Storytellersunplugged

by David Niall Wilson

I’m finding a lot of similarities between discussions we’ve had here at Storytellers Unplugged, and the novel I’ve been reading, so I thought I’d use this place, and this space, to try and sort them out a little. The novel in question is “The World According to Garp,” written by John Irving and narrated by Michael Prichard. I include the narrator here because I may comment on my interpretation of his reading of the book at some point, and since we have the inestimable Mr. Dick Hill among us, maybe he’ll have some insight that is germane.

My train of thought left the station about the time I’d heard the author’s preface in its entirety, and it has only made sporadic stops since. At some later point I may dwell on my dismay that, at the time of writing that introduction, Mr. Irving was waiting on his twelve year old son’s opinion of his manuscript. I don’t know Mr. Irving, or his son, so I can’t properly put into perspective what thought process made him believe that this book is appropriate for a twelve year old (no matter how mature). What I can try to put into perspective is the author’s contention that it is inappropriate for an adult to ask a question like — “is it autobiographical?” –about a novel. He further states that it is the reader’s responsibility to understand the book, and if he can’t, he shouldn’t read it.

Slipping back a few days here at Storytellers, I remember a very wise man named Richard Steinberg telling us that first and foremost, as writers, we must communicate. It doesn’t matter how smart or clever we are if no one can share in it, and if our chosen profession is to communicate our cleverness to the world, we’d better be damned sure we can do it. Anyway, to make a long rant much shorter, I went into this novel ready to dislike it based on the introduction.

Let me preface this by stating that I am probably one of the few people in America that have survived into their forties without reading this book, or seeing the movie starring Robin Williams. I’ve seen little bits and pieces, but when I picked up the book I very literally had no idea what it was about.

After the author’s preface, which he narrated himself, and very well, I nearly ran aground on the next stumbling block. Michael Prichard has a unique style of narration. Some narrators bring the characters to life by changes in vocal inflection, (thank you Dick). Mr. Prichard does not. He reads in a very precise voice, and it can become monotonous. Thankfully, I am tenacious. When I first started to listen, it grated on my nerves, but I found – after time – that it grew on me, and that it began to fit my perceptions of the book, and the intent behind it. I forged on, and I came upon the crux of the matter, as far as this essay is concerned.

Garp, our hero, is a “serious” writer. His mother, Jenny, is a popular writer of accessible material that does much better in the bookstores. It irritates Garp, and you can almost feel that irritation dripping from the pages. He rants about it. He and his pretentious over-achieving wife discuss it at length, this “serious” writing as opposed to, I suppose, all the rest. It is very difficult, after listening to the self-narrated preface, to disassociate Garp from the author, and so I have to think – either he believes the argument himself, or he is lampooning it. Garp trivializes the amazing and often startling life and accomplishments of his mother based on his perception of the inferiority of her writing and his contempt for the people who read and are captivated by it. I’ve told the story many times about the panel I attended years ago where an editor from a major genre publishing house made the mistake of jumping into this lake of fire. Almost the exact words, in the end, crossed her lips, and all heck broke loose. The words, directed at a mainstream author with serious sales who had been given his own “branded” look for his novels (popping out two or three a year), were these.

“Well, he’s a real writer. I mean, he’s a “serious” writer.”

The response was swift. It came from a genre author who was well-known at the time and on the rise. He said…

“I guess the rest of us are just jerking off.”

Now that I have that out of my system, I have to wonder at the apparent rift between “serious” and “important” writing and popular writing. I wonder equally at those who seem absolutely certain such lines exist, and yet, when asked to draw them fall north and south of one another, often with violently differing opinions. It reminds me a lot of organized religions facing off against one another trying to win debates on theology by stating over and over again that what they believe is right, and, therefore, everything else is wrong – and if this doesn’t seem to be so, it’s a matter of faith. George Michael also told us we “gotta have faith,” and you see where he ended up.

The mother in Dick Hill’s poem owned Joyce because he was “brilliant,” but it is not clear whether she owned the book because she BELIEVED he was brilliant, or because it was the consensus of learned opinions in “serious” literary circles. How many classics, I wonder, are owned and never read because the reader feels they should be experiencing something they don’t find when they try to read? Do those readers feel as if it’s some understanding, or intellect that they lack? Is it? Is there really an illuminati-like group of readers so superior that they can pick the “serious” work for the rest of us to be amazed by, or is it all a matter of who is in favor, and who isn’t? If a work is serious, and then the style in which it was written falls from grace, is it still serious?

Some wool-gathered notions about serious writing:

• If too many people like it, it can have brilliant points, but it is flawed.
• A fantasy that is published as mainstream can be literature, but a mainstream story with a bit of the surreal in it published as genre fiction is “pop” fiction, and not serious.
• The clarity of writing from the reader’s perspective is inversely proportionate to the seriousness of the work.
• If the work is incomprehensible, but has the appearance of philosophy, it can become a classic with the proper critical backing.
• If the work is incomprehensible, has the appearance of philosophy, but the author makes the error of suggesting it is serious prior to said critical backing, it will be dismissed as incomprehensible garbage.
• It is okay to have lots of graphic sexual content as long as it is accompanied with sufficient dissection of the human psyche, and as long as it is either described clinically, or in poetic, flowery prose. The word erotic in a review can boost sales by a serious percentage, while the word perverted has a more limited audience.
• The ratio of quotes must fall heavily toward classics and great thinkers. Too much pop culture reference will drop your “serious” rating, as it tends to cause academics to believe you have a social life and are actually FAMILIAR with the pop references, as opposed to lampooning them with your razor-sharp and far-superior wit.
• Apparently, it is difficult to write a serious work if the protagonist isn’t miserable.
• In serious writing, it is okay to take shots at critics and English professors because they derive satisfaction from the idea that you are paying attention to them. It may even cause them to criticize you further – any review in the right places grants you “serious” status because they only REVIEW serious works in serious places. Just ask them.
• If you have never been reviewed in a serious place, and you take shots at the critics anyway, you will be dismissed as a “pop” fiction whiner and actively ignored. In rare circumstances, this may actually boost sales and cause a real review to happen at some point in the future, but the rarity of this makes it a bad practice.
• Very little serious fiction is written about monkeys. There may be an avenue of hope here.
• You will rarely see the word erotic in a review of a book about a monkey.
  

And that is enough, I think, of that.

Some final thoughts on Garp, his world, his mother, and Mr. Irving’s book. I am enjoying the novel. It has engaged my imagination, and has made me think – even if those thoughts were not always positive in relation to the author, the book, or Garp. If this is all it takes to make the book serious, then I suppose that it is. The fact is, though, that it doesn’t incline me toward more of Mr. Irving’s books as strongly as I’m inclined to read the new book by Stephen King, or the next Harry Potter novel. What does that say about the book, literature, serious writing, and my own taste?

I’m told Mr. Irving is one of the great writers of our time, and that this book is a masterpiece. I’m likely the wrong one to judge that. I wonder, though, if the popularity of the work, in conjunction with the movie, has invalidated it in some way. It is pretty obvious in the preface, and in the character, Garp, that the author takes exception with popular writing, and those who read it. He seems to have little patience for readers who have questions about the writing of the book, but there is also a sense of detachment, much like Jenny’s detachment from the world within the pages of the book. In a way, all of the main characters of “The World According to Garp” seem to be impatient with life, and the world that surrounds them, so I leave you with a thought.

Perhaps the seriousness of a writer’s work is, as Einstein would nod, smile, and tell you – simply relative. The thoughts of each reader, the comparisons he or she will make to the world, to life, and to other literary works will be different every time the pages of a book are cracked open and turned.

