Detail of Madonna des Kanonikus Georg van der Paele by Jan van Eyck, 1436
Purely for your entertainment, here are 28 Totally Relatable Quotes About Books. I know I can relate to a lot of them. I’m sure you will find a few for yourself. One reason I find these interesting is because many of them show me how intensely involved readers will become with a book. As I have mentioned in previous posts, I believe that people live a vicarious existence through a story. When we write, we are not just writing a book or a story, we are creating a universe in which people will hopefully want to, not just visit, but dwell. All of the writer’s art should therefore focus on creating a virtual reality for one’s readers. To do that, we need a good grounding in, or at least a good feel for, human psychology, because we have to shape our creations to fit the human psyche. How do thoughts come into being? How do they lead from one to another? How do images form in the mind? No, I am not saying that we need Ph.D.’s in psychology to be good writers, but I think we need some sort of archetypal insight into human nature if we are to be the great writers we hope to be. Darn. I’m rambling again. 🙂
Here is an interesting bit of trivia: “8 Monsters of Literature and Folklore” at Dictionary.com – Free Online English Dictionary. You may have to wait a second or two for the slide show to pop up.
For those of you dealing with the demon of literary Rejection right now, please follow the link to a nice, very concise article by Rachael Stanford by on the same. Once you have finished, follow the link at the bottom of the article to a fascinating article by Stephanie Ostroff about how nine famous authors (C.S. Lewis, Anne Frank, Rudyard Kipling, Jack Kerouac, H.G. Wells, Louisa May Alcott, George Orwell, Sylvia Plath, and William Golding) were rejected often hundreds of time, often quite rudely or in a demeaning fashion, yet persevered to become some of the world’s best known writers.
I like stories of rejection like these, because they remind me that not all publishers are as insightful as we writers hope they are. As with all other occupations, there are publishers who are better or worse at their jobs than others. Therefore, if one of my works is rejected, even numerous times, it does not mean that the work is necessarily a stinker. On the other hand, I must confess to have written at least a few stinkers, and therefore I cannot in all good conscience blame publishers for all my bad luck either.
For me, being honest with myself and critically looking at a work that has been rejected several times to determine whether I have honestly done my best with it or if it simply didn’t meet the publisher’s needs at the moment or if the publisher has sufficient I.Q. points to function reasonably well in human society is one of the hardest parts of writing (not writing rambling, run-on sentences like this one is another challenge).
Now I submit everything electronically. Twenty years ago, when I first started writing, I submitted everything by mail. I always kept a file of the rejection slips I collected, so I would always have a working list of who would be eating a heaping dish of crow when I became famous. In fact, for several years I used to pin them to a bulletin board so I could look at them and smirk now and then. I still keep my electronic rejections, though I still need to create a file for them, for the same reason.
I have yet to become famous and the list is still growing, but having all those rejections gives me something to which I can look forward. At least they serve a purpose, which they would not if I took them seriously and let them drag me down: they give me encouragement and they help me persevere by instilling a spirit to prevail.
I read “The Illustrated Man” for the first time yesterday. I have been interested in reading it for many years now, after having seen the movie starring Rod Steiger as a television re-run perhaps as far back as the 70’s. But recently I have been reading “The Martian Chronicles” and when I found myself over the last few days in the Midland, TX public library with time to kill, I thought I would investigate other Bradbury works (even though I have “The Martian Chronicles” in the car).
The movie bears little resemblance to the short story. In the movie a young man (as best I recall) is camping in the woods as he travels across country, when Rod Steiger staggers into the man’s campsite. Somehow (my memory is vague) Steiger reveals his body is covered with tattoos and tells the camper that the future can be seen in the empty spaces on his chest and back. At this point, the spaces on his chest and back form the framework for a series of four short tales, which, if I recall correctly, are other Ray Bradbury stories. I will not reveal the end, which I recall as being quite good.
The actual story is not a collection of four stories, but a single tale of a man, William Philippus Phelps, who works erecting tents for a circus, but volunteers to become the tattooed man for the carnival sideshow after his weight balloons up to 300 pounds after he “stress-eats” because of the problems between himself and his new bride and he can no longer perform his job for the circus. Desperate to have any job at the circus, Phelps volunteers to have himself covered in tattoos. Someone steers him in the direction of an old woman who lives in the nearby woods and who does tattoos for free. He finds her and from her descrition (aged with eyes, nostrils, and ears sewn shut and living in a shack), she sounds very much like a witch. She inks the tattoos, which seem magically alive and writhing, but she also places a large bandage in the center of his chest and one in the center of his back and makes him swear not to remove the one on his chest for a week and the one on his back a week after that that. When Phelps does remove the one on his chest during the course of a show, it shows him strangling his wife, whom the tattoo witch had never seen. I won’t spoil the ending for you, which is quite enjoyable and reveals what is under the bandage on his back, because I strongly recommend that you read the story, which is only a few pages long.
Though Bradbury is, of course, world renown for his science fiction, this story falls much better into the horror genre. There is no science anywhere in story, only carnival folk, magical tattoos inked by a frightening witch, suspense, anger, and, ultimately, violence. The story is beautifully written with the language clear, concise, flowing, and simple yet powerful. I felt emotionally and intellectually drawn into the story and into Phelps’s life and felt empathy for his plight. This is an excellent work of horror, though its author’s fame as a demigod of science fiction undoubtedly has most people classify it erroneously.
