Storytellersunplugged

If I do this right, this post will be exactly 500 words (not counting the title). Why? Because it shouldn’t take more than that to discuss (not “talk about”) flash fiction, the class of stories shorter than X words (where X could be 1000, 500, 250…). For example:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

This six-word “story,” penned by Ernest Hemingway, never a garrulous writer to begin with, is often cited as the ne plus ultra of flash fiction. Despite its brevity, it packs a fearsome wallop. Does it have a protagonist? Sure—the unseen parents. Is there conflict? The worst kind. Resolution? Ah, yes, and a poignant one at that.

Flash stories often resemble prose poems. Not many writers go to Hemingway-esque extremes (but here are some.) It’s challenging enough to create a beginning, middle and end in a few hundred words, let alone just a few.  

I regard writing flash stories as another way of improving my craft and honing my word choice acumen. Normally, I inspect every sentence to see if it’s necessary. With flash fiction, I scrutinize every word. Is there one that means the same as these two? My writing becomes more precise and the ruthless editing process is akin to a fire sale: almost everything must go. Not many story ideas are well served by such a confined space. It needs to be a small, punchy story, usually told in a single scene with very few characters.

Years ago, I distilled a 3000-word story to a 500-word flash version. I’m not sure it was an entirely successful exercise, but it made me think differently about narrative and dialog. How can I represent things without actually saying them? What’s the best way to draw readers into the creative process? Didn’t those six words above activate your mind when you read them? Tell me you didn’t see the shoes, white, pristine and forlorn, laces neatly tied in bows. Were they on a mantelpiece like a souvenir, or in a box in the closet like a family secret? Did you, however briefly, consider a scenario that explained what happened to the baby?

When there is a hard upper limit on word count, the way I work changes. I write a bit, take stock of where I am, and then unwrite as much as possible to provide breathing room. I often choose present tense because it requires fewer words as a rule. Dialog becomes terser than noir. Only the very best adjectives survive, and precious few adverbs do. Verbs sizzle.

Flash stories work especially well in online publications. They occupy only a few screen pages and require little scrolling. They can be read, well, in the time it took you to read this essay. Like poems, they conjure up vivid imagery and fully engage the reader’s imagination.

As creative exercises, they make writers more aware of language, all its nuances and shades and textures, and of the impact of every written word. That’s pure poetry, in my opinion.

I think it was the DragonBar that made me remember an early lesson in my writing career.  And that happened because the carp ‘n’ tuna syndrome that beset my wrists after too many 18-hour marathons at the keyboard eventually led me to try voice activation software.  Dragon NaturallySpeaking with its DragonBar is arguably the leader in that field.  I had tried using it in the late 90s to write a book for a celebrity, but the error rate just killed me when it came time to transcribe our interviews.  The celeb’s voice was crystal clear, while mine sounded like a cat coughing up hairballs underwater.  And guess what?  Dragon just wrote “their balls” for “hairballs,” so my enunciation is still perilous at best.  I think I learned speaking from Demosthenes, and no one ever told me to take the pebbles out of my mouth.  At any rate, the new version of Dragon is more mumble-friendly and so intuitive that you can talk in your sleep and come up with coherent confessions by morning.  The mumble-friendly is a gas, but I can do without the intuitive aspect, which is actually a bit of a pain because of the way I think and speak.  That’s because the intuition is based on normal patterns of sane people, and I’m not…um – well, let’s just say that if you think unorthodox thoughts or constantly use language in inventive ways, Dragon won’t be able to zero in on you. 

So, there is this DragonBar on my screen.  I mean doesn’t the name alone set off pinwheels and sparklers in your imagination?  DragonBar! – can’t you just picture a lizard lounge with fire-breathing serpents warming their rum toddies by blowing on ‘em?  And there’s this little yellow dialog box that plays Simon Says with your every breath and grunt (clear your throat and it’s liable to “spit out” the Gettysburg address).  The thing spangles with color cues in response to your voice — a kind of synesthesia — that make you feel that your words are refracting light like bits of broken glass in the bottom of a kaleidoscope.  And the mystical crossing between sound and visual representation is unpredictable.  You never know what zaniness will pop up next, because what’s inside the box is sometimes outside the box, if you get my meaning.  Hmmm.  Maybe I’m looking in a mirror.

But it’s also inspiring, intriguing, rich in possibilities, thought-provoking, and a catalyst for newness and change.  It unblocks me, unlocks me — lets me develop and distill those truths I need to find and express in order to be me.  I can’t do that by following rutted footprints and being the same as everyone else.  Every day (and every experience) is fresh and new if you can find the words and wisdom with which to capture it.  To put it conversely, DragonBar does not go with the herd.  It goes beyond what you would expect from passive people, places and things.  It travels to terra incognita (land of my birth!).  There be DragonBars!  It does so by unleashing little imperfections in what you feed it; and that’s what reminded me of the early lesson in my writing career.

Before I became stupid, I knew a great many things.  I had a phenomenal memory for facts and could explain any process.  Never mind that most of those explanations were wrong; when I looked at a wall it dissolved into molecules and quantum paradigms.  I have written elsewhere in this blog about converting my mind’s warehouse space for facts to storage space for patterns [SU 2007 03-16 “MAMAS, DON’T LET YOUR BABIES GROW UP TO BE WRITERS…” ].  I did this because patterns are more valuable.  I can always look up facts, but patterns have to be recognized and understood.  At least, I think I did this conversion of my mind’s limited storage space.  But since that’s a fact, I may have forgotten it (I forget).  Before that, remembering facts was a kind of perfection.  And it showed in my writing. 

I wrote with an airless clarity that was logical and absolute.  I think a certain kind of beginner writer does this to a fault.  Usually they are male.  Usually they write about “things and events” or “ideas,” as opposed to incorporating “emotions.”  I’ve covered all three of those elements in a five-part series here on StorytellersUnplugged, which is central to my writing philosophy.  What the hell, here are the links: [SU 2006 04-16 SPIDERS AND SPUDS     SU 2006 05-16 HORNED OWLS & OTHER HORNY BEASTS     SU 2006 06-16 NAME THE BABY    SU 2006 07-16 MARMADUKE (ER…???) GOES TO COLLEGE, or WET, NAKED & SCREAMING     SU 2006 08-16 TIME TO JUMP THE SHARK ]. 

