much of my income comes from writing licensed fiction, or work-for-hire. With this type of book, an outline is essential because the licensor wants to know what you’re planning to write before you actually write it. After the outline is finished, you’re in for a wait while the editor, and then the licensor, reads and comments on your outline.

I finished my last work-for-hire novel at the end of January. Currently, I’m waiting for a phone call with a TV producer to hammer out some final details about a novel based on his show (which comes after waiting since mid-February for feedback on the outline). I’m also waiting on a collaborator to finish an outline for a different novel. Because it’s how the universe works, both of these will finally be ready on the same day, and due the same week. Wait, then scramble, then wait some more.

During the time that I’ve been waiting to start these two paying gigs, I have written: an original supernatural thriller (which my agent is shopping now—the most excruciating wait there is), two short stories (one sold to an anthology and paid, one not yet submitted), one short comic book script (sold and paid) and three full-length comic book scripts (back-end deal, not paid until after publication), and four Storytellers Unplugged columns, not to mention random blog entries, web updates, and other lesser bits of prose.

If the original novel sells, great—that time wasn’t wasted (financially speaking, not creatively). But since the regular, steady gig is the work-for-hire stuff, and that’s all been in the waiting stages, there haven’t been regular paychecks for much of the year so far. Which brings us to another aspect of Waiting for Writers 101—waiting to be paid.

Publishers like to hold onto their money as long as they can. So do I, but the grocery store likes to be paid when you take their food away, and the power company likes their money on time. The writer doesn’t get to make that kind of demand from the publisher, though (in 99.9% of cases, anyway). So we wait, and when the publisher feels like cutting a check, they do. As a writer, you’ve got to be careful about cash flow so you can survive those long periods of no money coming in, then everything owed you showing up at once.

A professional writer (at my level, I’m not talking about the Thomas Harrises and Dan Browns of the world) can’t afford to relax on the beach during these long waits. I have to keep working, keep exploring new avenues, new angles. Working keeps the creative muscles flexed, allows me to continue honing the skills necessary to improve my craft. Exploring in different directions can lead to opening up new markets that might pay off down the line.

Somewhere during the development of the English language, I’m convinced, a mistake was made. Waiters who work in restaurants don’t really wait—if anything, we wait for them to bring us our food and the check (especially when we’re late for a movie). They should be called “servers.” Writers wait. Even as we’re writing, we’re waiting (and while we’re waiting, we should be writing). “Waiters” definitely applies to us, but if we tell people that we’re writers and waiters, they get the wrong idea.

This is something that should be fixed. This is also the kind of thing that occurs to writers with too much time on their hands.

Too much time spent waiting.