Gerard Houarner

Or…”interrupted by a person on business from Porlock” — sustaining the vision of the story you want to tell as life’s storms rage around you.

Trust me, it’ll make sense.

Quite some time ago in a LOCUS interview, Jay Lake talked about the challenges of containing the story he’s working on in his mind, or living in the “dream world” of his fictional creation.

I’ve always related to the problem, and kept the issue alive in my notes if not in my ever shrinking mind. I know I’ve mentioned the idea before, but perhaps never explored the concept. Also, over the years as life has closed in and its many challenges consumed innocence, insouciance, and energy, writing has become harder, not easier.

The topic haunts me.

One of the many romantic notions about writers is that they rattle off poems, stories and novels in a “white heat” of inspiration, working day and night, chain smoking, sitting in their dirty underwear in small rooms, their haggard faces lit only by the light of a computer screen (a single dusty bulb in the “old” days, and by candle flame in ancient times) surrounded by empty liquor bottles and piles of pristine finished manuscript, until the book is done and the royalty checks are already in the mail.

Everything real seems to stop in these writers’ lives. Children are magically fed, creditors compassionately defer their pursuit of unpaid bills. The sanctity of the torch of inspiration is respected, and the fire is allowed to burn until the fuel is spent and words are forged.

Now, it’s true there’s a least one famous thriller writer who books a hotel room for a few weeks and locks himself away to write a novel. And there are writers with significant others who “enable” their writing by taking care of the little details of life so they can concentrate on living in the imaginary world of their story until the tale is told.

The reality is that for most writers, that ain’t happening. More often, we’re like Coleridge with what we innocently and passionately believe is Kubla Khan in our heads, putting down lines from a (hopefully not opium inspired) dream vision until we’re interrupted by, as the story famously goes, a person on business from Porlock.

And if you’re a writer and never heard of anything from the above paragraph, stop reading and don’t write, but search out the poem and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Romanticism.

So the problem (one of many) for writers is keeping what you’re working on alive in your mind. For me, what Jay Lake is talking about is more than a memory problem of recalling plot direction and character tics. And it’s not “inspiration,” that magical booster shot people who want to be writers wait for so they can produce something when, and only when, they feel like it.

I believe containing the story in your mind is about getting a state of awareness about what you’ve done, where you’re heading, and what you’re supposed to be doing with your story when you’re at your keyboard. Something like an altered state, without the opium. An understanding that certain things have happened and that, because of those things, the blank page/screen is waiting for you to set down what you already know, deep down inside beyond your conscious mind, will happen next.

Maybe it’s a meditative state, for some. Or the “zone” athletes talk about, in which years of practicing certain skill sets, along with instinct, experience, and athletic talents, combine to elevate performance out of the mud of fear, nerves and thought. A higher state is achieved in which the baseball appears bigger, moving slower, toward your gigantic bat which swings so effortlessly.

A dream state. Being “in the moment.” Focused on the thing you are doing.

This precious state of knowing and being happens all the time in life, I think, though we may not be aware of it. I think it happens in the process of raising kids, working, driving, praying. Addicts miraculously rise from their stupor to orchestrate their next score.

For writers, I think it means avoiding the struggle of finding the “next thing” to write, rekindling the fire of “inspiration,” feeling again the urgency of having to say the thing you wanted to say in those first moments you scribbled down the story idea. It means recapturing the magnificent arc of story you saw at some point early in the process, re-entering the dream of your vision of Kubla Khan, with all its shimmering details, its clever references, plot points, characters, imagery and layers of meaning, and dragging it out into the waking world whole and complete.

We want it to happen whenever we write.

But it doesn’t happen all the time. We can’t live 24/7 in the dream state of our stories. Other lives, including our own “real world” lives, also need tending and care. Duty calls. Responsibilities knock on our doors.

Obviously, opium worked, at least once for Coleridge. The “romantic” image of writers that includes empty liquor bottles documents the supposed need for alcohol and other drugs to “lubricate” the imagination.

Certainly there are plenty of literary legends fueled by this kind of inspiration. There’s also a lot of bs, folks claiming one thing but doing quite another because, well, the bon vivant is a cool “platform” from which to sell stuff. Aside from the physically, emotionally and cognitively self-destructive aspects of these habits, there’s also regret.

If you wrote that well when you were high, think how much better it would have been if you were in your right mind.

And then there’s the sad reality that 99.9% of that stuff is buried, unseen, along with the creators. Mostly, at a very young age.

So what triggers these states? What else can we use to find the dream in which we can create?

I believe the discipline tricks writers use – writing in the same place, at the same time, every day – not only helps with production, but it also gets the writer back into the “space” or “head” of writing. It’s certainly helped me at times.

Keeping a Fortress of Solitude, a Batcave, a private space decorated so that it resembles the inside of your mind, is a tried and true. But I’ve found that isolating, at times. Cut off from life. Too unreal, perhaps too comfortable. And sometimes, when illness, death, disaster, financial woes or other big life tragedies and issues knock on the door, the Fortress walls come down, or they seem just silly and irrelevant, both in terms of life and to a story you may be trying to tell.

Music, especially when writers talk about specific genres for different types of writing, also serves as an emotional and imagination gate to get back into the story. I’ve seen candles and scents would do the trick.

There are stories about writers doing it naked, as if getting back into some kind of primal state to get the work done.

But not everybody works that way, and even if these techniques work for the structure and discipline of getting back to the work of writing, there may still be problems finding the dream of the story, particularly when time has gone by or a writer is jumping from one piece to another.

I guess what I’m looking for is something tied not to the act of writing, but to the story you’re trying to tell. An anchor, or a touchstone. A key that unlocks the cabinet through which you enter the adventure.