The change in my writing did not come from a sudden epiphany anymore than the change in what I stored in my brain was instantaneous.  It was (and still is) a gradual trade-out of inventory.  I learn much more about life and people by focusing on patterns than I ever learned from facts.  And patterns are seldom pure and exact.  They tend to be a kind of consensus of observation, and they cut to the heart of an issue, and they reveal private truth like…uh, nobody’s business.  They separate the façades we all wear from the underlying and meaningful realities that govern who we really are.

Anyway, writing with perfect knowledge of facts can get in the way of showing the patterns of life.  To know everything is to be unreal.  You can even intimidate readers, or make them uncomfortable, by bombarding them with too much in-depth certainty.  Most of all, you are very likely to be rejected by mature readers as phony if all your prose is cocksure factual and exact.  On the other hand, the messy contradictions that show the humanity of characters (and even of the third person POV of the author) are more consistent with inexactness.  It wasn’t until I learned to use qualifier words and relative modifiers that I felt my characters coming to life.  Beware of characters you think you know inside and out.  You may have dressed them in caricature.  Let them go where you cannot.  Let them lead you from page to page.  Are you never going to change, be wrong or contradictory?  If the answer is no, then why create fully formed manikins whose thoughts and utterances are exact?  Sure your characters can have their unchanging bedrock, but all the more reason to show the reader their vagueness and uncertainty in the little things they think and do on the surface.  Let your characters grow and surprise you.

And here’s the key: apply some of that same inexactness to the narrator, even if it’s third person omniscient.  Because even that unobtrusive narrator is a kind of implied character POV, capable of stepping away from every other character and observing, describing, philosophizing, analyzing and so on.  You have the reader by the hand, and they must trust you.  So think of yourself as needing to come across as the real and imperfect person you are and not God.  Of course, if you are God, that’s different.  But then, shouldn’t you be writing a Bible? You are trying to be omniscient, not omnipotent.  So give the blend of your fallible humanness and omniscience a name or an anagram that will stick with you.  Think 3CPO — if I may borrow from “Stars War.”  Third Character-Person Omniscient. 

What I’m suggesting is that giving reality some elbow room is a stage of development in good fiction writing.  Pin it down too tightly and it may lose color, reverting to black and white.  The more human you are as a writer, while still observing and analyzing but never judging, the more your readers will fit under your umbrella.  Sometimes it is better to be merely omnipresent rather than omniscient as a third-person narrator.  And if you are writing first-person narratives you can really be imperfect.  First-person POVs enjoy the suspense of not knowing.  Sort of gives a whole new meaning to imperfect tense.

I do recall sitting in a writer’s group one night where I had a sort of epiphany about this.  And I have a déjà vu feeling that this anecdote is also in the SU archives of my columns (if you find it, please let me know).  Three of the people present that night stand out like an equilateral tri — no, too perfect, make it an isosceles triangle… aargh! worse… okay, you know, one of those Leaning Tower of Pisa triangles. 

So, there they were, three people coming from different angles from acutely bent to obtuse.  The first angle was a former ballet dancer who emoted with everything.  Her movements were dramatic and choreographed, even when she helped herself to the honey roasted cashews.  She would rise up on one bent leg, the other extended toward the coffee table, and with a graceful bob dip one hand swan-like into the silver dish, then curtsy back down to the divan.  Her writing was infused with emotional color but no form, rather like a finger pressed to mute lips seen in a dream for which there is no explanation.  The second angle was all sly mind games — ideas — which he perpetrated on the hostess mostly, and on those among us he felt were easily shocked (definitely not moi).  His writing was about transvestites, and in reality he was outing himself, enjoying the delicious dawning horror in the faces of the inhibited ones in the group.  But the third angle is the one I am writing about today — facts (things & events).  He was a wonderfully researched, technically informed, fact-crammed writer who should have been in charge of all shop manuals from Taiwan.  He also had a squeeze bottle of Neosynephrin (spelling — where is my pharmacist?) that he kept squirting up his nostrils.  One of the hosts had a hearing aid whose ultrasonic mosquito note came clearly into range each time he turned it up.  So it remains a very vivid memory for me, filled with eccentric mannerisms like the madcap Marx Brothers in “A Night at the Opera.”  Of course, I was the straight arrow member of the group.

If there was a single moment when the fallacy of a perfect omniscient narrator sank in for me as a writer, that was it.  But I’d like to make a distinction here between the kind of stylistic imperfection I’ve described and perfection as motivation.  I worship perfection.  It has always been my Grail.  Without it as an ideal to pursue full speed my life would be dull and empty.  The difference is in learning that communication has no rules.  DragonBar reminds me of that.

“What?” you say.  “No rules!  Absurd.  Of course it has rules!”  Well… not really.  Just the one.  Communication must communicate.  That’s the definition.  Yes, I’m using a ton of rules (or trying to) to write this essay.  But that’s my choice.  Sometimes you have to strip away all the rules in order to appreciate how much freedom you have within the rules.  You won’t find your voice on DragonBar, but you might find the breath of freedom and imagination you need to go looking for it.

Finally, last month I gave some misinformation in my newsletter which, for many people, is linked to this column.  I mentioned that the gift of a nomination at The1000BestSpecialPeople.com  expires after a year, and so I thanked a number of individuals for tributes and for boosts as the year drew to a close.  Now Australian Grant Soosalu informs me that the site has gone free and thus the nomination will stay up there.  Thank you one and all, in particular for the tributes and boosts posted since last month. 

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website.  My free monthly newsletter is separate from this column and the mailing list is growing by leaps and bounds.  I’ll be happy to send it to you if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net   Past newsletters are being archived at the website below, and the photos are now included!  

