writing

Gary A. Braunbeck > writing

Getting To Know Your Characters (Part 1)

June 1, 2006 0 Comments

by Gary A. Braunbeck

I’ve been very lucky in that readers and many of my fellow writers feel I have a certain skill for creating three-dimensional characters. I’m often asked how I manage to do this, so I thought for my next few columns here, I’d go over some of the methods I employ for characterization. Please bear in mind that these methods are those which work best for me and are not being offered as absolutes or — God forbid — a template that will guarantee you’ll get the same results. There is no such template; creating a multi-layered, believable, sympathetic character is, like everything else one learns about writing, a matter of trial and error.

Before getting any further into this, I need to give you a little personal background so you’ll see how I arrived at these particular methods.

For the better part of a decade — between the ages of 19 and 30 — I worked as an actor, mostly summer stock and dinner theatre, but I actually got paid to pretend I was someone else. During those years, I worked with an assortment of other actors, all of whom had their own approach to interpreting the particular role in which they were cast.

The late Laurence Olivier was a self-proclaimed “technical” actor — he worked from the outside in; he would find a walk, a speech pattern, various mannerisms, etc. through which the character would reveal itself to him. While rehearsing a Noel Coward play in which he played a prissy English lord, Olivier was having great difficulty getting a handle on both the character and how to play him. This semi-famous story reached its happy ending when Olivier, passing by an antique store, happened to glance in the window and see a walking stick for sale. He went in to the store, picked up the walking stick, and the moment it was in his hand, he knew the character. (The walking stick, by the way, was described by Olivier as “…one of the ugliest, most ostentatious things…” he’d ever seen, but knew that his character would think it was classy and tasteful.)

I worked with a lot of technical actors. I was one myself.

I also worked with a lot of Method actors. Method actors are an ongoing gift to the world from Constantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky, an actor, writer, and director from Moscow who created an approach that forefronted the psychological and emotional aspects of acting. The Stanislavsky System, or “the Method.”

Without boring you into a coma, I’ll try to simplify what “the Method” is. It requires that, if an actor is to portray fear, he must remember something that terrified him and use that remembered fear to instill reality and credibility into his performance. The same with joy, lust, anger, confusion, etc. Stanislavsky’s Method also requires that the actor know everything about the his or her character, usually by having the actor write a short “inner history” for their character, past details of their lives that — while never used on stage — would nonetheless give the performance even deeper authenticity.

In theory, Stanislavsky’s Method is an amazing tool for an actor. It requires the complete submersion of the self into the body, psyche, and thoughts of another person so that an actor’s performance rings of the truth.

I use the phrase “in theory” above because, in my opinion, too many actors use Stanislavsky’s Method as an excuse for self-indulgence masking itself as research. Don’t misunderstand — when you get a Method actor like Marlon Brando (in his prime), Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Sean Penn, Gregory Peck, Johnny Depp, Lance Henriksen, or Bob Hoskins (to name a small handful) who have the discipline and wherewithal to employ the Method to all its power, and you can have something glorious.

But I didn’t get to work with any of them. I got to work with Method actors who would spend weeks researching and writing their “inner history”, demand that I address them only as their character (even when off stage), and never, never make light of anything at any time.

The prime example of how Stanislavsky’s Method can be turned into rampant silliness happened when I was doing a stage production of Sherlock Holmes and had to do several scenes with the actor playing Dr. Watson. (I played a slimy little safecracker named Sidney Prince.) The actor playing Watson had written a 25-page “inner history” for Watson, researched hand-to-hand combat methods used by British troops during the Boar War, studied medical procedures practiced in London in the 1800s … and when the curtain rose each night, audiences were treated to his imitation of Nigel Bruce for two-and-a-half hours.

But that’s not the silly part. The silly part always happened off stage, right before the third scene of the second act (where Watson confronts Prince). As he and I waited for our cues, the actor playing Watson would drink a cup of vinegar. I asked him why, and this, word for word, was his reply: “Because, Mr. Prince, dealing with you leaves a bad taste in my mouth.”

