Gerard Houarner

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.

Some mornings, when I can escape from the world’s demands long enough to achieve a moment of clarity, or when I’m not too lazy, I seek wisdom in short, pithy bursts, like an expresso for the mind.

Some seek this kind of rush in various scriptures, others in the morning foreign stock reports.  I look for it in the funny pages.

It’s a habit developed as a child, when Hagar the Horrible was the new kid on the block, when Dondi and Little Orphan Annie and Dick Tracey and Steve Canyon were on their last gasps  (yeah, I read the sci-fi DT with magnetic cars and Moon Maiden, which was kinda cool in a pre-Blade Runner kind of way, with Dick running around in his fedora and sharp chin/nose while cylindrical spaceship/cars zoomed off to the moon fetching alien women who seduced wayward young police rookies….).

These days, I set my mental alarm clock to Get Bucky and Dilbert.

It’s weird, not getting your comics from a newspaper.  But newspapers are dying, they’re a failing habit.  Already, they slip from my grasp – I rarely pick one up, anymore, and when I do it frequently remains unread in the rush of chasing the list of daily things to do.  Now, I sit in waiting rooms and power up my “smart phone” and click on the comic application.  There they all are.  So I can catch up on a week, a month, maybe more, of wisdom for the ages.

Well, at least wisdom for now.

Often, the funny pages inspire my psychological theory for the day.  So here’s a link for a Dilbert cartoon that set things straight for me:  http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-03-31/

If that doesn’t work, look up Dilbert for March 31^st, 2010.

Basically, it says that leadership is the art of trading imaginary things in the future for real things today…and the punchline is the evil director of human resources telling Dilbert that  he might get promoted if he works all weekend….someday, if there’s an opening, and there’s nobody else more qualified…

Now this management tool is a stone cold reality in most places I’ve worked in, including places where management doesn’t actually have the instant power to promote because people must pass tests and score high enough on them to get even get a shot, or there are strict guidelines in terms of qualifications, degrees, etc..  And yet, people who routinely fail tests or don’t have qualifications place themselves in awkward positions of responsibility in the hope that somehow, someway, their desire for power and money and recognition will be fulfilled.

It’s a little like American Idol (or whatever amateur hour television show is relevant for your media generation) – follow the dream and you will be rewarded.  Or humiliated in front of millions.  Or, more likely, face the realization that the dream needs to be revised just a tad.

Now the relevance for all of this is, of course, in character building.

Characters are the engines that make stories work (if you ignore Aristotle), and characters need fuel.  That fuel is motivation.  And motivation comes from needs.

In the animal world, needs are clear and fundamental: sex and food.  Comfy nesting spots (if you’re that sort of critter), personal safety, personal comfort in the form of getting rid of parasites or staying dry, grooming (for sex) are the secondary needs that contribute to the ability to satisfy those primary, hardwired needs.

It comes down to passing on the species genome.

Humans, of course, are different.

That, of course, is a punchline.

But seriously, humans complicate those basic needs, that fundamental drive.  We dream.  Perhaps in small, cruel and petty ways – we dream of stealing our co-worker’s lunch from the community refrigerator, or doing the “hit it and split” on a Friday night pick-up.  Sometimes in large ways – we want to create a significant piece of art that speaks to our generation, perhaps to generations in the future, or we want to be President to shape the world according to the values we grew up with.

We dream of things that will make us feel good about ourselves and for things that will make us feel like we are better than others, that we are special and different – could be money, could be recognition, could be a role in work or society.

Some just dream of not being hungry, or lonely.

Today’s psychological theory of personality (and remember, this is only today’s theory, because as I’ve said in the past, these things change, just like people…and, deep down inside, they’re all the same and they really don’t change, just like people) talks about motivation as the need to do things today in exchange for imaginary things in the future.

Character motivation.

Working for a paycheck is, largely, not so imaginary.  But that is not always the case, not even in the “glorious and stable” Western world.  You work, and you hope the boss doesn’t disappear before paying you.

Just ask writers who deliver work to publishers who never pay.

(There’s a reality tidbit for those of you wondering if there’s any relevance to writing in this column.)

Working for a dream, for something in the future that may or may not actually happen – that is a fundamental development in motivation that I think separates humans from large parts of the animal world (doesn’t make us “not animals,” just makes us more complicated ones).