According to the Wikipedia definition (as of April 21, 2013), an idiolect is “…a variety of language that is unique to a person, as manifested by the patterns of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation that he or she uses.” This accords to the definition I learned in graduate school many years ago.
In my writing, I try to make as much use of idiolects and personal speech patterns as possible in order to distinguish speakers in sometimes lengthy conversations so that I can omit boring, repetitious attributions such as “he said”. I feel this also adds a sort of flavor to the story, because the way a person speaks tells something about the speaker in terms of emotions, psychology, and background among other things. Using idiolects adds a layer of subtle complexity to a story.
An example of this from my past is that of a college friend named Mike. One of Mike’s pet expressions was “Whatever!”, which he used often in a sort of sympathetic exasperation when someone persisted in doing something Mike thought stupid in spite of his advice to the contrary. On those occasions, he would chuckle and say “Whatever!” and walk away with a grin that said he would have fun seeing the outcome. If I were to write down a conversation between myself, Mike, and several of our friends, you could tell when Mike was speaking by his frequent use of the “Whatever!”, which the rest of us seldom used.
Used carefully and sparingly, an idiolect can be a subtle motif about each character that the author can use to remind the reader of some facet of the character at critical moments.
Poster from Johannascheezburger.com via Halloween Mike’s Horror Everyday on Facebook.
For the first time in a long time, I was listening to CDs on the car stereo as I drove back from Farmington (New Mexico) on the 14th, when I started feeling once again the latent but powerful emotions I associate with certain songs. The songs in question were Puddle of Mudd’s “Spaceship” from Songs in the Key of Love and Hate and “Would?” from Alice in Chains’s Dirt. When I was not that much younger than I am now, I used to listen to a broad range of music (from classical to hard rock to New Age and more) almost constantly. Therefore it will not be surprising if I state that others that stir me range from ACDC’s “Back in Black” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and, for a complete change of pace, to Enya’s “Orinoco Flow” and Michael Gettel’s San Juan Suite, both of which seem to stir not a tumult of emotions, but instead have the opposite effect and cause me to almost drift away on a sea of tranquility.
As I am sure is the case with most people, I find all my favorite songs enjoyable, but there were, and still are, some that stir me deeply and can even now resurrect feelings of intense excitement and passion as if I were reliving my “Glory Days” (which, by the way, is an excellent Springsteen tune that really hits home these days).
Out of those that stir my emotions the most, are a select group that have a certain je ne sais quois, a combination of primal rhythm, deep-toned vocalization, and soul-stirring guitar riffs, that do not stimulate the intellect as much as they instigate remote, subconscious parts of the mind to coalesce into a riot of images shaping themselves into the essential kernel of some grim tale that I know I can nurture, expand, and carefully, painstakingly mold into a narrative that would enthrall Dante or Milton–had I the time or unswerving diligence to concentrate on its writing.
“Enter Sandman” by Metallica is an excellent example of this. Even though the song is about the destruction of a family (according to Wikipedia), something about it compels me to write an intricate novel of espionage, assassination, betrayal, deception, and the inner horrors of the human psyche that paces back and forth in the recesses of my mind like a tiger in a cage, watching for an opportunity to spring forth into the light of day upon an unsuspecting yet willing audience. I have probably 20,000-30,000 or more words in the current draft of this story and I will probably trash most of these the next time I sit down to tackle this task. One day I will have to dedicate myself to finishing the story, because this is the only way I know I will be able to rid myself of the tiger’s pacing and of his relentless stare that bores into the back of my neocortex. As my life stands now, between chores at home and working 50-60 hours per week at my day job, I can find little time during an average week to work on the various short stories, novelettes, and novellas I have started over the past year.
Sad to say, I have two or three good novels that have been waiting over a decade or more for their genesis. Probably with each of them I associate some tune from my more turbulent past, if not with the entire work, then with at least some scene that plays over and over in my head like a teaser clip from a movie trailer.
For me, this is one of the delicious agonies of being a writer. I have so many fascinating concepts whirling through my head that I just know instinctively can be great works and that I enjoy revisiting whenever I have a few seconds to daydream but the lack of time in my daily life stymies their creation.
My question to you tonight, is are there musical works that inspire you to create works of horror and terror?
Someone told me recently that the pyschologist Carl Jung believed the work reveals something about the author. We discussed this idea for a few minutes before it hit home in a very scary fashion, because we were discussing my works of horror. I realized that at least sometimes my own subconscious fears may influence, if not determine, the course of my stories. Storylines reflecting the subconscious fears of the author makes a lot of sense, because, to my mind at least, dreams and nightmares also originate in and reflect the undercurrents of the subconscious.
So, what do you think? Is the subconscious wellspring responsible for the creation of dreams the same one responsible for creative works? What does this say about authors like Yann Martel who wrote “Life of Pi”? What does it say about authors like Clive Barker and H.P. Lovecraft and even myself?
“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.”
“The secret of artistic creation and the effectiveness of art is to be found in a return to the state of ‘participation mystique’ – to that level of experience at which it is man who lives, and not the individual…”
“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”
Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher 