I guess it’s a good thing that I kept busy working my next book to keep my mind off of the contest because I just signed a three book deal with JournalStone. It’s an exciting time, and I’m looking forward to some good years ahead with this innovative publisher.
To celebrate, I’m thinking of taking the family back to Woodstock, NY for a weekend. The book is very much inspired by the years I spent living there, working at Bearsville Studios, and I haven’t been back to the town in over a decade. I wonder if they still make that awesome lobster ravioli at The Bear. It was pretty much the only dish we could afford back in the day, but damn was it good.
I’m thrilled to announce that my novel, The Devil of Echo Lake has been selected as a top ten finalist in JournalStone’s $2000 Advance in 2012 contest. The top three winners will be revealed in mid May, so it’s going to be an exciting month. Last year’s winner, Brett J. Talley went on to see his first novel nominated for a Bram Stoker award, and JournalStone will be showcasing three upcoming titles including Talley’s second novel on the cover of tomorrow’s edition of Publisher’s Weekly. Needless to say, I feel honored to have captured the attention of a really cool up and coming publisher.
I have another creepy little piece of flash fiction out today in the Mardi Gras issue of Danse Macabre. I hope you’ll give it a couple of minutes of your time. I sure had fun writing it.
When I was studying traditional harmony in college, I used to wonder if we universally associate minor key sounds with melancholy and dissonant intervals with tension just because our culture has done it that way for so long, or if there’s some wiring in the brain that would make you feel music in the same way even if you were raised by wolves.
I’m thinking along the lines of a Carl Jung/Joseph Campbell Collective Unconscious sort of thing, can you dig it? If similar patterns of myths, monsters and heroes emerge all over the world just because the human head has a tendency to sprout them in the same way that it sprouts hair and tears without having to be taught, then couldn’t we also have an innate orientation toward certain sounds and–I’m wondering lately–certain narrative devices?
I’ve been telling my son bedtime stories since before he could talk, since long before he sat down in front of a TV where most of us probably absorb the bulk of our cultural conditioning, and I noticed early on that if I told him a story in which the villain (used to be something like a tiger or a crocodile, but we’ve graduated to a pantheon of comic book baddies) is roving in the open, chasing the protagonist or laying traps, he was seldom afraid to hear about it. He even invented his own monster at the age of three, and I’ve never been so proud.* But if I kept the bad guy off stage, lurking out of sight… If the hero didn’t know where the threat was hidden… Oh boy, then I’d get fear.
Long before my son had seen suspense done this way in books, TV shows, and movies, he reacted to it in oral stories the way people listening in the dark probably always have. Maybe an evolutionary lesson was inscribed in our brains ages ago: the most dangerous predator is the one you cannot see before it strikes. All I know is when I started hiding bad guys, if he didn’t just get up and leave the room, he would cover his eyes with his hands so as not to see the picture his imagination was forming. Funny that–not seeing makes you fear seeing (and yes, I would back off; I may want to scare the hell out of you, but I’m not a horrible parent).
For me this was a lesson in the primal nature of suspense, a reminder and an illustration of something I’d learned long ago from Tolkien when he kept Sauron off stage, and the Nazgul hidden deep within hooded cloaks. Stoker did the same thing with Dracula for most of his tale, building up a shadowy intimation of evil.
Of course, there’s a time for foreplay and a time to deliver. One of the delights of horror fiction is that we eventually get to pull the curtain back and see what’s been waiting in the wings. And if you’ve built a cool monster, I want to see it.
One glimpse can work dark wonders in memory and imagination, and leave an afterimage that burns in the mind’s eye long after the curtain falls back into place.
Here are some of the coolest monsters I’ve seen lately. This is the Krampus parade that’s held every December in Austria where legend persists of mountain demons who help Santa Claus by spiriting away the naughty children.
Those Austrians know a thing about horror. They know that unveiling the monsters for just one night a year will do the trick. While American parents are threatening our sugar-injected offspring with, “Santa won’t bring you the Lego Millenium Falcon if you keep it up,” Austrians are marching their kids downtown and introducing them to the hoard of bloodthirsty demons that will abduct and eat them if they don’t cut the shit. Austrians do not fuck around when it comes to monsters.
