February 2013 – Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher

Slattery’s Tao of Writing, Part 4: “Warehouses and All”

Lovecraft in the Agony of ContemplationIllustration by MirrorCradle — Lovecraft in the Depths of Contemplation
Illustration by MirrorCradle

A problem I have encountered over the last few months is that most of the short stories on which I am working are too long for most publications, but too short to publish as novels.

Most magazines accept short stories of about 2,000 words. Above that, there seems to be a law of inverse proportions : the more words your short story has, the fewer publishers who will take it. Unfortunately, lately I find it difficult to write a story in less than 10,000 words.

Usually, I start with a simple concept for a story, but as I write, I see more and more details coming to light, details I think are important to understand what is happening in the story. I keep whittling down the words, contracting here, expanding there, omitting this and that, keeping the story as lean and muscular as possible while fleshing out the story enough so that the reader can live the story vicariously, but somehow the story keeps growing.

There is a school of thought that stories are out there in the literary ether, just waiting for the right author to come along and give them birth. That is certainly the way it seems at times. We could expand that comparison even further and say that stories are also like babies after birth and each will eventually grow to a certain size–whether we want it to or not. But we have much more control over the size of a short story than we do the size of a baby.

Here is a link to one of my earliest stories, “Sudan“, which was published by Ascent Aspirations several years ago. It has 2,095 words. It is not a work of horror. It is by my current standards rather amateurish. I based the story on a rather poignant story told to me by a former US assistant agricultural attache to Sudan, whom I met in Luxor, Egypt in 1989. That story lingered in the back of my mind for some time, almost haunting me, as if it had always been waiting to be told to the world and it refused to pass up this chance, before I finally wrote it down. It was published by Ascent Aspirations in August, 2002.

In 2009, I came across www.sixsentences.blogspot.com, which challenges writers to tell a story in six sentences or less. The assistant attache’s story still touched me after twenty years, so I decided to see if I could tell it in six sentences. I did. I changed the title and location and submitted it as “Warehouses and All“.

While the original Ascent Aspirations version was good, I believe the Six Sentences version is much better, more powerful, more poignant, perhaps because it is more compact.

Both these stories have exactly the same meaning. Which length suits it best? It is hard to say. Ultimately, deciding the length of a story depends upon the effect the writer wishes to instill in the reader. I do not think there is any way to concoct a rule of thumb about how to determine the length of short story. The writer must simply have a subjective feel for what length is appropriate. That is part of the art of writing.

There are probably many wonderful stories out there that cannot find a publisher because they do not fit the space constraints of most publications. The reality of the literary world is that publishers do have space constraints and if a writer wishes to be published, he will have to conform to those constraints. But this should not be seen as a brutal, demeaning demand for an author to butcher one of his stories as if he were a literary Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac on a stone altar. It should be seen as a challenge, an opportunity for personal growth as a writer, because then one is forced to look seriously, impartially, critically, and clincally at the work, and to ask oneself, “What is it that I really want to say? What do I want the reader to experience? How can I make this more powerful, more meaningful? What is the essence of this story?”

You may find that while it is challenging, it is not impossible to pack the meaning of 2,095 words into six sentences and still achieve the effect you wish to impart.

Now, if you will pardon me, I have to go listen to my own advice.

Thoughts? Comments?

Slattery’s Tao of Writing, Part 3: Talking About Dogs

Painting of a Dog by Kim Duryang Sapsalgae, 1743 — Painting of a Dog
by Kim Duryang Sapsalgae, 1743

Some time back I was writing a story, thinking about how to be more mysterious in my writing, how to be less direct, yet provide more details in my narrative, when it occurred to me that (probably because I am a “dog person”) writing is often like talking about a dog without saying that you are talking about a dog.

Often, I have an idea or a feeling that I want to express, but if I try to express it directly and concisely, the reader will probably not apprehend the nuances I see in the idea. At the same time, much of the enjoyment in reading is trying to perceive the meaning behind the author’s words while experiencing the world of the work’s narrator vicariously. Therefore, as a writer, I want to get my ideas across without being so direct that the reader loses much of the fun of reading. For example, look at the first chapter of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway was known for his lean, muscular style, so you know he isn’t going to use any more words than necessary to express his ideas.

In the first chapter, he describes soldiers marching off to the front over the course of several months as he views them from a nearby house. As he watches the soldiers, the leaves fall from the trees, the vineyards dry up, the mountains turn brown and bare, and the dust the soldiers kick up turn everything bare and white–the color of bone. All these hint at death. Hemingway could have said simply, “Frederic Henry [the main character] watched the soldiers march off to their deaths”, but the reader would have lost the experience of living that time with Frederic and he would have lost sharing Frederic’s experience of witnessing an event and puzzling out its greater meaning for himself. All the artistic beauty of that chapter would have been lost.

I recall reading somewhere several years ago this idea described as the principle of contraction and expansion. That is no doubt true. Yet, to describe it so unemotionally as “contraction and expansion” seems aesthetically too clinical, too sterile, too confining a term for an idea concerning the breadth and depth of literary intellectual and emotional perception.

