Women In Horror (Sexism, Feminism & Male Preference in the Horror Genre Every Month)

(A late Women-In-Horror Month posting with apologies to regular readers: my computer died and took my originally planned post with it. This is a reconstruct… from the best of my failing memory…)

Here in the climate of #MeToo, female writers of Horror do not have far too look for a sad sisterhood.

How quickly must I apologize to male readers of this blog? How deeply must I sublimate the resentments that still haunt every writing decision I make like so many Leng Hounds?

This is how we know there is a problem: “No offense to male writers of the genre, but…”

Because here we are not talking about a casting couch. (Perhaps those of us who are writers of fiction too often seem unsexy in our sweat pants and pinned up hair, locked for long periods of time like mental patients in our writing rooms, we only “glam up” on occasion and usually by accident.) No, our personal Horror stories are more about the annoyances of #MeToo experiences in minimum wage jobs while being unceremoniously rejected by publication after publication – all (of course) touted to be the best in our genre, although we ourselves as readers may think differently.

Why, male writers might think, do we believe we still have a sexist problem in the Horror genre?

Answer: Because if an author like J.K. Rowling uses a male pseudonym (NOT a female pseudonym) to write fiction, then Houston we have a problem in publishing period. And Horror has no J.K. Rowling…

Never mind that no matter how she meant it, I found it somewhat disturbing that Rowling found it “liberating” to write under the pseudonym chosen. Because on one hand it was anonymity. But on the other, it was gender anonymity.

 

 

On Being a Female Horror Writer

So here it is: I am not saying that perfectly good, perhaps even GREAT male Horror writers do not suffer unexplained rejection. (And that’s all the apology you are getting.)

I am saying that what happens with male writers in the genre – unpublished male writers – is different. Male writers are allowed to be unpublished without being shamed.

Female writers are automatically assigned to the category of not being good enough to be published – not just not having found the right publication for our work. Our bios are filled with charming cats and doting spouses. We are not likely academics or authorities in any field – at least publicly (because bragging is not ladylike). And a lot of this is our own fault. We think the way we were cultivated to think. It is unbecoming, unflattering, and kind of bitchy to show any sign of aggression (read as “competitiveness” if you are male). And for those of us born around or in the Baby Boom – well, ladies should not be offensive. And if they are, they deserve to be taken down a notch and shown their place.

And then we overthink the thinking that has been imposed on us. Women in most professions today are still not “free.” This is sooo evident in women’s writing — from creating it to judging it.

For one thing, male writers are not forced to live deep inside their heads second-guessing EVERY creative decision they make.

I just lost sleep last night wondering why I keep writing MALE protagonists. What is wrong with me? Shouldn’t I be writing female protagonists? But then if I do write female protagonists, am I narrowing my audience? Will I be assumed to be a Young Adult writer? A sensationalist writer? A writer with no market?

Should that female protagonist’s name be gender-ambiguous? What if she is TOO strong? What does it mean if she has a boyfriend? How should they interact? What if she is too aggressive or not aggressive enough?

Should I write under initials? What if they see my blog avatar and I am outted before they read my fiction? Does it matter?

Will a female editor give me more of a chance if she knows I am female or be harder on me to overcompensate because SHE is a female in the typically male dominated field of Horror?

It took me a few hours to realize I had completely lost the story I was thinking about…

This kind of mental Vietnam goes on forever for female writers in general, but especially in our genre.

One of the most powerful discoveries I have made as a writer is the one where I realize that I am a female writer…which apparently makes some sort of difference…especially in the Horror genre.

Amazingly, what I have found is that where male authors are concerned, their end-product is evaluated at face-value; for female authors, there ensues a search for subtext. For male authors, biographical details are enhancements, for females, they are excuses. To properly “dis” a male author, one simply criticizes them like one does a female author.

Before there is an all-out, knee-jerk reaction from all the men out there, let me clarify: I am not only saying that it is harder for women to find appreciation or publication…what I am saying is that for some pretty interesting and un-admitted reasons, there are always strange, invisible criteria applied to the judgment of fiction works by women. Whether we are talking publication, Literary Criticism, or “simple” editorial decisions applied in anthologies; whether we are talking education, professions, and reputations, if you are a woman writer, people in general are wont to make apologies and excuses for your choices. Everyone becomes an arm-chair psychologist and a genre expert. All of a sudden the writing of a woman is not “just a story” but a running commentary against men, against patriarchy, against society…in other words, you are attempting to be Literary.

This makes it easier to weed out women’s writing from general submissions: if a publication wants playful, inventive storytelling and you are suspected of being a guerilla Literary writer, well this story is just “not for our publication.” Suddenly you are out of your depth as a writer and nobody wants to sort it all out.

And then if you are a woman and you write Horror…well then you, my dear, are miraculously transformed into a rebel.

What kind of woman writes Horror? Is it even decent?

