Gerard Houarner

Yes, we’re all busy. All the time, it seems. There are bills to pay, responsibilities to meet, places we have to be and things we must do.

“Modern” life and its freedoms have their pressures. Choices come with consequences. The consequences, frankly, are not as dire as those that come from a lack of choices. But, hey, what’s life without drama.

For many of us, there’s a need to use every moment we can to pursue something or other. To be active, engaged. Boredom, restlessness, frustration seems to come easily. So do opportunities for distraction.

For writers, of course, there are deadlines. The next story to be written. A new market to jump into. And the perpetual complaint that there isn’t enough time to write.

Well, time is relative, as the saying goes.

A lot of us talk about how we carve out time to sit at the keyboard and punch out a few lines. But sometimes it’s hard to come up with anything during those stolen moments. Hard to switch gears, to concentrate, to return to the world we created in our imagination. We might spend a lot of time getting back into that frame of mind.

Sometimes the fight is less about finding time to write, and more about preserving the need and the frame of mind to create.

So maybe another way to approach the writing gig is looking at the time that falls into our laps inconveniently. That would be the unplanned time we spend waiting for something to happen. (There’s an argument to be made that all time is about waiting for something to happen, but I edited that out because, well, I gave you guys a break.)

Some people call it “dead time.” You’re trapped in a commute, a meeting, a waiting room, an event. Whatever. The point is, you’re in a time and place that isn’t engaging you. You’re bored, adrift, perhaps losing your mind.

Some pull out a laptop or even a “smart” phone (don’t get me started) and start working on a piece.

I suspect these days people are more likely to be texting, gaming, shopping online, etc.

Reading is a traditional pastime, and for writers, essential.

But if you want to write, and can’t pull out the project you’re working on for whatever reason (like, you’re driving, or the setting isn’t appropriate), there are ways to exercise the writing muscles, and maybe gain an inch or two on whatever you’re working on.

Writing, even though it’s done mostly sitting down (unless you’re a best-selling media writer who prefers dictating into a machine while taking walks), is an active endeavor. It requires engagement of mind and body, attunement to senses, imagination and cognition. I say again, imagination.

I think we’re encouraged, if not trained, to turn imagination off in many situations. If we live in a variety of “worlds” – family, faith, work, creative, sport, etc – we have a lot more material to work with, but we are also undercover. Spies in the house of God. Locked in roles, tucked away in boxes.

We may spend a lot of time fighting not to think outside the box.

Working out the imagination is not a bad way to pass your dead time.

It can take work. Playing games is definitely easier. So is reading. Sometimes playing someone else’s game is what’s needed to relieve the stress, to give your mind and spirit a break. But in playing your own games, I think you’re preparing yourself to write.

Perpetual daydreamers have a different problem, but the problem, as far as I can tell from my own lost ramblings inside my head, is not being focused on a specific story or purpose. A little more structure can be helpful.

One dead time problem is being stuck worrying or obsessing about whatever is going on in your life, a negative kind of daydreaming. One way to get out of that “head” is to pay attention to what’s around you, looking at things as if they were brand new, through the perspective of someone else, a stranger, someone else in the vicinity, a friend or enemy, whoever is behind the thing you’re obsessing about, an alien, a traveler from another time or place. Focus on what’s outside, rather than inside.

Details make a story real. You’re gathering information, and practicing how to fill out information from the vague, dreamy settings in your mind. You’re also practicing observing the environment from the perspective of different characters. How does a boss view a meeting room, as opposed to the clerk taking minutes, the tech guy, the presenters, the people who will be called upon to come up with reactions. Or a child’s perspective on the family holiday dinner, versus the grandparent, the friends and neighbors, the person the daughter or son brought home to meet the family, the hosts.

Doesn’t matter how many times seen the room, been down that road, passed that pile of rubble, heard the family story or institutional line. Stepping outside of yourself forces you to experience the familiar in unfamiliar ways.

Just because you’ve seen a sunset doesn’t mean you’ve seen anything like the one happening now.

I grant you, the experience is not always pleasant. It’s a little disorienting. Surreal. It’s also…work. So is writing. The value to me in this kind of exercise is that it helps me bore down to the details I need when I’m actually at the keyboard trying to get something done. The other payoff is that, sometimes, I get something out of it I can use in the piece I’m working on.

Along the same lines, you can also get into describing people and places in different literary styles. From spare to lush, hyper-realistic and detailed to metaphorical, trying out different approaches to setting a scene is a good exercise that can break the monotony of your own writing voice or style. Coming up with one-line character descriptions is, of course, an art that may never be mastered, but I guarantee practicing it during dead time on a train ride will not only be entertaining, but improve your ability to call upon the skill when you’re at the keyboard. Finding ways to describe what they’re actually doing – how a doorman stands in the door, waiting, or how a construction worker acts in the cab of a crane, are all fair game. Looking at buildings, sky, bridges, hallways, cars, etc, will either send you scurrying off to Google for concrete details or inspire you to write poetry (if you’re not already one).

You don’t have to use your overly-detailed or metaphorical gems (um, “the parking lot looked as if the earth had tried to shrug it off its tired shoulders,” for example). You just want to play at being another kind of writer. Stretch and practice skills you will absolutely need when it comes down to working on a story. You never know, you might wind up reaching for pen and paper (or electronic device) to actually write something down.

If you’re the crime kind, you can tune the observational game to find, like Sherlock Holmes, or Monk, what’s off in the details of your environment or the people around you. Or, knock one small aspect of what you see out of whack, or make the place or person too perfect. Flaws and flawlessness, the keys to conflict.

Projecting yourself, or a character you’re working with, into your dead time environment is another variation. I often discover a new level of hell in places I find myself – for instance, at work, surrounded by a massive 5 year construction project, the steady pounding of piles being driven into the earth or the whine of the machinery driving them through rock, informs my every working minute. I can look out my window and put myself in and around the machinery, in the ditches and holes, pipes, concrete, etc. My travels take me to all kinds of odd setting, like a massive food distribution warehouse where my mind riffed on hell as an endless warehouse, demons sitting on top of food supplies but providing free access to bleach.

Perhaps a more challenging exercise for me might be to think romantic comedy instead of hell. We all have our lessons to learn.

But looking out on to landscapes from your deadtime vantage point, or following the story happening in a window across the alley, or through the open doorway in another office, are just as productive in a creative exercise kind of way.

If your deadtime is not physically restrictive – say you have an hour to kill before an appointment – then an alternative to sitting in a café and reading or writing might be to explore the neighborhood you’re in, paying attention to details, differences in people and places, architecture, food, etc, from what you might be accustomed to experiencing. Walking a narrative in your mind. Listening for different speech rhythms, music, smells, sounds.

Of course, a more immediate use of deadtime might be to keep the last couple of pages of what you’re working refreshed in your mind, even if you haven’t had time to work on the piece. Some of these games might serve to shake up what you’ve written, force you to look deeper, or come up with another angle on character, setting, plot.

From personal experience, it can also extend the amount of time you’re working on a project. Nothing like getting new perspective on work you think is already done. Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s just putting off the inevitable slide into anonymity. But, for the moment, it can be fun.