Time to run, not walk, to the nearest exit.

I finally came to the conclusion that for me, as an actor, Stanislavsky’s Method was useless. Every Method actor I had worked with wound up giving stiff, overly-mannered, obvious performances (in that it was obvious they were “acting”). I don’t know that I’ll ever do theatre again, but if I do, I’ll use the same “technical” approach that I always used.

But I came to realize that, while Stanislavsky’s Method might be useless to me as an actor, it was priceless to me as a writer. I still approach characterization — especially during the early stages of a story or novel — from a technical starting point, but almost always fall back on Stanislavsky’s Method when it comes time to add emotional depth and authenticity to whichever character is coming to life on the page — and I won’t commit a single word to the page until said character is someone I recognize as an old friend.

I always start with two simple questions, questions that are going to strike you as being a bit silly on the surface, but questions that, for me, reveal so much more than what is simply seen; for the purpose of this column, let’s say those two questions are these: How does this character put on his or her coat? and How much milk do they use when having a bowl of cereal?

Since this is already running a bit long, I’ll address the second question, and we’ll get to the coats next time.

Let’s say that this particular character uses just enough milk to barely cover the cereal, thus ensuring that both milk and cereal will be finished at the same time with nothing left in the bowl but the spoon. That’s the technical starting point, the outside. Now, let’s go in and look a little closer. They do this because they don’t believe in waste; they’re not the type to dump the last bit of milk down the sink after the cereal is gone. (And if there is any milk remaining, they either lift the bowl and drink it, or set the bowl on the floor so the cat can finish it.)

Why do they not believe in waste? Because they can’t afford to be wasteful. They work long hours at a job that manages to pay the bills, the rent, and buy a set amount of groceries each week. But no excesses, no luxuries, ergo, no wasting of the milk. This also suggests that this character may not be the happiest person you’ve ever met; after all, if they have to be this frugal with milk, then that frugality has to extend to every other aspect of their existence, as well, and with that comes an endless string of commonplace worries that, taken individually, may not seem like much, but cumulatively drain a lot of enjoyment from life.

This character is sitting at a kitchen table that also doubles as the dinner table, because he or she lives in a 3- or 4-room apartment; a nice-enough place that’s affordable if not fancy. I’m willing to bet that stashed up in one of the kitchen cupboards is a set of china cups and saucers left to them by a dead relative, cups and saucers that they only use on special occasions, like those rare instances they have company. I’ll also bet you that on this character’s chest of drawers in the bedroom we’ll find a jar filled two-thirds of the way with an assortment of spare change — mostly pennies, dimes, and some quarters — that this character is planning on using to buy themselves a nice little something-or-other once the jar is full, maybe a new pair of dress shoes at Target or K-mart.

I could keep going but I think you’ve got the idea. All of this from simply looking into their cereal bowl to see how much milk they used. And it doesn’t matter a damn whether or not any of the information from the above paragraph makes it into the story because I am now well on the road to knowing this person; and the better I know them, the more authentic and believable they will be to the reader, and we will have achieved what Stanislavsky’s Method demands: complete, unflinching, undistilled truth when depicting the human condition of the character in question.

Next time, the coats. In the meantime, you might want to think about what we might find in the pockets….

characters, writing

Forget Genre

March 13, 2006 0 Comments

by Gary A. Braunbeck

This is going to bounce around a bit like a paper cup caught in the wind, but will hopefully come together at the end, so bear with me.

One of the things I promised myself when I agreed to take part in this blog was that I would try to avoid offering advice to aspiring writers. This is not arrogance on my part, nor is it my assigned covert role in some labyrinthine conspiracy designed to make certain that basic necessary knowledge for starting one’s writing career is kept concealed from you, thus eliminating any potential competition you and your work might pose in the marketplace.