I think I prefer to think of this idea in terms of a dog, a living, breathing being full of warmth, love, loyalty, joy, anger, fear, tenderness, intelligence, stupidity, pain, and all the other abstract qualities sentient creatures have. Yes, I can simply say “dog” and hope my readers see all the nuances of a dog’s existence that I do, but they might not and I would be depriving them of the experience of sharing my perception and all the intimated nuances and emotions that come with it. So sometimes it is best just to describe the nuances of a dog’s life and let my readers enjoy drawing their own conclusions and along with these conclusions enjoy the subsequent discussions and debates among them as to who was right, who was wrong, who knew what he was talking about, who did not, and so on.

There are times when it is necessary to be concise, to pick a single word you hope is as pregnant with meaning for the reader as it is for you, but those times must be balanced against the times when the reader needs to experience an event and all its nuances. The writer, as artist, must decide how to balance out those moments. The writer strives to achieve a balance of ideas and perceptions. Balance is part of the art of writing. Balance is part of the Tao of writing.

Sometimes it is best to simply say “dog.” At other times it is best to talk about a dog without actually saying that you are talking about a dog.

Thoughts? Comments?

Slattery’s Tao of Writing, Part 2: the Allegory of the Stream

Thalia Muse of Comedy and Bucolic Poetry Illustration by Arash — Thalia
Muse of Comedy and Bucolic Poetry
Illustration by Arash

Once in a while, I come across some gem of the writer’s art that almost strikes me breathless with its beauty. The poems of John Donne are one example. The poignant first chapter of A Farewell to Arms is another. Recently, I began reading Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and every time I pick it up, I am nearly struck breathless with his simple, understated eloquence that touches one’s very core. Today I read a post at winebbler.wordpress.com and her simple, fun voice and flowing, relaxed style combined with playful use of the English language made for very entertaining and enjoyable reading beneath which I thought I could sense an undercurrent of growing artistic beauty.

That article made me start to think about what makes a work of writing aesthetically beautiful. After some thought, I reached the conclusion that every work of literary beauty has the same qualities as a powerful but smoothly flowing mountain stream: clarity, power, and an uninterrupted flow. But unlike a stream, a work of literary beauty must also be reasonably brief.

In every literary work I consider beautiful, the first universal characteristic that comes to mind is that the author uses a simple voice comprising simple, everyday words that anyone can understand. Writing is communication. Communication is one person disseminating ideas to others by using words, which are collections of sounds representing ideas. By using simple words everyone understands easily, the writer makes his ideas easier to disseminate. Why use a word that few can understand, when you can use a simpler word with the same meaning that everyone can understand? Therefore, our stream must be crystal clear and free of mud or anything that would hinder insight and perception.

If ideas equate to the water in our allegorical mountain stream, the precision of the component ideas, the words, give the stream its force. As I mentioned in my post “Slattery’s Tao of Writing, Part I”, words chosen for their precise meanings have power. As I said earlier in this article, words are ideas. Precise words are precise ideas. Precise ideas are powerful ideas, powerful emotionally and intellectually. Like all other forces in the universe, powerful ideas become more powerful if combined and organized with one idea leading logically, flowingly to the next. This facilitates understanding and the reading experience.

When my stream of thought is uninterrupted and powerful, I become immersed in the work. I can be swept away and can lose track of time and of everything happening around me. To my mind, every writer should aspire to instill this experience into his readers. When this happens, the writer has made an emotional and intellectual connection with his reader and the reader is grasping the writer’s ideas.

If organization is lacking, ideas are scattered like boulders in the stream and on the banks, creating rapids and breaking up the smooth flow. A powerful, disorganized stream is a torrent, destructive of everything along its banks, stiking out at random, benefiting no one. In communication, disorganization is the source of misunderstanding, the antithesis of understanding. The stream becomes destructive.

If a writer uses words his readers do not understand and they have to turn to a dictionary to find out what the writer intends, the clarity of the ideas is lost and the reading experience is muddied. Furthermore, the reading experience flows even less smoothly. Even if the reader can reason out the meanings of the words from the context, the stream of thought is still disrupted and muddied, even if to a lesser degree. The words will also lose much of their power, because the reader cannot appreciate the nuances of what he or she does not fully understand.

Lastly, every beautiful work has been reasonably brief. Reading anything exasperatingly long becomes tiresome for everyone. When readers become weary (word-weary so to speak), they can lose focus on what the writer is trying to communicate. This detracts from the reading experience just as if someone who enjoys swimming in a mountain stream can no longer enjoy their swim if they become overly fatigued with exertion.

That said, I will now close tonight’s blog before I wear you out with my ramblings.

Thoughts? Comments?

Slattery’s Tao of Writing, Part 1

A quick Google search reveals there are a lot of web articles entitled “The Tao of Writing”. This is mine. Let me begin by explaining what I perceive to be the Tao (others may view it differently and have equally valid perceptions).