Somebody once told me I’m always seem to be working because, at that time, I’d was always writing things down – snatches of conversations from which I harvested titles and dialogue; odd facts; descriptions of friends and family members other people would talk about who seemed interesting as potential characters. I guess I had a lot of dead time, back then. Or, perhaps truer, I used my time better in those days. I certainly aim to get back to those days.

Perhaps, I may even email myself my clever bits, if there are any, while everyone else is texting under the table.

In a recent BBC interview, Sir David Hare, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, playwright, and general curmudgeon, talked about writing –http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/hardtalk/9568401.stm

Brief and bitter-sweet in the clip, he talks about having to write, and writing being one of the most important things in life even as he acknowledges that he makes films not very many people see.
Now, of course, you have to take some of the negative things he says, when his work has earned him a title as well as an enviable lifestyle, with a hefty grain of salt.

But for this little, irrelevant writer, what’s really interesting is his belief that writing, as a profession, is not about self-expression. The implication, at least what I gathered from the clip, is that writing is about, in part, surviving the need to write.

He talked about a writer being at the mercy of one’s gifts and imagination. Writing is about, for some, trying to write the Great Thing, and then, dealing with the reality that one is always at the mercy of one’s gift and imagination. Writing is also about the painful process of coming to terms with the limits of one’s “gifts” and imagination, and the reality that the Great Thing can’t be done.

He also talks about dealing with being judged, which I interpret as being critiqued, misinterpreted, misunderstood or, simply, not being liked. Well, okay, I suppose, though money, awards and a title might go a long way to smoothing out any feelings about a lack of validation. After all, very few people may see his movies, but people still give him money to make them. But for the vast majority of writers, yes, dealing with rejection – from editors, yes, but also audiences — is a professional challenge that must be faced.

Finally, and perhaps most relevant for everyone, is the need for regeneration. Whether you call it being blocked, or running out of ideas or inspiration, or coming to a commercial dead-end, writing is certainly about finding the energy and creativity to start over again once a story is finished, a project is published, and the moment of publishing success, or failure, has passed.

Writing as life is no different from life as life. Denial is a beautiful thing, and seems to carry some a very long way, but as in life, I’m too much a realist to try ducking the stone walls of talent, imagination, audiences or lack thereof. And I am a fan of regeneration, feeding that thing inside that wants to make something someone else might find interesting. Writing as life means having to find a way through the disappointments and failures and keep going. Where? Well, you know how that goes, it’s the journey not the destination…

On a perhaps more inspirational note, Ray Bradbury’s birthday was August 22nd, and recognized in the LA Times: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/08/happy-91st-birthday-ray-bradbury.html

Hard to come up with a better example of writing as life, integrating gifts and imagination, dealing with being judged, and finding strength through regeneration…

When I was a kid, paper ruled.

Like new cars, new books and comics had that special smell. Of course, that smell came from processed wood pulp and ink instead of fresh plastic and metal, and the aged stuff was always at least a little bit ripe but never as stinky as broken down jalopy, but the sense memories are just as intense for pulp hounds as it is for car junkies.
We didn’t worry about grading back then. If an old comic had a cover, it was a bonus.

For a dime each we could pick up 50’s Gold Medallion crime and Berkely, Signet, Dell and other SF (always taking the ones with Powers covers) mixed with 60’s Ace and Belmont Doubles (I still have a copy of Doomsman somewhere)….

I used to spend hours going through boxes of old books and comics in the back of weird little mom and pop stores – the usual candy stores, but sometimes deli’s, or thrift stores, and the best, a craft store just off the main shopping street. Doctor’s offices sometimes had comics, and other places kids were dragged to and made to wait.
The world of paper opened up the wonder of words and their power to enflame the imagination.

Kids these days, they have electrons.

If you can smell the electrons, I think it’s a bad sign.
The internet has become the new/used book/record/movie/comic/whatever store. Where I used to spend hours going through boxes in the back of weird little stores, kids take breaks from living alternative lifestyles in online games (being Thundarr the Barbarian, I suppose, rather than just watching the cartoons) to go shop for their entertainment through a variety of personal multi-media environments.

It’s taken me a while to adjust. I’ve been using computers to write since the mid-80’s and dig it. Mp3 players and little nano pods are cool but I find the whole downloading, ripping, copying tapes and records, converting files and making up play lists tedious. Games – computer, online or console – bore me because, well, they’re programmed, aren’t they, and so a bit predictable and repetitive. Or, I just don’t care about the challenges they present.

I wasn’t of this world when I was growing up, and I still haven’t completely joined it.

However, despite the lack of a comforting scent, I find myself growing rather attached to my Kindle.
I don’t have a whole library in it, yet. But I have bunches of books from a few of my favorite writers, and I’ve spent a couple of hours loading cheap or free versions of classics and obscure, copyright-free myth reference books. I have a vision of being able to carry my entire reference library in a little book-shaped device, accessing it whenever I need it.

That vision, like my portable music library, is a bit further in the future. I’ve been on facebook for years and, well, I still don’t really know how to work it. I need the social network for socially ambivalent people. Not sure there’s one out there, or what the point of one would be. I need the device that will follow my instructions, intuitively divine my tastes, and get the crap I like without my having to seek it out, convert it, file it, elude the authorities for it, etc. Because, I really can’t be bothered to spend the necessary hours to do all of that.

I know. I’m practically Medieval.

However, what is here is the ability to carry your own library of crap in some sort of portable storage device, and what is arriving is carrying just the device to access that library of crap — games, music, video, alternate lives, other people both real and unreal, archaic things like books, and all kinds of other things — stored in a science fictional cloud anywhere anytime.

Kind of a Zen thing – it’s there, but not physically there. It’s almost like inventing a new lifestyle, a new class of the population that doesn’t buy “things” (outside of some clothes and the instruments that give them access to their electronic possessions). This population just rents, or buys access to stuff.

That, as they say, is progress. Evolution. We read from stone, papyrus, paper and now electrons. We saw pictures on cave walls, on stone, canvas, celluloid, television, cable, internet, from still to moving. We moved by foot, mount, car, plane, rocket. We hunted, grew things, and now we buy stuff in packages or have stuff prepared for us, slow or fast.

The old stuff still exists. People still work with stone, walk, hunt. Human needs haven’t changed. We’ve just found more efficient ways to satisfy them. More convenient. Given ourselves more choices with which to satisfy ourselves.

There will always be readers.

There’ll always be a hardcore collector types, too. These are hardwired personality types, just a human thing. Horses didn’t go away because of trains, cars and planes. They’re just not in the mainstream of everyday life. But it is like living in a sf world where Cordwainer Smith’s Lords of the Instrumentality are being born and getting ready to shape and take over the world.

I do find myself catching something of the zeitgeist. Maybe it’s because I’m getting old, or maybe life has taught me some unfortunate lessons, but I find myself growing impatient with the ton of stuff I’ve accumulated over the decades. There are still things I treasure, but more easily I find things that just weigh me down. I still love books, but often I look on my “stock” and say, when am I ever going to look at this? Some things have lost their connection; their meaning has become irrelevant. I guess it’s a process of self-editing, cutting things down to an essential core. Almost like trying to find the touchstones of a life, what thing symbolizes or gathers a much meaning as possible from different periods of life. Certainly having been around for a while puts perspective on so-called possessions…

From what I can see, the new materialism is only partially physical — electronic equipment is the new Mustang or Corvette. Oh, the old Mustang and Corvette is still there, make no mistake. There are clubs and car shows and auctions and whole industries devoted to that and all the former new materialisms that have swept across Western consumerism. Stuff to put in that electronic equipment is the new collectible — people download (steal) just about everything and anything (even years ago, Peter David was talking about losing money because of downloads of his media stuff, which used to be reprinted for additional fee but then wouldn’t be because people had the electronic versions). People brag about how many games or movies they have on their equipment. The latest car features are electronic – usb ports, bluetooth, electronic engines.
Writers need to plug in.