Curses. I bothered my pretty little head about it…

http://popsych.org/two-fallacies-from-feminists/

It has been profoundly interesting to me to discover that because it is not “cool” to like Literature in these times, any writing that is not clearly “anti-Literary” and quasi pulp-driven is inherently subversive. Slap on a female byline, and suddenly it is obvious to everyone but yourself that you are angry, anti-establishment, and man-hating, and write boring, overly saccharine, overly wordy, overly sentimental made-for-a-limited-female-audience trash fiction.

I didn’t come to this conclusion through rejections of my own writing, nor am I saying that is why I personally find rejection with my writing (I earnestly think my writing has flaws that I do not yet know quite how to fix). I am saying that this is what I see as a female writer researching the Horror genre. This is what I read in Criticism of woman in the genre…

Sure, many male writers experience something similar when they write Horror…the difference is that historically once male authors develop a body of work, that work “lives” in reviews, criticisms, comparisons, historical perspectives, collectible comics and collectible publications which go on to have value in the collective body of genre works…if not an underground following. A great deal of women’s fiction in the genre just disappears as old magazines disintegrate or go out of business.

When one considers that in the magazine industry at the turn of the century, it is estimated that over 70% of published Horror genre writing was being done by women…is it not truly weird that not only have most of us not read those writings, but we don’t even know the names of the authors?

Divide and Conquer

When you are a female writer of Horror, you tend to feel isolated and alone. Everywhere you look, the examples of how to write Horror “properly” or successfully are overwhelmingly male. Many like to say that this is because it is mostly men who have shaped and produced the genre.

But they would be seriously wrong. It is only that male writers have found immortality in the world of Criticism, reprints and anthologies. That has led to their constant rediscovery and intense scrutiny by genre experts while new male voices have dominated the last three decades of Horror because that particular period of the genre has focused on male-driven interests. The minute our genre became one giant slash-fest is when most of us noticed it…but the style of writing – including plotlines, dialog, the fast-moving, no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners narrative, the underdog antihero – these are the contributions male writers have made of late. But only of late. We are now on a railway “spur” to nowhere…The genre needs to reinvent itself and rediscover its center

Prior to the 70’s and 80’s, the writing style was much different. It was more Literary, with heavily detailed narrative, an emphasis on suspense, and exhibited a clear evolution from earlier genre works (think Poe and Lovecraft, Machen and James). In this period and prior to it, it was women who were the foot soldiers of Horror.

That is not to devalue the contributions of men of the period – including several heavy-hitters who came from Literary channels to write the occasional tale of the supernatural. But it is to say that women were mass-producing tremendous amounts of published works, while it is largely male writers who are identified as having risen to the top of the genre.

Yet if these women’s writings were so good, why don’t we know who they are?

Sometimes this is because many Literary Critics want to see a clearly defined body of work, and many women’s “bodies” (pardon the pun) are literally ghosts of the past (ladies notice the pun). If one can’t find them, collect them, and publish them, many Critics will not bother with them. The problem is that what happened to women’s writing – including its denigration, its relegation to the pulps, the public chastisement of the female authors at the hands of many male authors and the Critics of the times – means that we can’t find whole bodies of works for many of these writers.

While we are entertained by suppositions that women “get busy” with domestic duties and diversions and are therefore historically “unreliable” in building careers in general, the truth is a bit uglier.

Historically women’s writings simply were not assigned the same value as written works of men.

Women are expected to write for women readers. Men, on the other hand, write for us all.

This is a verifiable fact of history. One doesn’t have to be a feminist or dislike feminists to find plenty of evidence. It is just one more point of divide and conquer. If we stop and argue about that point, I would never get to my point.

Not being valued, the work of many early women writers is scattered about the many different publications of their day, most of them defunct or no longer having those issues available. No one thought to save the works, and just like today, many women were writing to pay the bills that come with the haphazard consequences of unpredictable lives dependent upon the favorable whims of men. Who knows what happened to their handwritten originals and typed manuscripts?

It is also to say that some of those works which did survive are now found in several subgenres and established Literary genres. Gothic, Gothic Romance, Suspense, Mystery, Ghost Story, Thriller, Supernatural Fiction, and straight-up Horror… No one knows where to put them: classified by genre, or by author’s body of work? (Maybe this is why I tend to shy away from re-categorizing Horror as “Weird”… it is predominantly male writers who can meet that particular defining “criteria” to the Literary Critic’s eye…and I am tired of witnessing the seemingly intentional exclusion of women writers).