Yes, a tiger goes out to hunt because of hunger and may, or may not, satisfy that hunger.

But a human goes to hunt because of hunger, which is a reality, and also because of glory and status and the power he or she believes a successful hunt will grant over others, which is a dream.  And, as a bonus, because humans really like to kill things and exert their power over their environment and may not be hungry or even eat the meat they’ve slain, which is another level of reality.  Or nightmare.

An animal may protect its young (not all species do) because the instinct is in them, it’s part of the drive to pass on the genome.

Humans may protect their young, but sometimes they don’t.  Often, because we are so complicated, they screw it up, in some major or minor fashion.  Sometimes, they mess it up deliberately.  Almost all the time, whether they try or they don’t try to protect their young, stuff happens anyway and messes up the kid in some small or major way.

I’m not sure animals get to be neurotic, or psychotic.  Not for long, anyway.  Unless they’re around humans a lot.

The need to eat and the need to pass on the genome get complicated almost instantly as soon as humans can act on those apparently simple and basic drives.

Amazing, really.

Because we are human, we add layers and mountains and oceans of stuff on top of those fundamental drives.

You can call the dream of an imaginary future faith, or ambition, or desire…whatever.

You can call how humans work to make that imaginary future come true politics, religion, art, war, commerce…whatever.

You can call the results society, culture, government, pleasure, pain, apocalypse, creation, heaven, hell…whatever.

Sometimes you do real things today for imaginary things in the future, and you get the promotion.

Sometimes you do real things today and there’s never an opening for you in the future, or someone else is more qualified.  Or the job gets outsourced.  Or the company goes out of business.

Sometimes, the dream comes true and you wonder (like Peggy Lee…go ahead, google it), is that all there is?

Sometimes, you look at the pile of ashes that is all that remain of your dream and sing the same song.

In the dreams of your characters is the future they want to make happen.  That is their motivation.  The story is in how they try to make that dream come true, and what happens – what changes in and around them – when they succeed, or fail, in making that dream come true.

Apologies, from one who struggles with the balance of dreams and reality, to those who believe dreams and reality are the same…

Taking the 59th street exit on the FDR in Manhattan, you usually get caught in red-light eddy between two tall buildings for what may seem like minutes, but is probably just 20-30 seconds (this is Manhattan, after all).

One access point to and from the apartment building on the left is across a footbridge over the eddy (lovely at dawn, looking out at the rosey-peaked dawn while inhaling exhaust fumes) that seems to lead to a long, glass-enclosed corridor decorated, at intervals, by art prints.  Occasionally, very occasionally, you see someone in the hall.  Once, I saw two or three, very widely spaced, walking all in one direction.

As is often my habit, I look at places like this and imagine them as a particular corner of hell.

So hell is an endless corridor.

Carpeted?  What’s the lighting like?  Is there music?  Or musak?

Is one wall windowed, overlooking an industrial wasteland (a go-to favorite of mine, alas) or a Bosch landscape of tortures to come should you ever reach the end of the corridor?  Or is it rock?  Lava?  A spongy mass that will consume you if you lean against it?   A blank wall.  Or another wall decorated by prints.  Or art.

Do the people in the corridor do the art?  Or someone – or something – else?

Who are these people in the corridor, by the way?  Are they all walking in the same direction, up and down?  If the same, are they spaced apart as they were in my vision?  How far – meters, miles?  Can they hear each other scream?  Or do they just run into each other’s trash?

Let’s get to the mechanics.  Do the people in this particular corner of hell need to go to the bathroom?  Do they get hungry?  Sleepy?  Do they want sex?  Drugs and alcohol?  In other words, is part of their torture the needs and appetites of their former lives?

It’s good to have needs.  Needs propel stories.  (Waiting for Godot has no plot, but the characters do have needs, of a kind, which holds the reader’s/viewer’s interest.)  So if not this, then some other need…something chasing from behind, or a carrot dancing just around the next bend of the corridor.  An urgent mission they were assigned to fulfill by reaching the end of an endless corridor when they arrived at hell’s gate.  A compulsion to reach the end of the hall.

How those needs are met, and frustrated, are sure to torture in hell, as they sometimes are in life.

Is there a culture in this corridor world of hell?  What protocols structure encounters, whether regular (as in the world of cross current walkers) or irregular (spaced walkers, perhaps lingering by a bathroom or food store they exhausted waiting for to share the company of the one who follows them – and what happens then, is hell really other people?).