Meanwhile, I believe I’ll keep plodding along. No…SERIOUSLY!

Onward!

DNW

by Dick Hill

Writing is difficult for me. I don’t exercise the muscles enough. Oh sure, I shoot off a fair number of emails to friends and business acquaintances, and I endeavor to make those entertaining (and for the business contacts, endearing), but that’s easy stuff. The expectations of most of these folks when they open their typical message are, I hope and expect, low enough to ensure that my offerings are a touch above the norm. Often a response in vein is prompted, so I can feel good about tickling somebody’s fancy and prompting a bit of writerly whimsy on their part, but this is all very light stuff. Bold plays in a penny ante poker game. To attempt to write something meant to stand up to a taller measure is daunting, which is why I so admire anyone who does so. And those who succeed, well…….they really earn my respect. That’s why, I suppose, I have developed a friendship with our contributor Rick Steinberg, who by most other measures is a miserable, irascible human being with few discernible redeeming graces.

For me then, writing something that I offer as more than something tossed off, has mostly been an unpleasant exercise. Kinda’ like cranking up the speed and grade on my treadmill so that I’m truly working hard up in the red light endurance level, it’s not something I often push myself to do. The two times I really managed to do the hard work were when I wrote for the stage, and those two efforts were both moderately successful. GUS AND ANGIE was a dramedy dealing with the relationship between a father facing death from an astrocytoma (brain tumor) and his daughter. It was named new play by a Michigan writer, and worked well in a couple staged readings and one full production. BOOMERS, a musical made up of monologues and songs, written to be performed by four actors playing some 20 different characters, has had a professional production that sold out and earned an extended run, as well as some community productions. Excellent reviews and audience response were gratifying, but the show has never really gone anywhere. This month however, I struck a deal with a small professional company to dust it off for a fall production. Not a lot of money involved, but then I’ve never been starry-eyed enough to consider my forays into writing as a source of income.

Talking with producer/director of the company, he mentioned one piece in particular, a monologue and song delivered by a woman dealing with her mother’s alzheimers. His own mother had suffered with that disease, and he said he wasn’t sure how he’d be able to direct it without breaking down. The piece never failed to be a powerful one in previous productions. Nested between a pair of ribald, comic offerings, you could look out into the audience and see just how many middle aged folks were moved to tears. I’m as proud of that little piece as I am of anything I’ve ever written, and the interesting thing is that it came so easily. My music writing partner and I spent a good deal of time fine-tuning the song, but my lyric had come very easily, and the monologue came even more easily. Different from most of my efforts. I’ve included them here. I wish I knew how to stick in a music file so you could hear the simple, beautiful melody Jeff English wrote, and the wonderful job my wife Susie Breck did delivering it on the demo we cut. A voice over introduced her as Anna Mae, a boomer born in 1947, from Charleston, South Carolina. Susie used a soft Southern accent, which I always find a lovely sound, and one that lends itself incredibly well to storytelling. Her delivery was quiet and measured, searching out the images and memories as if for the first time, slow, and secret, and sacred. A sharing that made each audience member feel as if they were the only one hearing these private thoughts. Read it slowly, see the pictures in your mind, and you’ll have some idea of what she gave us.

Alto

(From stool, perhaps a scarf added, Junior League)

My mother has alzheimer’s, and I sometimes wonder if that isn’t going to be the defining issue for us, being the first generation blessed with parents who lived long enough to face this ugly thing that eats your soul before your body. Momma was always my rock. My daddy died when I was in second grade, and Momma and I went to live with Mamaw. She had a big old house with a sunny backyard and lots of flowers, and Momma and I would sit out there in the sun, and she’d braid my hair, and then open up her copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, because he was a genius, and she’d read the same page she always read, the first one, and then she’d put it down and pick up something else. And on the best days it would be Zane Grey, and she’d read it out loud, and I would picture myself as one of the Zane girls, running to the stockade under a hail of withering fire, my apron full of much needed powder, or bullets, or…bandages? I forget. She would read just one chapter, no more, and tell me if I wanted to hear what happened next I’d have to read it myself. And then she’d close the book and stare off over the yard with this lovely peaceful smile, and then we’d do what she called high tea. She has a nice room now, as nice as you could hope for, I guess. She has a few of her things, and I try to keep some plants alive. I see her Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and Sunday mornings, but I don’t know if she sees me anymore. She spends a lot of time in her Kennedy rocker, looking out the window at the tiny garden they have with that same smile she used to have at Mamaw’s. I know she was happy then. Maybe she’s happy now. I don’t know…..I hope she is.

MAMA

A: Are the words still there inside you?
Is it lovely what you see?
Do you know I’m here beside you?
When you dream, is it of me?

I wish you buzzin’ bees and lots of flowers.
Red Rose tea and an old straw hat.
You and me and magic hours with Zane Grey,
and a big ol’ cat.

Sun bright, sky blue,
a plate of ginger snaps.
James Joyce feels ignored,
so he takes a nap.

Tell me Mom is Dad there with you?
Does he hold you even now?
Take you in his arms and kiss you?
Are you fine and young and proud?

Or are you the little girl now?
And does Mamaw hold the book?
We’d be friends if I could join you.
Tell me when and where to look.

I wish you buzzin’ bees and lots of flowers.
Red Rose tea and an old straw hat.
You and me and magic hours with Zane Grey,
and a big ol’ cat.

Sun bright, sky blue,
a plate of ginger snaps.
James Joyce feels ignored,
so he takes a nap.

Mama, tell me where you’ve gone.
Is there a girl with hair to braid?
I hope it’s somewhere nice and warm.
I hope that you are not afraid.

Once you said I was your mirror.
In my face your youth shone through.
Is the mirror working both ways?
Where you’ve gone, will I go too?

I wish you buzzin’ bees and lots of flowers.
Red Rose tea and an old straw hat.
You and me and magic hours with Zane Grey,
and a big ol’ cat.

Sun bright, sky blue,
a plate of ginger snaps.
James Joyce feels ignored,
so he takes a nap.

(BLACKOUT)

 

—Dick Hill

Since James Joyce came up in several comments over the last few days, I thought I might mention here that, back around 1978, he was damn near responsible for getting me booted out of college lit class. He was pretty much directly responsible for the C– I got on the final exam.

Bastard.

I will also add that in my college days, I was somewhat less temperate than I am in my old age. You didn’t hear it here, but there might have even been occasions when I attended class in a somewhat…altered…condition. Now, I’ve generally been a very happy altered person; not at all argumentative, sullen, or outright obnoxious, like a few too many folks I’ve known in my time. In my sophomore English Lit class, however, when confronted by FINNEGANS WAKE and ULYSSES, my happy, sedate altered self went right out the window and left behind some beastly, unfamiliar thing, which uttered phrases to my lit professor that proper college students really ought not — such as “lame-azz joking socksucker,” and “wasting my fooking time with this cockamamie bullschlitz,” and “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do you, prof?”

Well, maybe not quite that belligerent, but…damn near. My ire at the time was absolutely genuine because, altered states notwithstanding, I felt that I was at college, paying huge sums of tuition dollars (thanks, Dad), to get edumacated so that I might function in the real world, not be made the butt of some cruel joke that only hoity-toity college professors might understand.

Thus began my occasional fascination with the work of James Joyce.

I had to know: “What the FUCK was Joyce thinking?” and — considerably more pressing — “What kind of DELUDED IDIOT could even begin to think that this eye-searing gobbledygook was great literature?”