Frighteningly, I’ve also noticed that not unlike today, many of those women – unlike their male counterparts – were made to pay professionally, personally, and socially for their “bad” choices…specifically the one to write genre fiction. I personally suspect that I myself have had a handful of job interviews simply because employers who found my blog or LinkedIn page wanted to know what I really looked like. (Alas, there are no tattoos, no piercings, no Gothic lips or hair. I am a boring Horror writer.) And I can tell any young female novice of the genre that the adulation of your peers will not last; it will be replaced by a thundering herd of stereotypes about people who like Horror and the kind of women that write it. Those stereotypes will not be nice and they may cost you jobs, friends, and relationships. Unlike male Horror writers who are cool, and refreshingly anti-establishment, as a female you will just be weird and as all feminists are to those who don’t like them – you will be possibly thought dangerously unbalanced. This would be amusing if it did not have tragic, real-world consequences…

But it is just further proof of what I am saying here. Regardless of how our male counterparts think we are being treated or perceived, something ugly is still going on with the reception of women’s genre fiction and the “image” of female genre writers. If it’s out there in the workaday world, and Critics grudgingly admit it, what is happening at the publishing level? Why in the few remaining Horror sections of the fewer remaining bookstores is there only one or two female authors of novels? Typically only 1-3 female authors in an anthology of 15 or more? (Happily I can state that Ellen Datlow and Paula Guran have gone a long way toward changing that trend, but why are they as women typically alone in the inclusion of more female writers in anthologies?)

In Horror, clearly we are still an unwilling part of somebody’s tasteless joke. It took me a while to “get” that, because I am proud to write Horror and proud to be genre. I don’t “get” what other people find “disturbing” about that; I see such judgments as living proof of profound Literary ignorance which certain people appear to be proud to display. I don’t see writing as frivolous, or self-indulgent, or particularly subversive and irresponsible…but as a woman who writes, this is the message being spit in my face. Over and over again… All too often at the cost of employment in a regular job.

Do male genre writers experience the same? It doesn’t seem so, or it doesn’t seem as widespread…

But neither observation surprises me, because this has been the tradition of treatment of women who write genre fiction from the beginning. It used to be the standard treatment for women who write fiction period.

“If a woman writes fiction, there is something wrong with her.” (Darn tootin’…she’s not afraid to think for herself. And in the case of Horror writers, to destroy the world one monstrosity at a time.)

Meme Watch: Feminist Yog-Sothoth Sees All And Would Really Appreciate A Trigger Warning

The bottom line is that women writers of genre fiction have this strange uphill battle going on that we don’t remember starting. We just sat down and began to write stories for good or ill. But the fact remains that there are names missing from our canon which might well belong there but for the fact that they belong to women.

Now… one can toss around all the insults and excuses one wants about these (or any other) women writers. But if you have read women’s genre fiction especially from the late 1860’s into the 1900’s without deciding beforehand that they are man-hating feminists, you would be shocked and surprised at the quality. The ladies did more than hold their own.

Undoing Diversion

To unearth this wealth of writing, one has to be a bit of an archeologist. You are going to have to dig. But you are also going to have to avoid stepping in steaming hot piles of …argument. Because argument is one of the tactics of those who want women’s writings to stay buried and disenfranchised. To do that, the best diversionary tactic is to pit men against women and to humiliate any woman even thinking about challenging dominant opinions. Nothing derails the truth like a wardrobe malfunction and a little name-calling.

If a woman points out that certain worthy female writers are consistently ignored, then we can just call that woman with the annoying voice a “feminist.” And bitter. And jealous. In fact, so is that darn writer she is yapping about…

For one thing, sensationalism distracts from the real issues. If a woman can be labeled a feminist, we give ourselves permission to stereotype her right into man-hating oblivion. Best of all, we don’t have to listen to what she says or justify why it’s okay to maintain the status quo. We get to stay lazy, blind and in the bubble. We don’t have to do anything and there is a crowd of people patting us on the back for agreeing with their loud selves.

We also don’t have to judge history, ancestors, or our own behavior. Women – you see – tend to write fiction that is meant to strip the flesh of pretense from the bones of reality. That kind of thing happens when by nature of your gender, you are privy to the inequalities and injustices thrust upon others…or yourself. After a while you get pissed off. Unfortunately, even now times have not changed enough for women to “talk like men” and speak freely without some sort of repercussion.

All a woman must do is allege that this is true and the Gender Wars erupt. This is how we manage to not change: we divide and conquer. We get busy making it us-against-them, throw some dirty, scandalous rumors in and – voilà! – nobody is talking about the issues anymore.

So I am not going to talk about why men should see the things women see so clearly. What I am going to do is say this about women writers:

http://uppercasewoman.com/2011/10/24/what-feminism-means-to-me-and-proposition-26/

 

If even one of these issues raises its ugly head in a woman’s prose, she will be called a feminist, her work will be a treatise on some feminist issue, and that is just too darn lofty for the average Horror fan who just wants a good read.

But just try being a woman and not know these things intimately. Men are lucky; they don’t have to think about them. But for women, these issues shape our lives and will inevitably find their way into honest fiction because they haunt us. They dog our every step. Sometimes we even use them against each other to try and impress men.