So. There’s another world out there, evolving at light speed. Words will not vanish. There will always a place for words, a need for them in some part of the human world. But the method of delivery is changing fast. Readers are becoming comfortable with the tech required, and the tech is becoming friendly to the words (and the eyes that read them). Even the big guys are moving their comic book franchises online, I hear.

As writers, we’re aware how the business is changing. The print magazines are almost gone. Self-publishing is evolving into the realm of ebooks. Electronic rights matter. They really, really matter. What was wild speculation five years ago is fact now.

The subject has been discussed here by others, but I just thought I’d add my perspective as, well, whatever I am. I’m trying to catch up. I listen to Dave here at Storytellersunplugged, I’ve joined the gang at Crossroads Press. I visit sites http://www.kristinekathrynrusch.com/ and http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/ and http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ . Locus online is full of electronic publishing news. We’ve come a long way from Doug Clegg’s Naomi and King’s Riding the Bullet. Like my mp3 players, I find the technical details a little tedious. I’d rather be writing. But I still want readers, however they choose to read my stuff. I’d still like to make some cash out of this business.

So I’m grateful for the guys willing to do the heavy lifting, for the people who have the passion, time and commitment for the level of merchandising required. The old school is still out there, paper and ink is and will still be available. But, let’s face it, the production cost of digital product can’t be beat. Like selling water – it’s right there. I’m grateful to be a part of the future, however small that part may be. We’ll see what this electronic world is going to be all about.

“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.

(I apologize for posting this late. I literally forgot Gerard sent it to me because he posted it in the body of an e-mail, and when I got to looking and didn’t see an attached file, I … well, anyway…here it is…sorry it’s late – DNW)

by Gerard Houarner

In an effort to be at say something at least occasionally useful to new writers who may be lurking on this board, I’ve been wanting to babble a bit about plotting.

Some writers spend an enormous amount of time worrying about plot. I know I have. Folks here have talked about their plotting/story generating techniques, and I’ve eagerly lapped up the information and perspective. Every little bit helps.

The one tried and true method that’s worked for me, mainly because it’s one of those things around which I can consistently wrap my feeble little brain, is to approach a plot as a set of consequences.

Shit happens. All the time.

You think you put a cup on the table but you missed and the cup fell and shattered against the tile and broke into a million pieces.

What are the consequences?

Are there kids or animals in the house? Is someone about to get cut? Did the cup have an emotional meaning for someone? Did the noise trigger an unexpected reaction in you – sadness, joy, rage? Is there someone else in the place, and how do they react to the accident?

You might try the left-brain thought balloon exercise and free associate from that central action and see what jumps out.

The point of the exercise is, I believe, that it forces, or perhaps tricks, a writer to think of the details of a story without actually thinking: I’m going to write a story now, and then freezing up in front of a blank page or screen. It’s a way to structure the imagination. It’s the old “what if?” of science fiction. But instead of a premise based on scientific principles and a writer’s development of a chain of consequences based on that principle that leads to an unexpected set of circumstances and conflicts for character, the story starts with an action – something, anything happens. What’s the reaction? And once you shoot off a reaction – a barefoot little boy comes running into the kitchen to investigate the sound, eager to catch mommy breaking something for a change, and cuts his toe – what happens next?

And why?

If that doesn’t grab you, maybe a mother or father yelling from the next room, treating the adult who just accidentally broke the cup like a child, will spark something. Off we go on another series of free-association idea balloons.

I like the idea of free-associating because it allows whatever’s bubbling inside to rise to the surface in the writer, become part of the story, without the need to become overly intellectual about the process. This helps get the creative juices flowing, the writer excited and engaged with the story.

However you do it, starting off with an action and exploring the consequencest just seems to me a natural story and character generating method for a certain kind of writer. Pick up a newspaper, watch a travel show, and you can start your story off.

I suppose it’s a little Twilight Zoney – meteor crashes in a lake, so what are the consequences: takes the bridge out, forces bus passengers to hang out in a coffee shop. Out of those actions, a Martian and a Venusian make appearances. But out of an action, characters are created, and the writer is forced to explore them in order to continue the cascade of consequences. At some point, the writer “knows” the characters and the story “writes itself.”

In the old days, the “action” serving to inspire the writer might be the cover to the latest pulp magazine an editor just bought and now needs a story to go along with it. These days, it could be a “theme” anthology (shifting just a bit from an action to a situation or a setting as a method of setting off a chain of consequences) – pirates seem to be hot, as do sea stories. So the premise isn’t the action of a cup breaking, but a ship at sea – why is out there? Who’s the captain, and why is he, or she, out there? What’s the crew up to? Is there a storm? An attack? A questionable or interesting cargo? Someplace to go?

There I go again – looking for something to happen to set things off.

Of course, actions aren’t the only way to set off the big bang of consequences.

People are consequences waiting to happen. Because of this or that awful thing that happened in your past; because you were born with this or that kind of sweet or obnoxious personality; because you are having one or another kind of day, you are primed to react (or not react). What are the consequences?

Bad decisions have consequences. Characters making stupid decisions are a staple of story telling, but when those decisions aren’t examined in the story, aren’t supported by details and character development, they become just a cheap way to move the story forward. Bad decisions grounded in a character’s history or personality displayed in the conflict of a scene leading to that bad decision create consequences. Story. Aristotle says so, or something like it, in his Poetics (you know, I spent a semester with Greek tragedy thirty two years ago, and things get a little hazy after a while, especially after the prof was still arguing about the meaning of plot at the end of the term – no wonder he didn’t last as department Chair….).

There must be truth in those consequences of character action. They must come from some understandable, logical place, just like science fiction is based on a ground work of familiar scientific principles. So the work of a writer becomes drilling down into the details of why each reaction happened, so the next consequence follows in logical, and hopefully surprising, order.

Decisions judged to be “good” by society have consequences, too. Taking a risk for someone else, sacrificing oneself, protecting the weak, helping someone through a tough time.

I suppose this is a “genre” or even “pulpy” way of generating stories. No slippery stream of irony or narcissistic metafiction here. Some might call it the “what happens next” school of writing, what happens being whatever pops into a writer’s head at the moment, without grounding in character or setting or previous actions (actually, that might be metafiction). But my point here is that thinking in terms of consequences forces a writer to look more closely at all the things that might come together to create a reaction, and presents a way to clarify and focus characters as they move forward and interact. Given x,y,z, a character is going to act this way, but because of an action, another character, a particular setting, something else happens.

You can start with a precipitating event that catches your attention – murder, vanishing, noises in the night, meteor crash, a falling cup. Or you can kick off with a “character” (including the possibility of an individual or conglomeration of people you’ve met) you feel strongly about, doing something that sets off a reaction around him or her. However you choose to start, looking at the series of consequences generated from an action or the way a character behaves is a way to create a story.

