Storytellersunplugged

Steve:

On various boards lately I’ve been reading discussions concerning “extreme horror,” use of explicit and graphic detail, whether writers are out to “shock” the reader (and if that is good or bad). 

Melanie:

I think the answer to that has to do with why they’re out to shock the reader.  If it’s just for grins, the way a twelve-year-old might tell a scatological joke in earshot of adults, then I think it’s a silly waste of everybody’s time and of literal or figurative trees.  If, however, the intent is to shock the reader into an out-of-the-ordinary perspective–think Humbert Humbert–then that seems to me a perfectly valid thing to do.

Steve:

I know there are writers out there interested in topping each other in the degree of explicit detail, or in the most bizarre use of over-the-top content.  For me this has never seemed to have much to do with fiction, but was more like some sort of extracurricular game.  It’s a peculiar game in that the results are often opposite to what we might expect—the over-the-top-details present us with a less-, rather than more-, realistic picture of the event portrayed, often with near-comic effects.  The details push us away rather than bring us closer to some understanding.

But I suspect there are actually fewer writers out there trying to top each other in shocks than most of us might believe.  Most writers I talk to genuinely want to move the reader while achieving some sort of transcending realism in their descriptions.  If we think they’re just trying to shock us maybe it’s because they haven’t yet achieved the skills and perspective necessary to make that kind of story work.

Melanie:

It’s possible, though, that even art created for no other purpose than to play the game I-can-be-more-shocking-than-you could have the effect, almost despite the creator, of opening perspectives.  If we can say that the viewer, reader, listener is as much a participant in the creative process as the creator, then maybe it doesn’t matter so much what the intention of the creator was.  And maybe we can never really know, anyway.

Steve:

Now and then over the years I’ve been accused of just trying to shock, or disgust, with a particular story (although I can honestly say that’s never been my goal).  And although I personally am rather squeamish, I’ve written work occasionally which I’ve found disturbing both to create and to read afterwards, and have hoped readers have been perceptive enough not to confuse the protagonist’s view of the world and humanity with my own. 

Melanie:

Ah, yes, the old “You’re such a nice person, how can you write stuff like that?” When we were adopting our kids, we held our breaths that the social workers wouldn’t read some of our work and decide we weren’t fit to be parents.  Good thing the internet wasn’t so extensive back in those days, or they might have easily come across my stories about child abuse from the point of view of the perpetrator, say, or yours about children eating their parents.

Steve:

Yeah, I would have hated to explain that story to a social worker who had the power to say yea or nay to our adopting our kids.  I have to say I rarely think in terms of taboos, or of crossing the line of good taste.  It’s not that I don’t think those issues are worthy of discussion–it’s simply that they aren’t part of my creative process. They aren’t part of my relationship with my fiction, so they don’t appear on my radar. 

Melanie:

It’s hard for me to put the word “taboo” in the same conceptualization as “art.”  Are there really aspects of human experience that artists shouldn’t be allowed to explore?  I don’t much like images of eviscerated entrails, for instance, or movies where everybody’s awful to each other for no particular reason, or misogynistic hip hop.  Ever since I read The Diary of Anne Frank when I was thirteen, the age Anne was when she died, fictional and non-fictional accounts of Nazis and concentration camps have filled me with such primal horror that I can’t allow them in, no matter how beautifully written or ultimately uplifting they are.  But all those things and anything else I can think of have a place in the artistic canon.

Steve:   

I have always felt driven to write about those things which bother me, which–in their extreme forms–fill me with dread.  In the context of horror fiction, those are the themes about which I feel I have something interesting to say.  These aren’t the themes I necessarily enjoy reading about–more than likely, these will be themes which make me uncomfortable to even think about.  So although writing these kinds of stories can be invigorating, and interesting and challenging technically, the process of writing them isn’t particularly pleasant.  In fact, oftentimes the process is decidedly unpleasant, and draining, and costly personally to the point I feel I need an immediate antidote afterwards–time spent with Melanie, with children and grandchildren, a good comedy at the movies, etc.  I joke around a lot at home–I have to.  And the next story I write is likely to be something a bit less self threatening. 

Melanie:

The impulse to write about disturbing things for me centers around character.  In my book Revenant, one of the primary viewpoint characters is a pedophile.  He truly does love the little sister he has been sexually molesting for years; it’s a perverted, harmful love, but he feels it as love.  I tried to write from deep inside his head and heart in an attempt to understand someone I, tragically, knew. 