Well, yes, music works for a lot of people in this regard. Theme songs, like a Quincy Jones arrangement for a detective show, except the show is your story and the theme song is whatever rocks your boat. Alas, most of the time this is not for me. I find music too distracting, engaging me in ways that make me want to do other things besides writing, unless I’m writing a very musical story. And even then, at some point, I have to shut it down so I can concentrate on what the characters are saying and feeling.

I guess one factor in finding the right “key” is understanding which of the five senses dominates your awareness – are you visual, auditory, etc?

I do find getting in touch with the story’s setting a good way to start things up each time I write. Working on a longish piece set in a surreal desert, on and off over the past months (more on this another time), I found pictures, documentaries, even a screen saver all pretty good starting points. I write a lot in urban settings, and I live in a city, but I’ve also done nature settings, and I like parks and country, too. I know in those times when I write in a non-urban setting, I’m always thinking of and remembering the time I’ve spent upstate, out West, by the sea, etc.

Setting to me establishes the mood of a story. Again, I can see how music would be a great tool. But I’ve used, as above, documentaries, Sunrise Earth (HD films of sunrises in different parts of the world), and touchstone movies – Blade Runner, Casablanca, David Lynch stuff, surreal cartoons – running silently in the background to guide me into my zone.

Another way is to start every writing session by editing the previous session’s writing. This is a good habit, anyway, as what seemed like gold last night can turn out to be lead in the morning. But, depending on your need, re-reading the work and starting to tinker with it can get you back into the frame of mind you were in when you were last writing. Sparks fly, connections are re-opened. You’re reminded of things you wanted to say, or why you said such and such. You recall threats, you react to dangers. Hopefully, at some point, you’ll feel the need to stop editing and move into the action.

Yes, I know, there are some writers who cannot go on before finishing the perfect page. I studied under one of those. And for that person, the story was complete in his mind. It seemed like the dream of the story was readily accessible, though I was too young and stupid at the time ask. Most of us are not like that.

The point here is to get back into the overall story, the dream, and not to get caught up in close editing. Unless, of course, you find that to be your key. In any case, reviewing old work can wake up the other part of the brain where the dream is living. Listen to it when it calls.

By the way, I recently talked here on Storytellersunplugged about using “dead time” in your life as part of the writing process. Doing a little editing – re-reading what you’ve written, doing minor edits on the fly on your portable computer, smart phone, or manuscript pages — is not only a smart use of little snippets of time while waiting for something to happen, but it also helps to keep that dream alive in your head. Maybe it’ll make you more motivated to hurry home, or dip into the dream for as much time as you may have, and carry the story a little further along with new material.

The biggest key for me getting back into the dreamtime, I’ve found, are characters. I guess it’s something like an actor waiting in the wings, ready to throw up, having no memory of the lines, dreading the cue to step on stage. And when that moment comes and the floorboards creak underfoot, the actor doesn’t so much enter the play but the character in the play, and the lines flow and the fear flies off and the game is afoot.

It’s not the easy or magical, or nauseating, when I write. But I have found that once I’m “in” the character – I have a firm grip on needs, fears, strengths and weaknesses, as well as a sense of personality like sense of humor, patterns of connecting with others, how they relate to friends or family – I can see and understand the story through that character’s eyes. I’ve done long pieces through the eyes of several characters and never had a problem switching around and getting into the story from their point of view. Their individual worlds, and the world of the overall story, was usually within my reach.

Finding and feeling comfortable with the characters is another story, of course. Looking back, I can see the “failed” stories, particularly the ones that never sold or the ones I never bothered to finish, had problems centering on my lack of connection with the characters. The dream never came alive.

Sometimes (let’s not say often) dreams die when published. They never come alive for other people. So it goes. But at the very least, the dream should be alive for the writer.

Strong characters carry their own atmosphere, bring the mood to the story, invite certain kinds of characters to play with them. Good characters can make the work of telling a story so much easier.

Think of the Harry Potter series. Really, all that fantasy stuff is wonderful, but not particularly original. The magical schoolboy is practically an English genre all to itself. But it’s Potter and his Scooby gang that makes that dream come alive for readers. When I imagine myself writing something like that (and cashing all those checks!), I envy the way the characters come alive for readers, and how it must have been to work with them and letting the story flow from their traits, their histories, habits, needs and fears.

In my surreal desert fantasy (no, really, I’ll talk more about that next time, I really must), which was a pain to write and is still a pain in the editing/revision process, which this column is interrupting so I must hurry and finish so I can get back to that dream, I was only able to get back to it after through the many interruptions I had because the main character had a weight of her own. Sometimes she’d say or do things that completely surprised me. But I had a strong sense of her right from the beginning, and that anchor allowed me to slip back enough times (but not al the time, because no solution is perfect and writing is hard no matter how many tricks and shortcuts you use) to keep the dream of that story going.

Another thing that kept that piece, and most things I write, going and alive in my head is having an ending in mind.

For the desert piece, the reason I even started it was to write about the Caravan of Death. This was an idea and a collection of characters from one of my novels. I always loved the idea and wanted to return to it. I started the story knowing the little girl I invented would meet the Caravan of Death and somehow all hell would break loose. For that little girl to hold her own against something called the Caravan of Death, there’d have to be some special qualities to her, and finding those qualities became part of the process of telling the story, part of the dream.