The reason I am uncomfortable offering advice to aspiring writers is simple: I’m still learning how to do this myself (and I hope that I’ll never stop learning). Many of the things I discovered through trial and error no longer apply, and I wouldn’t dare try to tell someone else how they should go about managing a writing career.

But there is one piece of advice that, when pressed to, I gladly offer to aspiring writers — and it’s one that is often met by blank, confused stares: Forget Genre.

If you sit down and say, “I’m going to write a HORROR story,” you might — consciously or not — start grafting traditionally horrific elements onto a story where they don’t belong, and you can hobble a story by trying to force it to fit within the “traditional” (read: popularly accepted) boundaries of a particular genre, rather than expand those boundaries by not worrying about how it’s going to be categorized. View it only in terms of the story you want to tell, not the one you think readers are going to be expecting.

Two things happened recently that prompted me to revisit this subject for myself: 1) Reviews for my novella In the Midnight Museum and my new Leisure novel, Keepers started appearing, and, 2) A member of a local writers’ group made a statement so naive as to be almost — almost — laughable.

About the former: much to my relief, the reviews for both Museum and Keepers have thus far been overwhelmingly positive, but in almost every case, the reviewers have said something along the lines of “…it’s both horror and not”, or, “…I guess horror is as good as anything to call it…”

You get the idea. Neither work fits easily into any single category, and it’s making some people crazy trying to figure out where to put them. My response is: how about just addressing them as stories and leave it at that?

My guess is that readers and reviewers begin reading a story labeled “horror” (or “cyberpunk”, or “fantasy”, or “mystery”, or what have you) with certain ingrained expectations; they have come to anticipate certain elements to appear to a particular type of story, and are surprised — sometimes not pleasantly so — when those expectations are not met and/or indulged.

Only half a dozen times in my career have I sat down and said, “I’m going to write a HORROR story,” and then proceeded to do just that, always bearing in mind what readers expect in a horror story, and making damn sure I worked in as many of those expected elements as I could. Six times I’ve done this, and six times I’ve produced stories that are just, well…awful. And they’re awful because I did not forget genre, genre was the overriding factor in their creation — and telling a good story was secondary.

Shame on me.

Now to the latter point before I bring all this together.

I belong to a local writers’ group that is composed mostly of fantasy and science fiction writers. Many of these folks are unpublished or have just begun publishing; some of the folks have a decent amount of fiction already published; and a small handful of them, including myself and Charles Coleman Finlay, have got a fairly decent body of published work out there.

In a recent discussion, one of the members — who writes heroic fantasy — commented that she’d noticed a “…larger than usual number of horror-type stories” being submitted for critique, and could we possibly cut down on that because she and several other members don’t ‘get’ horror. When prompted for further comment, she also admitted that she’s read “…some Stephen King” but otherwise tends to read almost exclusively in the field of — you guessed it — heroic fantasy.

She is not alone in this; members who write exclusively mystery fiction have quit the group because they didn’t ‘get’ fantasy, and the science fiction folks didn’t ‘get’ mystery.

What’s to ‘get’? Somebody explain this to me — on second thought, please don’t, it wasn’t an actual request.

It doesn’t matter a damn if your story is horror, or mainstream, or fantasy, or erotica, or any other genre or sub-genre — it is, must be, must always be, first and foremost a good story.

Why don’t more readers and writers understand that? Have we become so tunnel-visioned in our expectations that we have given up the hope of ever seeing any genre attempt something new and/or different? Or have we been trained through a steady diet of the same old same-old to want nothing more than journeyman-level storytelling, storytelling that challenges neither the mind nor the heart (forget about those “traditional boundaries” I mentioned earlier)?

If you answered “yes” to either of those questions, I think it’s quite possible that you’re the type of reader or writer who’s come to think in terms of “genre” far too much for your own good.