I’ll be the first to admit that, on a purely emotional level, those feelings haven’t changed much. They’ve been reshaped, redefined, uh…altered, stood on their heads, and enlightened by all kinds of scholarly discourse, but while I’ve had certain moments during my umpteen attempts to read these FINNEGANS WAKE and ULYSSES (not a one of which has lasted more than fifteen minutes) in which a bulb goes off and I go “yes, dammit, that’s IT!”, for the most part, I’m still left scratching my head, thinking that these particular works may be the most self-indulgent, pointlessly opaque collections of verbiage anyone has ever foisted on the world. Had I been a lit critic back when these works saw light, I would have certainly been among those who were openly hostile toward the author. Yes, and to this day, I resent Joyce for coming between me and a love of literature that might have blossomed much earlier had I not spent several years laboring under the apprehension that, in order to qualify as a “great author,” one must actually be a trickster.

Changing my major from Journalism to Fine Art only reinforced the idea because, in this field of endeavor, I soon discovered that pulling the wool over the edumacated critic’s eyes was as simple as putting a paintbrush in an elephant’s trunk.

Alas, at the University of Georgia, there were no elephants.

Two things happened in later years that, at least intellectually, put my mind on a somewhat different tack. The first was reading several stories in Joyce’s collection, THE DUBLINERS. My God, the man could write. He wrote beautifully, he communicated, he had passion. He didn’t use opaque metaphors. He touched vital nerves. Maybe, just maybe, he was something other than a trickster…

Which led to the second thing: realizing that, while Joyce’s denser work didn’t speak to me — to put it mildly — even when the context of some of that gobbledygook fell into place, it obviously spoke to others whose life experiences were different than mine. And maybe, just maybe, they weren’t necessarily deluded idiots. That’s not to say I would trust them with my car keys (because God knows what a Stop sign -really- means), but it would behoove me to remember that those same others might not share my appreciation of Voltaire or Dumas or Wells or Poe or Verne or Fleming or Lovecraft. Lord knows, even some of the most devoted aficionados of horror I know find THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH as unreadable as I find FINNEGAN. Gaah! Who would think it?

The one positive thing that I can pinpoint from attempting to comprehend ULYSSES and FINNEGANS WAKE was that it helped plant firmly in my mind the basic point of Mr. Steinberg’s topic from other day: that writing is to Communicate, with a capital C. If not with me, Joyce’s two monsterworks communicated with -someone,- and as my passion to write grew, I knew that I too must Communicate, in my own fashion, with whatever willing -someone- I might target. Thus, I have long resolved to make my own writing accessible but focused, articulate but simple, and intellectually honest but fanciful. It took a while longer, but I also came to accept that — as much as I might like to believe otherwise — no matter how well-crafted the fruit of my labor, there would be those with whom it simply wouldn’t connect. After all, one needn’t have to write sentences such as “The eversower of the seeds of light to the cowld owld sowls that are in the domnatory of Defmut after the night of the carrying of the word of Nuahs and the night of making Mehs to cuddle up in a coddlepot, Pu Nuseht, lord of risings in the yonderworld of Ntamplin, tohp triumphant, speaketh,” to miss making a connection. Sometimes the derived experience, not the expressive power of the vehicle, is simply as alien to another mind as the domnatory of Defmut is to mine.

(I’m sure at this point you are aching to raise the heinously valid point that I, as the writer, for all my noise, might fall short of delivering the goods, and that any failure to connect is the fault of someone other than the reader. Let’s not talk too much about that, all right?)

In accusing Joyce of extreme self-indulgence, do I not leave myself — an unabashed purveyor of deeply internalized grotesqueries that I unequivocally believe my readers deserve — open to the same charge?

Absolutely. The scale is different, but not the act. (After all, it’s highly unlikely that in my lifetime, or anytime thereafter, there will be ranks of scholars and academic foundations devoted to studying every word I’ve ever scribbled.) In the bigger picture, are not all of us who are compelled to express ourselves by telling stories engaged in absolute self-indulgence? Again, I say yes. But the nobler side of that is that, when we succeed, we are not sermonizing but engaging in a dialogue with our readers. If we successfully draw them into our work, we draw them into our world, and even if we never meet, we become partners.

That, to me, is the allure and the challenge: to find my target audience and acquire it, thereby forming a partnership of the willing. Do I do this by conducting market research, predicting trends, emulating successful formulas, and reliably conforming to readers’ expectations? Though some corporate publishers might think this is a really a good idea, absolutely not. Yes, it’s just plain smart to educate one’s self about the business of writing; but the way I get the job done is by indulging my passion. And if I do it with an eye toward communicating effectively, my target audience might just approve. Better yet, with due diligence on my part and a spot of good weather, it might actually grow.

Mr. Joyce obviously found his audience, and more power to him. I still think he was a bastard; I should have gotten a B+.

–Mark Rainey

by Wayne Allen Sallee

Hello to everyone at the Round Table and in the audience. I’m making a late entrance here, thanks to David Niall Wilson and Stephen Mark Rainey, the Dukes Of Hazzard in modern horror. Dave has kindly offered to cut and paste what I write here and post it on the blog, as I am, and always will be, computerally inept. And yes, I made that phrase up years ago; use it as you see fit. I have read past entries, but still would like to jump in cold, by describing the last year of my life and how it changed the way I had to market myself as a writer.

First off, much of the reason for the sporadic manner of my writing has to do with my cerebral palsy. I type with only one finger and, even though I am in much better health overall since the days of Beth Massie’s Pseudocon’s a decade ago, thanks to the non-addictive beta-blocker Gabapentin, my strength still ebbs and flows, changing with the weather (currently with below zero wind chills) and my mental state ( I started taking Lamictal this past summer, which is primarily prescribed for those with seizures and/or bipolar disorder). The slowness of my typing keeps me from writing novels and longer stories like, say, Brian Hodge, whose novel PROTOTYPE stands as the finest, yet most dismal, novel I read in the 1990s.

I had the security of a day job in the Loop for twenty-three years, until I learned the real truths of job security in this new century. The company was bought out, and the only employees kept on were older than me yet making half my hourly wage. I received unemployment, which basically covered my rent and the cost of my pain medication without insurance. I found myself looking for writing assignments in places I never thought to look before, because of the immediacy of the situation, not just the joy of receiving a contributor’s copy of a book and forty dollar royalty checks fifteen years after the fact. (I’d bargain that Brian Hodge and I share the most appearances in the same book, starting with NIGHTMARES ON ELM STREET and LOVE IN VEIN).

While still looking for gainful employment in any way possible, even as a birthday party clown named Slappy for Clowns2Go, I discovered various writing jobs through Craigslist. (I also had more time to type; back when Rainey and James Robert Smith requested me to write a story for Arkham House’s EVERMORE, I declined as much because of my illnesses as to the few hours per day I had to type). This type of literary whoring I had not done since going to the first World Horror Cons, the equivalent of what they call at City Hall the “grip-and-grin” handshakes and introductions. Only now, just as in the case of the majority of my job applications, I was forced to contact people via emails and feeble attempts at drawing on sending an attachment of a shorter piece of fiction that might show my writing skills. As should be apparent here, whereas I am fairly decent with my stream–of-consciousness big, bad city fiction, my nonfiction still needs help. But, as with the late Karl Edward Wagner and Dennis Etchison and Ed Gorman, I found some very patient editors. I contacted Jeff Pierce at www.JanuaryMagazine.com about writing a tribute to the late Evan Hunter, who, as Ed McBain, wrote the 87th Precinct novels. No money changed hands, and Jeff had me rewrite several sections, but I ended up with an article on a website that is a stepping stone for many who break into the mystery genre. And, face it, how I survive each day in a city like Chicago is still a mystery. Larry Santoro and Marty Mundt, two local writers who started a website, www.FeralFiction.com, had me write an article about the history of Block 37, a long demolished piece of land in the new theater district that was the setting for many portions of my only novel, THE HOLY TERROR, set in the skid row era of the 1980s. That one paid me $75.00 and covered my expenses for a few weeks, though a follow-up on our infamous Fullerton Avenue Underpass Salt Stain Virgin Mary never materialized because I had yet to start taking the bipolar meds. The biggest boon of my time writing nonfiction was when I literally shoved my full leg in the door of BenBella Books, writing a 56 page, 650 entry glossary on the television show LOST, for a book entitled GETTING LOST, edited by Orson Scott Card. At this time a year ago, I was likely poring over index cards, writing the four hundred something entry.