But a general idea of the ending, in most cases, is part of the beginning of the story. As I’ve said before, the seeds of the end are always at the beginning. They may be invisible, implied, cast like shadows around the edges, part of the background, in the imagery and symbols, but usually it’s there, somewhere, lurking, waiting. You may not be aware of it. The secrets may only be revealed with time, the story’s development. You may re-read that beginning a hundred times before you see it. Or, you may have to go back and plant the damn seed as the ending becomes clear by telling the story. One way or another, the end usually gets there in the beginning.

And I say this not just because I have an Ouroborus tattoo on my arm.

It may not be the ending that actually happens, and in fact, it’s probably better if the ending changes as the story evolves. But having that ending, or just a general idea for how the character conflicts will resolve (where the characters are going in their individual arcs), serves not only as an anchor for the plot, but for all the different levels of the story being told. Having a direction, an ending, helps to give the dream And by general idea, I mean, do I want

Part of the reasoning behind beginnings/endings and characters as keys to keeping the story alive in your mind is another piece of advice that a lot of writers talk about: having a strong foundation.

By foundation, I don’t necessarily mean a strong beginning, though that helps. But, I’ve found to my chagrin, beginnings change. You think you’re starting in middle, like the sage writing advice tells you, but suddenly you discover you need to start the story earlier or, more often later.

And having a big finish in mind is no guarantee that it will happen, unless you’re the kind of writer who lives by the outline. No problem with that. If the outline works, and can contain the dream and make the story come alive in your mind, I envy you. Most writers I know throw out the outline at some point.

But a start and end does help to define the dream. It’s like recognizing a picture, knowing the outline on a map is not some vague blob, but Africa and all the history and pain and wonder that the name conjures.

And going back and making that beginning stronger, going back and revising and inserting and deleting material, even leaving notes here and there for yourself with what needs to be done right in the manuscript (and believe me, I’ve been startled by my own forgotten notes more than once, and slapped my head over a forgotten part of the dream that needed to poke its head out at the place I’d left a marker), is another reason to edit during “dead time” and start writing sessions by re-reading the story.

If you’ve been away from your story for a while, start at the beginning. See if the beginning awakens the dream, reminds you of the things you’ve already written about what’s going to happen, if the characters come alive and fill you with the need to go back into them, and if you sense what’s coming, good or bad, at the end, or perhaps more importantly, feel the drive to find out what happens, in the end.

If you do, then the story is still alive inside you, and the dream waits for you to join in the adventure.

As writers, we think and talk a lot about plot and characters, and how they form the structure of our stories.

What’s common to this, and many other discussions, is the idea of change.

There wouldn’t be a story without change, not even in the literary genre where, like Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot, characters might be trapped in the expectation of a change that never happens – but the possibility of change is still out there. We talk about emotional throughlines, or the transformations great and small characters experience through the actions they take in the story. We set off explosive events – change the rules, make zombies and invading aliens or monsters from out of time and space – and make our characters deal with what we’ve done.

Change, whether or not it actually happens, is the engine that drives a story.

Change comes as crisis, as evolution, transformation, as part of a cycle, or a break from that cycle. Change is birth and death, creation and destruction. It comes with shocking suddenness, hard and fast, and in tiny, excruciating increments of pain, or perhaps joy. Change comes with an opening of a door, or one closing. Change alters perspectives, brings character to an epiphany, a realization, an acceptance, a sensation of satisfaction and completion.

How a character (and of course the reader) perceives and reacts to change in all its flavors reveals everything about that person – their strengths and weaknesses, the brittleness and resiliency. What mix of emotion and intellectuality rises to process the change? What is mobilized in the character, what parts go into hiding?

Does the character embrace, or at least face, the reality of the changes occurring in their world, or do they want to pick and choose, stay in control of that change, even if deals with the devils and taking wishes from djinn popping out of magic lamps is historically shaky business.

What a character does in the face of a transforming situation is the story.

Of course, things may not change, inside, for our character. For every end of the world scenario, for every modernist ironic character study, change can be frustratingly remote. We remain human, even when we transform our characters into something else. Because, really, the inhuman just doesn’t translate. That may also be the point. And, there’s the approach to fiction that requires a return to the norm – you’ve got to come back from Oz.

Or not. If you can sell it, then you stay in whatever brave new world you’ve landed the rest of us in with your story.

Maybe.

You were expecting me to change?

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

I haven’t the foggiest idea if Abraham Maslow had much experience with the arts, but certainly his observation works for more than therapists and their menu of interventions.  (Maslow being a psychologist of the “humanist” tradition famous for, among other things, a view of personality based on a hierarchy of needs, which some might find useful tool as a way to look at characters and  conflict – check out http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/maslow.html as a start if you’re interested.)

The hammer and nail observation certainly relates to a lot of situations.  No matter what the profession, it’s never a good thing when a co-worker’s options for appropriate responses is severely limited.  As a matter of fact, the hammer and nail approach often serves as comic relief in storytelling.  And, as a predictor of a character’s early demise.

And, from the viewpoint of the “other side of the coin,” the hammer and nail can also flip from humor to horror, and become the sole motivating factor and/or technique for a predator.

But as a writer, it pays to have a bag of tricks, a few tools in the box to get your character from one place to another, another way to rescue characters besides blood and bullets.  Yes, writers and artists in general have their passions, obsessions, visions and all of that.  Lovecraft overcame his hammer and nail by making it a mighty special hammer, but too many would-be imitators/followers have tried using that same combination and found themselves on the unintentionally humorous side of the coin.  Writers have stock characters they lean on again and again, settings they wear thin, descriptive phrases that appear in story after story, set ups and pay offs that make their tales predictable, a reflection of the genre to which they belong.

It pays to experiment, to read and learn (never steal, writes never steal, they only learn from their betters, trust me), to try and fail (I know, the economic consequences can be dire, but calculated risks are part of every profession).