Far too many writers — both new and established — think too much in terms of the type of story they’re writing — and what’s worse, far too many of them read almost exclusively in the field in which they want to publish. While it is important to be be well-read in your chosen field, it’s vital that you read outside that field as much as possible, otherwise you’ll eventually be writing nothing more than a hip imitation of a pastiche of a rip-off of something that was original two decades ago but has now fallen far too deep into a well-worn groove to offer a challenge to either writers or readers.

I read all over the place, and do not restrict my influences to those giants in the field from under whose shadows I hope to emerge.

As a result, yes, both of my recent works are and aren’t horror; they’re both also fantasy and not; each is and isn’t a mystery, a romance, a mainstream character study. What they are, are two pieces of which I am very proud because they were the best stories I could make them … because I followed my own advice and Forgot Genre.

Approach any work as being simply a story, and you’ll always “get” it; think only in terms of “genre” and you’ll have a hobbled story by the third paragraph.

That is the best piece of advice that I have or will ever have for aspiring writers. I hope you found something useful contained here.

Now go read Theodore Sturgeon’s magnificent The Dreaming Jewels and put someone into brainlock when you ask them to tell you what kind of a novel it is.

Gary A. Braunbeck is the author of 14 books and over 150 short stories. If you enjoyed this article, take a look at his book Fear in a Handful of Dust: Horror as a Way of Life.

fantasy, genre, horror, science fiction, writing

In Praise of Proofreaders

March 2, 2006 0 Comments

by Gary A. Braunbeck

After a while, regardless of how well-focused, disciplined, and determined you are when writing a book, you just don’t, well… see it any more. It happens to all of us at some point on every project. You spend so much time writing, cutting, revising, and polishing, that you risk either not seeing the forest for the trees or become so over-focused on one particular tree that you don’t notice the forest fire until it’s too late.

Okay, carried that metaphor just a little too far, sorry, but hopefully you’ve already discerned the point: that there comes a time during a book-length project when you’ve spent so much time working on it that you lose perspective.

Here’s the thing: by the time you, as a reader, pick up a copy of an author’s book, the author him- or herself has read it over at least three times — and this is after the countless hours spent writing, re-writing, and polishing. If you want to include all that, as well, then I think it’s safe to say that by the time a book goes to print, its author has read it through, from beginning to end, a minimum of seven times, probably more.

This is a necessary evil. Editorial suggestions and changes must be considered and/or made, the manuscript must then be read through to make certain that these changes mesh with the overall story (tone, narrative arc, continuity, etc.), and if a problem is then discovered, it must be fixed, and the whole process starts over again.

I’m oversimplifying this because to describe the process in painstaking detail would not only rob the reading experience of some of its magic, but bore you to tears.

But when the book is finally out there, and everything looks good, the author and the editor can sit back and smile at having done their job to the best of their abilities. Authors often cite their editors as having been “instrumental” in helping to shape a book that may have encountered some rough spots along the pot-holed road to publication. Editors deserve all the credit that an author cares to cast their way, no arguments here.

But there is a group of unsung heroes in the publishing process, people whose names often don’t appear anywhere in the book, but without whose effort, insight, and input, a lot of us would look like illiterate fools.

I am talking about proofreaders, those folks whose thankless job it is to go through your manuscript once you’ve ceased being able to see it anymore and look for the signs of a possible forest fire (see over-extended metaphor at the beginning). Many people think a proofreader’s sole responsibility is to check spelling and punctuation.
While that is definitely right up there on their list of duties, many of them go the extra mile — hell, many of them go several hundred extra miles — to ensure that the book they’re working on is the best it can possibly be.

And they do this by deliberately searching out those elements that you, the writer, ceased to be able to see somewhere around Draft #3.