If your brain happens to work that way….

–Gerard Houarner

Gerard Houarner

Early in February, a thread on the Shocklines board exploded for a few hours as the subject apparently touched a nerve among many readers: people were asked to list five storyline cliches that really irritated them. Our fellow unplugged storyteller Jim Moore started the thread in part as research for his own column February 12th on story telling cliches.

Now this is a fairly interesting topic for writers trying to stay on the edge of readers’ expectations and intent on building literary reputations, or at least breaking out of the pack of nameless hacks churning out indistinguishable product.

A few brave souls resisted – including our own Elizabeth Massie – who pointed out that some of the cliches listed were actually “favorites” of theirs, or that they didn’t care about the cliches as long as the writing was engaging. I detected a faint echo of something I heard Joe Lansdale say years ago – paraphrasing: that he enjoyed going along for the ride and surrendering to his sense of wonder in reading a story, which seemed to indicate that he didn’t necessarily engage his obviously keen critical faculties when reading for entertainment. Hopefully, I didn’t misunderstand him (or else I’m due for a serious ass-kicking), but basically I thought he was saying he just liked certain kinds of stories, and if they were well done he didn’t care if he’d heard the same type of story before.

There was even some conflict about identified cliches that others felt weren’t cliches. Jim’s column also inspired further discussion, which was great stuff.

And then John Rosenman followed up with a dead-on column on the joys and pitfalls of writing workshops, which touched on some of the same issues based on the needs and personalities of readers approaching stories we write. There was even a posting by my buddy Gary Frank on Shocklines with the subject, “What I wrote vs What they read,” which pretty much summarizes the stunned reaction I’m sure many of us have had to critical and reader feedback.

I am not, of course, forgetting Richard Steinberg’s valuable lesson on communication and clarity, from his January 22 posting. I’ll try, but I’m afraid my parenthetical nature will get the better of me.

The general topic of reaching, or turning off, readers is certainly not new to this blog or to the writing community – one might even say it is cliched. And yet obviously some of us are drawn to it, fascinated by the view another writer can bring to the pit of our demise and doom. It may be superficial to some, but to creative types bent on making money, the discussion has significant value.

Which brings me to my own interpretation of the problem of cliches and reader expectations. Basically, we’re a genre. In fact, everything is a genre – style, plot choices, characters fall together into a pattern readers identify and react to, hopefully in ways that ease the money from the wallets. (Yes, I know, horror is an emotion, not a genre, but for the sake of playing devil’s advocate I’m going with genre as defined by a recognizable pattern of techniques and creative choices that bring the reader to the emotional and/or intellectual state they’re paying good money to attain – fear, terror, horror, or at the very least, unease).

Mystery, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, westerns, urban. Or, if you like, stories about family, or coming of age, or young adults, or space. Folk, pulp, media tie-in, commercial, post-modern, slipstream, experimental, bizarro, literary.

All genres. (Well, maybe.)

Of course, you can then slice any book into a lot of different genres, as well you should.

My point is that it’s all cliche, to a significant degree. In mysteries and certain kinds of horror, the killer’s either going to be a man or a woman, as is the victim. You go to a ghost story for, well, a ghost. Same with vampires, werewolves, etc. If you want to approach plot and character from a point of view of irony, with emotional distance and intellectual curiosity, then I suppose you’ll want post-modern with its own unique way of doing and saying things. But like New Wave, splatterpunk, experimental fiction in general, you pretty much know what you’re going to get. There’s an expectation of predictability in the fiction readers seek out. We want gore. Or atmosphere. Or footnotes.

There are only certain things you can do once you’ve chosen a situation, mood, character you want to write about. You can only mix and match so many genres before losing audience share – a slipstream vampire slice of life? Fascinating, but damn you’ve got to be talented to make that work, and then you risk pissing off slipstream readers with the vampire cliche, and vampire readers with the “no story” slice of life cliche (I don’t know if anybody can be upset by yet another slipstream “twist”….).

And, even worse (and how’s this for a cliche) – everything’s already been written.

But that’s okay.

Because I think most readers, from the media fans to college professors making a living interpreting and teaching classic literary fiction, are all looking for comfort food that will satisfy their reading soul, or stomach, or mind.

Many readers (I won’t say all, or most, even if those iconoclastic types who insist they only want to be surprised get pissed off when they’re not surprised in the way they’re looking for – they’re not getting the genre or mix of genres they want) want the cliches they like. They don’t call those things they like cliches. They call it the good stuff. It’s all that other stuff that’s cliched and hackneyed and stupid. Which may be perfectly true, in the sense of what I think we really want cliche to mean – lacking originality. But for many, vampires are cliched and there’s no room for originality and just bringing one up ends the reader/writer relationship on a sour note. Writers writing about writers is cliched. Small towns, young rebels, abusive fathers, victimized mothers, all cliches.

When I was an undergraduate, the English department had a “writers’ track” of literature courses they organized into genres like the Political or the Religious Novel (fortunately, Kafka fit into every genre and I made quite a literary term paper living interpreting him for my various professors). Now the fact that some works showed up in more than one course speaks to genre mixing and bending, which may point to the strategy for folks fighting for cliche liberation – certainly we have vampire detectives and romantic vampires and vampire-killer vampires, though I believe there’s an opening for a vampire clerk story in The New Yorker, but only if the piece is drained thoroughly of plot and infused with rich irony and topical references and commentary. Vampire cowboys, anyone? Well, I suppose now they’d have to be gay. I know a few years ago the horror field was nearly invaded by vampire roaches, but the project wandered into the Publishing Motel and never came out.

Except, of course, if you’re lucky enough to be branded sui generis, in which case booksellers don’t know where to put you, readers don’t know what you are, and so you’re screwed, anyway.
Yeah, the cliche thing can drive anyone pretty crazy.

I guess the struggle against the cliche leads to outbursts of things we feel is new, in terms of technique (splatter to post-modern), character (serial killer to children), setting (haunted to mythic, with an overpass of technology). But ultimately, the “new” quickly becomes “cliche” (visually, everything from Universal Dracula and Frankenstein to Alien) and we’re back to the norm of boredom.

Boredom for some. Satisfaction for others. The plots, the characters, the stories all lead to theh same menu of conclusions – life sucks, life is great, people suck, people are great, the universe is a mystery, the universe is defined by spiritual entities good and/or evil, etc.

So maybe we’re not talking about cliches at all, and maybe not even genre, but form. A structure, a story pattern. An archetype? The abusive father story, the tale of the killer, the vampire or ghost or mermaid story.

It sure seems like I’ve read a lot of mermaid stories. I’m not wild about them. But somebody is. And sometimes I even find them entertaining, not because mermaids scratch my itch, but the writer has done a fine job of defining character and conflict (thought for me there’s a depressing sameness to the these aspects of the story, too). So the writer for me has elevated the both of us out of the cliched aspects of the archetype if with nothing more than the rhythm and power of language. Other readers seek out these kinds of stories.

I like noir, though, and it’s hard to find a form more bound by limitations. And yet, I like the story pattern. The characters and message corroborate my world view. I find in noir a reasonable depiction of the true nature of things and people. It makes me feel better.