It pays to pay attention to how many times you describe a street, or a character, or a room, in exactly the same way.  It pays to pay attention to the plots you pick, the characters you rely on, the phrasings like, well, it pays to pay attention…

Zombies.  There’s a tempting target for hammer and nail.  And yet, as an example of how a writer might work different angles with the same very limited subject, you might try Scott Edelman’s collection, What Will Come After.

I think part of the struggle for artists in general is balancing passion and vision, which sometimes tends toward using the hammer of their particular talent and viewpoint to on every project, with the work of trying out new tools to shape different takes on the material.

By this, I mean doing obvious stuff like switching character viewpoints from male to female to “other,” experimenting with language and style and voice, stepping out of the comfort zone of habit, telling a “straight” story if you’re an experimental type and playing with structure if you’re already a straight-shooter.

Do something you don’t want to do.

Pick up a new tool, do something other than hit what you think is a nail.

I had a great conversation recently with a supervisor of a substance abuse clinic, talking about staff issues  and the learning process.  One of the things he talked about was dealing with counselors who used confrontation, a traditional substance abuse counseling tool, for every patient and situation.  And there he was, talking about hammer and nail.

To be applied to so many things in life, of course, from taking a different route to work to, well, you can figure it out…and to writing stories.

In the SU tradition for Halloween’s month, here’s a story I wrote a while ago, originally published in the Barnes and Nobles anthology, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories in October, 1998

****

They ate quickly, swallowing chunks of meat and vegetables, draining glass after glass of wine.  They finished his bottle and two she kept in a rack on the kitchen counter.  The stew pot was empty when they finally stopped eating, sat back, looked at each other.  Richard burped loudly.  Carmen put her napkin to her mouth and turned her head to the side.

“In high school,” he said at last, toying with the bread knife, “I killed a girl’s dog when she wouldn’t go out on a date with me, and I planted the knife I used in her ex-boyfriend’s locker.”

Carmen stood and went to the window.  She hugged herself, as if chilled. “In high school, I worked for a man who arranged for older men to see me after school.  He arranged for the abortions, as well.  That’s why I told you I couldn’t have children, anymore.”

Richard went to the stereo and put on a CD of salsa music.  Horns blared, voices cried out, intricate percussive rhythms laced the air. “About the scar on my chest you asked about last night,” he said, hips swaying as he danced his way to her.  “That was from the first one I killed.  She carried a razor in her purse and slashed my through my jacket.  I’ve been much more careful since then.”

Carmen turned.  Her gaze travelled smoothly from following the steps of his dance to the swaying hand holding the bread knife to the subtle, steady smile on his lips.  “You never told me you could dance,” she said.

He shrugged his shoulders, drawing nearer.  “I always wanted a dancer.  My first said he could dance, but when we went to the club he made us both look ridiculous.  What I took from the hospital where I worked as a nursing intern gave him a fatal heart attack, and could not be detected without specialized tests.  Since his family had a history of heart problems, no one bothered to look for anything else.”

Richard pressed his body against hers, pushing Carmen back against the wall.

“I’m so glad you wanted us to get to know each other,” he whispered in her ear.  He put the serrated edge of the bread knife to her throat.  “Sharing our pasts as well as our bodies makes our time together so much more satisfying.”

“It’s not every man who opens himself up to a woman,” she replied, staring  into his eyes, hands splayed against the wall.

Richard stabbed her once, expertly, and threw her to the ground.  “I’ll stay a little while longer,” he said, crouching beside her as she lay pumping blood on the floor.  “So you’re not alone as you die.”

“Thank you,” she croaked, a halo of blood surrounding her head, “but you don’t have to.”

Richard winced, dropped the bread knife, passed a hand over his stomach.

Carmen caressed his pale face with bloody fingertips.  “I drank all the antidote before dinner.”

end

A couple of months ago,  I riffed on a Locus interviewee’s  comments about writing, and this month, well, I’m going back to the well but this time it’s john Crowley and, well, it’s john Crowley…

In the January 2010 issue of Locus, John Crowley talked about writing and how he teaches, and said the following:

“When I teach science fiction classes, one of the stories I always give my students to read is “The Light of Other Days” by Bob Shaw.  It’s a story about memory: things that have been captured and lost, and the power of things that have been caught but shouldn’t  have been.  What I try to describe to students is the way a science fiction story ought to work.  To be a real science fiction story but a moving one, whatever technological gimmick you come up with has to be the bearer of the meaning of the story.  It has to carry the weight of the emotions.  It’s not a science fiction story if the scientific wonder or futuristic thing is just there but the emotions are about me and my wife, or my feelings about my son, and by the way, we’re in the future.  The SF thing has to carry the meaning, and you get the meaning of the story by thinking about the gimmick.”

Of course I’m old enough to remember that story from when it first came out, back in the day when short stories carried a bit more impact than they do now and when it was possible to read just about everything that was important in various genres without secluding one’s self in a priory.

The quote is an obvious, and valuable, lesson for science fiction writers, of course.

But, of course, it relates to any literary work powered by a central image, idea, crime, passion, adventure, monster, what have you – the gimmick, whether it is technological, fantastic, emotional, or simply the machinations of a thriller plot, serves as a metaphor for the meaning of the story.  The tools of the genre serve as a vessel for the  emotions of the characters in that story, the ones the reader is being asked to identify with, invest in, relate to and follow along on a journey.

Yes, I understand, Crowley is talking about a very specific thing relating to science fiction, and I’m adding fuzz to the matter at hand, generalizing and obfuscating a very important truth.