I found a job I was thoroughly unqualified for, working at a graphics shop in suburban Alsip, with the gracious help of fellow horror writer Joe Curtain, writer of DAUGHTERS OF THE MOON and a fantastic werewolf novel, MONSTERA. At about the same time, I was putting the finishing touches on putting together a collection for Annihilation Press, FIENDS BY TORCHLIGHT. Because of my new job, Marty Mundt and another Chicago writer, Martel Sardina, helped proofread the book for me. While my new job provides me with more time to write as I have the complacency of a twenty-minute commute by bus as opposed to two hours when I worked downtown, I make ten dollars an hour and have now been without health insurance for just under two years. But, hey, I’m employed. Because I’ve always known that I’d never make a true living from my writing. My joy is the printed word, the idea that others can be inspired by what I have written, not having a pocket full of bills like Tony Soprano. People have encouraged me to try a voice-activated system, so I could write without having to chomp on toothpicks or chew on my shirt collar for inner strength, but I’d like to be remembered as someone who wanted to be in charge of at least some part of his body, choosing my left forefinger over my nasally Midwestern voice. (Also, to be honest, that stream-of-consciousness I mentioned earlier might easily lose its edge if I relied on “typing” faster.) I even harbor the delusion that I will even be more well known more after my eventual demise, when I wave to the Grim Reaper and tell everyone who might be with me at the time, “Hey, there’s my ride!”

—- Wayne

Every aspiring writer of speculative fiction should, I think, put in some time working in a bookstore. And I’m not talking about a cozy, snug used bookstore whose real purpose is to accumulate enough literature in one place to create a verbiage singularity that will let the hobbits out of wherever they’ve been hiding and into our universe, a place where each and every volume has been lovingly frosted with pixie dust and given the benediction of the King of the Cats, who drowses nobly in the front window as a living advertisement of how massively winsome the place is. Not that I have a problem with that sort of bookstore, mind you, no, not at all. They get a surprising percentage of each of my paychecks, and I’m happy to keep it that way. But they’re not what I’m talking about here.

Oh, no. I mean a bookstore, emphasis on the store, one with store classifications and frequent saver cards that you have to pimp every twenty-seven-point-six transactions lest your immortal soul be cast into retail peril. You know the ones I’m talking about here - the McBookMegaWorldMarts that have sprung up in every mall with the strength of purpose to have outbuildings, or inside every one that has room for them. The ones where every book placement is precisely laid out and paid for - the term “shelf runner” does not mean what you think it might mean, but it does cost a lot more than you’d think - and books are very clearly a commodity.

Working in a store like that is, in every sense, an education. There are a lot of things one picks up, ranging from a keen appreciation of how the average customer picks out a book to the basic idea that there are a hell of a lot of books out there, and that no matter how many you write, your total output is still going to be a drop in the ocean. It’s humbling and intriguing and surprisingly germane to writing, and I’ll no doubt ramble on about the particulars another time. This month, however, I want to focus on one particular piece of knowledge that working in a bookstore can bring, and the somewhat unorthodox method by which I learned it.

The bookstore I worked in was a Waldenbooks, tucked into an odd corner of an odder mall in Dedham, Massachusetts. The place was dimly lit and thinly trafficked, and my interview for a bookseller position had summarily metamorphosed into a therapy session for the assistant manager, who spent our entire conversation explaining to me how awful the place was and why she was quitting. Then, she offered me the job.

I took it, of course. I was in grad school, I’d just had my funding pulled, and I needed a source of cheap books like Wimpy needed cheeseburgers. The words “employee discount” were precisely the shot of spinach, if I may stretch the Popeye metaphor a little further, my academic efforts needed, and besides, it was a bookstore. What more rapturous place could there be for someone pounding towards an M.A. in Lit? What better employment could a budding litweenie ask for, than to be surrounded by books and to get paid for it. Apart from the miniscule pay, the necessity of flogging Frequent Reader cards every time someone bought so much as a comic book, the strange mating dance that my weekly schedule did with my class schedule and the lengthy trek to Dedham itself, the job was perfect. The cute girl working at the Mrs. Fields next door who slipped me a free cookie every now and again? A bonus.

Like most of the bookstores of my acquaintance, the place was staffed with devout readers, specifically, science fiction fans. Apart from the manager, who was a befuddled but kindly avuncular type in the best Dickensian tradition, and the freckled physical therapy major who’d signed on in search of victims to practice on, we were all speculative fiction nerds to the nth degree. What this meant in daily terms is that there was a constant, vicious struggle over who got to shelve and maintain the science fiction section, and that we pretty much ignored learning anything about the other 94% of the store if we could help it. While our tastes were not identical, they were damn near congruent, and so many happy hours were spent on the shop floor debating the merits of Heinlein versus Herbert, whether the Dragonriders of Pern were science fiction or fantasy, and most importantly, why other folks Just Didn’t Get How Brilliant All This Stuff Was. Sure, we’d sell customers books from the other departments, but we were really only interested in the ones who bought the stuff that we liked, and all that we read was the stuff we recommended around the circle to one another. We were a happy, unchallenging little cabal, which may have had its benefits, but I don’t think we were even aware how limited our boundaries were, or how tightly we set our horizons.

For my part, I was an early casualty in the struggle for SciFi shelving. Instead, I made a dignified retreat into taking care of the Horror section, along with True Crime, Occult, History, and Bibles. Occult and Bibles, incidentally, were located right smack dab next to each other, a circumstance that led to more patrons eyeing one another uneasily than you’d get in your average well-lit XXX theater. But I digress.

You see, I was perfectly happy after losing out on the chance to shelve the weekly influx of space opera and mightily-thewed barbarians. After all, I didn’t get stuck with Romance. The Romance section was big. The Romance section was scary. The Romance section got more books in every Thursday morning than any three other sections put together, and God help you if you didn’t get the latest and greatest out on the shelves before opening, especially on the third Thursday of every month. That was when one particular line of romance novels would come in, you see.

That was when we’d get the nuns.

I didn’t know about the nuns when I took the job, and the first couple of months I worked it I had no idea there was anything to know about them. Every so often I’d see them as I straightened Bibles, surreptitiously planted Thomas Ligotti books on empty spots on endcaps, and generally went about my duties. They were always there Thursday mornings, especially the third one of every month, and I had a vague notion that they’d taken a van in from a convent somewhere in the vicinity of south Jamaica Plain. There were eight or ten of them, as I recall, friendly little old ladies who zipped around the store like the ghosts in an amped-up Pac-Man machine. None were more than four and a half feet tall, at least in my memory, and they all looked as if they’d been freeze-dried sometime around the War of the Spanish Succession. Think Yoda in a habit, and you’d get the right idea.

