Cody Goodfellow

If you’re serious about writing modern, cutting-edge horror, you’re going to have to learn to like hurting people’s feelings.

This was never a problem for me, as I’ve always possessed a gift for it. But as I’ve worked to build a façade of convincing maturity, I’ve tried to find new ways to articulate the passionate reaction real-world horror inspires in me. I’ve tried to be less exploitative of real pain and distress, because despite what many may misapprehend about our genre, the end goal should be to control fear, not to try to create it.

I’m not talking about advocating
a controversial political point of view. If you have some ideological kidney stone you need to pass so badly that alienating at least half your potential readership is of no concern, then no sane advice is going to dissuade you. You can’t do any kind of horror without taking on the real universal states of pain and death, while fears of madness, deformity, disease and torture are very real because they happen to someone else, everyday.

If you’re just trying to tell a story that deals in real pain, and brings confusing but stirring issues into sharper relief, some care should be taken so that the message of your story hits home, without making readers dismiss you as a flaming demagogue, or a callow ghoul.

They say that tragedy plus time equals comedy, but the raw, rough ore of confrontational writing is most authentic when emotions still run hot, and should be put down as soon as the feelings can be reduced to words. But then the author should step back and take a long look at the work and ask themselves not if it’s going to hurt someone’s feelings. Take that for granted, but ask yourself, with that assumption made, do you really mean to? Do you need to?

In the wake of 9/11, our media culture did a brief about-face on depictions of violence, and many works which seemed hardcore and neat on September 10, suddenly seemed trite and insensitive. Collateral Damage, Schwarzenegger’s 2001 terrorist revenge porno, was set adrift to sink by an embarrassed studio. Shows that satirized current events retreated into hiatus or reruns, and many pundits declared the death of irony. But clearly, these clowns never looked it up in the dictionary, because the biting latitude between intended and actual meaning bubbled up like radon in the media’s attempts to smooth over the traumatized collective unconscious.

The best examples were on radio, where a bunch of songs spiked with glibly violent imagery suddenly seemed uncomfortable, like inviting a miscarriage mom to a baby shower. Clear Channel dropped a long list of verboten tunes, from Steve Miller Band’s “Jet Airliner” to Van Halen’s “Jump,” and anything from Rage Against The Machine. British post-grunge band Bush really put their foot in it with their single “Speed Kills,” which featured the lyric, “at my best when I’m terrorist inside.” This harmless bit of faux-radical nonsense only hoped to cop a little of the edgy menace associated with terrorism. Gavin Rossdale was only trying to terrorize our musical sensibilities, but after 9/11 drove home for all Americans the real pain and misery that terrorists cause, “Speed Kills” was yanked, then re-released as “The People That We Love.” The offending lyric was redubbed, “at my best when I’m maverick inside.” And America’s long national nightmare was finally over.

Many other bands, when faced with the ugly dilemma of eating their work or self-censoring, opted for the latter. Fallout Boy prototypes Sugarcult changed the chorus of “Stuck In America” from “Everybody’s talking about blowing up the neighborhood,” to “…waking up the neighborhood,” while Jimmy Eats World retitled their album “Bleed,” instead of “Bleed American,” though the song had nothing to do with violence or terrorism, at all.

All of which has nothing and everything to do with writing horror fiction. Only one or two controversial mass-market books percolate up into mass-media consciousness at a time, because the media makes little time for books they haven’t written themselves. After the Oklahoma City bombing, the reprehensible race war fantasy The Turner Diaries gained fame as McVeigh’s half-assed tactical manual. But most books written after and about real tragic events get a pass, because even if they genuinely intend to set off a bomb, they are isolated terrorist events, explosions going off only between the reader’s ears.

But I was faced with a very similar dilemma with my second novel, Ravenous Dusk, and when faced with the choice of braving it out with something potentially exploitative and insensitive or changing my work, I chose the latter as well. Even though nobody would have pilloried me on The Today Show for exploiting or mocking the tragedy of 9/11––or the suffering and despair of terminal cancer patients, or the heartbreak of psoriasis––I decided that it only takes one genuinely disgusted writer to make you, objectively, a douchebag.

Without giving too much away, a scene late in Ravenous Dusk has the hero in a fight on a passenger jet en route to Hawaii. For a lot of reasons that seemed important at the time, I wanted to crash the plane, so the hero could walk out of the wreckage, which seemed more intense than just saying repeatedly that he could probably kick your ass.