Yes, I understand that the technological innovation is not at all the same thing as a paranoid thriller plot, or a noirish scenario of doom, or a dragon, or a stranger in town, or a couple trapped in a domestic hell.

But Crowley’s observation sent my mind down a rabbit hole and into a world I haven’t inhabited in many, many years: college.  Sophomore.  Greek classical literature, the roots of Western literature.

And the old Red Queen said hi:  Aristotle’s Poetics.

You just can’t get away from the damn thing.  There’s a version for film writing, Rick Hautula (aka  A.J. Matthews,  or the “next Stephen King” as he’s “lovingly” referred to at Necon writers’ conference) is always referencing it whenever he talks about writing,   My college professor in Greek lit obsessed about the Poetics, before he was summarily dethroned as temporary department head and saner (in only the most liberal, academic sense of the word) heads prevailed.  It’s online (google it and you’ll find various “”Butcher” versions or splurge and for a couple of dollars you can pick up a better used translation), and there is a lot of study and summary material dedicated to it which presents in capsule form those hours of debating and interpretation you might spend, along with a ton of money, experiencing first hand in college classes.  If you need the live performance, knock yourself out.

It’s all about dramatic unity.  The Poetics offers the first cohesive theory about the structure and aesthetics of storytelling, at least as it relates to Western aesthetics.  You could do worse than read, or more accurately, spend a little time studying and researching, old Aristotle.  Much of what you’ll learn in modern writing courses comes from the groove he laid down 2300 years ago.

What was said then is, of course, still relevant now.  Certainly in the commercial markets available to us.  Certainly in relating to what our audience has been trained to expect, through school and lifetimes worth of mass consumption of stories – from structured and packaged biographies (for those non-fiction types who don’t read “fiction”) to folks schooled in everything from the classics to pulp, comics and summer blockbuster movies.

Dramatic unity calls for a story structure in which all the parts are tightly interconnected.  The usual line-up includes time, place, rhythm, emotion, theme, action.

Ooooo, action.  Don’t get my old professor started on that.

Anyway, Aristotle served as midwife to the notion of show, don’t tell.  He viewed storytelling (specifically, tragedy) as a mimetic art, that is, a reflection of the way the world actually works. No deus ex machina.  Fear and pity, at least in tragedy, are the emotional goals for the audience, followed by catharsis.  Characters, sadly, are rather strictly defined in moral/societal terms, hardly the intense, psychological creatures of today.

There are interesting things out there on the Poetics – you could much worse than spend a couple of hours going through some of the online free college study material (google something like aristotle’s poetics analysis).

Yes, there are issues.  This is all fine and well for Western style storytelling, and we all know that Western style storytelling is the very best of its kind, certainly, and everybody else wants our Westerns style storytelling and there really is only one kind of story and one kind structure that really, really, really reaches down into the core of who and what we are because we’re all the same, when you come right down to it, and those Greeks got it right for everybody when they did their thing and everybody else got it wrong and they just better hurry up and get with the program…

Well, there are some cultural differences, things found acceptable and rules broken, as story fulfills different needs at other times and/or parts of the world.  Hell, there’s plenty of variation within our own “sacred” Western rational point of view.  You can start with Euripedes.

Of course, the way story, or the art of poetry, can reflect individuality in the context of a society rather than merely represent culture, fate, what have you, is a twist on Aristotle’s take on the matter.

What makes the Poetics valuable, no matter how you shake your rhubarb (as another generation’s Joker might say), is the logic of making the story coherent in terms of an internal set of rules.  If in your world folks express themselves periodically through outbreaks of song and dance, or extended hand-to-hand combat, then so be it.  Just make sure the logic holds true as certainly as apples fall from trees in our world.

The Poetics might not work for you.  The work might bore the bejesus out of your imagination.  I’m just saying, Aristotle’s Poetics is a place a lot of writers you read and love have passed through.  For some, it’s a bible.  For others, a tool to help get a handle on story structure.

There’s a reason the thing’s been around for thousands of years….

A while back from the time this will come out, I was drawn into an interview with David J. Schwartz, (Locus vol 63, #4 – October 2009, Superpowers, The Sun Inside).   He mentioned a number of things that resonated deeply with me, touching on some topics I’ve talked about before, so I just wanted to mention a few things I came away with…  Of course, you should all go out and buy at least one book from the man…

 The key point for me was that writing involves filtering the way we experience the world – magical, fantastic, realist, etc.  For many, this involves writing from genre elements, genre or mainstream tropes, because it some way that is how we experience the world – as heroic adventures, as reality, as, um, horrific or a doomed noir spiral of self-destruction, etc.  He was quite taken by Marquez and magical realists, who use the filter of deep Catholcisim and South American storytelling, which makes it difficult for outsiders to quite capture those distinctive  points of view.

 “Some writers we call magical realists are uncomfortable with the idea that they’re writing fantasy, because for them, this is the way the world is.  If you talk to certain Native American writers, they’ll say, “This is not made-up stuff.  Ghosts are real; spirits are real.”  So Marquez is writing about the world as he experiences it, but he experiences it through a filter of deep Catholicism and South American storytelling.  Those are points of view that attach deep significance to natural things, cycles of life, in a way I don’t think Vonnegut does.”

 He talked about myth/religion structuring the world so it is comprehensible and meaningful – so does storytelling – and agreed with M. john Harrison’s strong sentiment against explaining every last little detail in a fantasy world, that some things make sense but not everything needs to.  I strongly agreed with the idea of fantasy as unsettling (and, though not mentioned here, by extension horror as transgressive and not a reassuring fairy tale designed to convince readers things will be normal again).  The idea that magic as an unpredictable and dangerous tool certainly worked for me as a reflection of life.  So did using mythic elements to represent a longing for understanding deeper meaning in reality while maintaining a healthy skepticism of the religious impulse and of definition/definitive answers.