The blues is about as cliche a form as you can get – even stretching beyond the twelve bars, you’re still talking about a limited point of view – life sucks, and/or this is how I’m gonna deal with this here sucky life – and a limited set of progressions and rhythms. A number of horror writers have made the observation that the blues and horror are related, parallel expressions of the same aspects of humanity (like horror, the blues are an emotion). And yet, for all its predictability, the blues as a form sings eternal for a small but loyal following, and has spawned other genres/forms from r&b to rock and roll all the way to hip hop.

We need these forms. Not everybody needs all of them, but it’s evident by their survival that there are forms writers consider cliched which still speak to a great number of people willing to part with the beer money to pay for the book. They fulfill an expectation, a desire, a need. Even the space opera media tie-ins and the vampire stories. I’ve seen Ed Bryant bow his head and shake it from side to side in mourning for the commercial fate of writers (in the case I’m thinking about, William Browning Spencer) who try something new and put themselves on the bleeding edge of literary creation, beyond the reach of reader expectation. Messing with reader expectations for a writer making a living at the game seems dangerous – maybe some of the full time pros on the board could speak more to that aspect of writing, if they haven’t already….

But as for the cliches, even as some folks need them, others react harshly to their use (one shocklines poster even singled out monsters, which is pretty funny on a horror board). There’s a wide borderland between cliche and cutting edge where, judging from the board reactions, the babies can get tossed out with the diapers.

So my struggle now boils down to finding the cut off line for something a writer does with a much-used form even fans of that form consider cliched. (Another struggle might be to find the right form, or combination of forms/genres, to make a hit with editors and writers, but that, as they say, is not the subject of another essay but simply the nature of the beast.) Someone on one of the boards made the very cogent observation that, for horror, imitating the superficial components of a style or storyline, without getting to the root fear, defines cliche.

That observation helps me get a handle on the issue. Like the blues, or horror, it’s the emotion of the piece that helps it transcend its predictability, at least for devoted followers. I’m not quite sure how the observation would translate for other genres – in mystery, is it the bracing intellectual challenge of the crime’s solution or the reality of the emotional journey of the crime’s perpetrator and/or investigator that provides the spark (or illusion) of originality? For science fiction, is it the sense of wonder provoked by the vision of a future us, or the audacity of a premise rooted in the intersection of a character and a sliver of that vision? In “literary” fiction, is it the delicacy and precision of selecting and deploying details and language, even structure, that separates the forgettable from the memorable, or how deeply the ordinary, the “real,” can be plumbed?

False dichotomies, I know. Ultimately, I think it’s how the story makes the reader feel, or rather, how successfully the story makes the reader feel (what they want to feel) rather than think, that becomes the litmus test for the cliche. Even in the intellectually-oriented forms, I believe the reader comes to them not just to solve a problem or admire the construction of sentence or smirk at irony, but to feel “smart,” to connect with the part of themselves that happens to function at a higher level and experience a connection with someone who shares their world view, or the thrill of understanding a complex set of ideas, or catch a reflection of what they perceive to be the “real world.”

If a reader doesn’t have a need to experience the emotion implicit in the form, or can’t, then there’s no connection between creator and consumer and the work becomes irrelevant, cliched. Lame. Stupid.

Like watching hockey when you’re into football. Or any team other than the one you were raised to root for. Or a classical music fan confronted by rock and roll, or a goth at a couture show.

So I don’t know how important it is to worry about what readers may feel are cliches – at least part of the reaction may simply be that the work is reaching the wrong audience. Vampire novels are, for many in the horror field, tired and played out. But they’re still selling. To me that means for many readers, and for some writers, vampires are not only important but emotionally meaningful. Is that any more “wrong” than writing for critics, professors and a handful of literary journal readers? We write and read what we need to write and read, not necessarily what the masses or the elite judge is good for us.

As writers, it is perhaps more important to listen to the reaction of the hard core fans to the work (or the editorial gatekeepers to that audience), whether their zombie zombies or vampire slaves or into realistic characters/settings or the supernatural – if a consensus judgement of “cliched” is passed, then the writer needs to pay attention – the itch hasn’t been scratched. The emotion inherent in the form hasn’t been reached.

You haven’t reached the intended reader’s inner zombie, or vampire, or sensibility for language and structure.

At least, that’s what I’m thinking today – please, feel free to educate me. I’d really hate to wind up being cliched about all of this….

— Gerard Houarner

by Gerard Houarner

By a happy coincidence, this one follows up Elizabeth’s great essay from a few days ago, though takes a different track (which is scary, because you never really want to wander too far off a trail blazed by Ms Massie, but I’m brave, or perhaps a little too much like those unsung stars of COPS, with their inspirational bad choices…..).

 

I was reading Entertainment Weekly for January 15th (yes, I read EW, mostly because it’s the only nationally distributed periodical I know that treats horror, sf, fantasy in various media and cult art in general with a delicate balance of critical snark and geeky respect – it’s not WIRED, but it isn’t the Sunday Times Book Review, which doesn’t know it presents a viewpoint delicately balanced between critical snark and geeky respect on its own cult world that is as deeply rooted in a finely nourished and tuned cultural aesthetic as it is in very big money).

 

Breath. Taken.

 

Anyway, I was reading EW’s interview with Norman Mailer (his presence in EW perhaps taken as a sign by some of how far he’s fallen from the literary pantheon – you can hear Gore Vidal giggling), and he was asked about enjoying taking on the first-person voice of a “devil” in his latest novel, The Castle in the Forest. He answered first by saying you want to have fun with your narrator. Then he referred to Warren Beatty, who after his performance in Bugsy could have been worried his friends wouldn’t want to hang out with him anymore. The actor said something to the effect that you only need 5 percent of someone in yourself to perform the part. Norman Mailer then said that’s all you need in novel writing, and admitted to being 5 percent devil.

 

Now there’s a few things I found interesting in this point of view.

 

I personally think most of us, including Mr. Norman Mailer, have more than 5 percent devil inside us, but that’s just me talking.

 

If you do the math, that’s only about 20 sustainable characters inside you, including the ones you play in everyday life, unless you’re Max Bialystock (a bialy is a New York baked breakfast staple, with onions and sometimes other tidbits in the middle, originally, according to Wiki, bialystoker kuchen – oh, Mel) in which case you can sell limitless investment shares in a near infinite number of identities to unsuspecting little old lady readers.When I thought about this for a minute, I started reaching for the checkbook to sink a few bucks into old Max’s latest production.

 

How many characters are inside of us? For some folks, this is a pretty easy answer. They were raised right, vote red, or stay true to blue, believe in morality or ethics, hang on for dear life to what keeps the world simple and get pissed off at the use of the word “nuance,” never mind the phrase, “cognitive dissonance.” They are perfectly normal people who state firmly that they have one person inside them, maybe two if they’re Geminis, and I am frightened by them because they do not believe, or certainly don’t admit in conversations both casual and heated, that they may be capable of actions or even thoughts inconsistent with the identity they present to the world. They are who they were brought to be, who they think they are, and could never be anything other than the rational, faithful and balanced individuals they observe themselves to be in any and all situations.