Culture also propels needs, as well as structures them.  Culture complicates the fulfillment of needs with rules.  Culture is good for story.

Does all this hell stuff mean something – is it a metaphor, or a satire, or a surreal excursion, a virtual simulation or game or test, or the dreams of a catatonic character?

And we haven’t even gotten to the characters, yet.

The point of this exercise, of course, is to approach storytelling from yet another angle – developing an idea, a premise – hell is an endless corridor – and making it real by asking questions and finding answers for them.  Could be science fiction, where the rules are the ones that rule the external world, or fantasy, in which the action serves as a metaphor for the rules governing the inner landscapes of people.

In other words, some kind of logic needs to be applied to stories at some point in their making.  Usually.  By most folks.  (Have I hit all the qualifiers, yet?  Because everybody’s different, yes, I know.)

Because logic will be applied by editors, publishers and readers.  So you’d best to get know the concept.

Internal logic, logic consistent with the rules set up by the world in which the characters live – that’s all that’s asked for, most times, by readers from casual and professional.

When that logic gets worked out is up to you, of course.  Some let the undertow of emotional and intellectual currents carry them off through some stuff that happens to these folks they throw in, and when an ending is reached, logic is applied and the stuff that happens is tightened up a bit or a lot, and the folks, well, they get that stuff happened to them.

Others work all that logic out in their heads, know the arcs and the twists of their tale ahead of time, and set about the clean and crisp construction of a story with a certain amount of precision and confidence.

Wherever you fit in the spectrum, from master architect to pulling it out of the hole with your eyes shut, it’s good to remember what can propel a character and a story is usually something that can follow a form of logic others can understand.  Vampires, living dead, werewolves – all logical in their context.

Now, if I were John Skipp, I’d tell you all to work out a little 100 word ditty based on “the corridor is hell” premise and see how many different views of hell you can get (and how brief they can be), and then send it to me, and I’d post the best ones next time.

But, of course, I’m not John Skipp and I don’t have a legion of fans and I’m not even sure who’s reading this (I do have a fan, Mr. Legion, from Des Moines, who mostly buys my stuff used but is very sincere, but his old 486 desktop has been acting out lately and I’m not even sure his screen is working anymore and last I heard the mice had eaten through a power cord and the roaches were dancing on his hard drive disk).

So if you feel spunky, see what you can do and send it to me and I’ll be back next month with something from you guys.

But, most likely, I’ll be back with something else acting like this never happened.

Just like if I was in hell….

A while ago, I received an email from a David Javet from Switzerland asking if I’d read his Master’s thesis on Lovecraft, The Pen That Never Stops Writing.  Being a “consumer” of so many things Lovecraft, I said sure.

Mr. Javet’s work is quite a labor of love (and, of course, a thesis on literature) and I bring it up here because so many are influenced by the ideas and vision, though hopefully not so much the style, of H.P. Lovecraft (even more so with the blessing of a Library of America edition of his works).

Like Aristotle, it’s always good to bring up Lovecraft every now and then because, like Aristotle, Lovecraft speaks to a core human sensibility and need for story.

I pause for the removal of bodies dropped by the use of those two names in the same sentence.

Moving on…

What struck me, at least in terms of a subject for SU folks, was David’s exploration of mythic story telling.  Going through the well-documented functions of myth, and the issues of myth as a representation of culture, we wind up with a point that’s important for new writers – that myth is essentially a tool, like language, with its associations and history, but also with an inherent capacity to be transformed.  In fact, for myth to survive, it must change to take in what is going on now or die, just as the faiths of conquerors and the conquered adapt to each other, absorb and transforms images, rituals, meanings.

In other words, it is important for writers who are fans of Lovecraft, or any other collection of mythic visions and stories, to process what has been done in terms of what is here now.  Science, from biology to cosmology, has come a long way since Lovecraft’s day.  So has storytelling, and the media through which stories can be told.

For a living example, check out Datlow’s Cthulu Unbound anthology.  Or even the Call of Cthulu role playing game.