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/

by John B. Rosenman

No, no, I’m not talking about the sensational movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis in his first Oscar-winning role. I’m talking about my left foot, which until six weeks ago was strictly dependable, except for a weak ankle that necessitated wearing an ankle brace if I engaged in physical exercise. One day I noticed that my left foot hurt. Then it hurt a lot more. Then it got better and lulled me into a false sense of security, because just when it had almost returned to normal, it started to hurt again. The swelling returned, and each day the painful areas shifted. Now it was my toes, now it was the top of my foot, and now the bottom.

Finally, after two weeks of fluctuating discomfort, I went to a clinic. They X-rayed it and the doctor prescribed a pain killer. His best guess: gout, something that had occurred to me. He referred me to a podiatrist, and I went.

About this time, you’re probably wondering if I’m blogging on the wrong site. What does any of this have to do with writing or creativity? To which I say . . . patience.

I hobbled to the podiatrist’s office, had my foot X-rayed, and was led to a room with a padded chair where I waited, my throbbing foot extended like an offering to some sadistic god. After a few minutes, I heard someone in the hall and moments later, footsteps approached. I sighed, expecting a stereotype in a white coat – that is, a middle-aged podiatrist in a rumpled white coat who looked like Edward G. Robinson.

I was wrong.

Beautifully wrong.

Into the room walked a Vision of Loveliness, a Goddess Who Must Be Obeyed. Let me be plain here: to say that MY podiatrist was attractive is like saying Venus is photogenic. Folks, we’re talking Drop-Dead Gorgeous. I swear that within the first few seconds, I actually started to salivate, like Pavlov’s dog.

Then my writer’s brain kicked in. Mixed with my heterosexual proclivities, the result was bizarre or unusual, as it often is with writers, who have a tendency sometimes to see trivial experiences as dramatic or fictional events in which they are the main character or leading actor. Examining my X-rays, my doctor informed me I had Hammer-toe, not gout, and that a dislocated joint explained why one toe was partly looped over the other. She also said that she had received an operation just five days before for that same condition. Here she showed me a delectable bandaged LEFT foot as proof.

Gazing at her exquisite instep, I realized that I’d had a foot fetish all my life and had never known it. What’s more, the fact that she and I shared the same affliction on the same foot, created an instant we-are-made-for-each-other soulmates aura I could not ignore. Never mind that it was completely one-sided and unreciprocated. When, after all, has any writer worth his or her salt let reality derail a satisfying romantic fantasy? When she advised me that my condition would only become worse with time and that I needed to have it fixed, I promptly said, without thinking, “Well, why don’t we do it right now?”

Turns out, a patient had cancelled his procedure and she could work me right in. I lurched up, limped to a phone at the front desk and called my wife, telling her to bring lunch (it was two o’clock and I hadn’t eaten), and to give me a ride home.

I then limped to a back room and climbed onto a padded couch. A nurse told me the only “real” pain I’d feel would be when she numbed my foot. She asked me if I was ready.

I gave her a John Wayne grin and said you betcha.

She sprayed some icy solution on my left foot and then gave it four needles. And let me tell you, those needles came from all directions and went in deep. Then my goddess materialized with an angelic smile. She suggested I might want to avert my eyes and perhaps contemplate the ceiling, but there was no way I was going to remove my gaze from her. Besides, I felt that a potentially heroic, semi-preposterous scene was imminent, and part of me wanted to play my creative part so I could dramatize it to others later.

SHE asked me if I was ready.

Repressing the urge to ask for a shot of bourbon and a hunk of rawhide to clench between my teeth, I gave her a fearless look and nodded.

She smiled and then broke the second largest toe on my left foot. I watched her proceed to the smaller toe adjacent to it and crack the knuckle out of that one. She then sliced my toes open, gutting and filleting them like little fish. I gazed down at the bloody ruins of my toes and thought, “Wait’ll I tell folks about this.” Next came the black stitches and a two-inch long pin, which she inserted horizontally to the hilt in the broken toe. In the month since this operation, I’ve had some pain and a little pleasure from this wicked pin, making up all kinds of inane jokes which probably amuse me only. You know, how the pin has improved my TV reception remarkably, and its only drawbacks are that I sometimes get stopped at the airport or pick up a cheap porn station from Seattle.

Well, I won’t belabor this chapter in my life any more, except to say that just after the slice and dice was completed, Jane arrived with a cup of chili (with cheese) from Wendy’s. In tales I tell of this saga, I usually mention the chili as a humorous example of my courage while they bandaged me up and gave me a prescription for enough Oxycodone to stop a charging rhino in his tracks.

Since the operation, I’ve gone back once more to have the stitches out, and I’m frankly ambivalent about my next and possibly last visit, when the divine doctor pulls the pin on our relationship and I can wear a regulation shoe on my left foot. But part of me foresees a continuation of this cosmic drama, with the toesies on my right foot misbehaving. Again and again I go back to her, but after she has cracked and repaired all my toes, what possible excuse will I have left to see her? Hmm, damned if I can’t think of some truly sick and morbid possibilities.

At any rate, like the ham I am, I continue to narrate and dramatize this experience. Sometimes I tell colleagues I was so enraptured by this celestial creature that if she had said, “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m afraid we have no other choice but to amputate your left leg,” that I would have given her a he-man shrug and said, “Well, Doc, if you really think it’s necessary . . .”

Okay, here’s the point of the whole thing, and the question(s) I want to ask those reading this blog. Are we creative types more likely to see even trivial experiences in our lives as momentous events in which we play a vital role – sometimes as an action hero, other times, as a watered down protagonist or Everyman? Is there a detached writer or editor sitting on our shoulders, weighing the possibilities? Do we dramatize our lives and ourselves more than others? I really want to know. Seems to me I’ve heard this discussed before and the general consensus is yes. But surely ordinary people do it too. There’s Thurber’s Walter Mitty, for example, who spiced up his humdrum life with heroic fantasies. But then, what was Mitty but a writer who hadn’t found himself? I’m also reminded of The Truman Show. Are we more likely to imagine we’re the star of a lifelong sitcom or dramatic series with smash ratings? Are we so narcissistic and vain, so enraptured by the image in our psychic mirrors, that we suspect that everyone we pass is an adoring fan?