 

Assorted riots, lynchings and cultural revolutions aside, I do believe there are a great many people who are solid, consistent, firm in their investment in and interactions with humanity. Rational and fair-minded. I just don’t think there are as many as stake a claim to this territory. Of course, I’m an urban guy, I read the newspaper, and I’m working at a state psychiatric facility after years in street clinics. I have a different perspective. Pressure tends to expose the inner landscape. Gut irrational reactions are easier to come by than facts or questions, however unpleasant either might be. Maybe I’m jaded.

 

But I believe there’s an unpleasant number of people who present an array of lies to the world, and to the themselves, about who and what they are. I include myself, though I struggle against the lies I tell myself, those pesky irrational impulses, the fear of questions I’d rather not answer. Really, I do. Trust me. I’m a writer.

 

Anyway, the folks who use normality as a shield against even the potential for irrational reactions and feelings frighten me far more than the sociopaths and psychopaths I have known who pretty much lay their cards out on the table, at least in the circumstances in which I’ve interacted with them. Because these nice Dr. Jekylls’ can turn and do turn on a dime, causing considerable damage at the drop of an exchange with a culture they know nothing about, or the sound of an alarm, or the unfolding of a natural or man-made catastrophe. And you don’t see them coming. They shake your hand, say hi, and the next thing you know they’re trying to deport you.

 

The revelation of character (good and bad) through crisis is one of those fundamental writing rules that works equally well as life advice – listen and watch during those first moments of meeting someone new, the opening of a relationship’s story, when the end may be implied; and listen and watch when the shit hits the fan.

 

Anyway, I’m saying all of this to say the writer in me feels more comfortable with the belief that we have tiny percentages of a vast array of characters at our disposal. Our central self-concept probably does revolve around a handful of daily roles we fulfill – parent, lover, friend, family member, geek, day-job worker bee and/or creator.

 

But there are daily life experiences ranging from childhood to about five minutes ago, from events that happened to us to things that occurred to people close to us, all the way to what we may feel when we read or see something on television, that plant the seeds of other selves in us.

 

Victims, abusers, raging killers, suicidal depressives are the types that come immediately to mind for the typical horror writer. We’re sensitive to any number of traumatizing and traumatized personalities. A long time ago, I read an article by Nina Kiriki Hoffman discussing the idea that horror is about pain, and in a recent Locus interview, Peter Straub talked about using pain and humiliation in his writing. Pain is certainly in horror’s roots.

 

But there are many paths through pain, and I think we come across them on our individual journeys – family, friends, associates, even strangers you stop and help. You hear about pain every day in the news. On the boards. Around the water cooler.

 

With a touch of empathy and imagination, encountering someone else’s pain can open the door to another character, somebody not at all like you, with nothing in common except that they experienced something traumatic. This is a point of vulnerability which opens up people to each other, because if it’s one thing we all share, it’s suffering.

 

But there are other common points. Rage works. Love. Those irrational impulses. The rational ones.

 

Whatever’s inside of us, each little five percent segment, especially the pieces we’re afraid to approach, is a resource for character development, and a window to other people which allows us access to a larger cast of characters. Bits and pieces of ourselves we may call desires and roles and fears and duty, the inner devil and the angel, whatever lie or hope we may hold up as a momentary mask, are all connections to types of people we might normally think we could never understand, never write about. I think it’s possible for us to identify on some level with just about anyone, if we have the stomach for it.

 

I suppose the process I’m trying to convey is something like what some actors do to prepare for a role – research the background of a character, the culture, study people and catalog physical and behavioral details, borrow from personal history and the lives of others, yes, but also reach for an emotional perspective in yourself, particularly the uncomfortable or scary ones, to reach the scary places in a character, perhaps even a hero; reach for the loving places to find the more tender parts of a villain.

 

I guess another way to say what I’m trying to say is that we’re all human, that the masks we wear – culture, religion, ethnicity, work – both shape and express what we are beneath the masks. We may not recognize ourselves in the masks of others, but somewhere in the funhouse mirror image of a man in a suit or a woman in a kimono, a kid in hip hop or goth uniform, is a piece of us. And the way to find it is in the basic human hungers, fears, lies, pain, joy, catastrophes and miracles we all contain.

 

I know what I’m saying goes against the tribal urge to separate, demonize, to engage in the us vs. them, red vs. blue, etc. Much of what I’m talking about rests on a foundation of empathy, which in many quarters is viewed as a weakness, even a betrayal of the tribe.

 

But as writers, working directly with the human condition like sculptors dipping hands in muddy clay, I think self-exploration and empathy is part of the job. Pretending to be someone else, doing something very different from our ordinary life, is probably one of the things that drew us to reading and writing in the first place.

 

We want to have fun with our narrators and characters. I’m saying as writers, we can create a richer, more diverse cast of characters by stretching beyond the limits of our casual daydreams and fantasies, reaching into more personal spaces. Everybody has limits, places you might try to reach and simply can’t. I personally can’t do child abuse. Don’t have the stomach for that. But I do try to go other places, in myself and others, to write about characters who may not necessarily be fun, or certainly don’t have anything to do with what I’ve experienced in my life. I do it to stretch, to play in someone else’s secret garden. I do it to tell a familiar story in a different way, to see the same stories we all tell through different eyes. I do it to try to reach new readers, to make a sale by being different, in a coherent and logical kind of way.

 

It’s a job to pay attention to those other selves inside us, face pain, weakness, the demonic, and find more than twenty 5 percent selves to use as emotional templates. Empathize with pain, the demonic, the normal beneath the odd costume. No matter how ugly, or scary, or different. Because we’re human, and those other selves are human, too. Even if they’re human in what we may call an “inhuman” or monstrous way, beyond the comfort zone of our expectations of others. Even if they don’t listen to the same music you grew up with, or use different spices in their food. To my mind, that stuff is also human. But call it inhuman if it makes you feel better.

 

Well, I’m afraid I’ve wandered away from the village of clear and concise advice once again. That is apparently my way, my secret and unpleasant self running rampant over the logical discourse of rational discussion and instructional presentation. Damn, I hate when I do that.

 

Just, you know, don’t take it personally. I wouldn’t want to be you when you’re angry…. –Gerard Houarner

by Gerard Houarner

(Note: Gerard turned this in on time for a post on the 4th, but unfortunately to an e-mail address I no longer possess. Since George has had a health setback and is slightly behind on his column, I’m posting Gerard’s a few days late. George’s essay will appear on the 31st on the off day. Thanks! — David Niall Wilson)

Did anyone else answer Skipp’s 70 question (okay, 69) test last month (June) and find out they were an android? Can’t wait to see what he comes up with tomorrow….. But, oh Creator, why did you make me this way?

I’m sending this in ahead of time since I’ll be somewhere out on the water on the 4th so I hope everybody has/had a great holiday.

Anyway, I was going to talk about Vision this time but I changed my mind (or maybe I got a new pair of glasses). Given the profound nature of the past month’s run of essays, maybe I got cold feet. Well, you’ll probably get the vision thing soon enough.

Instead, I thought I’d talk about a recent writing experience that didn’t involve writing (well, hardly any). Linda and I were invited to be MC’s at the Horror Writers Association Stoker Award banquet June 17th, where we had a chance to talk to many seasoned pros and Big Guys we’d met before as well as quite a few new folks. Since I’m in a “new writer” frame of mind with this blog, I wanted to talk about what goes on at these kinds of gatherings for those of you who’ve yet to experience a convention or writing conference.