The Chinese character above translates as Tao, the way, and is pronounced as “dow”, as in “The Dow-Jones Industrial Average”. Taoism is an ancient Chinese religion rooted in the teachings of the legenday Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (sometimes transliterated as “Lao Tze” or in a number of other ways) as expressed in his book, the Tao Teh Ching (The Book of the Way). The Taoist religion, as I understand it, is far removed from Lao Tzu’s original philosophy, because the religion incorporates demons, gods, demigods, spirits, and other things that are not mentioned in the Tao Teh Ching or in the teachings of the original masters such as Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, or the Huainan Masters (at least in the translations I have read).

What the Tao is, is hard to express. “The Way”, as I understand it, refers to the the way of the universe, basically how the universe works in a general sense. In the American vernacular, we would probably express it as “the way things are”. Some reader might respond to that as, “Sure. I understand. You’re saying the Tao is why toast always falls buttered side down. Gotcha.”

No, I am talking about something a bit more profound. It’s more like this:

You work hard at trying to find a publisher for a story and are consistently rejected by what you perceived to be all the most suitable choices. So, one night when you are battling insomnia and have just started the first glass of your second bottle of wine, out of frustration you send it off as a shot in the dark to some big name magazine who will never accept it, and lo and behold it is accepted. So, sometimes it seems that you work your butt off for something and get nowhere, but you give up trying and you succeed. Basically, the Tao is then like learning the way the universe works, then learning to succeed by adapting to that way. Confused yet? Have I oversimplified my point or have I made it overly complex?

Understanding how the Tao works is not something anyone can express in words; it is something one can understand only subjectively, i.e., one must have a feel for it. In fact, the first sentence of the Tao Teh Ching is “The Way that can be spoken is not the true Way.” For most people, reading the Tao Teh Ching will probably be an exercise in confusion and frustration and contradiction. In the Tao Teh Ching, nothing is exact; everything is metaphor and allusion, about how water flows into a valley and then the sea, how wood is shaped, the balance of the universe, and so on.

To complicate matters even more, because the Tao Teh Ching was written in Chinese about 2,500 years ago, and the translation of the original Chinese characters may have changed significantly since then, translation of the Tao Teh Ching into modern languages is frustratingly imprecise, often relying on traditional or customary translations as opposed to knowing exactly what Lao Tzu was saying. For today’s modern, exact, Socratic-tradition-based society, this is maddening. Our scholars argue about the meanings of works written in modern English, how are they going to agree on something as nebulous as the Tao Teh Ching?

So, what are the important ponts of the Tao that everyone should remember?

As I perceive the Tao, one critical aspect of existence is balance; the universe consists of opposites that must balance out or problems arise. At the same time, all existence arises from the conflict of opposites. An example of this is the old Zen Buddhist rhetorical question of “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” I do not know the official or traditional answer to this, but from my Taoist perception, the answer is that there is no sound. The sound of clapping is produced only when the opposing forces of the hands meet. Thus it is with everything in the universe. Two opposites have to come together to produce anything: light and dark, man and woman, left and right, up and down, hot and cold, etc.

Another critical aspect of existence is that emptiness can be as important as substance and non-action can be as important as action. There are other aspects, of course, but I will stick to these for now and address those at a later date.

Take a look at your hand for an example of the first principle. If there were no spaces between your fingers, you would not have a hand, you would have something else, maybe a flipper. Likewise, a sculptor can create a sculpture only by cutting away pieces of material so that the now-empty spaces create a form. So a sculpture, or any object for that matter, comprises both substance and emptiness.

For an example of the non-action versus action principle, think about problems you faced in the past. Could you have solved any of them by simply doing nothing? Not every problem can be solved by doing nothing, but some can.

These principles are symbolized by what is know in our society as the Yin-Yang as shown here:

In the yin-yang, as I perceive it, the eternal circle of the universe is formed by the interaction of opposites, here symbolized by light and dark, but while they are opposites, a little of each exists in the other.

For a very short book, the Tao Teh Ching is filled with incredible depth and meaning. For me, in the few translations I have read, the Tao makes perfect sense, and I understand the world a little better each time I read it. However, others may read it and just be confused or frustrated. The Tao Teh Ching is something that will either speak to you personally and enlighten your world, or it will not.

But what has all this to do with writing?

I see the Tao at work whenever I write anything. I see it in what I consider to be some of the basic principles of writing: less is more, what is not said is often more important than what is said, and so forth. For me, this makes writing almost a form of magic, not in the sense of illusion, but true magic where one creates something out of nothing by using as few components as possible, by making something complex by keeping everything as simple as possible.

I will give one example and then I will close this article for the day and pick it up when I can sometime in the hopefully near future.

One of the first principles of writing I learned was to use as few words as possible. Strunk and White, in The Elements of Style, say to “Omit unnecessary words”, which in itself is a perfect example of omitting unnecessary words. How much more concise can that one sentence be? It contains absolutely no unnecessary words. If one word is omitted, the sentence ceases to have meaning. The virtue of this is that, if done properly, the work becomes much more powerful because each word carries more weight.