Two personal examples: a few weeks ago, right before my second Cedar Hill collection, Home Before Dark was being prepped for the printer, one of Earthling’s marvelous proofreaders noticed that in my story, “Palimpsest Day”, the age of the mother did not add up if one stopped to consider her dates of birth and death. Now, I know that a lot of people tend to read such details with a quick eye and don’t stop to do the exact math … but that’s no excuse for sloppiness, and that is exactly what this mistake was — sloppiness on my part. I had become so over-focused on fine-tuning the story so that it fit into the overall arc of the Cedar Hill cycle that I overlooked a small but significant detail — making sure the mother’s age added up. While a mistake of this sort probably wouldn’t have ruined the story, its mere presence would have lessened the story’s value. I had read through the manuscript so many times that I simply didn’t see this problem any more, and thanks to a sharp proofreader, neither will you.

Second example: up until its fourth round of proofreads, my novella In the Midnight Museum contained a glaring continuity error that, while in and of itself quite small, would have damned near pulled the rug out from underneath the entire story had it not been caught by the proofreader. It was a quick, minor detail that very well might have been overlooked by most readers, but those readers who would not have missed it would have had the entire second half of the story ruined by this nagging inconsistency. (You’ve noticed, haven’t you, that I’m not telling you the exact nature of this mistake? That’s because I am so embarrassed by it that I dare not share the specifics, lest you think me, well … simple. “My God,” you’d say. “A sponge would have seen that.” And I’d prefer you leave this essay thinking I have an IQ higher than my shoe size.)

But, again, this potentially destructive detail was overlooked by me because I had stopped seeing the whole of the moon and focused only on the crescent (I figured it was time to switch metaphors).

So consider all of the above to be a preamble to this: a song of gratitude to all proofreaders, those unsung heroes who labor over our manuscripts almost as long and intensely as we do, whose unblinking eye often catch the flaws that we can no longer see, and whose objectivity gives us a fresh perspective just as we need it the most.

I’m going to end this by getting even more specific: Paul Miller, Don Koish, Deena Warner, John Everson, Ron Clinton, Robert Mingee, Jack Haringa, and — my own personal major domo, Mark Lancaster … thank you. A thousand times, thank you. Thank you for caring about my work enough to go those extra hundred miles and always pointing out even the smallest problem, no matter how testy I get about your nitpicking. You are why I look like a good writer.

My gratitude and admiration knows no bounds.

Now see how many mistakes you can find in this blog entry. Just don’t tell me about them or I might throw a hissy fit.

Gary A. Braunbeck is the author of 14 books and over 150 short stories. If you enjoyed this article, take a look at his book Fear in a Handful of Dust: Horror as a Way of Life.

publishing, writing

Using profanity in fiction

February 23, 2006 0 Comments

by Gary A. Braunbeck

Unless you’re writing in the Christian Young Adult genre (and even that’s up for debate), it would be unrealistic to write a novel or short story wherein one of the characters didn’t swear at some point. Our lives have become much more fast-paced and frustrating, and a result of that frustration is that people swear more now than they did, say, back in the days of Booth Tarkington’s Magnificent Ambersons.

However (you knew that was coming, didn’t you?), there is a difference between the way people swear in real life and how they should swear in fiction.

I know a guy who would have a full one-third — if not half — his vocabulary hacked off at the knees if he were unable to say “f***”. My wife talks in her sleep; though she strives to be polite in her speech, her most common nocturnal utterances are some combination of “christ”, “sh**”, “f***”, and “what?” I’ve passed strangers’ conversations wherein I picked up at least nine different profanities before they were out of earshot.

I remember one instance, while reading Skipp & Spector’s The Light At The End, where in a single line of dialog, one character used eleven profanities — including all of the Biggies — in one sentence; it was rather impressive … but it was also way too much.

Yeah, I have no doubt that there are people out there in the real world who do speak like that, but if you overuse profanity in your dialog you rob it of its most important function.

Profanity, at its core, is best used as violence without action.

It should be employed in fiction to either foreshadow or replace violence. If you follow this suggested guideline, you’ll not only use less of it your writing, but what you do use will be so well-placed that it will have ten times the impact of an endless string of curses.

