Gerard Houarner

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.

Gerard Houarner

Who Are You?

Yeah, yeah, classic rock. I really want to know.

Do you, really?

It’s a theme I keep coming back to, re-approaching hopefully from different directions, because I find in it an interesting key to a number of different locks – people, characters, relationships, situations, culture and society. And writing.

Maybe “what are you” would be a more appropriate question. But I don’t want to get personal, and I’m not even sure I want to know that about myself.

The point is, who we are may or may not change, over time and in different situations. Consistency is sometimes offered by fine, upstanding citizen folks as a positive value, but a consistent “who” or “what” needs to be added for me to get enthusiastic about the concept.
This train of thought was inspired in part by an interview with Peter S. Beagle in Brutarian 48/49, in which he’s asked by the interviewer, Jayme Lynn Blaschke, what can he do now he couldn’t at 19 when writing his first novel.

In his enthusiastic response, he points out technical skills he’s developed, as well a willingness to handle scenes he couldn’t when he was younger. In short, his approach to writing has evolved, to the point where he says he finds himself less clever now than when he was 19.

He also talks about a writing internship he had at age 22 with Larry McMurty and Ken Kesey, in which he felt out of his depth. What particularly struck me there was his reaction to writers who were “very much from somewhere and could tap that, where I have the perspective of an immigrant’s child. I could never be from the Bronx…”

He goes on to say that he didn’t think he’d been delivered to the wrong parents, but dropped on the wrong planet. I particularly appreciated his saying that he almost had to invent a world to be from, leading to his involvement with fantasy.

I’m an immigrant’s child, and I feel exactly the same way. I’m so alienated I don’t recognize myself in the mirror.

Ba dump dump.

Anyway. The kind of fiction I write, the actual need to create fiction, certainly stems from the same kind of issues. The worlds I invent are the worlds I come from. They’re who I am. My personal “Dreaming.” They are at least in part my reaction to the “other” world I interact with, the waking world.

Never mind my issues with the species.

Which are, of course, very different from other writers – some of which are explored by other contributors in their storyteller postings as we all talk about our influences and what drives us to write.

But the point is, there is a part of the creative self that identifies so closely to a past, place, style, subject, feeling, and which really doesn’t change. That’s part of what I’m talking about – knowing your strengths, passions, foundation. Pay attention to what you react to, what you notice, what you find easiest to do and most satisfying. Because once you get a feel for what’s important to you, what’s meaningful, not only can your tale begin to “pop” but I’m betting you’ll want to get back to the keyboard to write. ‘Cause you’re gettin’ to the good “stuff.”

And who you are – long-term and through all those pesky developmental stages of life – shapes what you do. Including writing. Tastes can change. Style. Subject matter. If you leave yourself open, new voices, technology, media can also shape your creative choices. Life’s ass-kicking will also most certainly give you the opportunity to write from different points of view. So will life’s joys and victories, which are often just as difficult to see coming, or even if you see them coming, to understand emotionally what they mean.

I’m just saying there’s a core “who” or “what” you are, and tapping into that person rather than chasing the image of what you should be, the ideal of a favorite writer, the goal of best-sellerdom, whatever other external goal you might hold as important, just trips you up.
Unless, of course, you’re one of those genius types who gets to magically match talent and ambition. Maybe you get lucky and you don’t have to struggle or think too hard to become a hit. One thing’s for certain, if you’re not that lucky, and you don’t find a way to dig your way to who you are as a creative entity, you’re not going to go very far.

But I’d argue that, except for some of the formula best-seller writers who write the same thing over and over because their audiences won’t buy their off-brand product, all writers will change. Even, perhaps especially the geniuses. They have to.

First off, for the non-geniuses, what initially brings us to writing is usually just not good enough. Whether we’re doing Lovecraft pastiches or break-neck wanna-be big-budget potboilers, there’s something missing in our game. Like, maybe, characters. Or a point. A plot. Whatever it is, there are changes that need to be made to our “game.”

In this same issue of Brutarian, Michael McCarty and Mark McLaughlin interview Ramsey Campbell and, in talking about his phenomenal success at a young age, he talks about learning his craft by imitating others while “homing in on what I had to say for myself.” He talks about “denying” his Lovecraftian influences in order to discover his own themes and then eventually rediscovering Lovecraft. In rereading Lovecraft, he still finds different qualities to appreciate.
The point here for me is that Ramsey Campbell took the time to discover who he was as a writer, his relationship with his environment, what he enjoyed reading and experiencing of the world, in order to focus on a unique voice and approach to the work. He became not just another writer, but one of THE writers.

And in Peter Beagle’s comments about his early years, I caught that there was an essential quality to the writers he studied with that he couldn’t use because it was alien to him, and perhaps the need to learn from these masters blinded him initially to the truth that there was essential quality, a perspective, in him that was also valuable. It just took him a while to get in touch with that part of himself.

So mastery of the craft, adjustments to editorial guidance and markets, and most importantly, a better understanding of who/what we are, brings on a change in what we write.

Secondly, and this goes for everybody, I think, life won’t let us stay the same even if we’re determined to be consistent. The simple fact is that things change – from our bodies to the world around us. We raise families, we watch and feel friends and family pass away, we succeed and we fail. These events transform our perspective, our priorities.

Okay, maybe not always for the better. Maybe not successfully (I am haunted by the writer at a SFWA gathering who told me that, as his sentences got longer, his sales went down until he couldn’t sell anymore, and he wasn’t interested in writing short sentences, anymore – I’ve never seen him again). Call it a maturation process.

So who you are will shift, if not by situation or circumstances, certainly by time and experience.
Paying attention to those shifts adds to the material you have available to write about. Ignoring those shifts gets you drifting further away from who you are, and maybe gets you in trouble. You get to a point where you’re not doing what you really want to do, anymore. There’s no joy in the work. You get blocked.

You get lost.

For the new writers who presumably come to this blog, my message is to embrace what you are at the moment, don’t fight to hang on to the past or imagine something other than what you are. Don’t try to be who you aren’t, just because you think what you want to be is cool. The process of being creative includes fighting to become who you are.

Doesn’t mean you won’t have to make compromises. If you want to make a living at the game, who you are may not be enough. Or it may be too much fo
r readers to handle. But when I talk to my buds, or listen to writers talking about their craft, I can’t tell you how many times I hear them say they stuck in this bit or that because that’s what made the story worthwhile for them. They may be writing a media tie-in, or a piece for a theme-anthology they can’t quite connect with, but what makes them successful and what lets them get some satisfaction out of the writing is drawing on who they are and getting some piece of that self into the story.

I don’t think you get anywhere without a firm grasp of who you are, what tools you possess, what point of view you present. It doesn’t mean you have to get all analytical about it. Lots of writers don’t ever think about this stuff, they just do it. They may not think about it, but as Harlan Ellison always says, they pay attention. They know what’s going on around them, and inside, and when something doesn’t feel right, they bail.

Now, of course, what goes for the writer also goes for the character, so if you’re new and haven’t pulled anything out of this babbling yet (if you’re an oldtimer, you’re probably not here, anymore), pay attention to your characters. Who are they? You better know on some level, or you’re not going to have much of a story. Even if you’re not the type to write biographies and take extensive notes and research and such, even if you’re a by-the-gut type writer, pay attention to that gut. Even if you don’t know who the character is as the story evolves (or even if you think you do), your gut knows better.

Who are you? If you haven’t pulled a thing out of all of this even down to this last line, then put that question up around where you write, and I’ll bet asking it of yourself or your characters (perhaps even your editor, agent, publisher, spouse or child) will lead to some useful answers sooner rather than later.