I’m working on a piece for a publisher who has a particular liking for something I wrote in the past. He asked me specifically to try and recapture what I did in that first piece…not the story itself, or the characters, but the style - and it set me on a short quest.
The older piece was my novella, written for Cemetery Dance years ago, titled “Roll Them Bones.” In that work I was asked to emulate the styles of several authors popular at the time, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Ray Bradbury. One problem with this is that none of the three of them has a similar style to the other two. What I gathered from this fact was that I needed to find a point of similarity - something glaring that I was missing in focusing too tightly on the authors. I think I found it.
What I determined that the publisher was after was more of a “formula”. He wanted a group of friends coming back together after long absence to some place from their past to fight or finish some evil they’d faced before. In essence, that was what I did in “Roll Them Bones.” As it turns out, that was only one thing I did.
My new quest is different. This time it’s myself I’m seeking - something I did in my writing that worked very well for someone. I read the story again. Then I made a short list of other stories similar in style, and found a shocking truth (to me). Those are my most critically acclaimed stories. Those are the ones the largest number and diversity of readers found memorable. One was “The Call of Farther Shores,” which was picked up for 2005: Year’s Best Horror.
The quality that I found in the stories in question is the topic of today’s essay. The topic? My past. All of these stories have at least one setting, or one incident, that is drawn directly from the important memories of my past. The Call of Farther Shores takes place in a barber shop created from that of my step father and the one my grandfather took me to as a child. In that same story, the description of the parent’s bedroom is a description of my own parents bedroom. In Roll Them Bones I brought to life a combination of my childhood home at Charleston Lake, in Illinois and my grandfather’s home town of Flora, Illinois.
The thing is, there are serious depths to the memories, details, and impressions I have saved over the years and when I took off the dusty sheets and dug in deeper, I was able to transfer some of that to the words. In other words I wrote in a place I’d been before, albeit modified, and it lent the prose a strength and conviction it might not have had otherwise.
So now I’m writing “Hickory Nuts and Bones.” I remember very clearly walking down the railroad tracks with my grandfather when I was a child. It was hard to walk - you either walked on the railroad ties, spaced just far enough apart to risk a sprained ankle at ever step, or you worked your ass off trying to slog through gravel made of giant broken bits of cinder. There were the skeletal remnants of creatures the train had struck over the years. There were odd, sometimes very old bits of debris.
We used to go down the tracks to the persimmon trees - it was the one time anywhere in my life I got persimmons, warm and pulpy - sometimes bitter. We also went back to groves of hickory nut and walnut trees my grandfather knew. They were magical times, usually followed by a stop at the East End Cafe, where they had an old Minah bird that talked, ice cream sundaes, and cream in those little glass creamers - I used to drink it straight.
Those are the times I’m after in this story, and there’s a very different feel to such writing…a sense of dropping back into another world. I hope I find it again…it feels like I’m close. I think it’s important, and I suggest it to anyone as a starting place. Find a memory a place, or a time, that you remember, but when you think about it it feels surreal - as if the memory detaches you from the world. Build around it and see what comes to you…if it works, let me know.
I’m off down the tracks in search of Hickory Nuts and Bones…I’ll let you know what I find.
–DNW
8 Comments, Comment or Ping
Gerard Houarner
Yes, good source of inspiration, especially when you can get at the emotional roots of the memory. No need to get all Remembrance of Things Past, of course. Obviously it’s worked out well for you — congrats on writing stories that stay with readers and publishers!
Mar 1st, 2008
Thomas Sullivan
How very valuable! This is the kind of (self)-knowledge you can only glean over time, but suspecting it at the start of a career can act as a proactive guideline. I think I’m able to confirm a trend in my own writing toward that, Davey — maybe with a little extension. I like to use a real life model for settings (and people). As you say, the authenticity comes through in telling details that are otherwise hard to manufacture. There are exceptions, though, and I’ve sometimes had a reaction that found my creations more real than the bizarre truths I was describing. Life sometimes IS stranger than fiction, and that can become an obstacle in the telling. Writing from a model has been the focus of a lot of my method and led me to really examine things closely, because then you can take the model apart or morph it or turn the mirrors a quarter-degree or otherwise to create infinite variations. I’m reminded of Flamingo Frank Wydra’s wife, Karen, who is a master painter. She sometimes sets up a simple model and simply stares at for hours and hours over a period of a month or more until she knows it well enough to paint with bigger than life insight into light and shadow and context and essence. That’s the way I want to approach everything I use, be it people or settings or events. The problem then becomes editing rather than just recording or inventing. Maybe it’s as simple as “write the things you know,” only the trick is in how to become acquainted with them. Ah, yes…another excuse to research! I do love examining the world and beyond.
– Sully
Mar 1st, 2008
Janet Berliner
Happy hunting. –Janet
Mar 1st, 2008
Dave Wilson
Thanks Gerard, and yeah, the emotional roots are what grow the best persimmons (:
Sully, that’s interesting about Frank’s wife. When I was working on the stories for the upcoming book “Lost and Found” - all based on art by Lisa Snelling, I used to take the images, make them computer wallpaper -print them and hang them on the wall, and try to find the things that even the artist might not know she’d put in there…
Janet, it’s going pretty well so far…
-D
Mar 1st, 2008
eric wilson
Dave, I like your direction with this. One thing left unanswered, though (or maybe I missed it), is the shared trait between King, Koontz, and Bradbury. Did you ever figure what that was? Do you believe delving into your own past is the same trait? Just curious. I like all three of those writers, but for very different reasons.
Mar 2nd, 2008
Dave Wilson
Eric, I thought I covered that, but probably I glossed it over in the quest for nuts and bones and such.
What the original publisher was asking for wasn’t a stylistic similarity, but a formula - the Scooby gang on the quest against the big bad - small town, big evil, group of heroes - resolution. One of my favorite books of all time is “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” and that was part of the feel I went for.
The thing I found about myself was the strength in those very deep past memories…
Dave
Mar 2nd, 2008
Elizabeth Massie
Dave, hope you find it. I’m betting you do. I love the stories in which I find myself digging back, digging deep, revisiting and embracing those powerful sensations and memories from a time long ago. It is me I seek, and the universal “me” that, regardless of specific experiences, we all share.
Mar 3rd, 2008
Dave Wilson
Beth, if this makes any sense…I think I “found it” but I don’t yet know what “it” is. I’m working through the story - writing with a vague uneasy premonition of darkness to come…but I don’t clearly see (yet) which of the memories will step forward and pull the lever that separates me from the main track and diverges in a yellow wood. It’s coming…something wicked…
Mar 3rd, 2008
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