To do this, a writer needs to use words precisely. Try to find a word that captures the exact meaning of the idea you are trying to express–and the shorter the word the better. After all, you are trying to communicate an idea to the largest possible audience. Why use big words that will send readers scurrying to the nearest dictionary, thus interrupting their chain of thought and perhaps tainting their reading experience, when you can use words that everyone understands and keep their experience free from interruptions?

An example of using words precisely would be revising the sentence “A man went quickly to the store.”

Now, shorten it by replacing “went quickly” with “ran”. While you are at it, replace the other general terms with more precise ones. The sentence becomes “John ran to Walmart.” Now, if you have had any background information on John, you know who he is, what he is like, his possible motivations, and that he is in a hurry for some reason to get something from Walmart, knowing the kind of products Walmart has, you may have an idea of why he is going there. If we changed the sentence to “John ran to the Red Dot Liquor Store” we have an even better idea of his motivation. If we said, “John sped to Red Dot Liquors in his brand-new corvette”, we know even more about John: we know he can afford a brand-new corvette. If you have ever been in Red Dot Liquors, you know something of the products they carry and that may say something to you about John’s decision to purchase them.

So, how much more excitement and power does the sentence “John sped to Red Dot Liquors in his brand-new corvette” have versus “a man went quickly to the store”. The final version packs a lot more information in almost the same space.

So that is part of the magic of writing for me: using as few words as possible to create a work. On the surface, it seem to go against logic. How can you build something by using as few components as possible and deleting the ones you do have whenever possible?

Try an experiment, take the first page of any run of the mill romance novel and draw a line through every word you consider unnecessary while keeping the meaning of the sentence. Then take your final product and do it again. Do it a third time if you like. How much were you able to reduce without changing its meaning?

Now take the first page of a novel by Hemingway, someone known for his lean, muscular writing. How far were you able to reduce it before changing the meaning?

Someone once said, “draw a line through every third word and you will be surprised at how much it improves your writing.” I have tried that and it works wonderfully. Of course, you can’t arbitrarily omit every third word, or the work may become nonsense, but it does cause one to question whether that word is necessary.

I have always marveled at the idea that one can write something by omitting words. It goes against my standard, American, public school education, where teachers give a mininum number of words to an assignment and one is forced to insert as many words as possible just to meet the requirement. But can you blame them? If you told the average American high school student to tell what he did over the summer in as few words as possible, he would say, “I had fun” or “I worked.” Good luck teaching him to write.

Anyway, I am rambling once again. I will close for now and pick this up at some later date.

Thoughts? Comments?

How about a bit of horror in your humor?

Tonight, I thought I would just do a quick Google search for “horror” and “humor”. Here are my favorites from among the many results.

Thoughts? Comments?

Addendum:

Follow this link to view a demonstration of the waterphone, the device responsible for the majority of eerie sounds and music in horror movies. This clip is from wimp.com (a very entertaining and often intellectually intriguing site).

Is “The Epic of Gilgamesh” the first work of horror?

GilgameshPhoto by Samantha from Indonesia, Sydney Uni., 2006 — Gilgamesh
Photo by Samantha from Indonesia, Sydney Uni., 2006

I have been wondering about what the first work of horror actually is. The standard answer I find on the Internet is, of course, that the first horror novel is The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole in 1764, but that doesn’t satisfy me. I have read a lot of Greek mythology since my early teens and I know they are filled with the kinds of horror that would make Clive Barker shudder and they were written probably 2,000 years before Walpole. Then I recalled The Epic of Gilgamesh.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is perhaps the oldest written story in any language. It is a long poem, probably written about the 18th century B.C. I read The Epic of Gilgamesh a few years ago, and although not lengthy, it is difficult to summarize. In essence, it is the story of a Mesopotamian king named Gilgamesh who builds many wonders but is cruel to his people. To teach him a lesson, the gods create a wild man named Enkidu in the wilderness who later becomes a close friend of Gilgamesh and with whom Gilgamesh goes on many adventures fighting demons and monsters only to lose Enkidu to disease later. After Enkidu’s demise, Gilgamesh seeks out Utnapishtim (the Mesopotamian version of Noah) to see if he (Gilgamesh) can have eternal life, but the answer is no. Gilgamesh returns to his kingdom a wiser man. Here is a link to a more detailed summary at Spark Notes. There are several translations in hard copy, but if you are curious about the original form, here is one that can be found at ancienttexts.org.

The Epic of Gilgamesh could perhaps best be described as a myth expressed as an epic poem with elements of horror. It was probably written more to express a certain philosophy or to record a myth than to entertain, which is the ultimate goal of horror novels and films. Nonetheless, it does contain elements of horror, particularly supernatural horror, and in the modern age, if it is read outside of a classroom, I think it will be read mostly for entertainment. So, while it was not written as a novel, would it be accurate to say that The Epic of Gilgamesh is the first work of horror? If it is, then aficianados of the horror genre could state with pride that the first written work in any language was a work of horror.