We’d done the MC thing a number of years ago when the Stokers banquet came back to NYC for the first time after 9/11. We hired a Native American storyteller/shaman from the Bronx (there is an informal support staff one should always have on call – doctor, lawyer, dentist, mechanic, handyman for spastic writers, a rabbi, priest, and a storyteller and/or shaman….I’m pleased to say we have them all) (I’d be interested in hearing what support staff others find necessary), who gave a fable/blessing as a healing offering to the largely perplexed audience right before we took the stage. Well, at least we understood what we were doing.

I had the honor of announcing Linda’s name as recipient for the Poetry Stoker that night in front of her mother and our writing group, so there was a bit of nerves and anticipation over all of that. But everything went well — we weren’t stoned from the stage by the outraged masses and disappointed nominees. And afterwards, I believe we hand fed Tim Lebbon quesadillas at the bar. Or under it. Whatever. Tough to beat a night like that.

Stoker 2006 was a bit different. There was nothing at stake for us, symbolically or at the awards, though we did want to give a smooth performance. If Stoker MC’s had a mutant power, it would be invisibility – we’re not announced ahead of time, or mentioned in the reports afterwards (unless of course you’re a Name). People are at the banquet to pick up their awards and hear the Big Guys speak. Unless you do something that people waiting for their awards consider stupid. Then you’re mentioned. So we wanted to preserve that high level of anonymity. Plus we didn’t want to embarrass our bubba Lee Thomas, who was running the shindig and invited us.

We worked on a script, Nick Kaufman threw in some stuff we had to do for a raffle, I wrote an introduction (thus the weekend’s writing work) for Toastmaster Monteleone featuring way too many Sicilian proverbs (which I had to learn to say in Italian – I tried to get them translated into Sicilian, but oh you Sicilians, you’re a tricky lot! It was much easier getting ten guys I know named Vinnie in a locked room to teach me how to mispronounce the lines phonetically.) and Lee rehearsed the whole show a couple of times during the weekend, so it went fairly smoothly. In fact, the whole event was pretty flawless thanks to Lee’s team, except for the very end, apparently, when a bottle (tequila?) met a glass desk cover a bit too quickly and cracked it….but of this we shall not speak.

So what do writers do at these writer association gatherings for the rest of the weekend, when they’re not busy collecting their awards and listening to the Big Guys speak?

They go to panels. At the Stoker weekend, there always seems to be writing-business oriented panels about contracts, agents, publishing, etc. If you’re new to the game, it might well be worth your time to come for this part of the weekend. At this gathering, the most fun I had was at the critics’ panel, which included a PW reviewer who gave us some insight into the his approach for reviewing our work. Since the Stoker banquet seems like it will now be attached to the World Horror Convention, I’m sure the HWA will provide a track of writer-oriented programming at these conventions, so look for a WHC coming to your neighborhood soon.

Writers pitch. I never have formally in all the years of coming to these things. But I have talked about the kind of work I’d like to do with publishers and editors, and once in a blue moon it’s led to something. I’ve talked to editors and agents. I’ve heard a lot of stories from those who have gone through the formal pitching process at these things, and it seems to me from all of this that the trick is you’re selling yourself as much as the work. I didn’t hear of any writers being told they were idiots and that their work sucked. Everyone I talked to (about a dozen people) were encouraged to send their work in to an editor or agent. Maybe it was my imagination, but the writers who seemed most positive about how their pitches went and felt they received very enthusiastic feedback had something interesting in their background – as an example, there was a non-fiction writer who’d done some major magazine work and managed to drop some pieces he’d done and places he’d been.

Basically, they didn’t just gush about their writing or spend the whole session detailing every plot point. They presented themselves as part of the package.

So the message here is be interesting. Professional, but interesting. Give the editor or agent a chance to be excited to meet you, to feel like something about you is going to help sell the book, that you bring something personal and special to the work, and that you’re capable of meeting a deadline and writing a sentence and talking to people about your work. (Of course, the book still has to be good.) It’s a bit like being interviewed by non-genre media – give them a handle on you, an angle on your story and yourself, a way to hook the public on how to approach a stranger telling a story.

It’s easy if you’re a cop or a doctor or someone famous. I’ve used my job at a psychiatric center as a shoe horn on more than one occasion. People roll their eyes, twitch and say ‘no wonder you write horror.’ If you’re a K Mart clerk, you could push your perspective on people (and thus, your characters) through the prism of that job. If you’re a house wife or husband, you might speak (or claim to speak) for particular kinds of house wives and husbands through your stories. If you were inspired by a particular school of writing, or have a passion for travel, music, movies or art or something else that people can relate to, use these as references for your work. (I’m not sure I’d try to connect with video games, unless the editor was very young). I’m not saying talk only about yourself, just include yourself – a brief couple of lines about how your unique experience of the world made you come up with this particular plot and these particular characters.

Just a thought. Marketing, as much as I dread it, begins as soon as you type “the end” to a piece. Probably before, but that truth is too much for my tiny brain to contain. You take it as far as you can and need to – and if it’s only as far as a list of potential markets you’ve researched and a manila envelope with sase, or an email submission with an RTF attachment, then that’s that. But marketing in this day and age encompasses endless opportunities for schmoozing and making impressions, from blogs like this one to MySpace to perfecting, or at least not completely sabotaging, the pitch.

Writers also brag at these confrences. You get an idea who’s selling where, and what’s being sold, so that’s always useful, though at times depressing because sometimes you’re the guy not selling anything. But at least you get leads.

Writers read their work to an audience. There’s usually a reading track at conventions and at the Stoker weekend where you can hear your favorite writers perform. I know many people who hate going to readings, and who hate reading. No problem. But if you’re a writer getting published, you may at some point be asked to read, and it would be foolish to give up the opportunity to sell your work by making an impression on curious potential customers. Trust me, these opportunities don’t come often.

So drop in on the reading track (or go to the local bookstore or coffee shop – you don’t have to stay within the genre). On this particular weekend, we learned a thing or two about structure as Douglas Winter talked about his use of point of view before reading an excerpt from his latest novel, and received a refresher course on audience involvement from Thomas Monteleone as he stalked the aisle and got up in my face while reading a story. You’d be amazed what you can learn from listening to another writer read. Depending on the kind of material (obviously not Remembrances of Things Past or Finnegans Wake) and the performance skill, you can get pick up quite a few tricks.

Let’s face it, many of us are shy and hardly performers, or else we would be on stage using our creative energy in that way. Many of us are or were from the mumble fast and split school of reading, which is why so many people hate coming to readings. A lot of people don’t rehearse – what scans well, or what reads by eye in a tricky/symbolic/amusing kind of way may not translate to spoken word. A lot of us drone as if the sheer magnificence of the words we have set down on paper will burn themselves into the brains of listeners and shock them into awe. Alas, is takes more than words, no matter how beautifully strung together, to impress an audience. The problem is you have to speak them, and if that’s not well done, the words die a terrible death in the silence between the reader and the audience, and the story or the poem is stillborn, and people don’t feel inspired to search out your work.