Needless to say, they weren’t the slightest bit interested in anything in any of my sections. For one thing, they already had all the Bibles they needed, and as for the rest of it, I got the feeling that it wasn’t their thing. So I’d wave, say hi, do the employee manual-mandated shuffle of “Is there anything I can help you find today?” and watch them scoot off. Clearly, they knew where they were going and what they wanted, and they didn’t need a freshly scrubbed clerk with his nametag on upside down trying to “help.” I’d only slow them down.

That’s where the lesson was, mind you, not that I noticed it at the time. Fortunately, I’d get another chance.

I didn’t really understand what was going on there until after I became one of the hallowed keyholders. This was a responsibility that meant that I could open or close the store without the manager present, and that I could nominally be said to be “in charge” when nobody more senior was around. This, in turn, let the manager sleep in on occasion, which made him much happier, and allowed those of us lucky enough to have keys to revel in our Al Haig-like quasi-authority.

Thus, I was in charge and practically alone in the store one fateful Thursday. We’d gotten a particularly large shipment that day, as I recall, and the bulk of it was romance novels. Not just any romance novels, either - the third Thursday was when the steamy, sweaty, smutty ones came in. The ones with titles like “Acapulco Sauna Surprise” and “Penetrating Passion”. The ones whose cover art consisted of an artfully photographed yet shapely female buttock pressed up against the steamy glass of a shower door, a splayed hand posed suspiciously nearby. Those romance novels.

I thought nothing of this at the time. I opened the boxes, checked them in against the manifest, threw them onto the shelves as best I could, and generally got the store ready for our 10 AM opening.

At a quarter after, the nuns arrived. They swept into the store like a well-mannered, devout tornado, and through a series of complex, well-rehearsed maneuvers, made their way to the back.

Specifically, the back left, which is to say, the corner where the romance novels were shelved.

“That’s interesting,” I thought. “They’re over by the children’s books.” And they were, mind you, as the same Mensa candidate who’d placed my sections next to one another had placed kiddie lit and Romance right next to one another. Then I shrugged and went back to the cash register, the special order alerts, and all of the other desperately important tasks that a junior keyholder at a chain bookstore needs to busy himself with.

They next thing I knew, they were there. All of them, lined up neatly in front of the register and bearing stacks of freshly uncrated romance novels. Right on top of the pile that the nun at the front of the line held was Acapulco Whatchamacallit.

I swear, the damn thing was staring at me. Not the nun - the buttock on the cover.

I gulped. Forced myself to make eye contact with the smut-carrying nun in question. Smiled nervously as she put the pile of books down on the front desk and shoved it toward me with the universal gesture that means “Please ring me up so I can get the heck out of here.”

“Sister,” I said, and picked up the first book, half expecting it to squirm out of grip and run away while shouting “Unclean! Unclean!” I cleared my throat, stared at the book and tried again. “Sister, I don’t know how to say this, but I’m Jewish, and I don’t feel right selling you these books.”

She smiled at me, a big, beatific smile, and reached out to pat my hand reassuringly. “You’re very sweet,” she said. “Here’s my Frequent Reader card. I’m a lifetime member.”

So, I did the only thing I could. I shut up and sold her the books. I sold her the books, and I sold the nun after her the books, and I sold every last one of them every last book they wanted, regardless of what my rather sheltered moral sense said was “appropriate” or my even more undeveloped literary sense said was “good.” Those were the books they wanted. Those where the books they liked. I’d just come face to face with an army of militant readers who knew what they wanted and who would never, ever read the stuff I liked.

(Well, judging from what they’d just bought they might, but only if it had spicy bits. Then again, that’s another digression.)

That was the lesson, of course. Whilst the staff had been squabbling over which Mercedes Lackey novels deserved faceouts and which ones didn’t, a great many people whom we’d had no interest in had come into our store, bought books we’d most likely never heard of, and been perfectly content with their purchases. They were reading - drum roll please - stuff that they liked. Not the stuff that we liked. Not the stuff that we wanted to push on them, because gosh darnit, everyone ought to be reading the stuff we thought was good. Nope, they were perfectly content with their own taste, as well they should have been.

That, then, was the lesson that the encounter taught to me, the seemingly basic notion that not everyone had read what I had read or liked what I liked. I couldn’t assume my taste and experience were anything but that - my taste and my experience - and that I’d do well to take an interest in what other folks were into instead of constantly trying to drag them into my little literary pup tent. The borders, if you’ll pardon the pun, needed to be expanded. Not necessarily to the steamy bits of Acapulco, mind you, but stretched out into other areas.

In other words, other people like other stuff, and that’s just fine. Until then, it had always been possible to sit on my tiny ivory throne and sneer at those who “didn’t get it” or refused to make a pilgrimage onto the sacred territory of Stuff I Liked. After all, they were just professors or fellow students or whoever - people I had context for, and whose resistance to my obviously superior taste I could rationalize away. But when that tiny, cheerful nun shoved that pile of books across the counter, that made it a whole new ballgame. It made it clear that there were a lot of other people out there who clearly had no ulterior motive for not sharing my taste and my reading history, and that it was arrogant to think that my particular preferences were all that there were.

It is, I think, a valuable lesson, and not necessarily an intuitive one. The act of writing professionally is in certain ways a deeply egotistical one, a way of saying my words are worth your time, and with that comes an easy temptation to get wrapped up in the known and safe. To realize, however, that your taste is not automatically superior to anyone else’s just because you like specfic or Civil War historical fiction or, God forbid, soggy-in-the-shorts romance novels, is to understand that there is a audience of readers than exists that is wider than you and the people just like you. Once you’re aware of that, it’s impossible to go back to the parochialism that insists you’re reading the only good stuff, and nobody else’s picks are valid. From there, it’s an easy step to checking out some of that other taste, to broadening your own likes and possibilities, and maybe, just maybe, using that to inform your writing. Otherwise, you’re just writing to an audience of you and your dopplegangers, and that doesn’t go as far as you might think.

Maybe you knew that already. Maybe you learned it somewhere else. Me, I picked it up working in a bookstore, selling naughty books to nuns. If you get the chance, I highly recommend the experience.

Working in a bookstore, that is. The bit with the nuns, well, I’ll let you decide that one on your own.

by Janet Berliner

For those of you who have not seen “Singing in the Rain,” abandon this essay at once and buy, rent, borrow or steal it. Pay particular attention to the incomparable Gene Kelly’s “Gotta Dance.” It’s about passion.

Which has what to do with writing?

Everything.

The late film reviewer and interviewer Stu Kobak wrote:

“Creative juices can flow in most any circumstance. … Today, waiting in the hospital’s ambulatory surgery wing… an old woman limped by with a walker. She bumped into my wheelchair. I noticed she was wearing red shoes. I thought, The Red Shoes, what a fantastic dance movie. Dance, movies, inspiration._..[for] an old woman trying to capture the flair of youth with a pair of colorful shoes. I whipped out my notebook like a gunslinger in a B western, ready to take on the world with words.”

Like Kobak, I am captured by artistic dedication, whether or not it requires sacrifice–as it most often does.

There’s an old joke that goes something like this:

Tourist to New Yorker: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?”
New Yorker to Tourist: “Practice, Man. Practice.”

To which I would add, be passionate about what you do.

Out of passion and practice grow the flowers of skill. I cry equally when I listen to Chopin’s Preludes, hear Jascha Heifetz play the violin, watch Baryshnikov fly across a stage or see a master carpenter run his fingers over a piece of his finished work.