What do you think?

More on ETA Hoffmann

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann1776-1822 — Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann
1776-1822

I am up late tonight and thought I would just throw together a few additional tidbits on one of the earliest masters of horror: ETA Hoffman.

Here is an interesting paragraph from The Literary Gothic:

24 January 1776 – 25 June 1822

You know the “Nutcracker” ballet, the one that every local ballet troupe is obligated to perform at Christmas? This isn’t the guy — Tchaikovsky wrote that music in the 1890s, using the translation by Alexander Dumas (pere) rather than Hoffmann’s original. But Hoffmann wrote the short story that lies behind it, and it’s a short story that’s very unlike the charmingly sentimental puffery that little kids get dragged to every December. Very unlike… Hoffmann, a brilliant music critic and respectable composer as well as writer, is one of the major figures of German Romanticism, and a powerful and disturbing writer — and disturbed, according to many; Sir Walter Scott, in his extended discussion of Hoffmann and literary supernaturalism, concludes that Hoffmann needs medical attention more than he needs literary criticism, and no less a student of dysfunctional minds (which I guess is just about everyone’s) than Sigmund Freud made Hoffman’s “The Sandman” the center of his essay on “The Uncanny.” Hoffmann, although strongly influenced by Gothic literature, is probably best regarded as a fantasist rather than a “Gothic” or “horror” writer, although Freud’s term is perhaps the most apt.

This link leads to a rather lengthy article on Hoffmann and German Romanticism at theliterarylink.com. I haven’t read it yet, but to a fan of German literature like myself, it looks fascinating. I hope to find time to read it soon.

Here is a link to the text of “The Sandman“, one’s of Hoffmann’s most famous works. Litgothic.com says about it:

“The classic — and widely anthologized — tale of a boy and his automaton — and, according to Freud, who discusses this work in his essay “The Uncanny,” castration anxiety. Automata, by the way, were a happening phenomenon in the C19 — check out Edgar Allan Poe‘s “Maelzel’s Chess Player” and Hoffmann’s own “Automata” for other Gothic-tradition examples; for a general discussion of automata, check out The Automata Gallery or this History of Automata.”

Here is a link to the goodreads.com article on Hoffmann. And from there here are two interesting quotes from Hoffmann:

“Why should not a writer be permitted to make use of the levers of fear, terror and horror because some feeble soul here and there finds it more than it can bear? Shall there be no strong meat at table because there happen to be some guests there whose stomachs are weak, or who have spoiled their own digestions?” ETA Hoffmann

“There are… otherwise quite decent people who are so dull of nature that they believe that they must attribute the swift flight of fancy to some illness of the psyche, and thus it happens that this or that writer is said to create not other than while imbibing intoxicating drink or that his fantasies are the result of overexcited nerves and resulting fever. But who can fail to know that, while a state of psychical excitement caused by the one or other stimulant may indeed generate some lucky and brilliant ideas, it can never produce a well-founded, substantial work of art that requires the utmost presence of mind.”
― E.T.A. Hoffmann, Die Serapions Brüder: Gesammelte Erzählungen Und Märchen In Vier Bänden

Another link to another lengthy article on Hoffmann, but this one deals with Hoffmann’s treatment of “the uncanny”.

Another interesting summary of Hoffmann’s talent, this one from nndb.com:

“Hoffmann is one of the master novelists of the Romantic movement in Germany. He combined with a humor that reminds us of Jean Paul the warm sympathy for the artist’s standpoint towards life, which was enunciated by early Romantic leaders like Tieck and Wackenroder; but he was superior to all in the almost clairvoyant powers of his imagination. His works abound in grotesque and gruesome scenes — in this respect they mark a descent from the high ideals of the Romantic school; the gruesome was only one outlet for Hoffmann’s genius, and even here the secret of his power lay not in his choice of subjects, but in the wonderfully vivid and realistic presentation of them. Every line he wrote leaves the impression behind it that it expresses something felt or experienced; every scene, vision or character he described seems to have been real and living to him. It is this realism, in the best sense of the word, that made him the great artist he was, and gave him so extraordinary a power over his contemporaries.”

That’s it for tonight. I am off to the land of dreams.

Beyond the Veil of Reality

Face of Horror Houseby Horror House — Face of Horror House
by Horror House

Last night, I watched an adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House” on the Masters of Horror series (season 1, episode 2) on Netflix . Afterwards, being late and time for bed, instead of finding the story on Project Gutenberg or some other cost-free source so that I could read it firsthand, I read a summary of the story on Wikipedia to see if the adaptation was at least reasonably accurate. It seemed to be, even though the story was set in the modern day and the ending varied significantly from the original. But, in accordance with today’s tastes, it was rather bloody and cruel in ways I am sure Lovecraft never intended (I say this after having read a considerable amount of his most famous works).

The most interesting aspect of the story to me was not the story itself, but speculating on how Lovecraft came up with the story’s concept.