Whether we hide behind a male viewpoint or venture out to express our own, we don’t get the same choice as a male writer to be separate from the issues – simply because even if we don’t write about them people will root around in our words until they can find some semblance of what they think is there. And if that is not enough, they will talk about our private lives as though that is the reason for our failures and insufficiencies.

Is that why men tend to be “struggling writers” and women tend to be “failed” ones?

We could argue the merits and faults of feminism with men who hate what they think is feminism, or we could preach to the choir. But who I really want to reach is the female Horror writer out there who thinks she is alone in the genre, who thinks women don’t write Horror well, who thinks women never really contributed to the history of Horror.

Like that young woman, I also want to know: why haven’t I heard these names before? Where are the reading lists that include them? Why do I have to have some forty anthologies of “classic” Horror to get a sampling of the women writers of this genre?

The answer is simple if not simply unpleasant: genre writers of the female persuasion were definitively not treated the same as male writers in the past, and because of it, many are overlooked if not lost altogether. In order to change this, we first have to see how we ourselves may be being treated and speak up. We have to stop allowing anyone to make us feel somehow deficient or inferior because we choose to write, or to write genre. We must support Literary Critics who are willing to analyze the writing of women writers, and editors who include women writers of today and yesterday. We are fortunate in having editors at the top of our genre who tend to do that now, but we must never allow ourselves to be lulled into complacence. And we must definitely never allow ourselves to be convinced that it is because of women in the genre that the genre seems to be losing prominence.

It is not about the writing or who is writing it…Horror (like all of publishing) is still battling Technology for the right to exist…

Women have important things to say, and in Horror, important ways to say it. I don’t mind noticing that I am a female genre writer. But I resent being reminded of it only to be made to feel guilty. This is 2020, isn’t it?

And yet we still see a predominance of male writers published in the genre – even though women are gaining some ground.

So for all of you novice and new Horror writers – especially women writers – I say “Hold onto your hair, fellow Horror-chicks. We write among giants.” Following is a list of books that address women writers in and around the genre, writers of the past and present. I am going to name names. And while some of these can be pricey, they are eye-opening and worth the read.

As a female writer of the genre, you would be doing yourself a disservice if you overlook this information and the glorious treasure troves of Horror fiction. If you’re going to be part of a tradition, it helps to know whereof you write…

Because some of those “men” might well have been women.

Literary History and Criticism/Essay

Carpenter, Lynette and Wendy K. Kolmar, eds. Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, c1991.

Davenport-Hines, Richard. Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin. New York; North Point Press, c1998.

Hay, Simon. A History of the Modern British Ghost Story. New York: Palgrave McMillan, c2011.

Joshi, S.T. The Modern Weird Tale. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., c2001.

Nelson, Victoria. Gothika: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, c2012

Short Story Anthologies

Ashley, Mike. Unforgettable Ghost Stories by American Women Writers. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., c2008.

Baldick, Chris, ed. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, c1992.

Bleiler, Everett F., ed. A Treasury of Victorian Ghost Stories. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, c1981.

Cox, Michael and R.A. Gilbert, eds. Victorian Ghost Stories: an Oxford Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press, c1991.

Dalby, Richard, ed. Ghosts for Christmas. Secaucus, NJ: Castle Books, c1988.

Dalby, Richard, ed. The Virago Book of Ghost Stories. London; Virago Press, c2006.

Dziemianowicz, Stefan R., Robert A. Weinberg & Martin H. Greenberg. 100 Ghastly Ghost Stories. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, c1993.

Lundie, Catharine A., ed. Restless Spirits: Ghost Stories by American Women 1872-1926. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, c1996.

O’Regan, Marie, ed. The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women. Philadelphia, PA: Running Press, c2012.

Salmonson, Jessica Amanda, ed. What Did Miss Darrington See? An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction. New York: The Feminist Press, c1989.

Women Authors of Note in Supernatural & Gothic Fiction

Aiken, Joan

Alcott, Louisa May

Alice Perrin

Amelia B. Edwards

Amelia B. Edwards

Antonia Fraser

Atherton, Gertrude

Austen, Jane

Austin, Mary

Baldwin, Louisa

Barbara Burford

Beecher Stowe, Harriet

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth

Broughton, Rhoda

Cather, Willa

Charlotte Bronte

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Cobb, Emma B.

Corelli, Marie

Crawford, F. Marion

Du Maurier, Daphne

Dunbar, Olivia Howard

Files, Gemma

Glasgow, Ellen

Hull, Helen R.

Jackson, Shirley

La Spina, Greye

Lawrence, Margery

Lee, Tanith

Lively, Penelope

Molesworth, Mary Louisa

Morton, Elizabeth

Nesbit, Edith

Oates, Joyce Carol

Oliphant, Margaret

Pangborn, Georgia Wood

Peattie, Elia W.