Talent, you say. How lucky to be so blessed.

Yes, but–

Frédéric François Chopin lived for only 39 years. By the time he was seven, he was composing and by eight he played his first concert. While his love affairs are well known, it is his passion for the piano that lives on.

Jascha Heifetz started violin lessons at age five. It is said that, around the age of 25, he told Groucho Marx he had been earning a living as a musician since his debut at the age of seven. Groucho apparently answered, “And I suppose before that you were just a bum.”

Ah, but these were geniuses, you say. Perhaps so. In no way do I compare myself with them, but I have passion a’plenty. And I “Practice, Man, practice.”

Example: Ten years or so ago, I was in intensive care, tubes coming out of every orifice; doctors Saying, “Get ready for your Maker.” I covered my bases and asked for a Rabbi, a priest, a Jesuit monk. I also asked for my computer. I had a deadline to meet. At any time I was vaguely compos, I pounded away, which was a good thing because the doctors were wrong.

Another time, confined in an old hospital near a beach in South Africa, I had an idea that wouldn’t let go — an idea born of Morpheus, morphine, my own wheezing and the machinery keeping me alive? Again, I asked for my computer. The story itself died. The passion that drove me to write under those circumstances kept me alive.

No matter what else happens or doesn’t happen in my life, I remain compelled — PASSIONATE — which segues back to where I began with “Singing in the Rain?”

If you wake up in the morning and sing out, “Gotta Dance,” put on your dancing shoes; if your first thought, before sex or food or going to the bathroom is, “Gotta Write,” DO IT. When the dark times attack, DO IT. If you don’t, you’ll lose your passion, and without that, there is nothing.

“The first responsibility of the writer is to be understood. After that comes entertaining, influencing, teaching. But none of that is possible without understanding coming first.” – “Vegas Rick” January 22, 2007

Theme is everything.

Ain’t it?

Nah, it ain’t.

As Mr. Richard Steinberg points out, understanding takes priority. What good is “theme” if few people get the message because the prose is so clunky, tortured, dense, labored, lofty, or bland?

I took a short-story writing course while an undergraduate down south, and we talked a bit about theme. Too much, to suit my unrefined taste.

My prof’s last name was Seay (pronounced “see”), and he had a page-boy cut and wore an eye-patch and sounded like a fusion of Bill Clinton and Shelby Foote.

As a guide of sorts in the class, we used a book called Techniques of Fiction Writing by a fellow called Leon Surmelian.

I still have that book in my library. That self-same one.

For me, something almost mystical touches me when I hold a book now that I held way back then. A book I read then that I flip through now. There is something ageless about it, but it must be the very same book.

It helps if it was a good book then. And the feeling is even more emotionally driven if I still think it’s a good book.

But I did not like Surmelian.

Then . . . or now.

Surmelian was beyond me. Or at least it seemed to be.

Perhaps my expectations were incorrect. I’m sure that the book’s emphasis on “theme” might have been helpful to some folks, but at the time, I simply wasn’t trying to become another Faulkner or O’Connor. I just wanted to learn how to write a bit of fiction.

I really wanted to, but I was so uncoachable. A tin ear deaf to the sound words made on the page and to the unique messages that certain combinations of words could convey.

This was beyond me.

And what was beyond me was “theme.” Theme.

The emphasis on the thematic just did not resonate with me. And that was my problem, I am sure. Surmelian? At that point in my young life, if it wasn’t a product authored by Anheuser-Busch, I wasn’t that interested.

I didn’t worry too much about theme.

Nowadays?

I still don’t worry about theme. And perhaps that has become too obvious on the 25th of each month in this space.

But I do worry about understanding.

And about direct communication.

And about the dearth of words that plagues me when it comes time to write. Of the hundreds of thousands of words available free-of-charge to us all, you would think that lacing a few of them together would be relatively easy.

Especially after years of practice.

Not that the mythological “writer’s block” is a problem with me, mind you. I don’t chin-scratch a lot before committing prose.

And I can crank out ground beef fairly well and consistently.

But sometimes – sometimes – I find it salutary to launch a piece with someone else’s words.

As with this essay.

Quoting a famed or otherwise brilliant writer has many advantages and few downsides. Besides lifting me off the hook for producing a catchy lead sentence, it provides enough throat-clearing leeway to yank a few times on the rope of my own pull-start lawnmower. And those quotation marks carry a thin patina of legitimacy that, one imagines, might extend the halo onto one’s own words.

And so Rick’s words came cascading down on me.

Unbidden, they came to me, and I was able to copy them word-for-word.

Scribbled them verbatim, I did.

Who says there is no muse. There is a muse, and he is Steinberg.

And he set to me the theme of this essay.

Understanding.

So in that vein, let me confess, here and now, something shameful.

I am a graduate in the liberal arts. Journalism.

At first, I was a double-major, in English as well. But that went by-the-by. It went by-the-by when word came down that I must take Milton. So I abandoned English and fled to the Radio, Television, and Motion Picture sequence.

All us journalists are, or were, a kind of writer, no?

When I say “writers,” I mean anyone who would communicate clearly and concisely, with passion and power, with style and substance. Anyone who uses the written word as a vehicle for expression.

I know that the majority of writers on this site are accomplished stylists, published artists, capable expressionists, and able philosophers. In fact, I will vouch for that.

Persons of substance with something to say and beautiful ways to say it.

Unfortunately many people gambol about out there, and they have something to say, but no facility for saying it.

And plenty of people have wonderful facility, but they are bereft of imagination or inclination to spin a yarn deep and fanciful.

And many unsupervised people are about who have nothing to say and nothing to stop them from saying it.

And then there is the middling mass of us, striving to be heard. Wondering if we will ever climb up from these depths of ignorance and doubt.

Some of us are, or were, journalists.

And every journalist worthy of the appellation “scribe” is working on a novel tucked away somewhere.

Journalism? I said shameful. Why is it “shameful?”

Because many journalists just know that it’s not “real” writing. It’s playing at writing. Deadlines, column-inches, and all that.

But I simply jest.

Perhaps I reveal a bit of that envy I have always carried for the folks who seemed to daub words upon the page in elegant strands of diamond-like prose, sentences to enrapture and stories to enchant. Envy or the folks who can sustain a narrative page-after-page, chapter-after-chapter, without exhaustion.

Yeah.

Envy.

Sour grapes.

The simple act of journalism was . . . well, writing about stuff that merely happened seemed to me to be a kind of minor league for writers. Double-A ball, at best.

But journalists do write.

They commit writing. Felonious writing.

Many write well, you probably agree. But I wasn’t one of them when I was a young journalist.

I was the worst kind of journalist . . . a pariah in at the newspaper.

Let me breathe deeply . . . and choke this out.

I was a sportswriter.

Sportswriter.

Collective gasp. The crowd shrinks back. Murmuring in the theater akin to that heard when the burgomaster announced to the shocked audience at the Vienna music festival that Captain Von Trapp would be taking his position in the German Navy as soon as the concert concluded.

As a young sportswriter, I committed every literary sin imaginable.

Let me correct that.

What I actually did so abominably and unspeakably sinful was so far from the fine work of my comrades at Storytellers, that to call these transgressions “literary” would insult legions of English professors, prize-winning novelists, and proctors of prose across the land.

Petitions would circulate.

Rallies organized.

A million-muse march on Washington.

Ah, yes . . . those sins.

Clichés.

A pitcher was never just a “pitcher.”

Sure, you were permitted to use “pitcher” one time.

But from then on, your holy obligation was to find colorful substitutes. Otherwise folks might not think you were a colorful sportswriter or working hard enough for those big bucks we earned.