 Finally, a piece of solid advice from this gentleman’s point of view – write about life as you experience it, focusing on the mysteries.  “It’s not that I’m a terribly religious or mystical person, but I am mystified by the world; the world is, in many aspects, incomprehensible to me.  And that’s the point of view I write from: this thing is something I cannot fully grasp, so I want to write around it and try and get a handle on it.”

 Yes, indeed, I am there.

 Of course, if this resonates with you, as well, I’d suggest a close reading of his work to see how he has handled the translation of his vision of an incomprehensible world into a viable commercial writing career that has garnered, at the very least, an interview in Locus.

 I, alas, can’t help you there…

Just a note to pay attention, in this season of change (and isn’t always that season?), to landscape.  Setting.  The physical place in which the action of your story takes place.

 Because, even if you’re a minimalist, you’re going to have to provide a physical stage for your characters to feel, interact, move. 

 Even a bare stage is a stage that is bare when an actor performs, and that means something because the actor is performing on it.  Don’t even get me started about what happens when the spotlight comes on…

 But seriously, a sense of place creates tension between your characters and that place.  They move this way instead of that, pick this thing up, put this other item down.  Look through a window.  Reveal themselves to your reader.

 Of course, landscape is also a projection of all that is going on between your characters.  It contains the symbols of your themes, provides the context from which meaning can be found in the actions of your characters.

 Genres are full of tried and true settings – the haunted house, the rocket ship, the enchanted palace.  Even in mystery and thrillers, and certainly historicals, the landscape provides plot points, character, the feel of the exotic and the familiar.  Noir is practically a world by itself, like the blues.  We thrive on these settings, readers are drawn to them because they want to experience that other world as much if not more so than the characters and their dilemma.  Their garishness sometimes makes it seem like the story might be more about place than characters.  Setting is certainly a powerful tool for us, but that makes it even more important to consider its role in the story, what it means for the characters and what they are doing, where they are heading.

 Everything you pick to show of your landscape is as meaningful as every line of a character’s dialogue.

But, on the other hand, not everything must be explained, or come with several volumes of background notes.  LeGuin, Moorcock, M. John Harrison and others who are masters of the literary/commercial fantasies have written about the role of landscape, so I’m certainly not going to repeat their advice. 

Matt Cardin had a great piece on Lovecraft and setting a while back– it’s offline now, but I’m sure he’s got it squirreled away someplace online.

It’s important to understand that landscape as a projection of the author’s mind, the characters’ perception of the world, sometimes a character by itself sometimes with its own throughline or arc reflecting the important parts of what is going on, other times a mirror to the story’s soul.

It’s not just a stage.  It’s a world, intimate when shared with a reader, like two lovers in a dark cafe corner.  But like the world, it is experienced in bits and pieces, in the moment, in the story’s moment, and so takes its meaning and relevance not in histories or geological surveys, but what is experienced in that moment.

Of course, all this is just blah blah blah.  I stand aside, helpless with envy, to offer a paragraph of Cormac McCarthy from All the Pretty Horses to show off how grand and subtle the interplay between character and setting can be…

            “By dark the storm and slacked and the rain had almost ceased.  They pulled the wet saddles off the horses and hobbled them and walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddlelegged clutching their knees and vomiting.  The browsing horses jerked their heads up.  It was no sound they’d ever heard before.  In the gray twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste.  Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being.  A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool.”

This kind of thing can inspire, or make you never try to set word to electronic screen ever again. 

That’s the risk you take when you step into the waste, after the storm, in the night….

Hate is a relatively simple emotion. Stupid, but simple. Oh, people can cook up extensive mythologies to fuel the engine of hatred. And the mechanism itself can be elaborate – really, pick any brutal, self-destructive regime, past or present, and sift a while through the careful orchestration of grandiosity and paranoia. That’s not intelligence. No critical thinking involved, really. That’s just a flailing need from the ego to justify actions that appear, relentlessly, sometimes inescapably, to be inhuman.

But when it comes right down to it, hate doesn’t need justification. It is a primitive, primal monster and sustains itself, quite simply, on the worst in us.

That guy just doesn’t look right, or this one here talks funny, or this fella I knew once said he’d come from across the river and you know how we all feel about those folks and so that’s why we call this the Hanging Tree. It’s all the same. That other guy is different. That scares me (because I’m a punk) so let’s all kill that other guy before he does something bad (like show us up for the punks we are).

Hate does only one thing.

The heart of hate is very small.

The same – that it is a simple emotion – could be said about love. Not by me, at least most of the time, but certainly lots of folks believe you find yourself a beautiful woman or a handsome guy, find something/anything in common to take you through the next 50-60 years, and presto, you’ve got love.

Others believe you marry someone with good “potential” and love will grow like a fern, or perhaps a flowering bush.

Some folks focus on a thing or two, about a real person, or an imaginary one, and put all their energy and attention and “love” into the fetish, whether it winds up being large organs or bank accounts, out-sized personalities or talents, fishnet stockings or bouncing pecs.

Sometimes you fall in love with the feeling of love, and being loved. Not the other person.

Sometimes this stuff works. Other times, there is the sadness and the grief of losing someone, or sometimes a part of your self. Or just the feeling of loneliness that digs deeper into the soul, carving out deep pits no joy can ever fill, no sun can ever illuminate.

The bloom fades, the love becomes intangible, a memory, a ghost, until at last even the shadows and echoes are gone and there is nothing left but an empty, desolate house. The feeling of love and being loved blows away because there was nothing there for it to grow roots into, no real person to feed and sustain it.