But 9/11 changed everything.

Sadly, I am stricken with a distressing shortage of natural respect for the dead. It’s about as much reverence as I typically feel for people getting off the Space Mountain ride at Disneyland while I’m getting on. It happens to everyone, yet we drive ourselves crazy trying to game the situation.

While I wasn’t worried about 9/11 widows or Oprah knocking down my door, I was suddenly concerned with the weight of a planeload of fictional people on my conscience. I asked myself what every good terrorist, or mediocre rock singer, should ask themselves before committing an act: does this do or say, what I want it to? Is the extremity of it worth the pain it will cause the people I just made up and did it to?

In all too much horror fiction, these questions clearly don’t get asked often enough. When a single coed is skewered by a slasher or devoured by zombies, it scares us based on our sense that it could happen to us, or someone we love. The skillful writer puts us in the scene, but if the carnage is contrived without an insight into real fear and pain, it rings hollow, whether the menace is ripped from today’s headlines or the Apocrypha of the Old Testament. The effect gets magnified a thousandfold when writers try to wipe out a whole world full of such weakly realized effigies. War Of The Worlds and Cloverfield got basted by some sensitive critics for exploiting the images and conditioned responses from 9/11, but they got mixed results out of trying to show one man’s view of an apocalypse. The specter of real tragedy should be like a tool in the workshed that you only use when you’re seriously going to harm something. Measure twice before cutting, but if you’re shy about picking it up, maybe you shouldn’t, or seek other work.

Don’t tell readers what to think or how to react; tell them what to think about by showing them the unforgettable and the unacceptable. Raise questions, by what you write, and answer them, if you can. Put yourself in the victim’s shoes; ask yourself how you would feel, reading the story in question, if the subject matter hit home.

A final example of this where I do possess a nerve that occasionally transmits disturbing sensations of empathy. In the end of Frank Darabont’s The Mist, the script takes a detour that many feel is an outrageous squandering of the film’s goodwill, and a cheap shot at the original work. While I usually err on the side of the literary purists, I loudly applauded what Darabont did, because someone in my childhood took their own life, and I was, frankly, a little sick of seeing it romanticized as a final solution.

It seemed like the solemn decision to end it all, rather than face a worse fate, had been abused by too many horror stories to grab an intensity they otherwise hadn’t earned. In the end, while I hold the sanctity of human life and of that growing between my teeth in equally high esteem (sincerely), I think routine use of suicide trivializes a mortally heavy issue, and wanders away from the theme most of these stories seem to be setting out, from the beginning. At what point is life not worth living? For an author to place that weight in a character’s hands is no big deal, he can do it a thousand times before breakfast, but each death cheapens the others a little, even when they’re made up.

When Darabont repudiated what Drayton did, he seemed well aware of the gravity of the situation, and eloquently raised the question of whether Drayton’s duty to his son, to all humankind, was to stay alive and die defending his son against any sliver of hope for survival. That’s what animals do, and it’s the reason why there are still animals, despite our best efforts. Your opinion of The Mist was probably a little different… but speaking as someone whose reality-roughened feelings were enervated by what I saw on the screen, I was also rewarded with a rich debate, rather than a sense that someone had taken a cheap stab at my pain in a cheesy movie.

SHOW & TELL

By Cody Goodfellow

Remember how utterly lame Halloween costumes used to be?
What kid-hating idiot in the 1960’s decided that kids had to be the Platonic ideal of a character, instead of a mimic of the real thing. that a kid who wanted to be the Wolf Man for Halloween really should instead become a billboard for the Wolf Man. Spider Man was supposed to go begging for candy in a rubber suit with a picture of himself on it. Perhaps because irritable cops kept shooting at anything remotely resembling Tatoo or Gene Simmons, we were forced to wear these retarded costumes that told who we were supposed to be, instead of elegantly showing what we were.

Show, don’t tell: an ironclad dictum, the kind of rule you must obey to produce bearable writing, but must break to produce anything enjoyable. For no better reason than that I love to donkey-punch conventional wisdom whenever I see its loathsome, helpless haircut, I tried to get to the heart of the show and tell controversy. They got along so great in elementary school; what the hell happened to split them up?

