Storytellersunplugged

(Quick note from the wings…Elizabeth Massie sends greetings from the land of overwhelming deadlines, down there by that Myth Pool. She’ll be back next month, entertaining as ever. In the meantime, here is a special extra bite out of Brian Knight’s Mind - DNW)

By Brian Knight

Be silent in that solitude
Which is not loneliness, for then
The Spirits of the dead who stood
In life before thee are again
In death around thee, and their will
Shall overshadow thee: be still.
- Edgar Allan Poe, Spirits of the Dead

I’m going to admit to something right here and now, something I’ve never admitted (at least not while sober) in my life; not to my mother, my wife, my friends, or, in my very brief religious period, my pastor.

There are people living in my head. Men, women, and children. A whole fucking legion of them, and they speak to me almost constantly. Most of them are too uninteresting to hold my attention for long, or only speak to me a couple of times before moving along to whatever purgatory awaits uninteresting figments. Some, however, are very persistent. They camp out at the threshold of my consciousness and hold court with each other, telling their stories to each other within earshot of an unwitting eavesdropper.

They know I’m here, of course, but like the vampires or demons in old folk stories, they will not, or cannot, leave the shadows and enter the place in my mind where I live my daily life, my home, unless I invite them.

Sometimes, because of who I am and what I do, I will invite them in. Sometimes they ignore me, or flee my invite never to return. Sometimes they come to me with a smile and say, “It’s about damn time.”

One of them was a WW2 era German Pilot involved in strange and horrific Black Ops missions. One is a sick old man haunted by the ghost of his long dead first love, which has taken up residence in an old Ford Falcon. There is a whole gaggle of teenage girls, some of whom have already made themselves comfortable in my head and some who are still waiting in the wings for their time to join the party. They like to tell me stories about a dangers they’ve faced, monsters they’ve fought, and magic they’ve done.

The latter have already told me two of their stories, and they were good. Unlike most of the people living in my head, those girls have not move along once our business was finished. They wait still, and rather impatiently, for another turn to take over my brain.

Some, sadly, die before their stories are finished, and instead of moving from the questionable gray matter between my ears to the page of a novel, novella, or short story, they go to the bone yard.

Their unfinished tales go into a folder reserved for failed stories, and then I forget about them.

Sometimes, however, the dead, even if they were never really real to begin with, do not rest in peace. Sometimes they come back, and having already been invited once before, shove everyone else aside and begin talking again. Sometimes they continue their old, dead story where they left off, but most often they have something completely new to say.

For me, as a writer, this presents a very uncomfortable choice. Do I piss off my other invited guests by shushing them so I can hear my ghost, or do I ignore it until it goes away again?

It depends on the liveliness of the particular ghost, and how interesting its story is, but one thing I have noticed in retrospect is that some of my best stories were once ghosts, until that is, I put them on paper and gave them the energy they needed to live again.

As Stephen King once wrote, sometimes the dead speak, and boy howdy, can they tell a good story.

—Brian Knight