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart

Quick, Dorothy

Radcliffe, Ann

Rendell, Ruth

Rice, Anne

Rice, Susan Andrews

Riddell, Charlotte

Salmonson, Jessica Amanda

Shelley, Mary

Sinclair, May

Spofford, Harriet Prescott

Stewart, Mary

Tuttle, Lisa

Welty, Eudora

Wharton, Edith

Wilkins Freeman Mary

Wood, Mrs. Henry

 

 

Reading Like a Writer: Horror Through Slime-Covered Glasses

There are many reasons to read a great Horror novel: to scare yourself, to scare your parents, or to scare your teachers. But there is one reason that – if you write – you might not have considered: Reading great Horror novels can teach you how to write great Horror.

Seemed obvious, didn’t it?

So why doesn’t “just” reading a great Horror novel beget great writing?

The answer is: there are different ways to read fiction; you can read as the intended audience, you can read as a Critic, and you can read as a writer. And if you don’t understand the difference, you can’t put the writerly gifts hidden in Classic Horror to work.

Reading as the intended audience is easy. You pick up the book and let it take you someplace else; this is entertainment in its purest form and all control is relinquished to the author’s storytelling wiles. There is no commitment beyond the pursuit of enjoyment.

Reading as the Critic is much darker, much more motivated, colored by academic analysis: it is technical, and it is over most of our heads, requiring a great deal of preparation, such as a Classical Literature background, and an understanding of linguistics, psychology, philosophy, and history. Most of us don’t naturally go there and do not want to: it is cold, hard work that seems intent on destroying the innocent bliss of reading for fun.

On the other hand, reading as a writer is a weird marriage of the two. It is at once dependent on enjoying what you read, and then wanting to dissect it in order to understand what made you want to keep reading and what made its afterimage stay in your head. Reading as a writer is all about asking yourself how and why and when another writer managed to get it “right”… it is about studying their technique for the purpose of creating your own.

YES. READING IS TECHNICAL AND SOMETIMES ICKY

Yet for many people – writers included – it never occurs to them to read something differently.

This is in part because we don’t know how. It also doesn’t occur to us to go beyond the pondering of the magic which appears to be involved in the writing of good Horror. We tend to not want to take it apart, to look behind the curtain because it is the magic that we love to savor.

We are, at heart, a superstitious lot…

It doesn’t help that reading as a physical act quickly becomes so automatic that we are not even aware that we are performing a complex brain activity. We seem to “glimpse” a word and it magically forms images in our minds…effortlessly….mystically.

We curl up someplace snug, we open our book, and wait to be enchanted. We don’t think of reading as work, because as we grow into being readers it becomes wickedly instinctive, unconscious – even involuntary….like magic. Words take on a life of their own, threading their way through our imaginations. We begin to visualize. We become engaged in the tale. Soon, we aren’t even aware that we are reading because the story simply and spontaneously unfolds…

As writers we are looking for clues when we read.

And reading as a writer means that you will have to adapt your reading technique; you are no longer seeking entertainment alone – no longer the one being wooed. Instead, you must become a shadow Critic, poking and prodding everything from the sentence structure to characterization, from punctuation to plot, from the outside in.

To do this successfully, a couple of things must happen first:

• You must read the book for thrills
• You must understand what you are looking for

https://frankenreads.org/event/frankenstein-book-discussion/.

THRILL SEEKING ON A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT

Chances are, if you write Horror, you love Horror. This means you can’t read a word of a new story or novel and not get caught up in it. Of course, that is what every author hopes for, so it is not altogether a bad thing. But it is distracting. Your imagination latches on to the prose like a face-hugging alien – pupils dilate and the pleasure centers of the brain light up like Frankenstein’s monster.

It is important, then, to read a tale first for the enjoyment – to get that habitual and natural pursuit of happiness out of the way. It does serve a purpose: you will know exactly when and where that sweet spot of being hooked and being Horrified took place.

Sometimes it even begets your own monsters, new story ideas, or creates a nice, fertile mood for drafting or brainstorming. But reading for pleasure is not reading as a writer, and it should not be mistaken for such.

Reading for pleasure is that something else: a spinning of the channels of the imagination, a hope of hooking up with a really great idea or being swept away by one.

Yet for writers of Horror fiction, sometimes even reading for pleasure can go awry because if you write Horror, you also come to wonder how it was exactly that a given story scared you… and you eventually might come to be distracted by the fact. This is especially true if you re-read the story years later, when phrases like “What was I thinking?” enter the mind because you read parts you don’t remember and you can’t find parts you thought you did read…

“What happened to the Horror?” you might ask. And exactly how did the writer cause us to manufacture details that were implied but not actually there?

This, friends and neighbors, is where Horror goes all Brain Science…

Two things are at work here:

• the writer’s technique,
• and the curious effect emotion has on human memory.