Showing makes prose more cinematic, but it also limits its palette. Artfully and dynamically painting the scene in words satisfies every writer’s frustrated dream of making movies, but overuse is like trying the same roundhouse punch until your reader drops, or drops you.

As much as we are expected to produce Technicolor, Odorama brain-movies for our reader, the glassjawed ham & egger will swiftly succumb to the shocking uppercut of just coming out and telling the story, now and again.
In film, showing is essential, because everything is fed to the passive viewer, who slips into a waking dream, if the particular film doesn’t suck out his will to live. In literature, of course, imagery is an expensive illusion generated by a flurry of words, the visual writer a tourist in the cinematic dream state, saddled with a horrible exchange rate and indecipherably showy directions. It falls to any writer above fortune cookie counts to weave a spell in which the reader must actively pull the words off the page one at a time, and still daydream according to precise and purple instructions.

Showing gets a lot of unfair praise, while telling is often unjustly maligned. You drop a fortune to take your brats to a Hannah Montana “show,” while a “tell” is what cost me my kid’s college money at the Commerce Pai Gow Casino. The highest praise lavished on modern genre hits usually applauds their relentless pace and vivid imagery, and readers often cite the cinematic quality of their favorite prose.

But even the zippiest thriller books can only chase after the hypnotic buzz of movies, and “breathless” thrillers often lumber along glacially under a welter of cinematically redundant detail that shows nothing at all (Witness Patricia Cornwell describing an entire dream kitchen with only the brand names and colors found in the catalog).

I love cinematic detail in my own and others’ writing; I try to nail every image as vividly as possible, but that’s why all my favorite work is double the word ceiling for any paying magazine. Something had to give, so I tried to make my descriptions more strategic, to pick nodes of detail that triggered mnemonic responses in the reader that would fill in the gaps. Some readers would prefer you count every palace guard’s pocket change, but they’ll unconsciously thank you if you find a way to make them think you did it, and save a few trees.

Still, there must be a simpler way, and a better way, that wins back the atavistic, hoary old charms of good old-fashioned storytelling, that has kept our backward art alive and kicking against all comers, from cave paintings to the Playstation.

Harlan Ellison is a past master at evoking vivid settings while leaving the darkest conclusions to bloom in the sleepless reader’s mind. His strongest stories, particularly his asshole-fables from the Gentleman Junkie era (at the risk of getting sued [Hi, Harlan’s Googling Lawyers!] I won’t quote anything, but trust me), he pointedly tells you just what kind of shithead you’re about to share spit with, in colorful, but indisputably telling tones.

Tom Picirrilli’s hallucinogothic noir style revels in decadent but svelte imagery, then counterpunches with direct apostrophe, the narrator flat-out telling you the fucked rules that govern his misbegotten character’s lives. The hairy brass balls on this guy drop out of the book and onto your chin, when he does this trick right.

This kind of technique breaks the wall, turning off as many readers as it probably turns on, but reader’s aren’t reflexively turned off by a voice, so long as its distinctive qualities add to the delivery of the story. The words aren’t magic smoke or dancing army ants. They’re words some guy or gal wrote to trick you into dreaming their dream.

Having only muddied my own neat personal definitions, I picked up a case of Heineken and went to see the Wise Old Owl. He told me some stuff that made me nod gravely and scratch where I hope one day to glue a convincing beard, because all his wisdom directly contradicted what I thought I totally understood. “I think telling plays best in moments of relative stillness,” he hooted, “the calm
between the storms. That’s where literature can pull off cerebral effects that you can’t get anywhere else.”

Now, I’d supposed that showing would be called for to lace less dynamic portions of a story with theme and atmosphere, while telling would be good for hustling readers through the unlovely mechanical tuff that intrudes on every story. And I had to agree, because NOBODY can put them away like Mr. Owl.

Then he got loopy, like he saw juicy, tender pink mice flying out of my pockets. “But when it comes to action, it’s all show me show me show me. And every single word that ISN’T a show-me word has to do the work of at least a dozen others, in order to replace them, add velocity, AND still communicate something deeper.”

Sure, we all want more action, but as it gets bare of metaphor and imagery, doesn’t it approach telling what happened, baldly, tersely, to speed the reader ahead all the faster under the falling expositional brick you’re dropping on the next page.