Steve:

I don’t read very much of my fiction after it’s been published.  Some of that is because I’m rarely satisfied.  But more often it has to do with the fact that I don’t want to visit that experience again. I published my story “An Ending” in one of John Pelan’s DARKSIDE anthologies.  The content of that story probably appalled me more than it did the readers who felt appalled in the reading of it.  But it was inspired by an appalling reality faced by some people at the end of their lives.  In order to fully capture the psychological and emotional resonance I was feeling when contemplating this reality I felt I had to go as far as I did.

I’m primarily known for my relatively quiet fiction.  This is in large part because I find it endlessly fascinating to explore the subtle ways a character’s consciousness can insinuate itself into a setting and a storyline, the way a protagonist can “haunt” both his/her environment and the other characters.  But even in this kind of story a great deal of anxiety is generated, and in the end I feel a need to carefully extricate myself from the story I’ve created.

I’ve written stories touching on a few of publishing’s supposed taboos (pedophilia, necrophilia, etc.), although not very often, and usually with just a few carefully-chosen details to suggest the magnitude of the horrible thing which is occurring.  There is a great deal of truth in the argument opponents of graphic fictional content have made that if you are too explicit your audience is less able to participate imaginatively in the reading experience.  At the same time, I think there are occasions when you have to use a few explicit details in order to adequately capture the nature of some particularly horrific event.  Sometimes not using these details is to sanitize to the point of distortion, and to lie about the true nature of an event, rendering it less than convincing or even nonsensical. 

Melanie:

One of the reasons I wrote Black River was to break another taboo, though I think this one is usually cast as a creative no-no rather than a prohibition of the subject.  That’s the experience of acute grief.  Conventionally, grief is suggested by the carefully-chosen detail, the resonant image followed by the cutaway, the words not said and the tears suggested rather than shown.  That isn’t how acute grief works in real life.  It goes on and on, and it’s messy.  In that book, I set myself the creative challenge of staying head-on with the protagonist’s messy, seemingly endless grief for as long as she needed me to, showing it rather than suggesting it. 

Our agent, Robert Fleck, has received responses that surprised me to a book Janet Berliner and I wrote collaboratively.  Called What You Remember I Did, it’s about a woman who may or may not have been sexually molested by her mother; now the mother is old and increasingly confused, and the daughter believes she might be recovering repressed memories.  We’re looking at the whole idea of repressed/recovered memory, and to do that we of course had to show explicit memories (or “memories,” depending on whether you think recovered memories are therapeutically valid or utter hogwash).  Bob reports that several editors have rejected the book because they “don’t do sex abuse of a child.”   I’ve been quite taken aback.  It doesn’t seem quite the same thing as “we don’t do historical novels” or “we don’t do novels translated from Swahili.”

Steve:

The task of fiction, I think, is to provide a number of different lenses and points of view so that we can see the world more completely.  Sometimes we need these additional lenses in order to see the full truth of a thing. I believe that sometimes real-life events are of such significance they become part of our spiritual and psychological selves.  I think an event as massive as the Holocaust, for example, is difficult to fully comprehend using only the lens of historical writing. I think it requires the additional perspectives fiction can provide–which would make a fiction narrated from a Nazi’s POV, for example, more than legitimate subject matter.

That doesn’t mean it’s going to fit everyone’s comfort level, or that everyone’s going to want to read that sort of material on a steady basis.  As I mentioned earlier, a portion of my own fiction is beyond my own, personal comfort level.  I have a particular hypersensitivity with issues affecting children–not just physically hurting them, or putting them in danger, but with all the supposedly normal things said or done to them which stifle their imaginations, stymie their self-worth, and crush their spirits.  And yet I write and publish stories about that sort of thing all the time, because even after all these years I’m struggling to achieve a kind of understanding of it.

The last couple of years I’ve been working on some book projects I started in the early eighties but then abandoned.  One of these abandoned projects is UBO, a science fictional horror tale about human violence.  I think that’s one of the big, important subjects for a writer to tackle.  Race is another one, particularly for American writers I think, but so far I haven’t found anything particularly useful inside myself to bring to that subject.

UBO is structured around a series of experiments (conducted by aliens? future humans? it gets complicated) in which our protagonist is forced to live within the simulated consciousnesses of Jack the Ripper, Adolf Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, etc.  It’s not a pleasant process researching this material and turning it into fiction (which is no doubt one reason I’ve abandoned it so many times).  The work involved has been massive.  But next year I plan to tackle it yet again. 

Melanie:

We always pass our work back and forth.  We’ve always been each other’s first editor.  But I probably can’t read this one.  That’s very disturbing to me.