Now, yes, I understand Hollywood tries and mostly fails at re-making the old myths it created or, more likely, stole.  But that’s because nothing new is added.  The old franchise is copied, not re-interpreted.  No risks are taken, no formulas are changed to reflect contemporary views of the world.  But for every dozen Jason remakes, there is occasionally something like Abrams’ new Star Trek, or on the literary side, a book like Let the Right One In.  Nothing earth-shattering, of course.  But you can feel and see the change of attitude, the issues being dealt with, that give the old myths a contemporary relevance.

There is nothing wrong with classics.  They should be absorbed, understood, used, like any language, in the discussion of what is relevant today.  There is also nothing wrong with taking the concepts in those classics and perhaps seeing if enough time has passed for the original vision to grow, for the language of imagery and character and plot to be used to interpret terrorism and disease or one’s own personal vision of the world.

Because growing up in this world, the writer’s vision is guaranteed to be much different than someone who died 50 or 100 years ago.  Some things remain true and consistent – who and what we are as human beings, our needs and fears, our drives and the capabilities to fulfill them.

What has changed, through technology, cultural pollination, the availability of information, is the language we use to tell ourselves, and others, about what is going on inside and around us.

So I go back to what I’ve always said in these SU  posts – pay attention.  The world is in many ways a different place today than what it was 10, 20, 30 years ago.  Of course, in many ways, it isn’t.  What pieces of the world you pick up from the past and the present, because they are meaningful to you and you want to play with them, are the foundations of the particular vision you will bring to your writing.

Basically, like Lovecraft, you create your own mythos. It may not be as grandiose, or detailed, but it will contain the imagery and ideas and tropes that resonate with you.  It’s your job to explore, expand, improvise, adapt and transform that material into something that is particularly yours, and understandable by others.

That is, if you want to be any good.

As usual, I find myself out on the edge and I hope what I’ve said makes some kind of sense to somebody out there.

David’s thesis is, of course, about much more than what I’ve touched on here.  He may not even agree with what I’ve said.  But, as always, you should go to the source (always track back to the origins of what interests you, whatever the art, so you can see the influences and transformations along the way and understand, and perhaps even contribute your own relevant rendition).

Interested readers, and hopefully editors and publishers,  can reach him at david dot javet dot gmail dot com and tell him you heard about this piece and would like to know what he really said.

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 the recent World Horror Con in Salt Lake City, Utah, I was placed on two folklore panels. This happened on the con’s first night, back to back, after twenty hours of travel and the usual greetings, reunions, time adjustments and hotel issues that come with these gatherings. Much more con and travel time has passed since, so my brain hasn’t been able to quite hang on to every detail. However, I thought that just the idea of this kind of discussion was valuable and I’ll try to share a few scribbled notes and recollections.

This was the first time I’d been on such panels or even seen them at a horror con. I’m sure it’s a more common panel theme at fantasy/sf gatherings, or maybe I haven’t been around for a while. Usually I’m called on to discuss the merits or faults of gore or violence or the extreme, with occasional forays into the process of editing or writing. I was really happy to be a part of this discussion because I often reach into myth for story structure and ideas, and I’ve hit on folk magic and trickster tales for a number of stories.

Certainly horror as a genre, intertwined with supernaturally inspired thrillers and suspense fiction, has grown from folk tale seeds – vampire, werewolf, zombies, ghosts, etc. (even though the influence these days seems to come down to writers second hand through movies and games). Legends and folk tales are the foundations of the fantastic and the dark.

I also had just finished an interview focusing on folklore/urban legend questions before attending WHC, so there’s something in the air. Perhaps, in the visually/viscerally overloaded/overwhelming multi-media environment in which we find ourselves, creators and even members of the audience are looking to connect with the deeper meanings and emotional contexts behind flashy effects and over-the-top story ideas.

The first panel focused on Horrific Folklore (Horrific fiction has always drawn from folk tales and legends – what is it about folklore that touches our psyche?), moderated by Steve Rasnic Tem, w/Yvonne Navarro, Michael Potts (professor and budding fiction author) and JoSelle Vanderhooft (poet and Stoker nominee).

Aside: Steve contacted all of us ahead of time with some questions and asked for suggestions for further lines of inquiry. Then he showed up and introduced each of us himself, having researched our backgrounds. I was already in awe of his fiction, and now I’m stunned by his thoroughness as a moderator. There’s a lesson for panel moderators….