Please tell me what you think. Am I nuts, or perversely normal? Really, I can take it.

In the meantime, I’m getting ready for a trip to the Dentist next week. Though he’s in his fifties and does look like Edward G. Robinson, I feel my muse stirring. After all, his assistant’s from Sweden and she’s one hell of a looker. . . .

  I’ve been invited into a few charity anthologies recently. Most of them looked pretty good on paper. Like communism the equation looked sound, but once you got into the details they tended to fall apart.

  One of the anthologies is in defense of a website for writers that is getting sued for, frankly, telling the truth. It happens. Probably a lot, too. Here’s the premise in this case. I and a lot of other writers are supposed to donate stories for the anthology. An editor will donate his time for the anthology. A publisher will publish the book and the monies that would have gone to the writers and the editor will go to the charity. After expenses are taken care of, naturally. But that’s cool. The expenses can’t be that high, right? I mean, we’re talking about a print-on-demand endeavor here, so a few hundred dollars for the layout, and then the public can swarm in, pay fifteen dollars a pop for the books and save the website from certain death caused by legal fees.

Of course, there’s no agenda for advertising. It’s possible that the advertising budget might have to come out of the profits for the book, too. That could slow things down. I mean, okay, so they can announce it on the internet, hit a few bulletin boards, maybe even get a banner up for free at the site they’re going to help through their legal problems. So a few more people will find out about the anthology and order it.

 Right?

  Sure. I’ll get right on that. After I’m done paying my bills. Oh, please don’t misunderstand me. I am rooting for the website. They’ve never done me any harm and I’m all for letting people know what companies to avoid, what “agents” are out to screw authors over and which publishers are managing to mishandle their books hard enough to make sure their authors never get paid. I’m very much all for that. I’ve never been to the site myself, but a lot of people swear by it.

 I have to look at this from a business perspective, because as I’ve said before, this is my business. I’m dealing with a commodity. It may not be much as commodities go, but it’s all I have. At one point or another I’m obligated to look at what’s in it for me.  For those of you who’ve grown tired of my rants, you might want to skip ahead to my closing statements. This is probably going to get ugly.  First off, there’s nothing in it for me. 

But wait, Jim! There’s exposure, isn’t there? It’s for a good and worthy cause and public perception will make you look like a champion of the downtrodden!

 Um. No. Sorry. It doesn’t work that way. First off, there’s already something like 30-35 contributors, most of whom are tossing in stories that are under 2,000 words. My name won’t stick out in that lot. Also, I don’t tend to write short short stories. I tend to write 7-10,000 word long pieces for my promotional works, what the hell makes you think I’m even capable of a smaller piece?

 Secondly, most of the people offering stories, at least according to a few of the comments I’ve seen, gave over stories that hadn’t been sold or that they hadn’t been able to sell. Nothing personal but I don’t want my stories printed with a bunch of other tales that apparently weren’t making the grade with the paying markets.

Yes, I DO sound like an ass when I say things like that, but it’s true. Because a good number of the names associated with the anthology so far are also unpublished authors. That doesn’t mean they aren’t any good, but it does mean there aren’t a whole lot of names going in there that will increase the awareness of the anthology. Get an original story by Dean Koontz, Anne Rice or Stephen King in there, and the world will know of the collection. Mortimer Pipkin, Aloysius Hammesfar and Dirk Hatrack on the other hand are not going to boost public awareness. With apologies to all three, should they happen to be fledgling authors whose names match the ones I just yanked out of the ether.

 The editor is also, frankly, someone completely unknown to me. I’ve seen his name on a few boards, read an occasional post (and often disagreed with every word said editor wrote, but that’s neither here not there) and otherwise have never heard of our esteemed editor. To me that means said editor probably doesn’t have the chops to carry this off properly.

  God, I hope I’m wrong and end up with egg on my face. I’d love to see the anthology kick all sorts of posterior and make money hand over fist for what I believe is a worthy cause. I’ll eat that serving of crow with gusto, boys and girls. No hesitation at all. I mean that.

  So, let’s see, what else….Oh, yeah. The publisher. Print on demand. No budget for advertising, second string or volunteer layout….Yeah. Not looking any better in my eyes.  Sorry, but there it is. Probably get a decent piece of clip art for the cover, unless they can convince one of the professional artists hanging on the bulletin boards to throw them a bone, or the editor’s sister is halfway decent with a pen and ink kit.

Hey, I’ve seen plenty of fly by night micro presses cranking out some truly, truly hideous covers lately and they’ve survived, haven’t they? Well, some of them, maybe? Damn. Hard to say without research and I don’t have the time to look into that, so let’s pretend a few of them are still doing well. It could happen.  

So let’s do the math. 30 writers. One editor. One maybe artist. Possibly even a decent layout by someone with a clue. What the hell, we’ll call it thirty-five people minimum involved in what could be a phenomenal anthology that will pay away all the financial woes that a lawsuit has cast upon a website that helps writers by warning them about the scum waiting to prey on them in their moments of weakness or in their early naiveté.

Hell, how could I not want to step right into that project?  