Of course, emotion is not exclusive to Horror; but Horror is – as Lovecraft so accurately pointed out – fear’s first cousin. And fear is one of the most potent emotions because of its ability to hijack the brain and create memories where none previously existed.

When we experience fear, we process it according to our own experiences, and the reconciliation of the emotion with existing memory tends to reshape the new memory as colored by the old. So when we read Horror for the first time or for enjoyment, we are surrendering our brains to the puppet-master of emotion. The monster in the dark becomes more or less sinister based on what we read and what associations we make with it.

So during our teen years, when we fear the ending of the world before we grow up and realize our lives, the monster that threatens this scenario has more scare power than the same monster will when we are at midlife or older, when we are wont to rationalize, minimalize, and offer concessions – even to monsters. While the monster lurking in the closet has more “terror cred” if the reader has ever been or imagined being attacked in their home, the threat of possession by demons more intimate if one is a lapsed Catholic with residual guilt, how much Horror is delivered to a reader totally depends on the reader’s own experiences and learned fear management.

Horror, it seems, is very personal.

So how does the writer tap into that formula that makes a specific fear generalized?

Well, we are going to have to look at technique…and it is as elusive as it is desirable. And we are going to have to admit that not all Horror will scare all people at the same time; in fact historically, much Classic Horror scared its period audiences because of how those stories related to what was happening at the time. If we are able to associate the Horror with something contemporary, the story will still scare us. This means it has to be a Horror that is bigger than the monster – the monster has to represent something bigger.

The bad news is that such success is a bit of a crap shoot.

The writer must be able to gather that perfect storm of what is most likely to scare the bulk of readers in a specific target group at a specific time and for a specific reason, the exact amount of disclosure in when, where and how to reveal the monster, and the strange magic of storytelling.

The first point means a writer must really know his or her audience and not from afar – readers will sniff out the fakers and pretenders — and to actually understand and anticipate what his or her contemporaries really fear the most in life. The second means developing a kind of sixth sense about how to pull back the curtain without shouting “ta-dah!” and flattening the curve of your climax. The third means a writer must connect to that preternatural rhythm of prose that says exactly what it needs to and no more.

And it is the second and third of those ingredients that writers can learn from doing what readers love most – reading.

But there is of course a potentially fatal flaw imbedded in every writer (reading or otherwise)…a kind of subliminal kill-switch

And the glitch is this: very few writers are Masters of Their Domain – once again, most writers are readers and read as readers first. We are addicts of prose – both our own and random words printed on pages. We can’t stop ourselves from seeking the “high” so we might as well admit it; we really do have to read a good book first as a reader. We become as dazzled and bewitched as a fairy with a Celtic knot.

Then and only then can we go back and hope resolve to read as a writer. (And if you think I am kidding, go back and read your own writing – something old that you have forgotten. You won’t fixate on the bad parts that need fixing, but you will congratulate yourself on getting the good parts handled right. Sick, isn’t it?)

We are no different with a Classic writer’s writing; we embrace and stroke the beastly prose that made us feel what we wanted. We excuse any parts we did not understand or disliked. And most of all, we let how the writer set us up slip right past us.

This is why we have to go dark. We have to use the Critic’s lens…those slime-covered glasses that dissect what we hold most sacred.

 

Illustration by Gustave Dore (1832 to 1883). http://wordyenglish.com/p/little_red_riding_hood.html

ALONE WITH THE CRITIC

For most of us, our only exposure to Literary Critics and analytic assessment of writing is both boring and negative. Critics are, after all (and to our knowledge), the ones who rip our favorite authors apart and insult our intelligence by stating outright that we don’t have any. They are the wolves in the sheep pen…

But what we don’t see is that the Critic means we are forever reading as readers and telling them that enjoyment means everything. Critics want more. And if you remember high school, so did your teacher. And then your professor. So why didn’t you get it? Could it be that no one ever really taught you about the many ways of reading?

The bad news is that it is perfectly possible.

For years we are asked to analyze what we read without being shown how to see words acting differently on the page…And for many of us caught in the passions of youth, we don’t want to….we aren’t emotionally ready yet.

But doing so – learning to read the same words, the same stories differently – is what helps us develop the ability to find and judge truth, to understand the use of metaphor and analogy, to separate polemic from satire. Try looking at our current internet, fake-news (which used to be called propaganda by the way), social media-led world, and NOW you see the importance of that talent…

So it was no illusion…education has always placed heavy emphasis on interpreting and deciphering prose. And all of those term papers, research papers, and required reading were about that. Yet education has never been graceful about teaching the details…because education has failed to show us the complete picture of how and why. Instead, it has served to embitter most of us about the critical process.

It made us feel stupid.

Worse, educators are great for coming up with ways to analyze writing, for some ruining the enjoyment of the Classics. And while this is a real fear for those needing to read like writers, and something that does in fact happen to some people, it does more so to those who are closet editors. If once learning how to look at language means you cannot turn it off, then you must face it: you are an academic, an editor, or a Critic. Get thee thou education and do not pass go. Be happy. Follow your obsessive bliss…because all genres need you.