Anyway, one of the discussion threads focused on how intensely grounded most of the writers on the panel were in folk tales from their native regions. Most were from the South, and when coming up with ideas relied to varying degrees on stories and characters they grew up with in their particular towns and counties.

Being a city boy from an immigrant background, I was at a disadvantage in terms of conjuring stories from local legends, but I suppose I filled that emotional childhood void by gravitating to myths. I did get a sprinkling of “old country” stories from the family gathering dinner tables, but alas, a lot of that was told in old-country Breton, the language of adults in my upbringing.

There was talk as well of family specific folk tales carrying fears, attitudes, traditions within the clan – the audience reacted strongly to this idea, offering up their own experiences in hearing about and keeping family specific stories about ancestors or heirlooms.

Steve talked a bit about a book he’d brought along, The Silver Bullet and Other American Witch Stories, an old collection that came out of a WPA project gathering regional legends. You can often find these kinds of tales collected by enthusiastic locals in chapbooks at town bookstores. Tour guides like my buddy Gordon “Space and Time” Linzner in NYC and site specific cemetery/ghost/haunted tours are another way to tap into source material.

A couple of scribbled comments: folklore handles death in ways other forms don’t (JoSelle’s work being an example), and folklore gives narrative structure and meaning to family lives. They explain mysteries.

There was also Steve’s fundamental observation that people will believe anything (just look at the lore and legend that evolves from politics). He was focusing more on the odd connections that are made between doing a particular thing to get a specific result, and how those connections are passed on as fact (Von talked about burying something – and now I can’t remember what! – to help sell your house).

There was also a very interesting ethical issue brought up in the use of cultural folk tales in modern stories, illustrated by the example of a tribe refusing to let an author transcribe the tales they’d shared because they belonged to the people of the tribe and were not meant for outsiders. Certainly many religions have “secret rites” and levels of initiation, with private stories meant to carry on particular lessons and beliefs.

The second panel, Urban Legends as Fodder for Horror Stories, included Hank Schwaeble, Steven Shrewsbury, Nate Southard, with Weston Ochse as moderator.

Second aside: “Moderator” – yeah, right – I arrive seconds late and the bunch of them say I’m supposed to moderate, like I don’t work every day in a psychiatric hospital and can’t handle warped reality, so I play along and have them introduce themselves and ask a question and make some comments, and in pretty short order the lawyer among us is taking over as lawyers do and the panel is flying.

Afterwards someone from the audience congratulated me on a well-run panel, so I’ll take that as strange little convention panel folktale to pass along to others as a warning – always be first at the table at the front of the room, and don’t trust three guys with last names all beginning with “S” when they’re teamed with another guy whose last name sounds like the name of a tree.

Anyway, the panel debated the meaning of urban legends, as well as the relationship between urban legends and folklore. I thought folklore had a more cultural context and mission in terms of communicating beliefs, values, history, knowledge over generations, while urban legends (a term which irritates me because these “modern” legends are not necessarily “urban”) were more recent, and associated with the mysteries of technology and modern living (alien abduction and alligators in the sewers). College campuses were identified as a huge vector for transmission of these viral legends. I thought The X-Files was pretty much an encyclopedia of urban legends, from conspiracies to aliens to toilet monsters.

Science is the new magic? Well, maybe pseudo science, like the uncorroborated “facts and findings” that worm themselves into the heart of personal financial or health or even governmental policy decisions.

As with the first panel, this one was very well attended with a free flow of thoughts between panelists and audience. Once again, most of the writers were passionate about grounding their stories in some kind of folklore, either “real” as in the kind to be found already circulating out in the world, or made up for use in the story.

I suppose in a publishing world where procedurals, serial killers, detectives and criminal suspense seem to be taken a bit more seriously and are perhaps more popular because, of course, they are “realistic,” I found it refreshing to return to primal metaphors for human darkness. Certainly the roots of modern storytelling are in the campfire explanations offered by the first masters of language to listeners eager to understand both the mysteries of their existence and the night sounds coming from just outside the circle of their flickering light. The experience renewed my hope that not all things supernatural and mythic are destined for the scrap heap.

By the way, hi to the SU crowd I ran into at WHC – Mort, Richard, Brian, Deborah – and sorry I missed Alexandra and Cody (I think I missed you guys, though maybe I just don’t remember because, well, like I said, con and travel time, etc — and what happens at these conventions stays there …right?).