Oh wait. Bills to pay. Now I remember.  Got a novel due. Just finished editing another novel. Been doing some freelance work as an associate editor (That means first reader, line editor and a few other hats that I have to wear in addition to writer.). Got several projects I want to get off the ground and a few collaborations I’m toying with. Still have the day job to consider, because we’ve already discussed the evils of the American medical system and how not being insured guarantees your financial destruction, haven’t we? Or is that a subject for my next essay? I can’t remember. Still have to finish a short story that I promised last October. It’s been named and half written, but I really, really need to finish it. It’s a paying market, too. I need the cash. Let’s be honest here. My short story could fill my gas tank a couple of times and it would be really, really cool to actually fill the tank for the first time in half a year. I have two novellas contracted that have to be written soon. I’ve promised a foreword to an author I admire, who for some insane reason thinks that my words at the front of his novella will help it sell. Who am I to disillusion him? That’s due next week and I haven’t finished reading the story yet. Got this essay to finish in the next fifteen minutes or I’ll be ticked at myself. No, the essay doesn’t pay, but as I’ve said before, if someone wants to believe my opinions on the writing process can be of assistance, who am I  to ruin their fantasies? And if you’re reading this, you might be the someone I’m trying to help. That, or you really, really need to find new ways to amuse yourself.  

I don’t have the time to give away a story for a charity anthology that will probably not sell anywhere nearly as well as I and others would like. I don’t have any spare tales floating around and I simply cannot justify losing a couple of days or more when I can barely keep up with what’s already on my plate.

 I’ve got a protégé who’s been waiting patiently for me to finish reading the manuscript he sent me 6 months ago. Seriously, I feel like a worm about it, but I haven’t had the damned time.

so does skipping the charity anthology make me a bad person?

 Maybe.

 But it also makes me at least a little responsible to the people I already owe works to, and it makes me a little closer to being able to pay my bills.

 But if I hear good things about the anthology when it comes out, and if I have the spare change, I’ll buy a copy and eventually read it. That way, when the time comes, I can lie to myself and say that I contributed to helping that website that’s always helping out the writers and stumbled into some legal problems caused by telling the truth about a few small press publishers with an attitude problem and enough money to get bitchy about it.  

This comes down to the other side of professionalism. This is the part no one likes to talk about or think about. It’s a business. I would love to find the time to help out on a few charity anthologies. Show me one with an editor I admire, a publisher I respect and a few names I think will actually do some good and I’ll be there, or at least think about it while I’m catching up on my deadlines.

 I don’t give free stories to webzines, I don’t accept anything below a certain amount per word when I sell stories to published magazines, I don’t sell novels to new publishers who are trying to prove their love of the genre while simultaneously not paying me. Yes, there are a few markets where I’ve broken my own rules. Yes, I’d gleefully sell a story to All Hallow’s knowing full well that there wouldn’t be a penny to be made for giving up my first print rights, because I know the exposure would be worth it.

I don’t do charity anthologies for editors I’ve never heard of or publishers that have no track record, because I can’t waste my time on them. Nothing personal. It’s business.

 Pastry chefs don’t give away wedding cakes to everyone coming in off the street. They charge for their services, with exceptions for promotional reasons. I’m the same way with my stories. If there’s something in it for me, I might give away a story, but if the only thing it’s getting me is my name in print, I’ve had better offers.

  Besides, the last time I did a story for free I was promised a copy of the magazine as payment and the publisher on that one screwed me. (Yeah, you know who you are. We’ve exchanged a few e-mails before you stopped responding. Can’t pay me a contributor’s copy? Don’t ask me for references….)  Want to be a professional act the part. That includes deciding to say no to charities now and then. It sucks, but if you don’t follow the rules you establish for yourself, how can you expect to make a living at a job where the average writer makes less than five grand a year?  

James A. Moore  

It was Sunday at the L.A. Book Festival.  I’d just met Joe Hill for the first time (a quick greeting and a few words while on a signing line) and had hurried off to get Raymond E. Feist’s signature on some of his early work, thus to increase the books’ future salability.  Unfortunately, Feist wasn’t there; a personal emergency had come up.  I was left with one book left unsigned, by an author who was due to hold a signing in three hours.Rather than loiter at the festival, my companion and I left.  (And this is a lesson for all first-time convention or festival attendees: if you can avoid it, don’t have your panel, signing, or reading scheduled for late Sunday afternoon.  Even early Saturday morning, when many people will be too tired and/or hung over to attend, is a better time slot.)  While walking across the UCLA campus, she asked me an interesting question: After all the time I’ve been getting books signed, and with all of the autographed merchandise I have, had I gotten to a point where requesting one more signature wasn’t as exciting as it used to be?As with most good questions, the answer is both no and yes.  I thought it would be worthwhile to explain that here, as a means of insight into the minds of collectors, fans and dealers.

With Mother’s Day coming up, I’ve been thinking a lot about how my mom’s choices made me into the adult, the father and the writer I’ve become. (Thinking is easier and cheaper than shopping.)

And aside from concluding that my mom is better than your mom, I realized that she gave me a gift I don’t suppose many horror writers really ever got from their parents and other family. My mom didn’t just teach me to read, or encourage me to write, draw or make music; she never once, to my recollection, discouraged me from reading or writing horror, and never tried to make me feel guilty about honestly expressing myself, beyond her inveterate critical comment, “I think I’m getting a migraine.”

Many reading this might disagree, but I believe that much of horror lit’s inferiority complex begins in the home, and it’s deeply rooted in the writer’s psyche, by the time we start making friends and picking fights on message boards.

We all grew up reading the same anthologies in the 80’s boom, and each and every one was prefaced with variants, sometimes elegant, often pugnacious, on the defense of horror; proclaiming its prehistoric pedigree and its sneaky presence in so many mainstream classics, and maybe taking a stab at the catharsis argument, or a more daring poke at the real appeal such atrocious stories could offer to damaged/enlightened souls, and the subtle, superhuman powers conferred on them thereby. We shook our heads at the ignorance of our elders for banning EC Comics and marginalizing and editing Cronenberg and Carpenter movies, but we must have internalized the judgment on horror as frivolous and morbid at best, and corrupting trash, at worst.

Reading Stephen King, I have always wrestled with the paradox of how the most successful writer of all time could so plainly feel a deep stigma about doing what he loved to do. But King’s predicament always seemed weirder to me than it might to most, because I started reading King at age 8.