One of the first epiphanies I had about public reading was when M. Christian invited me to an erotic reading in a downtown NYC club as part of a book launch tour. I had the sense to write something funny, not just straight sex and/or violence, and even experimented with a mildly amusing accent (real actors would laugh at my attempts, but I never said I was a professional) to use when reading it. Well, come that evening, a long string of writers and poets came up on stage and a lot of them absolutely killed – these guys used props (one guy put on a condom on his head), bounded from one end of the stage to the other, worked the audience and their material and had people testifying at the bar. Some had to be performance artists. There were, alas, a number who stood stiff at the podium, never looked up, read their work in a flat monotone, and huffed off the stage when they received only mild applause. I didn’t kill, but I wasn’t one of the zombie readers, either, (though I had been in the past). I learned quite a bit about the range of what one could do at a public reading (they never taught us this stuff in writing workshops in college, and nobody ever read that way in college, either). A little risk-taking is not a bad thing (for example, Douglas Winter got his audience’s attention by throwing mints at them!).

On a completely different note, I attended a Gahan Wilson reading at KGB’s here in NYC, where I learned how a more subtle but no less theatrical presentation could destroy the audience. The place was packed to the very high rafters, and even Peter Straub was in attendance. I arrived early and got a seat right by the podium – I was about a foot away as he read, so it felt like he was reading to me. This occurred before the bar had a microphone, so usually writers had to work at projecting their voices, particularly when the dancers in the rehearsal hall overhead started stomping full blast. He read a couple of his classic stories in clear, strong voice, yet sometimes he modulated down to almost a whisper, but the audience always seemed to hear him. Of course, they were hardly breathing, since his mannerisms and facial expressions (he IS his cartoons) so perfectly captured his words that he had everyone under his spell. He didn’t jump or wear a condom on his head – he was (and is) the epitome of erudition and sophistication, a true gentleman, and yet, like Vincent Price, he added tension and humor by changing pace, inflections, using accents, making eye contact with apparently as many people as he could and giving them one of his comically horrified expressions. He killed. It was a revelation.

Now I never overcame being a shy and non-performer type, and I just don’t have the talent to pull off a lot of the tricks and skills I witnessed in the above two readings, but with these performances serving as inspiration, I paid much closer attention to the skilled readers both inside and outside of our community. A couple even shared a few tips and gave me feedback. A rehearse. Practice reading. Try to pick the material I’m going to read carefully. I don’t think I’m a zombie reader. Please, try not to be a zombie reader.

Go to the readings, study, practice. It’s part of the job of being a writer.

While you’re at it, if a writer in being honored or publicly interviewed, please go there instead of slurping down another round at the bar. At one WHC I went to Gene Wolfe was the goh, and there were ten-twenty people at his “speech.” He was impressed that many people came, which told me not only had he done this kind of thing often enough before, but had learned not to expect people to show up. This was Gene Wolfe, folks.

There were other new/unknown writers in the audience and he picked one and had her sit up there with him, and he casually dispensed tricks of the trade and hard earned wisdom (sometimes the real story starts at the end of the story you’ve written; if you have more than one ending for a story, use them all) while sharing the stage with a bright, talented writer. It was a great session. I learned from a master. Isn’t this why writers go to writing conferences and concentions?

What else happens? Writers make deals. Projects that have been cooking for months are formalized in a contract, or paid for, or delivered because of the convenience of everyone getting together at this event. Projects are initiated, proposals are requested and discussed, anthology TOCs are assembled, interviews are done, pictures taken, secret handshakes exchanged. Even if you’re not having lunch with your agent or dinner with your editor, either bearing contracts and/or checks in hand, this business aspect is useful because you get to see and hear about who’s making those deals. And maybe you get a chance to pitch, informally, to those deal makers.

Which brings me to the bar.

Sure, a lot of folks get drunk. They party, they carouse. They run half naked through the halls or vomit in the pool. You know how it goes at conventions.

But I don’t know if these are the folks selling a lot of stuff. Granted, maybe they just did and that’s why they’re floating, hopefully face up, in the pool. But, really, I don’t think that explains a majority of the floaters.

What you can do is stay sober and dignified, especially if you’re a beginner or an unknown or someone nobody gives a damn about, and simply ask an editor, after offering them a drink or perhaps even a quick bite (an unlikely opportunity since they are always lunching and dining with the Big Guys), and without the intense expression of desperation and pressured speech so many of us are guilty of when in the presence of people who can help us, what they are looking for in a story. What excites them. Who are their favorite authors and why? How can you sell them a story?

If you’ve been rejected by them, you might want to mention that and ask how can you write a better story for their particular market. If you’re really smart, you’ll know and have read stories they’ve published and be able to talk about what you liked about those stories. At the very least, you’ll have something personal and positive to say in your next cover letter to the editor, besides the dry and stale report of your previous sales (you know better than to summarize your story in the cover letter, of course).

I’m sure not everyone would appreciate this approach. But sometimes it works. Editors are people, too. No, really. No matter how many rejection slips they send out, no matter how badly they’ve crushed your hopes and dreams, editors are people. I know. I are one, sometymes.

Editors want to read good stories. They want to be excited by great ones. They want to discover new writers. They just don’t want to be pitched to every waking moment of their day. So treat them like the human beings they are, and not the insensitive, rejecting monsters you may think they are, and talk to them about stories or books they’ve edited and get them talking about their wants and needs.

Again, it’s a fine balance between kissing ass and just having a real conversation that might prove a fun release for the editor, and be educational for you. I vote for having a real conversation, abandon all hope ye who speak to editors. I’m not big on kissing ass, and I’ve never seen that kind of thing sell a story on its own. Maybe some other form of oral performance, on some other corner of the anatomy, might get you over. At least, so I’ve heard.

Flossing your teeth! That’s what I meant! Clean teeth sells fiction! You all have filthy minds!

Anyway, a lot of times, it really pays to shut up and listen at the bar. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Writers should be doing this, anyway – observing, rather than trying to create an illusion of self-importance around themselves, unless performance is a part of your muse. The observations will pay off in the work. The self-importance will mostly result in ridicule. Editors talk on panels, of course, but they’ll keep on talking at the bar about what hot writers they’re reading and who really made an impression on them. All valuable information.

Writers also meet each other. At the Stoker banquet, I noticed many of the old hands reaching out to newbies, saying hi, talking to them about the evening and the weekend. This was quite a change from the early 90′s, when I attended my first Stoker banquet, where everyone seemed huddled in tight little circles. Maybe there really were deals being made, back then. Horror was hot, money was flowing. Who had time for nobodies? This time, Linda dragged one shy guy off to meet his favorite authors, including Peter Straub and Tom Monteleone, who spent quite a bit of time with him and was his charming, debonair self. So smile. Introduce yourself. Stay loose.

Don’t go expecting to sell your books and stories to editors neck deep in submissions, or get an agent, or be recognized for the half-dozen stories you may have had published here and there. Take the pressure off of yourself. Scout the territory, be open and flexible, listen, ask questions. Not everybody in the room has to leave it with your business card in their pocket. Please don’t try to sell your chapbook to David Morrell. This isn’t the battle you have to win.

The battle, and the war, is at the keyboard, or the notepad. And in your mind and imagination. These writer conferences are just a tool. Use them for inspiration, information, contacts. Or avoid them like the plague for the depressing reminders they can provide that you will never win any of those awards or be one of the Big Guys. But don’t forget that the only work that matters is putting words down to build a story.

G.H.