Sportswriting, you see, was thought different.

And so, the “pitcher” became a “moundsman.”

Or a “hurler.”

Or a “reliever.”

Or a “right-hander.”

Or a “lefty.”

Cross-country runners became “thinclads.”

And on it went . . .

I do not know what it is that grips many people when they begin to write about sports. It’s as if they believe it’s a different kind of journalism.

Now, I’m not referring to some of the wry stuff crafted by Frank Deford or Bill Lyon, or Curry Kirkpatrick when he was at his best. John Feinstein has done good work, too.

I am referring to the vast wasteland of sports pages across this great nation. Rife with clichés and freighted with opinion pieces by phalanxes of too-sharp young J-school grads who promptly chuck Strunk and White into the drawer . . . until they need it for “real” writing.

Sportswriting intoxicates. It unleashes the mediocrity in many of us, so ready to burst forth in all its blandness. It drags us into the stygian depths of formula stories, where athletes always “give 110 percent,” and a “nailbiter” is “going down to the wire,” and a “field general” is tossing one last “Hail Mary” pass. Is it really so far from Orwell’s double-plus-good Newspeak?

But much ink (so many kilobytes?) has already been spilled hashing over the two-minute half-life of sports metaphors, clichés, and assorted jargon.

What concerns me more is what their use demonstrates about the disconnect between what is on the page as a medium for communicating information about an event in an interesting and novel way. In a way that increases understanding.

It demonstrates what I have observed about many writers, particularly younger writers. Many simply do not recognize the link between words and reality, how one portrays the other, enhances the other, shapes the other.

The reciprocal effect that writing can have on the world and that the world invariably has on writing.

They do not understand why what they have written oftentimes does not communicate what they meant to say. That writing to send a message is quite apart from reading to understand the message being sent.

I didn’t understand this completely. And even now, I often forget.

I am thankful that I have forgotten most of those early efforts on the sports page of a newspaper I will not name.

Suffice to say that I was not truly clear on how words worked on the page. And I think that many would-be writers today lack a fundamental understanding of how words work.

Do I know how they work? Have I unlocked that mystery?

Suffice to say that I am aware that it is a tremendous problem that I must constantly strive to surmount. And thus I work for greater understanding of the language and how it is wielded by those I would most like to emulate.

Emulate, of course, in a way that achieves the effects that I see them achieve, but in my own way and with my own self-conscious ruffles and flourishes.

It’s a journey. A long and tortuous journey, I can say.

But a wonderful journey filled with sweat and frustration and the occasional glimmer of hope when a phrase clicks into place seamlessly and perfectly or a metaphor chimes genuinely fresh.

Rare moments of triumph.

And that is my theme, I suppose. To savor the journey and the struggle to become what one is not. And along the way, to communicate and to have one’s writing be understood.

Not so ambitious a theme, but one that is essential. And worthy, I think.

by Jeffrey Thomas

Horror/SF author Jeffrey Thomas was kind enough to make time in his busy schedule to chat with me about his life and views as a writer. Looking untanned and ill-rested, Thomas greeted me in the mirror of his bathroom, while brewing a cup of ginger tea, burning a stick of incense, and playing a CD of Natacha Atlas, all presumably in an effort to impress me with his coolness. I asked Thomas about some of his projects past, present, and future, and how he manages to juggle working on his books, a day job, and writing scintillating if self-indulgent essays.