When I complained to my third-grade teacher about the lame in-class reading books, she gave me The Shining. She knew I loved monsters because I drew them on every piece of schoolwork, and she knew my mom, because I attended the school where my mom taught (never in her class, but got beat up monthly, just the same, thanks, Mom!). She did not clear it with my mom specifically, but she also took me to see Dawn Of The Dead and bought me my first Fangoria. (And yes, there were times when I wished Ms. Robbins was my mom. Two stupid times.)

My mom was not into horror at all; she loves anything heavier than Kurt Vonnegut would put her into catatleptic fits. I once tricked her into going to see Children Of The Corn, and she had a continuous panic attack from the opening meat slicer scene to the ludicrous flaming tomato god climax, but she didn’t drag me out, and she never asked me why I couldn’t stop laughing at the gory bits.

I hear a lot of other writers talk about how their families have problems with their work. Some of us who come from deeply religious backgrounds or conservative parts of the country often say that they have to lie or even hide what they write about, and while I think this conflict might give more of an edge to the work than otherwise, it often leads to a sameness of tone, that makes so much of modern horror collectively, I think, kind of a bummer.

I don’t think even a plurality of us came from physically abusive homes, and yet child abuse is a horror staple as ubiquitous as the showoff serial killer and the sexy kickass vampire hunter who’s also a vampire. I won’t say so much, but I’ll ask the peanut gallery, if their families disapprove of what they do, and how they cope, and most importantly, how it affects their writing.
But oh yeah, I was talking about my mom…
My childhood was messy even by 70’s standards, and I am told that I was a very angry kid. She claims not to remember big chunks of it, but I remember always feeling loved, despite all the awful things I did. (My worst fallout from reading The Shining was, I called another kid an “officious little prick” at school; he broke a clipboard over my head, and I stabbed him with a pencil… but he later claimed that the “big words” hurt the worst.)
My mom never spanked me; the worst punishment I could get was solitary confinement in the bathroom, until I turned twelve and she found my Walkman and comic books. She worried about me, but she didn’t try to medicate or change me. We went to therapy for a while, and it was kind of fun, and we went to church a few times in my whole childhood, always a different one. Maybe it was because she was feeling spiritually insecure, but I sometimes think she just wanted me to see what it was like. Now, she irregularly attends a nondenominational syncretic church with surfing monks, because nothing about it gives her a headache.
We traveled a lot on the cheap when I was a kid, and backpacked for weeks at a time in the Sierras. I read a King-sized novel almost every day, ate a box of Captain Crunch on the road (the only time I got sugary cereals was on the trail), and I learned to respect total silence, and to put complex streams of thought together over hours and days. I brought that peace back with me, and I can still have it, whenever I need it.
She seldom put her foot down about what entertainment I could consume, and sharpened my wiles with her feeble efforts to thwart me staying up all night watching Godzilla movies, or sneaking into Scanners or The Thing, instead of Popeye or Megaforce.
What I guess I’m trying to say is, my mom somehow nurtured my creative adult self without ever trying to tame it, so I never had to defend what I loved to do to anyone, until I started writing for money. I would never have become the writer I am today, I believe, if I were made to feel I was just printing the devil’s toilet paper.
Thanks, mom. (How’s your head?)

When I was a kid, and on into my teenage years, and a few occasions after that, by which time I really should’ve known better, I would sunburn on a world-class level. Still could, I suppose, but … no thanks. The fun’s gone out of it.

It’s these ancestral Northern Euro genes, which drained my hide of every last picoliter of ancient ancestral melanin. The result: sunburns so spectacular that, even after dark, having me around was like having a radiant sliver of the sun in the room. With pincers instead of fingers and my eyeballs mounted on stalks, I could’ve had a swell sideshow career as the Boiled Lobster Boy. For a time, it was even a point of masochistic pride, just seeing the drop-jawed reactions I’d get from friends.

Well, I’m paying for the good times now, eh?

Now I go to the dermatologist for annual damage control: precautionary, nip-it-in-the-bud stuff, tracking down any tiny pre-cancerous spots that, if left unchecked, could blossom into a problem one of these years. He nukes them with a few aerosol shots of liquid nitrogen. The stuff sits on the exam room countertop in a serious-looking stainless steel canister. Rupture a tanker truck full of it and you could freeze a T-1000 Terminator made of liquid metal — yeah, that stuff.

He puts the nozzle to my skin and pumps the trigger a few times. Under the burst of white vapor, the first couple never hurt. Then it starts to feel like a needle-sharp shard of ice being driven into the skin. So cold it burns — I’d heard that phrase all my life, but never truly grasped it until that first round of liquid nitrogen a few years ago.

What’s left in the aftermath is a whitish dab, flash-frozen, no longer skin-toned. Dead-looking, actually. The color comes back when it goes through similar stages as a burn: reddening, swelling, blistering, scabbing.

So as I sit here a few days after the latest round, my left forearm looks as though someone tried three times to stub out a skinny cigarette on it. A Virginia Slim, maybe. Three more in a line, like a strafing run, up my right cheekbone. The patch on the bridge of the nose, where the skin is thinner, has looked, fittingly enough, like a highly localized sunburn.

Unsightly? You bet. I look like I lost a bar fight to a VFW drinkslinger named Gladys.

After another few days, though, will come what always strikes me as a small miracle of resilience and regeneration. The skin will look fresh and smooth, a healthy pink rather than inflamed red. Baby skin, almost. The latent trouble that had been at the center of the spot — a perpetually dry flake, or a scaly patch the size of a pinhead — will be gone. A few more mistakes of callow youth, eradicated.

This time, though, it occurs to me that a similar process is taking place on the inside.

Under the skin, I’m a red, swollen, scabby blister.

Sorry if you’re eating right now.

*

In another folder on this computer, a Word file is growing. Not as fast as I’d like, but then, do they ever? It’s a novel that bears almost no resemblance to any I’ve done before. That’s as much by compulsion as choice.

It isn’t a comfortable process, but then, is it ever? Actually, it can be, at least by degrees, although I didn’t recognize the trappings of a comfort zone until I’d evicted myself from it. A lot of the writerly tricks I could rely on before are gone. They have no place here.