It’s been said by at least one poet that you’ve got to get naked to love. Physically, well, people have worked all kinds of techniques for that. Emotionally, that’s true for certain kinds of people. Being open and honest, not holding back, exposing one’s self and vulnerabilities and emotions, is certainly a turn on for some. But not for everyone. In fact, that kind of openness is probably scary to a hell of a lot of people.

Sometimes you only show enough cards to get yourself loved, and you only pick up enough cards from the other person to get invested in your love of that person. For a while.

Then, of course, there are the kinds of love we have for family, friends, community, that can be as deep as the kind of love we speak of when we draw little Valentine hearts, and as intimate in their own ways.

There is love based on biological chemistry, the kind that draws bees to pollen, and love that has little to do with other people but is drawn to things. Or ideas. The abstract realms rather than the world of flesh and blood. Riddles. Words, or music, or forms and colors.

Occasionally, and I hope for all of us more often, love is simple. Without boundaries. Intimate. Innocent. Raw in its purity, and vice versa. Unencumbered by the expectations of self or others. Unconditional. Honest. Wise to the marrow about self and others.

Love, it would seem, does only one thing. As hate destroys, love creates.

But for me, love can create all kinds of things, not necessarily healthy or wise. That kind of love is dark.

There is the love that is possessive and destructive. There is the love that is delusional, or focused on the self rather than others. There is the love that picks and chooses what to love in a person, and hopes to ignore what may be terrible. Or inconvenient. Or too painful to accept.

There is love that destroys innocence, and love that annihilates self and/or the other.

Love in these cases builds dark palaces, torture chambers, mental emergency rooms for trauma victims.

The seven deadly sins – wrath, greed, sloth, lust, envy and gluttony – can all be said to root in love gone bad, though you might have to work a bit for sloth.

So why am I nattering on about love?

Because someone once said every story is a love story, and it doesn’t hurt to think about the truth of that in the cold, dark, bitter heart of winter when we have a holiday celebrating love (or open heart surgery….sorry, I get so confused).

Or maybe it does hurt.

Whatever the case, love is the heart of every story.

And because, if every story is a love story, a writer can and should ask, what kind of love is at the heart of the story you want to write? In the heart of your characters?

And, for the sake of symmetry, balance and all-important structure, someone needs to ask, what hates that love, opposes it, perhaps even resides next to or in the very heart of that love?

Yes, sadly, the conversation turns not completely to love, because that is a topic more vast than all that the eye can behold and requires a very different venue. I ask only to glance at love.

Keep it at the periphery of vision, if it is too bright and painful to stare at until your eyes and heart burn out.

Romance is, of course, the obvious genre of the love story. The popularity goes back a ways. The Illiad and the Odyssey. Gilgamesh. Grendel. Oedipus Rex. Okay, okay, chivalric poetry. The Tales of Genji. The Ramayana.

I’d argue, if I was 36 years younger and still a freshman, that there is love in the existential heart of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In the heart of darkness. In the Nausea that inhabits the space once reserved for the soul…though I admit, I’m a writer, and thus frequently full of crap if not an outright liar.

So. Love, and hate, like tattooed knuckles that can either caress or batter, stand somewhere in every house built of story. Could be front and center, or perhaps deep in the background like faded wallpaper. But if you’re writing to be read by human beings, and you’re dealing with characters related to humanity, then somewhere in there you’re dealing with some form of love. And, I’d submit, if your work hard to eliminate it (like some classic puzzle-oriented science fiction), love’s absence is itself a thematic statement about the story.

Love and hate are other lenses through which to view the idea of telling a story. Clues to open up characters and plot. Maybe a key to unlocking what kind of story you want to tell. Or maybe just more crap to confuse you….

by Gerard Houarner

For Storytellersunplugged’s “October story” tradition, I’m reaching back to 1995 to post a piece from a Necropolitan Press small press magazine called The End (#3), edited by Jeffrey Thomas. It earned an Honorable Mention in the 9^th Annual Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.

The Lost Mothers

“Eat your chicken soup,” she commands, keeping the steaming spoonful of yellowish liquid hovering by my mouth.

“Wear your hat,” another advises, thrusting a mass of prickly wool into my hands. “And your scarf.”

“Did you wash behind your ears?” inquires the one scrubbing the skin from the back of my skull.

They dance around me like gaudy, flower print scarves caught in a whirlwind. Smiling all the time, even when they scold, as if they’re afraid I might run away. As if I could.

“Run out to the store and get me a milk, Peter,” one of them says as she closes my hand around some change she has placed in my palm.

“Rub your mommy’s feet, why don’t you, dear,” another whispers, then puckers her too-red lips in an expression of pleading.

Peppermint-scented words drift down from the one towering over me, arms outstretched: “Give your mommy a nice, big hug.”

But when they think they’re alone, when they think I’m still out there on the never-ending, always perfectly trimmed and treeless lawn trying to find the way back to my own land, they say other things.

“I wish he was hung like his father, old Hook,” grumbles one into her tea cup.

“That old fool spoiled the little darling, letting him tinker with bells and play with tiger lilies,” complains another, rattling the pans she’s putting back into the cabinet.

“Maybe he’ll grow up some day and take care of us all,” cries another excitedly over the electric hum of her appliance.

I draw myself into the fetal position and desperately suck my thumb.

“Every mother’s dream,” they all reply.