*My boy’s first monster, verbatim:
Jonkerman drives a black automobile really fast. He has a nose on his belly. He is black, has eyes on his hair and the hair is on his feet, and he has a mouth on his hand. He is one million inches tall.
Last year my brother gave me an old laser printer that he had lying around, and today I printed out the first draft of my second book on it. I love how fast a laser is and how the toner lasts like, forever. Today I also love how heavy laser paper is because my 324 page ms. looks like The Fucking Stand. And that’s pretty satisfying for making you feel like you’ve accomplished something when you’re also a bit jittery about discovering the quality of what lies within.
The first printout makes a book feel real in a special way, and after a couple months of letting this one sit, I’m finally ready to spill blue ink all over it. I’m ready to find out if it’s worth another 6 to 12 months of work… or if it’s irredeemable.
I’m hoping I’ll find that it has the mojo to justify the redrafting and polishing, but if it doesn’t, then I’m free to go back to the wild, wonderful potential of writing the next one in first draft.
When I walked into the kitchen with the Stack o’ Paper, my wife asked, “What’s that about?”
“It’s last year’s harvest: book two,” I said.
She got all excited, and I went into the bathroom and dropped it on the scale. It’s 5 pounds. A first draft is like an infant; you get to weigh it, and get all giddy, and it doesn’t matter that it might be a little ugly with disproportionate features and slime all over it.
But the giddy moment passes as soon as you turn the title page over and dig in. Some say that writing is an act of courage. Sometimes I agree, and sometimes I think…
Writing can be done by any brazen fool, But only the brave can read it when it cools.
If you read interviews with authors, this comes up sooner or later. A writer will talk about how there is often a point when the characters start saying and doing things that surprise him, things he didn’t intend or anticipate. One can get the impression that writers are people who spend a lot of time in a trance listening to the voices in their heads. Voices that are frighteningly independent. But a writer isn’t exactly a shaman, right? He knows he’s just making these people up out of scraps of imagination. They aren’t really going to do anything he doesn’t want them to, right? Or are writers half crazy?
Of course writers are half crazy—we hope to one day feed our families by telling beautiful and terrrible lies about folks who don’t exist. In our underwear.
I, for one, happen to think that on a good day the line between writer and shaman, between craft and trance, gets blured. But to bring a book into the world you have to write on a lot of days that aren’t so enchanted. A few weeks ago I finished the first draft of my second novel, and here’s what I noticed happening with regard to characters going off the reservation.
I don’t outline, but I do write up a short forecast for each section of a book. Just enough of a map to give me confidence that there are some landmarks on the horizon I’m aiming for. But then, in the actual writing, I find that, like a weather forecast or a Mapquest printout, things on the ground are different.
I may be planning that a character is going to learn something three chapters from now that will cause her to take a certain action, but in the scene I’m writing today, she figures it out sooner because she’s just smarter than that. If I want to be true to what I know about her, if I want her character to be credible, I can’t go holding her back for the sake of a plot device, and I just have to let things develop differently.
This tends to happen most often when I’m writing dialogue. If there’s one thing that shouldn’t be contrived to serve the plot, it’s dialogue. Dialogue has to serve the characters, and it’s best when the writer is kind of overhearing it, like a spy with a steno pad eavesdropping on two people, each with their own agenda. [Plot is a side effect of characters at odds doing things that make sense to them] If the characters are having honest reactions, they won’t sound like they’re reading a script. And those reactions will sometimes surprise the writer, taking events in a different direction.
The ending of a book is also a fertile place for twists that can surprise the writer. I’ve heard some authors say that while they might not know exactly how they’re going to get to the ending, they do know the ending in advance. I can’t relate. For me, story telling is part problem solving, and I don’t know the sum of the equation until I’ve puzled it out. Every little decision I commit to over the course of a novel narrows the range of possible endings in an organic way. I may know of an event that I hope will fit like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle, but when I get there and all of the elements are in play, and everything I ‘ve learned about the characters has taken on an irresistible momentum, I just might have to toss that piece and find one that fits true without having to jam it in and fray the edges.
How about you other scribes? Do your characters think for themselves?