A long time ago, I stopped trying to tweak my story ideas so much that the idea alone would give you an embolism. I realized that just articulating my simplest idea so another could and would want any part of it, would tax every last brain cell to destruction, and so the weirder things get, the more plainly they have to be described.

Mr. Owl chided me for the foolishness of only bringing one case of beer, and flew away. I was left no closer to any solution, but it’s still my dream to see show & tell reunited again, and not like on that Captain & Tenielle special, where you could totally tell they’d both been hit with curare darts.

If nothing else, I learned anew that reexamining the purpose and approach of each sentence as an entity, an attack, unto itself, can make any writer break up the numbing patterns that surface in veteran career writers as well as novices.

But we must remember first and foremost that we are writers of stories, not movies. All writing is storytelling. If your words string together to form an image, you are playing with powerful tools, but you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find what all the other tools can do.

And don’t give beer to owls.

The Heartbreak Of Battered Writer Syndrome
By Cody Goodfellow

Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
––Iago, in Othello, Act 3, scene 3, 155–161

Mellow Out Or You Will Pay
––Jello Biafra

The first sale I ever made was for a book-length supplement to a gaming company, in 1994. I wrote and delivered the project, and waited… for ten years. No contract, no payment, no publication. Every few years, the publisher and I shared some laughs over the situation, but I didn’t have anywhere else to go with the work, and no contract to lever anything but excuses out of them.
When the book finally did come out, they had another writer revise and expand it, and went ahead to press without realizing they’d never given me a contract. I played along, because by this point, I had two novels out (self-published, because I didn’t trust anyone else), and needed the exposure.
They paid the first portion of what they owed with the signed contract, and have been assiduously avoiding me ever since, except when I end up in one of their fiction anthologies, which I, from time to time, still do.
Am I a battered wife, to let these larcenous creeps off the hook? A sucker, to keep working with them? These clowns have acted in both bad faith and incompetence over the years, but business-wise, they’re still a better ally to me than many editors in the industry, with whom I am pleased and proud to work or share a drink.
As writers, we have so little control over anything, that it becomes an imperative that we fight, whenever we think we can, to get our due, in the hope of clawing our way to glory. I don’t think a less stressed-out strategy would hurt one’s future; in fact, I think a more relaxed approach is more professional, because a professional would rather write, than fight.
When you’re slaving over a hot story for days, weeks or (like me) months, it’s easy to lose sight of the essential worthlessness of what you’re doing, in the larger sense of the cultural mainstream. You could count the pro-rate anthologies and magazines open to new writers at any given time on one hand, and still have a free nose-picker. Word rates are largely unchanged since Lovecraft’s day, and Lovecraft lived on navy beans. It was an outrage then, and it’s only accrued outrageous interest since, but this is the life that has chosen us, isn’t it?
We must face the sad fact that the unbearably vivid and masterful works of literary art we cherish are still, to most people, as a bunch of ugly, dumb words, with nary a picture to break up the monotony. In short, a damned hard sell.
Most people don’t read, and almost nobody reads short stories. So, in the whole of the cultural market, there is not even a shrinking pie for horror writers to fight over, nor even crumbs. There are atoms of market share to compete for, and yet writers are, in the good ways, the least competitive bunch of starving workers I’ve ever seen.
We all strive to tell the scariest tale, but not at the expense of holding each other back. Because we share the secret of lonely brain-labor, we are closer to each other than to any of our readers, or to the editors we sometimes demonize for short-changing our greatness. So, it sometimes seems like the natural thing to do, to gang up on them.
And the effigy we whip up for such occasions is quite often a hapless, overextended amateur editor, motivated more by a misguided passion for the dark literary arts and devotion to the same writers spoiling to go all Guy Fawkes on his ass, than by any code of professionalism.
Mostly, these guys are trying to be professionals, too, and to promote our art. They want us to succeed, and have staked a lot of labor and a smidgen of hard-won capital on it. And like us, or anything on two legs, they make mistakes. Big ones, sometimes. It’s hard not to imagine a cabal of editors somewhere, swilling cognac and feeding a fire with our irate letters, because somebody must be getting rich off all our brain-sweat.