The novel is old enough to talk now, not as fluently as I hope it will someday, after it’s a bit older, but already it knows something of the world and human apprehension. We peer at one another through the window of liquid crystal.

“Do you trust me?” I ask.

It doesn’t answer right away. I don’t blame it for waiting. It’s seen me at high points and low, and the mood swings probably unsettle it. I’m pretty sure it’s registered the disappointment in my eyes when I find it doesn’t look as good today as I thought it did yesterday. When I’m expecting rugged beauty, and instead discover what’s waiting for me is this slimy, cruikshanked homunculus, stewed from my own blood and incubating in a vat of horse manure.

Maybe it notices the recent scabs and thinks I’m no prize either.

“You’re all I have,” it finally says, almost like an accusation. “Do you trust yourself?”

What a question. I keep showing up, don’t I? It’s not like I don’t have other folders to go to. Or could create from scratch, if it came to that. There’s always more blood and horseshit where that came from.

“Well enough to know I needed to make a change,” I tell it. “I … I just wish I’d met you earlier.”

“Don’t be stupid.” Because it knows better. Even when half-formed, novels possess their own wisdom, with insights unbound by time. “You wouldn’t have known what to do with me. You’re different now than you were then.”

“Better, you mean?” I ask, hopeful.

But it doesn’t say anything, not yet, and so I try not to read all the wrong things in the silence.

*

It may be the liquid nitrogen talking, but there’s a little part of me that wonders if, as a writer, I didn’t leapfrog from earnest hopeful to fledgling professional a bit too soon. I sold my first two novels back-to-back, a few months apart, when I was in my mid-twenties. They were things I’d been working on since my early twenties, and in part drew on influences and life episodes from earlier still.

Too soon? I know, I know, it’s heresy to even think such a thing. To anyone clawing for an inch of headway and digging behind the couch cushions for crumbs to feed their hope, there’s no such thing as too soon. Those tandem sales were the culmination of years of tenacity, and the weeks and months of waiting seemed to pass like bullet time in The Matrix.

But, in a way, they also set a template for the future. A path of least resistance. And now, so much of what was in those novels, and the things that informed them, and the path they opened up to keep following … not much of it seems particularly relevant any more.

Make no mistake, I loved those first two novels, and the other early ones that followed. Loved them one and all. How I burned to write them. How they got under my skin.

But that was a skin that started to slough off somewhere along the way.

It can happen in any walk of life: waking up one morning, or one year, to realize that the skin you’ve fashioned for yourself no longer feels quite right. The fit is wrong. It’s not you anymore. It mirrors something other than what you now feel inside.

A writer, as few others can, at least has the luxury of trying on new skins, and some are adept enough at it to become shapeshifters, switching back and forth between the old and the new. And it’s enough.

Sometimes, though, a skin just needs to be shed, by whatever means feel right and necessary. All at once, if that gets the job done. Or maybe by subjecting it to the slow freeze of a long, cold winter, winter on the inside, an icy stasis in which the plants die and the sap stops running, but with time enough to ruminate, too, and wonder what it is about this cold place that makes you want to take that skin you know and wrap it around yourself just that much tighter.

At least until the spring that you know has to come sometime.

*

The novel still hasn’t answered, even though its last words continue to hang between us: “You wouldn’t have known what to do with me. You’re different now than you were then.”

“Better, you mean?” I try again.

It bides its time, doesn’t quite want to commit, doesn’t want to lie, either. “Just … different.”

Fair enough.

And so we keep going for another day, a page or two or three at a time.  Slowly. The same way the best kind of trust builds.

GONE WITH THE WIND AND OTHER WORDS OF WISDOM

There are questions that many new or would-be writers ask me, an old or has-been writer, and I thought this a good month in which to share those questions.

Also my answers.

Q: Is it true that a good title is the most important selling point for a book?

A. Yes. For that reason, you should call your novel GONE WITH THE WIND.

Unless it’s a diet book, for which you might find a more suitable title.

Unless your original diet book title was THE LOW FAT, NO CARBS, FAT ASS DIET, which is almost as good as GONE WITH THE WIND.

Q. I’ve heard that poetry is booming. Should I pursue my interest in poetry with a thought to making it my career?

A. Take a look and you will see that most major cities that still have newspapers have column after column of “Poets Wanted” in the job listings. Poets are in every bit as much demand as radio repair technicians and buggy whip socket installers.

Think … Your Future in Poetry!

Q. If Oprah chooses my book will I become an overnight sensation, wealthy beyond my wildest dreams?

A. Yes, but it won’t happen. Oprah and I spoke yesterday. She says she doesn’t like you.

Q. There are many colleges offering degrees in creative writing. Should I think about creative writing as a major as opposed to computer science?

A. Definitely. There are over 400 USA colleges in the Associated Writing Program granting degrees at Bachelor’s or Graduate levels and more than a few of them employ my friends–while Columbia College in Chicago employs me. I’d like to see that employment continue.

Q. What can a writer expect to earn a year?

A. I don’t feel like showing you my W-2s or 1099s, but you should know that I now set aside one day a week, the day the Purolator truck arrives, just to count money.

You will not earn money like, say, a podiatrist or a the Minister of Recreation and Leisure in Iraq, but you’ll do more than all right.

Q. Why do so many writers have trouble with alcohol?

A. I’ll tell you if you buy me a drink.

Q. Should writers be active politically?

A. If I didn’t think this were so, if I didn’t believe that writers must be engaged in and active citizens of their world, then I wouldn’t be supporting Norman Thomas in the race for the White House.

Q. How come so many bad books get published every year?

A. You are buying into a common misconception. Research clearly shows that no bad books get published. Only good books get published.

Okay, there was once a bad book published. It was called GONE WITH THE BREEZE.

But Oprah didn’t choose it.

So it tanked.