I understand from the Wikipedia article that Lovecraft had recently attended a lecture and read up somewhat on non-Euclidean space. Apparently, he was intrigued with the idea of existence on different planes. Somehow he came up with the idea that the different planes of existence might intersect and beings would be able to move from one plane to the next. This is the concept that the protagonist of the story, Walter Gilman (a graduate student in Physics) is studying when he moves into the Witch house, which was a boarding house in the fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts, but three hundred years ago was the residence of a witch. Gilman, as I interpret the TV story, notices that the corner formed by the intersection of two walls and the ceiling in his room coincides with the intersection of three dimensions. It is this intersection that the witch who previously resided in the house and her familiar (a really nasty creature combining a rat with the face of a man) uses to re-enter the house in the modern day and create havoc for Gilman and the other residents. I won’t give away the ending, but it is a good story and probably one of the more reasonably accurate adaptations of a Lovecraft story that you are likely to find.

What I found most interesting was speculating if how Lovecraft came up with the story was to be looking at the intersection of three walls in his house and wonder if different planes of existence could intersect like that and, if they could, could creatures use the intersection to move from one plane to the other? I am always fascinated by how writers come up with ideas for their works. Did you ever wonder what spurred Richard Matheson to write I am Legend or Stephen King to write Carrie?

I know that some authors of Horror (such as Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, and Arthur Machen) were intrigued by the idea of a plane of existence beyond what we take for reality, that what we perceive as reality may actually just mask the true reality. Apparently, Lovecraft was thus intrigued as well and used his ideas of a possible alternative reality as the foundation for what others would later term “the Cthulhu Mythos”.

After having contemplated this since last night, I have been asking myself, what did these intelligent men see in their interpretations of the everyday world that would lead them to believe in the possible existence of an alternative reality? Based upon my experience with humanity, I have come to realize that some people have some downright bizarre concepts of the world around them, but how did these concepts originate? What causes their perceptions to be so radically different from mine? Is it a matter of genetics that causes their synapses to be linked together differently? Do they have slightly different body chemistries influencing their thoughts? Is it that they simply encountered different views of the world as they grew up? Is there a reality that they can perceive but I cannot–in the same way as I can see the workings of God in everything about me, but others do not and thus call themselves atheists and agnostics?

What are your thoughts?

Edward Lucas White

If you have never heard of Edward Lucas White (as I had not until recently), do yourself a favor and look up his short story “Lukundoo” (1925). This is probably one of the best and most terrifying horror stories I have ever read and it is the story for which White is best known. Probably his next best known story is “The House of Nightmare” (1906), though it is not nearly as good as ‘Luknudoo” and by today’s standards of horror would be considered more of a quaint tale told by children around a campfire than true horror. Nonetheless, Lovecraft considered White to be one of the masters of “weird fiction” and mentions him in his treatise “Supernatural Horror in Literature.”

One interesting aspect of White is that he based at least some of his stories on his nightmares, which is not uncommon among horror authors, but after reading “Lukundoo” I had to ask myself, “what was going on in this guy’s psyche?”

Do you base any of your works on dreams or nightmares? Write in and let us know.

Zombie Response Unit 23 Car 54

I was taking the dog to the vet in Farmington (New Mexico) this morning, trying to come up with a subject for my daily blog, when I saw this car ahead of me. Of course, I followed him until he stopped in a parking lot, and then I asked his permission to photograph his vehicle and post it on my blog. Enjoy.

Thoughts? Comments? Have you seen anything like this in your area?

Addendum:

Talk about timing! Check out this CNN article from Dean Obeidallah on “Time to Protect America from Zombies” that appeared only this evening.

Fascinating Habits of Writers of Horror

Some writers have interesting habits.

I have always found one of the most interesting aspects of studying the lives of famous writers to be the personal habits they have while writing. The habits show the writer’s personal side and perhaps give an insight into how their creativity is ingrained in their natures. Following are some examples of the better known habits of mainstream authors (the few examples I have collected of “horror habits” follow these).

Hemingway said that he, at least in his Paris years, wrote for four hours each day before going to work at the Kansas City Star office, he wrote using pencils and a spiral bound notebook, and he started each days writing by sharpening twenty pencis.

F. Scott Fitzgerald never rewrote anything less than nine times.

Thomas Mann was very disciplined and rose and dressed in a suit each day as if he were going to work at a bank (even though he was going only so far as his living room), started each day at the same time (I think 8:00 a.m.), wrote for four hours, broke for lunch for an hour, wrote for another four hours, and then ended his day, by going back to his bedroom and taking off his suit.

Hunter Thompson and Henry Miller were at the opposite end of the discipline scale and might write for days, then not write again for days or weeks, before going on another binge of writing. Thompson might write some lines on a napkin while having lunch at a restaurant, then take the napkin and force it through a fax to get the work to his editors at Rolling Stone.

Here are the tidbits on writing habits by authors of horror.