For example, in my novel In Silent Graves, there is a sequence in which the main character (who’s just lost his wife and newborn child) encounters two guys on a city bus who are swearing and cursing and spewing the most unbelievable filth (Andrew Dice Clay wouldn’t say some of the things these two guys do). Their language is upsetting a young woman who’s sitting near the main character, and as the intensity of the profanity and filth builds, so does the main character’s frustration and anger.

It’s the only time in the book that profanity of this level is used, and that was deliberate: it’s supposed to be as shocking to the reader as it is to the main character, because the increased intensity of the filth that comes out of their mouths foreshadows the violence that ends the scene.

profanity, writing

Whoa, wait a minute — this is supposed to be a horror story!

July 8, 2004 0 Comments

by Gary A. Braunbeck

I was asked to be one of the three judges for this year’s Chiaroscuro Magazine/Leisure Books short story contest. We got quite a number of submissions, and on a scale of 1 – 10 (10 being the highest), the stories came in at a solid 6.5 to 7, which, I have to admit, surprised me — if for no other reason than a handful of past judges from other contests (not just this one) had led me to expect otherwise.

To be honest, I wasn’t prepared for there to be such originality among the submissions; for every mad slasher, ghost, vampire, and (insert tired horror cliché here) story I read, I found there to be at least one story whose content, writing, or central idea outshone the more predictable tales (and even the predictable stories displayed a level of technical craftsmanship that was refreshing).

But even in a majority of these original stories, certain disquieting similarities began to pop up, the most predominant one being that, somewhere past the mid-point of the story, it seemed that the writers suddenly thought: “Whoa, wait a minute — this is supposed to be a horror story!” … and subsequently grafted obviously horrific elements onto the narrative so it more resembled the popular concept of horror.

Example: one story dealt with a young boy’s imaginary friend whose physical form and behavior changed to suit the young boy’s mood; if the boy had been mistreated by his friends, the imaginary friend appeared to him as beaten-up and angry; if the boy’s mother had scolded him for something he did wrong, the imaginary friend appeared to him as smaller and sadder.

You get the idea.

Now this was — for the first 6 pages — an absolutely wonderful piece, reminiscent of the best Twilight Zone episodes, but then–

— Whoa, wait a minute — this is supposed to be a horror story! —

— the imaginary friend shows up, unbidden, in the shape of a deformed monster wielding an axe, tells the boy that he’s “…sick and tired of pretending to be something I’m not”, and chops the little boy up into bloody chunks (the death of the boy takes almost 2 pages, and is unnecessarily graphic).

Now, had this turnabout been set up anywhere beforehand (which it wasn’t), I might have accepted it; it might have been a terrifically vindictive morality play about allowing reality to intrude too far into one’s fantasy life (which it is, at least for the first 6 pages, and beautifully done); the ending might have been interpreted as the death of one’s fantasy life equaling the spiritual and physical death of the Self; in other words, it might have resulted in something deeper and infinitely more disturbing than the cheap, bloody shock that the writer chose to end it with because, gosh-golly-gee, it’s a horror story and you expect this sort of thing, right?

What made this doubly alarming is that, in almost every case, the writers who grafted these ham-fisted horrific elements onto their stories had demonstrated a level of skill that led me, as a reader, to believe they were going to stay true to their voice and vision (and no, I won’t apologize for using that last word); until these grafted elements intruded, each story had suggested that its writer was not only well-read and intelligent, but trusted their own instincts enough to know that it’s okay to do Something Different in horror; yet near the end, some mass-market, don’t-challenge-the-expected-norm, lowest-common-denominator gene kicked in, and something SPOOOOOOKY or Shocking!!!! (read: recognizably horrific) arrived to bust up the party and send everyone home way too early.

And I keep wondering: Why?