However learning to approach reading academically and as a critical thinker is an important thing.

Reading as a writer is one of those irreplaceable tools every writer needs to master, and one I’d never really heard expressed as a technique before my return to the college classroom. In fact, if I had heard it in any guise before, I probably dismissed it as a cutesy way of inflating the ego. But this is a serious technique, and here’s why: especially within the United States educational system, not everyone reads enough “good” fiction or “Literature” to develop a subliminal sense of how to mimic the different elements that made those works great.

I know I have been guilty of such neglect. I always wanted to read the Classics. But for some reason, unless someone made me it didn’t seem to happen. I always felt intimidated by their greatness, I suppose, figuring that because they were such a source of study, discussion and Criticism that I would not ever fully understand them and I didn’t want to appear even more stupid.

But that is a cheap excuse. Books are books after all, written for readers. Yet I was plagued by the mystery so many modern readers are: what make a book great? What makes literature the Holy Grail of writing?

Unfortunately, it is not as mysterious and awesome as it sounds; it has more to do with the ability of a writer to accidentally or on purpose say something bigger than is stated in the story, while dazzling the reader with the competent and artistic handling of language.

This does in fact mean that some books are Literature but which are unrecognized as such – at least they are not yet. But it also means that we need to look at prose the way we’ve learned to look at poetry: it can be read for simple enjoyment, or it can be dissected and impress language technicians with double-meaning, allegory, metaphor, analogy and pure genius. The level to which you as a reader or you as a writer wish to enjoy fiction is up to you. But being willing to get down and dirty with the dissection business (something Horror writers and readers should be familiar with) can open amazing windows to understanding how great fiction is constructed.

So to learn how to write better Horror fiction, we have to do what engineers do: we have to deconstruct prose to see how the pieces came together and rendered success.

As Francine Prose (ironically surnamed as she is) states in her book Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them, you have to discover how to read analytically: to become “conscious of style, of diction, of how sentences were formed and information conveyed, how the writer structures a plot, creates characters, employs detail and dialogue” because writing “is done one word at a time, one punctuation mark at a time” (3).

One of the best ways to do this is to sit down with your favorite book or short story, and start copying it word for word. This slows you down, forcing you to notice every phrase, sentence and punctuation mark. It reveals how you were manipulated by the rhythm of the author’s own choices, why you as a reader gave emphasis to certain passages, were susceptible to others. You notice vocabulary choices, perspective, the intimacy or distance gained by wording and grammatical emphasis. These are your tools – your paints, your canvas, your textures, your lighting. This is the writer’s version of art school.

And because you are also a writer, chances are there is already a bit of the academic in you… As such, you have merely to access that natural curiosity about “memory. Symbol. Pattern. [because] These are the three items that, more than any other, separate the professorial reader from the rest of the crowd.” (Foster xxvii)

Since writing is the creation of patterns, reading is the logical reverse engineering of them.

Like art, writing is all indeed about patterns – everything from plot (of which there are various estimates as to the actual number of available “master plots” from two to twenty or more) to motifs and themes. Decoding these patterns is like deciphering a riddle the author consciously or subconsciously embedded in the text ( Prose 4-5)…

This is what close reading is all about. For example, Prose recounts and old English teacher’s assignment to read King Lear and Oedipus Rex and “Circle every reference to eyes, light, darkness and vision… Then draw some conclusion” upon which to write an essay (4). This is where Literature tends to stand out: these hidden gems lie awaiting discovery and assessment. Literature then, invites the reader back into the text multiple times, to explore potential meanings and relevances, to form opinions and make discussions.

Fiction today is really not much different. We just don’t feel as free to criticize, fearing offense or even attack by fans of the author, if not the author… Yet this is what is meant to happen to fiction. It is meant to be discussed and re-read, and even judged. That doesn’t mean that accepting criticism is easy, or that criticism is just or warranted every time. But unless you write in a vacuum, readers will find you. And they will judge, each and every one. Doesn’t it make sense that writers would write with the intent of surviving that criticism?

The fact is everyone has an opinion, for good or ill, correct or not, graciously delivered or accompanied by obnoxious and illiterate venom.

As writers, we have to detach ourselves from our own work, allowing our “children” to grow up and go out into the cold, cruel world.

We must realize that they will be judged and sometimes justifiably found wanting, but that it is ok to love them anyway.

This is the way fiction becomes Literature, the way writers test and challenge themselves to become better writers, the way good Horror becomes great Horror.

Are you up to the challenge?

References

Adler, Mortimer J. and Charles van Doren. How to Read a Book: the Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. New York: Simon & Schuster, c1940, 1972.

Foster, Thomas C. How to Read Literature Like a Professor: a Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines. New York: Harper Perennial, c2003, 2014.