ME: Thanks for talking to yourself today.
JT: (Gazing at his reflection warily.) Sure.
ME: Of course, other writers have probably used this witty self-interviewing gimmick before you…
JT: (Starting to move toward kitchen) Okay, look, I didn’t come to the bathroom for this…
ME: Wait, please – okay, we’ll get right into the questions. On the topic of cliches, a large portion of your body of work takes place in your milieu of Punktown, but hasn’t that sort of world been done before? A future mega-city, flying cars? I mean, from THE JETSONS to BLADE RUNNER…
JT: Look, it isn’t really about the flying cars, is it? Whether I’m writing about a futuristic society, or a serial killer, or working on the thousandth zombie novel this year (and it’s January), it’s about what you (er, I) bring to it of yourself. Your own signature, idiosyncracies, eccentricities, obsessions, style, personality; the smell of the incense you were burning as you wrote, the lingering aroma of your ginger tea, the echo of the songs you were playing. Your DNA should be wired right into the words. Otherwise, instead of giving birth to a baby, you’ve manufactured an android that might walk and talk like a book but has no memorable features and nothing in its soul.
ME: Sort of like the replicants in BLADE RUNNER, which you seem so influenced by, hmm? (Knowing, accusatory smirk.)
JT: Look, I wrote my first Punktown story two years before that movie came out.
ME: Dick’s book was out long before that.
JT: I didn’t read it until after I saw the movie! Jeesh! I hate being accused of stealing ideas from other sources. At Amazon.com, my original A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET novel THE DREAM DEALERS has been accused of ripping off the movies BATMAN FOREVER and STRANGE DAYS, neither of which I’ve seen. At various times, in various interviews, it’s been hinted that I’ve emulated authors like Thomas Ligotti and Michael Marshall Smith, who I hadn’t even read at the time (but have greatly enjoyed since). It goes back to the previous words about striving for originality. Not only do readers and reviewers instinctively work to draw comparisons between your fiction and the stuff they’ve encountered before, but writers do this ourselves throughout the process. Even before we begin. I want to write a vampire story with the tone of SALEM’S LOT. I want to write something incorporating Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. I want to do a thriller in the vein of Thomas Harris. But whether you go into it mimicking the voices and mannerisms of the stories you’ve enjoyed, or you make the story so much your own that the spark of inspiration becomes drowned out in your own fire, is the critical difference between original creation and factory mass production.
ME: Boy, you don’t shy from mixed metaphors, huh? “Drowned out in fire?” Anyway, I think I see my point. For instance, what you’re saying has been said before, ad nauseam, but you’re saying it in your own way, however tortured your prose might be. Okay, next question, Mr. Originality…
JT: I swear, I’ll walk right now if you don’t…
ME: Hey, without me to take the wind out of your sails once in a while you’d sail your boat right off the edge of the ego map.
JT: (Under his breath) Talk about tortured prose.
ME: You write novels, short stories, blog entries, plus you hold a third-shift job, are father to a teenager, and a husband. How does a writer juggle these aspects of his/her/my life? Are the most productive writers overage fan boys who don’t have a girlfriend and live in their mom’s basement and don’t have a life so they don’t have anything better to do with their time besides writing more misogynistic slasher novels and masturbating, while you’re sleepwalking through your pharmaceutical manufacturing job at night and trying to do something all literary and shit in the scant few hours you have to yourself?
JT: Jeesh, where did that come from?
ME: You tell me.
JT: Well, I think all serious writers find that conflict to be their primary nemesis (even before rejection slips, overzealous editors, skimpy advances, nonexistent royalties, etc.). If writing is just a hobby to you, then you squeeze it in where you can. But if you’re serious, you have to make the time, even if you crowbar it into your day. Huh – that’s easy for me to say, but not always for me to accomplish. I can’t stick to a writing regimen, though I know some writers do, working for such and such an amount of time every day. For me, it depends on errands I have to do, practical matters I have to attend to, email correspondence with friends and family and editors, deadlines for blog entries, and so on and so on. I do my best to crowbar open some time, but sometimes I’m just too tired, man, or the muse simply isn’t there for me. Hello? Hel-lo?
ME: Huh? Say something?
JT: Sigh. Anyway, I wish I could live off my writing (I don’t ask for a private jet, just to make enough money to pay my bills!), so I begrudge my blue collar job, but I don’t begrudge the time spent with my son or wife, of course. In fact, I see it the other way – I’ve often felt guilty about all the time I’ve spent writing. How many more books could I have read to my son instead of writing books that sometimes not too many people may have read? Yes, I need to nurture and nourish myself, and writing does this for me, but has the sacrifice been worth it? Would I have been a better family man if I had taken a second job or poured my energy into pursuing one well-paying job, instead of squeezing what little money I could from writing fiction? Just how selfish should I allow myself to be? How much should I sacrifice of one or the other of me – the writer me, and the husband/father me?
ME: Wow, how many me’s are you? Hey, let’s divert the subject a bit before you get all weepy on me with that self-loathing of yours.
JT: I don’t loathe myself.
ME: Well, I do. Anyway, you mention your wife, and you’re always quick to point out that she’s Vietnamese. In your blogs, message boards, emails, etc., you bring up your travels to Viet Nam at the drop of a non la (Vietnamese straw hat). What’s up with that? Are you trying to show off what a lovely, lovely lady we’re married to?
JT: Hey, hands off my wife, Jackson.
ME: Easy, man, easy. Really, though – are you showing off about how worldly you are? The super-interesting writer boasting to all us folks in Smallville about your exotic life?
JT: Well, first off, you do have to promote yourself as a writer. I’ve found that some publishers will put your book out and that’s pretty much the extent of it. No advertizing, no review copies, no promotion; makes you kind of wonder why they even bother. Of course, other publishers are quite the opposite! I’m not knocking all publishers, or even any publisher, since I’m grateful for all of my books whether they’ve sold well or moderately (I don’t want to have to find that second job, you know). Still, you have to promote yourself by any means, even if it gets a bit obvious and obnoxious.
ME: Like this interview?
JT: Precisely. You have to make your presence known, get some notice, on blogs, message boards, Myspace, conventions, whatever. If trying to come across as interesting makes people interested in reading my books, great! But I don’t mean to make things sound so calculating. It has more to do with my personality, the trait that makes me a writer: the need to communicate my enthusiasm to people, to make them share in the things that excite me, so that we share in the experience. Babbling on about something that has stimulated me – like visits to a foreign land, marrying a person of another race and culture, being the father of a fascinating and delightful autistic child – is just my way of expressing myself, very much the same thing as when I say to a reader, “Hey, let me tell you about this crazy place I’ve invented called Punktown!”
ME: Do these true life experiences find their way into your fiction, or are you too busy hanging around on message boards to actually work on a story now and then?
JT: Yeah, the irony is that the promotion effort does take away from the actual creative time. But yes, of course my true life experiences find their way into my stories. And yet, I still haven’t written a story about an autistic child, and I’ve set a short story or two in Viet Nam but haven’t been able to devise a Viet Nam novel yet. I guess it’s just the way my mind digests the world; I’m a fiction, not a nonfiction, writer. Things get warped into distorted shapes. I’ve written about special children, but made them misunderstood monsters or mutants to heighten the pathos or to make the reader more unsettled and challenged, or just because I like monsters and mutants. I’ve written about men falling in love with alien women, demons – again, heightening for dramatic effect the experience of being involved with a woman of a very different culture. And my impressions of Viet Nam are finding their way into the science fiction novel I’m working on right now. Well, that’s me. It returns us yet again to what I said at first about our idiosyncracies, our private obsessions, the things that make my fantastical city different from another fantastical city. It isn’t the flying car so much as the guy in the flying car; where he’s going, and why.
ME: Zzz.
JT: I just can’t rely on this muse of mine.
ME: Huh? What are you talking about? You couldn’t come up with a subject for this essay and look how I bailed you out!
JT: Do you think the interview bit distracted them from the regurgitated platitudes?
ME: Aw, who cares. While we’re in the bathroom, let’s finish our business and get back to our real writing.
JT: Now you’re talking…
ME: Yeah. To myself.
JT: Well, that’s what it’s all about, right? You write for yourself, as if speaking into your own ear, and if someone else listens in and likes it, then…
ME: I thought we were finished. Any final thoughts?
JT: Buy DEADSTOCK, my new SF/horror/Punktown novel coming out in March.
ME: Subtlety is your bailiwick.
JT: And modesty is yours.
ME: Thanks. And thanks again for taking time out from your busy schedule to participate in this monologue.
JT: I’m entirely welcome.

By
Richard Steinberg

“Al dra ‘n bobbejaan ‘n goue ring, bly hy nog ‘n lelike ding,” C.J. Langenhoven

How true that is.

Words for every writer, serious about their craft, to engrave on their frontal lobes, emblazon on the hearts, print out and carry around in their pockets. Perhaps even one of the “three great truths” to any writer’s being. Maybe the most important of the three.

In our work, when it properly reflects the essence of the above quotation, it becomes clear that . . .

What?

I don’t . . .

I don’t understand you.

Oh! You mean you don’t read Afrikaans?

Huh.

How can you NOT understand it? It’s one of the most wonderfully written things I’ve ever come across!

But then, wonderful writing can’t make up for an inability to communicate something, can it?

I’m talking about the personal regret Robert Louis Stevenson felt when Edward Hyde was perceived as the hideous freak and Henry Jekyll the pure at heart victim.

What Curt Siodmak experienced when The Wolfman was seen as the monster doomed to “B” remakes opposite Maria Ouspenskaya.

The pain of Bram Stoker when his Count was vilified, rather than Victorian morality.

Don’t get me wrong, there are smart readers and stupid readers – none of the latter viewing this website, of course – those that get it and those who couldn’t get it if it was force fed them in a world with no distractions. Nothing we can do about that.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with beautiful strings of words laced together in a necklace of flawless prose that signifies absolutely nothing.

But there is nothing right with it either.

And the truth is, no matter our facility, our talent, our gift(s), or our experience, if the reader doesn’t get it, the blame belongs only on our shoulders.

The first responsibility of the writer is to be understood. After that comes entertaining, influencing, teaching. But none of that is possible without understanding coming first.

I’m not arguing for “writing down” to our readers, and certainly not for assuming that our readers are so dumb we can only write to the level of a Me & The Chimp episode. Far from it! I’m arguing that we respect our readers enough to take personal responsibility for communicating our message to our audience.

I was at a Book Show several years back, sitting in the green room waiting to take my place at one of the autograph stalls, and got into a conversation with a major author of “important” books who was always well reviewed by the most “edgy” reviewers. This individual was lauded, and promoted – and most importantly to me at the time – highly paid.

Work that I had read, but didn’t have a clue what the books were about.

This writer wrote with some of the finest licks I’ve ever seen. I mean profoundly moving imagery, stunning narrative, compelling dialogue. And images, well . . . I hope one day to create images as vivid. But, in the end, the books left me essentially empty; as I didn’t understand what the message was, barely understood the story, and hadn’t a clue as to the purpose of those 400+ pages I’d consumed.

And as the author and I stood to take our places, they turned to me and said: “It’s not important that you understand. It’s only important that I understand.”

Wow! Cool! I mean think of the poetry of . . . wait . . . uh . . . what was that again?

Bullshit, is what it’s called.

I’m not arguing for the lessening of majesty. I could’ve started The Gemini Man with the words: “Piatigorsk was a really depressing place.” Instead I chose to write: “The Rainbow never made it to Piatigorsk.” I love well put together words almost as much, if not more, than I love well put together women!

Yeah, I need to get out more; I know.

But don’t l