And to myself, I chant, I’ll never grow up, I’ll never grow up, I’ll never grow up…

end

** The Lost Mothers is, of course, © Gerard Houarner.

I’ve played with the world of Oz in similar, just more elaborate, ways in the recently published The Oz Suite, available from www.eibonvalepress.co.uk (along with amazon, hororr-mall, etc – there’s even a relatively inexpensive $12 trade edition). If you’re curious, you can check out some samples that are up for a brief period on my site, http://www.cith.org/gerard/secretpage.htm (the third sample, mistakenly unidentified on the page, follows the * divider and is from “The Wizard Will See You Now.”)

Happy Horrors!

by Gerard Houarner

Another in an occasional series of over-intellectualized approaches to writing which, at worst, will send you screaming into the internet abyss after the first paragraph or, if you get through a few lines, may remind you or jog into place a more coherent version of the notion you’ve had all along.

I’m not promising anything, I’m just throwing a bunch of suff out there….

Filters.

This is what you could call what folks, and characters, use to include and exclude information about themselves and the world.  Taking a look at characters in terms of the filters they use can be a means of generating and resolving conflict and developing emotionally satisfying characters.

I’m just saying….

We have a collection of these filters: ways of looking at the world driven by biological and psychological engines. They are ways we pick and choose (consciously and unconsciously) what we see, allow ourselves understand or influence us, or ignore. They range between logic based on “facts” (the belief in one’s logic and facts is, obviously, also a filter) and the purely emotional.

I know, they’re also called beliefs – religious, political – as well as values, interests, passions, biases, prejudices, perspectives, agendas, sensitivities, tragic flaws, faith, fetishes, appetites. They’re the (complicated) rules of the game we play, or don’t play, with ourselves and everyone around us.

But I’m looking for a term more specific than the usual “needs and wants” that sometimes serves as a basic sketch we might draw for characters as they come to life in our stories, and something not as limiting as those terms. I’m reaching for a framework that considers anything that could influence in an individual’s choices and still allow the imagination some room to play.

I’m choosing “filters” as the operative word because it describes the function of all those other aspects of ourselves and our characters. Like lens and noise and air conditioning filters, they alter our perception of the nature our environment, and our interactions with it as well as with ourselves. Their interplay determines what’s available to our particular decision making.

I’m also choosing filters because it implies active, constant choices being made, often unconscious.

We operate in spheres of perception – personality/background/training/culture/environment contribute to the filters we use to shape the reality that we perceive. And we swim through a world filled with resources, information, dangers and distractions, using filters to screen for what we want (again, consciously and unconsciously) to reach us and block out what we consider irrelevant.

As I writer, I’m on the look out for story and character ideas, and for material scratching my particular itches in urban environments, deserts, mythology and folklore, the bizarre and the fantastic. Those are some of my particular filters.

Apparently, I have filters designed to ignore all kinds of real money-making opportunities.

For others, significant filters may be based on a love for the Boston Red Sox or the latest fashions. Or a fear of water bugs or closed spaces.

For all of this filters stuff, volcanoes erupting, bombs dropping and asteroids crashing are pretty concrete aspects of reality that cut through all psychological games. Big stuff crashes through filters, re-shapes perceptions, which is also important to telling a story – as in The Stand and apocalypse stories in general.

But I’m thinking of the kinds of conflict that generate interesting stories that happen when spheres of perception intersect and culture/psychology filters clash, from two people sitting at a bar to two empires straddling a world.

On a personal level, filters you discovered or were taught to use, that helped someone get through a mad household or a tough neighborhood or an exclusive and socially pressured private school, are obviously conflict points once settings change. What worked in one place won’t in another. And other characters’ filters serve as barriers, or as resources and even solutions to problems.

(I don’t think I’m talking about Big Evil and Grand Good characters, here – Sauron is a force of nature, and frankly the elves and dwarves and Ents are pretty much one with what they are. But by the time you get down to the gaggle of hobbits, I think you can see the kind of external and even internal conflict I’m talking about that’s generated by different sets of filters.)

For example, if I screen out information that reinforces the fact that I am a 52 year old male with “limited” looks and athletic abilities (for whatever deep-seated psychological reasons, or simply because I’m an idiot), and instead allow information like “Telly Savalas was bald and he was still considered cute and studly” and “that waitress was nice to me so she must think I’m hot” through my reality filters, I allow for a lot of both tragic and comedic possibilities in my own private world as well as public and family life.

No, there are no examples on YouTube .

Besides glaring (and hopefully more subtle) “blind spots,” finely tuned filters also set up powerful character strengths – detectives, crusaders, mass murderers, that sort of thing.  They allow a character to be focused.  And as we all know, there is a cost for excluding information from our world even as there is a reward for specializing in a absorbing a particular set of facts and skills.

Being thrust into new situations leads to the discovery or the development of a brand new set of filters (and talents, of course).

Filters bring people together, and most interestingly, a single common way of looking at the world can form an allegiance among wildly different people (like, oh I don’t know, strangers trying to survive a haunted house or rampaging monster).

Obviously I’m not telling anyone anything they don’t already know about people and stories.

But sometimes, switching perspective on a writing problem can reveal interesting solutions. Since characters drive plot/story (sorry, one of my filters doesn’t let me see a plot driving a character – cars don’t drive people), it can be vital to dig a little deeper into the heads of even minor characters and see the world through their eyes, their filters, and find new ways they might behave and so contribute to the story.

So all I’m saying is, along with writing “bios” on your characters, or researching your historical figures until you know where they went to school and with who, or pulling stuff out of the “air” as you zip through your story, it can be valuable to make connections between whatever “facts” you’ve established about your character and the way they’re looking at the events unfolding in the story. That is, really explore what they are excluding, and what they might be picking up on, and how those filters might bring characters together or drive them apart.

One last filter note – editors have them, too. They’re called guidelines.