Thomas Cotterill, another WordPress member, wrote this interesting article on the habits of Stephen King. I have read elsewhere that Stephen King normally writes a first draft, which he runs past his wife, Tabitha, makes some changes and then sends it out to friends for their inputs, and then writes a final draft, which he sends to the publisher.

I have yet to find anything detailed about Poe’s habits, but I did find this general description on the website of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore.

“Edgar A. Poe, one of the Editors of the Broadway Journal. He never rests. There is a small steam-engine in his brain, which not only sets the cerebral mass in motion, but keeps the owner in hot water. His face is a fine one, and well gifted with intellectual beauty. Ideality, with the power of analysis, is shown in his very broad, high and massive forehead — a forehead which would have delighted Gall beyond measure. He would have have [[sic]] made a capital lawyer — not a very good advocate, perhaps, but a famous unraveller of all subtleties. He can thread his way through a labyrinth of absurdities, and pick out the sound thread of sense from the tangled skein with which it is connected. He means to be candid, and labours under the strange hallucination that he is so; but he has strong prejudices, and, without the least intention of irreverence, would wage war with the Deity, if the divine canons militated against his notions. His sarcasm is subtle and searching. He can do nothing in the common way; and buttons his coat after a fashion peculiarly his own. If we ever caught him doing a thing like any body else, or found him reading a book any other way than upside down, we should implore his friends to send for a straitjacket, and a Bedlam doctor. He were mad, then, to a certtainty.” — (Thomas Dunn English, “Notes About Men of Note,” The Aristidean, April 1845, p. 153. At this time, Poe and English were still friends, and the tone of this item is happy and jocular. In reviewing this issue of the Aristidean in his own Broadway Journal, for May 3, 1845, Poe comments “. . . the ‘Notes about Men of Note’ are amusing” (BJ, 1845, p. 285, col. 1).)

Dean Koontz says this about his own writing habits on his website:

“I work 10- and 11-hour days because in long sessions I fall away more completely into story and characters than I would in, say, a six-hour day. On good days, I might wind up with five or six pages of finished work; on bad days, a third of a page. Even five or six is not a high rate of production for a 10- or 11-hour day, but there are more good days than bad. And the secret is doing it day after day, committing to it and avoiding distractions. A month–perhaps 22 to 25 work days–goes by and, as a slow drip of water can fill a huge cauldron in a month, so you discover that you have 75 polished pages. The process is slow, but that’s a good thing. Because I don’t do a quick first draft and then revise it, I have plenty of time to let the subconscious work; therefore, I am led to surprise after surprise that enriches story and deepens character. I have a low boredom threshold, and in part I suspect I fell into this method of working in order to keep myself mystified about the direction of the piece–and therefore entertained. A very long novel, like FROM THE CORNER OF HIS EYE can take a year. A book like THE GOOD GUY, six months.”

Here is an interesting interview by M.R. Hunter with Richard Matheson in Lastheplace.com. Apparently, Mr. Matheson does not have a computer, but writes everything in longhand and then has it typed up.

I have yet to find anything on Lovecraft’s writing habits, but here is a link to HPLovecraft.com that details his personal interests including his unusual dietary habits.

Lord Dunsany had the most eccentric habits of which I have heard. The Wikipedia article on Lord Dunsany states:

“Dunsany’s writing habits were considered peculiar by some. Lady Beatrice said that “He always sat on a crumpled old hat while composing his tales.” (The hat was eventually stolen by a visitor to Dunsany Castle.) Dunsany almost never rewrote anything; everything he ever published was a first draft.^[7] Much of his work was penned with quill pens, which he made himself; Lady Beatrice was usually the first to see the writings, and would help type them. It has been said that Lord Dunsany would sometimes conceive stories while hunting, and would return to the Castle and draw in his family and servants to re-enact his visions before he set them on paper.^{[citation needed]”}

If you know of a source for information on the work habits of one or more horror writers, please share it. If you are searching for a topic of an article to write, I would like to suggest writing on the work habits (or interests) of horror writers. It would be fascinating to see if there is a common thread among them or if they vary from the habits of mainstream authors. For example, I have found out that Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and Bram Stoker were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Anyway, I am now officially rambling.

If you have any thoughts or comments on this article, please share them.

Who influenced Edgar Allan Poe?

Over the last couple of hours I have been wandering the Internet, searching for interesting tidbits about writers of horror to post on my blog. I have been noting how Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, and M.R. James and a host of others influenced Lovecraft, who in turn influenced Stephen King along with generations of writers and film producers, and how Poe influenced them all. Of course, the next question that came to me was “who influenced Poe?”

I did a quick, cursory search of the Internet and found no good answer. A few speculated that he was influenced by the events of his life (duh, aren’t we all?), while a few others speculated that he was influenced by other prominent authors of his time (again: duh, aren’t we all). No one I found yet seems to be able to cite Poe’s influences like they can of Lovecraft, King, or others.

Does anyone know of a reliable source that cites the authors that Poe read?