Where there is true ill will, profiteering or crass inconsiderate treatment, we should come down on them with anvils of furious indignation. When you’re dealing with someone you’ve never met, it is all but impossible to guess at motives, but one thing is almost certain: they’re probably not getting all that rich off you. In most small press pubs, each title has to hoist the next one into being by selling through, and outside the echo chambers of message board fandom, we are not much of a threat to any other entertainment market’s fresh-baked pie.
All too often, the broken promises or delayed payments are the result of poor planning, vaporous financing, and naïve expectations based on a business model that would make a kamikaze pilot think twice before signing on. If they screw over a stable of writers, they can look forward to blackballing and public shaming in the virtual town square, and whatever chance they had to learn from their mistakes is snatched away. And so is another place for writers to be read.
It is not amateurism, I believe, to write and market short fiction with the primary goal of placing it where it will be read. Even if you can write like Harlan, you’ll still be lucky to be driving a Geo Metro in your dotage, if you only write short stories.
To expect payment is not naïve, but given all the other obstacles to success, to appear in a well-made publication alongside superior talent is far more important to long-term success, than the elusive and unimpressive paycheck. To a writer who hopes to sell novels, short stories are a calling card, a trifle that will introduce you to new readers who will, hopefully, be moved to seek out your other work. Think of it as placing an ad for yourself, for which you will, sooner or later, get paid.
When my novels came out, they were well-reviewed, but nobody noticed (except Skipp, who, God bless him, likes looking under rocks). Then the gaming shitheels put out the all-but-forgotten resource guide, and die-hard fans of the Cthulhu Mythos subgenre started to buy my books, and recommend them. I started putting fancy mustard on my navy beans.
Since then, I have appeared in anthologies put out by the unscrupulous fucksticks, if I like the editor and the theme. The editor makes sure I get paid, and every story drives more sales of my novels.
Am I bitter? Hell yes, but the grievance is still only small-claims chump change, and I hate dressing up for court dates. My books put out by Perilous Press handily outsell the one I wrote for them, while they pay me to place ads in their anthologies, which keeps the navy beans sailing.
If you are an honest editor, thank you. It’s harder to make a living at than writing, and you get even less love. We need more of you. So, if you don’t like lynch mobs on your lawn, listen up.
Writers are bosom companions of disappointment. Horror writers thrive on it. Editors trapped by ugly shifts in events can keep writers satisfied simply by keeping them updated. When family troubles or financial hardship hold up progress, writers should be notified as soon as the delay is unavoidable. I’ve seldom seen writers bolt from a delayed anthology as long as they knew where they stood, but I’ve seen others melt down because an editor, no doubt embarrassed by the undoing of all his crazy promises, clammed up and tried to ride it out. Writers are used to bad news, but nobody likes the mushroom treatment (kept in the dark, fed only shit).
Some editors should be shot for their crimes against writers, but writers should try to remember that if they are in it for the long haul, they can expect gridlock, wrong turns, and more than a few dead ends and deranged hitchhikers along the way.
Lately, the idea has taken hold that being a professional means, first and last and always, getting paid for what you do. I always believed that professionalism started with doing what you said you were going to do, no matter what the other guy did. In the end, you must get paid, but a little patience and empathy makes better business sense, than the Goodfellas professionalism of the “fuck you, pay me” variety. Professionalism also cuts both ways; before you go fetch a rope over a late check, review your contract. Better yet, review it before you sign it, and iron out the vague or unacceptable kinks before you have to resort to vigilante justice.
The flip side of this, which I must acknowledge before someone beats me up with it in comments, is that you should never, ever let your work become entangled with something poorly edited, sloppily laid-out or just plain bad. There may be too few decent magazines paying better than a hobo’s wage, but there’re millions who turn out abysmal products, or who tie up misled writers’ works forever, and produce nothing at all. They, too, are driven by love of art, but if they can’t make or recognize it, they can’t possibly help you, whether or not they can pay. My argument only applies to editors and publishers who have business problems, but who turn out professional work that makes you look good. This is a whole other topic, but like porn czar Ed Meese once said, “I know it when I see it.”
To date, the vulpine unclefuckers at the gaming company have not made good on their debt (to me or anyone else, because it’s SOP for them; hey, maybe they screwed you, too!). I’ve been patient and polite throughout, and remain so, because despite themselves, they’ve promoted me quite a lot, bless their black, smegmatic hearts. But on the day I need some folding green more than I need their help getting my name out, they’ll know they’ve been fucked by a professional.