Q. Why do so many writers like jazz?

A. They dig jazz, they dig it. That’s because Louis Armstrong gave advice to the band and to all of us when he said, “Not too slow, not too fast. Not half slow, not half fast.”

Q. Why isn’t there more substance to your column this time around?

A. Because last night I worked late to finish up a novella you’ll be able to read in DOORWAYS magazine. It’s called THE DOCTOR, THE KIDS, AND THE GHOSTS IN THE LAKE and it’s part of my “Imagined Hemingways” fictions and I’m at least 86% pleased with it.

Because today I taught a four hour class in writing and had conferences with two students, one of which was kinda tough, because the student is working on some reality based fiction dealing with his harrowing experiences in a recent war.

Because soon SOUTH PARK will be on and my wife Jane and I like to watch SOUTH PARK, thereby proving that we are hip AARP members.

Because sometimes these STORYTELLERS UNPLUGGED columns can be just a little fun fluff foo-foo to write without the world suddenly shifting off-axis and heading for a collision with the planet Mongo.

Because I need a wee break before—tomorrow–I undertake writing my big new novel: GONE WITH THE MONSOON.

(Which Oprah’s already said she likes.)

So, yeah, I’ve been having a hell of a spring. I’ve been missing deadlines, having to back out of promised projects, and having constant sourceless panic attacks and bouts of serious doubt about the quality of my work and my ability to do it. It’s a precarious way to make a living, this writing gig, and there’s always the fear that you’re going to lose the mojo and that will be the end of that.

Anyway, I talked to my editor on the current book, and had to tell her that I just wasn’t going to get it done on deadline. I’ve never missed a novel deadline before; I still feel kind of awful about it. (It’s a bit of a point of pride for me to get work in early.)

But here I was having this experience where I could not think, or plot, or write, and it felt like every word was being dragged out of me as if with red-hot pliers. Usually, I write by inhabiting my characters, and suddenly, I couldn’t get into their heads. Usually, I feel story structures as a shape, a thing with dimension and weight and movement, and that had utterly deserted me. I had no sense of how anything worked, or if it balanced.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been so scared in my life.

So the past four months has been a learning experience. Especially since I could not figure out what was wrong with me.

Until I went away on a business trip and forgot to bring my daily multivitamin along. And whammo! Within two days, the panic attacks stopped, my confidence and usual sunny demeanor (hah!) re-established themselves, and I was thinking about stories. And the stories seemed interesting to me.

When I got home, I took my vitamin–and within two hours, I was back where I had been before I stopped.

Well, you don’t have to tell me twice. I threw the damned things in the trash.

And today, one week later, I wrote 781 words that were not an agonizing grovel through misery and broken glass, and which I think actually contribute to the story I’m trying to write.

I think I’m cured. By Jove!

And I’m even more convinced than I ever was that brain chemistry, man, is a powerful and mysterious force. Oh, and also, I won’t be taking that brand of vitamin again.

And my editor has given me an extension on the manuscript, and if we bust our butts, we may not even have to reschedule.

…hey, check it out. A happy ending!

by Matteo Curtoni

I don’t know if it’s the same for some (or all) of you, but my stories are hungry. They’re always hungry and some of them are more than hungry - they’re ravenous. Of course they’re hungry for  love and attention, for the hours I spend working on them. But the hunger I’m talking about now is something different. It’s the hunger for the things that stories want to find inside my head when I’m writing, I guess. They sink their teeth into paintings and photographs that I just vaguely remember sometimes, into songs from obscure or not-so-obscure bands that I happen to find on Myspace, into pages from authors I love or I loved a long time ago, into pieces of news half-heard on the radio while I’m having a coffee in a bar. Anything, really. But I don’t think it’s up to me to look for the words and sounds and images that they need to feed on, so I let them find all that stuff where and the way they want - and I must admit that usually chance helps them with their hunger more than I could ever hope to do, even if I decided to try.
These days I’m writing a new novel called A Sud dell’Inferno - which means South of Hell - that’s coming out in January 2009, here in Italy. It’s set in Milan and deals with a sort of modern-day Sawney Bean Clan. (By the way, mesdames et monsieurs, if you’re not familiar with the deeds of Sawney Bean and his lovely wife Black Agnes Douglas, I warmly recommend you to check out their terribly amazing story.) And South of Hell is really, really ravenous… indeed one of the most ravenous stories I’ve ever written. While I was still working on the plot, it devoured Johnny Cash and Rob Zombie, 16 Horsepower and O’Death and The Flesh Eaters, passages from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and William Faulkner’s Sanctuary that had been haunting me for a long time and still haunt me today,  Harvey Bennett Stafford’s Muerte! - Death in Mexican Popular Culture and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Russ Meyer and Daniel Pennac’s Le Dictateur et le Hamac. It chewed and swallowed so many true crime stories that its belly’s still aching to this day and later it ate news about the fires that every goddamn summer turn some of Southern Italy to a wasteland of ashes and smoke and even ate some scenes from Chris Nolan’s Dark Knight trailer.
I told you: it’s a ravenous book, and that’s one of the reasons I’m so fond of it.
Now that I’m working on it full time (until last week I was working my head off translating The Mike Hammer Collection Vol. 1 and I didn’t have much time for anything else) it keeps feeding and feeding and I guess that’s appropriate enough, since hunger is one of its central themes.
I never, never try to find out why a certain story’s hungry for the things it feeds on. It would be a waste of time, probably, and I guess that it would feel somewhat unfair. I just let them chase their appetites the way they want, without asking questions, without investigating too much. I’m sure it’s not a matter of influences - literary and/or creative influences are something deeper and older and much more complex for me than the banquets that stories consume inside my head. Rather, I think it’s a landscape that stories ask me to create for them, a landscape made of pages and sounds and hints and fragments, that won’t necessarily be visible or perceptible between the lines once the novel will be written but that somehow creates a much more deeper focus on the creative process of writing.
Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, I gotta go now.
There’s a ravenous novel that’s demanding for my attention.
Bon appetit to all your stories.
Best,
M.