Addendum:

(February 17, 2013) Here is the beginning of an answer to my question. Follow this link to the article “The Influence of E.T.A. Hoffmann on the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe” by Palmer Cobb, in Volume III of Studies in Philology, The University Press, Chapel Hill, 1908.

Algernon Blackwood

Illustration by Ianus

Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) was a prolific writer and is probably one of the forgotten masters of the horror genre. He was a favorite of H.P. Lovecraft as the three quotes below (from www.hplovecraft.com) illustrate:

“Aside from Poe, I think Algernon Blackwood touches me most closely—& this in spite of the oceans of unrelieved puerility which he so frequently pours forth. I am dogmatic enough to call The Willows the finest weird story I have ever read, & I find in the Incredible Adventures & John Silence material a serious & sympathetic understanding of the human illusion-weaving process which makes Blackwood rate far higher as a creative artist than many another craftsman of mountainously superior word-mastery & general technical ability…” (to Vincent Starrett, 6 December 1927)

“He actually analyses and reproduces faithfully the details of the persistent human illusion of—and out-reaching toward—a misty world of vari-coloured wonders, transcended natural laws, limitless possibilities, delighted discoveries, and ceaseless adventurous expentancy…. Of all Blackwood’s voluminous output, only a golden minimum represents him at his best—but that is such a marvellous best that we can well forgive him all his slush and prattle. It is my firm opinion that his longish short story The Willows is the greatest weird tale ever written. (with Machen’s The White People as a good second.) Little is said—everything is suggested!” (to Fritz Leiber, 9 November 1936)

“It is safe to say that Blackwood is the greatest living weirdist despite unevenness and a poor prose style.” (to Willis Conover, 10 January 1937)

Blackwood pursued a variety of jobs and careers during his lifetime, but based on the current Wikipedia article about him, his two main passions seem to have been writing and mysticism. According to this article, Blackwood once wrote to Peter Penzoldt:

“My fundamental interest, I suppose, is signs and proofs of other powers that lie hidden in us all; the extension, in other words, of human faculty. So many of my stories, therefore, deal with extension of consciousness; speculative and imaginative treatment of possibilities outside our normal range of consciousness. … Also, all that happens in our universe is natural; under Law; but an extension of our so limited normal consciousness can reveal new, extra-ordinary powers etc., and the word “supernatural” seems the best word for treating these in fiction. I believe it possible for our consciousness to change and grow, and that with this change we may become aware of a new universe. A “change” in consciousness, in its type, I mean, is something more than a mere extension of what we already possess and know.”

His two best known stories are The Willows and The Wendigo. I have not read The Wendigo yet, but I started The Willows two days ago and am into Chapter II currently. So far, it is very well written with a beautiful description of a canoe trip down the Danube. Towards the end of Chapter I, Blackwood begins to slowly bring out some eerie aspects of an island on which the narrator and his Swedish traveling companion have pitched camp for the night. With the beginning of Chapter II, the supernatural element begins to build ominously in a way that somehow reminds me of Mussorgsky’s symphony “Night on Bald Mountain”. If you are familiar with Mussorgsky’s opus, you know how I suspect the story will develop. I look forward to finishing The Willows as soon as possible and beginning The Wendigo shortly thereafter.

Thoughts? Comments?

Russian Cthulhu Nesting Dolls

I mentioned yesterday that German was my first major at college. Russian was my second. Therefore I had to dive into Russian horror at least a bit today to satisfy my curiosity. So I did a quick search on Google Images and found out that Russian horror is apparently alive and well.

The most interesting item I found in my search results were these Lovecraftian nesting dolls. I did not have time to go to the website (agreatbecoming.com), but I did see that the name of the photo is cthylhufhtagn_mikebilz.jpg [sic]. I assume Mike Bilz is the artist (very creative, Mike!) At first opportunity I will visit the site.

Addendum:

I visited agreatbecoming.com after posting this blog and found that it mainly focuses on computer games. The blurb at the top of the webpage describes it as A blog about games, networked media, technology, evolution & nature..”You are privy to a great becoming, but you recognize nothing…” Interestingly, there are a considerable number of Cthulhu knick-knacks shown–making the site worth a visit for fans of Lovecraft. For example, here is a Cthulhu Santa (from reyenamarillo.tumblr.com).

Enjoy your visit to agreatbecoming.com!

Okay…just one more addendum to German Horror

I saw another really cool post on the photos of the German Horror Writers Circle that I just had to share. The book cover above is of the novel “Meeting with Skinner” by Harald A. Weissen posted on Facebook on May 7, 2010. The accompanying summary reads:

“Imagine, that everything great that has occurred in the world since the beginning of time has been steered from a control room – discoveries, wars, political reversals, poverty, and prosperity.

Imagine that a single person has been sitting in this control room for several decades and the fortunes of the human collective has been influenced at his own discretion.

Imagine that the next person in this room is crazy.

The search for the control room draws together a traumatised young woman by the name of Laika, Elendes Biest, and Skinner , the last illusionist.”

I just think it’s an awesome post and a fascinating concept. The artwork is great too.

Thoughts? Comments?