Flash back to a month ago, on the Shocklines discussion board. The subject of happy endings came up, and it appears that many readers have come to expect a certain formula from horror: meet the main character, get to know/like him or her, follow him or her through the horrific darkness that ensues, and emerge alive and triumphant with him or her into the light at the end.

Mind you, I’ve got nothing against happy endings – providing that they emerge naturally, are consistent with the overall tone of the piece, and (this is the important point) are justified. Otherwise, it’s just bad plastic surgery.

Happy endings only work when they’re justified from within the natural progression (both tonal and narrative) of a story, and in my fictional universe, that rarely happens; horrific elements only work when they’re justified, and in the case of many of the submissions to the contest, this just wasn’t the case; too much grafting, not enough 2nd or 3rd-drafting: the writers didn’t trust their own instincts enough to not take the obvious way out.

Consider if you will Stephen King’s remarkable novel, Pet Sematary; here you have a story that is incredibly dark, with only the briefest flashes of light and hope sprinkled throughout. The dark (and, at best, melancholy) tone of the novel is set early on, as are the ground rules of its microcosmic universe, and King never once betrays those rules or the novel’s tone: because of the expert way he sets up everything, he can’t betray them and remain justified in the world-view he presents.

Many readers were shocked that King ended the novel as he did, and the reason behind this shock? As a friend of mine put it: “After all the horrible things that had happened, I was expecting a happier ending.”

Not if you read it correctly, you weren’t.

From almost the very beginning, you know there’s no way in hell that this is going to turn out for the best. So how would you have felt if King had betrayed his story to give readers an “expected” happy ending? And even if he had found a way to cop-out with touching warm fuzzies at the end, do you think the novel would have had the effect on readers that it did? That it still has, over 20 years later?

King never flinched here, never pulled back, never hoodwinked for the sake of making things more palatable or comfortable for the reader; the result is a novel that is not only one of the most emotionally rich he’s ever written, but arguably the single most horrific of his career.

And for you “…light at the end” folks, ask yourselves this – and be honest: how many of his novels and stories have had “happy” endings? I can think of maybe four – and even those aren’t “happy” endings in the traditional sense. So why does his work endure? Because it’s honest unto itself. From A Buick 8 may not be the best-written story he’s ever told, but it’s arguably the best-told story he’s ever written, simply because he remains true to the tale. And sometimes that means not ending things with a gaudy display of horrific fireworks; and sometimes it means not ending things on a happy note, lest the story and the reader be betrayed.

Old William Shakespeare|Willy S. said it best, folks: “To thine own self be true.”

That is, in reverse, the answer to my question about the contest submissions: these horrific elements were grafted onto the stories because their writers (for whatever reasons) have been conditioned — be it through uninspired films, television programs, or from reading work by writers whose only influence has been said films or television shows — to believe that readers will only accept a story as being “horror” if it has certain readily-identifiable elements — i.e. gore/violence/zombies/ vampires/what-have-you — that are popularly mistaken as being the only elements that horror is concerned with.

There is a new generation of upcoming writers who are being conditioned for mediocrity; they will not — or cannot — trust their own instincts because the popular misconceptions about horror are threatening to become the accepted rules. If that happens, if the tired, formulaic, tried-and-true become the norm once again, then I’ll be more than content to make do with being a writer whose work is only read when people are in “…a certain mood.”

But I will not be content to sit idly by and let the upcoming generation of horror writers betray themselves, their stories, their craft, and their chosen field by giving them the impression that it’s all right to shove a bloody shock down a reader’s throat because this is supposed to be a horror story.

The solution is simple: Don’t do that.

If you get to a point in a story where you say to yourself, Damn, I’d better have something horrific happen pretty soon, do yourself and the rest of us a favor and walk away; come back to it in a day or two when you can approach the story fresh, on its own terms, and not those you have been programmed to think are applicable; yeah, you might not end up with a wide readership, but odds are the readership you will have will be a fiercely loyal one.

horror, writing