Prose, Francine. Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. New York: Harper Perennial, c2006

Author Biographies: Can or Should You Separate an Author From Their Work?

For most of us, one of the harder challenges of writing fiction is deciding what to put in those little, abbreviated bios that editors want.

We agonize over the details. We do our best to find some outstanding characteristic of our lives, our qualifications, ourselves to share with strangers. Maybe even to impress or endear those very strangers to us.

For the most part, those brief bios are meant to be introductions: brief summations of why we might be qualified to call ourselves a writer – mentioning relevant university degrees, real-world jobs, past publication, or professional organizations (often depending on the story or the publication), or even a synopsis of the story in play– but also to shed just enough light on personality that we see a bit of author as a person. In sum, these succinct profiles are blurbs of the author’s life – not full on biographies. And that is a more fortunate thing, as it turns out.

Because if existing author biographies are any indication, actually having one written about you might not be the perk it sounds like. For example, we seldom think about the harder reality that today in particular, anyone can find out pretty much anything about our private selves. And they will. And they will publish or promote the most unsavory of these details. For all of us would-be and under-published authors, those short little author bios are – in reality – the least of our worries.

At what point is some information too much information? And should an author’s life and philosophy be kept separate from their work? Does who the author is, really matter?

In the world of reading, analyzing, reviewing and Criticizing an author’s catalog of works, author biographies can enhance our appreciation for an author, or ruin everything.

What Do We Know and When Should We Know It?

I have always loved reading author biographies. I love them because they teach me more about the struggle to write than the writing.

As a writer, this is important. I’m not sure it is significant at what point on which train J.K. Rowling decided to write Harry Potter. But am I curious about why…about her decision making process in the writing, about her background and where she developed such a keen marketing savvy that it puts Amazon to shame.

Yet for some, knowing the details of a person’s life – like Lovecraft, for example – leaves them proudly proclaiming a distaste for the works themselves. They may declare a deliberate omission of the writing because of how the writer lived his or her life, how they THOUGHT. In short, they disapprove.

When and whether to separate an author from their work has been part a long discussion. And such things took a particularly evil and pronounced turn after the Holocaust, when scientists had to sort out whether to keep ill-gotten scientific results gleaned from torture, or to abandon it all as a condemnation of how it was derived.

One point of contention may well be intent.

While an Artist’s beliefs are not actions; their work is action. And there is a significant difference in belief and incitement to degradation or violence.

Where do we draw the line?

This is a tougher question than we think. We cannot step anywhere (for example) in the United States where we are not stepping on stolen ground, adoring older structures that may have been built by indentured or enslaved hands on property that once belonged to someone else, or even constructed for the purpose of insuring the taking or keeping of property thusly gained.

We cannot even brag on technology without facing character flaws: what of Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who gave us our Space Program in exchange for overlooking his service as a member of Hitler’s SS? Or perhaps we justify that today things are less threatening when we consider that the founder of Facebook was alleged to have stolen the concept from fellow students at Harvard University. Perhaps when we benefit from advances or enjoyment, we are fine with wearing rose-colored glasses.

We manage to be myopic when it suits us. But at all times, humanity is faithful to its tendency to commit all manner of sins. And when considering the Arts and writing, this becomes important. Because when an Artist’s work reveals something too easily forgotten or buried about a time or place, that work – no matter how despicable, gains a value.

Looking at Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a recurrent visitor on the banned books list is a perfect example. The use of racist language places the book in a time capsule that in these more allegedly enlightened times should make us uncomfortable, yet it reveals nevertheless an important question as to whether or not the book still serves a purpose. That it does, but now perhaps presents an additional purpose, keeps it relevant. The language and context are now important things to discuss. And perhaps that raises the age when the book should be read, but it does not negate the most important message of the book: Life for many of our fellow citizens is often unfiltered and unpleasant…. It is time we look at what is under the whitewashed fence.

H.P. Lovecraft has long been the Horror poster child for these arguments. But he is by no means alone. In fact, there have been times when the flaws of many of our greatest American writers have all been paraded past us like they are qualifiers for greatness.

If you are a writer, that probably gives you pause. And it is certainly not why I read author biographies.

Like all writers, perhaps I seek a community awareness, some reassurance that the best writing often does come from enduring horridly difficult times, dashed childhood dreams, flawed thinking, lost friends or absent or invisible ones, the bitch-slapping life of poverty so many of us wind up in, the sense of being outcast, downcast, and just plain lost.

As Arts people, we have long endured the rumors: that the true geniuses among us are fatally flawed characters… They are not only misfits, but drunks and drug addicts, mentally disturbed and disrupted individuals, living tragic, abbreviated lives we all should envy for the permanence and quality of their life’s work.

It makes it hard to want to be successful if one must sacrifice one’s life, health, and sanity to the cruel gods of creativity. And it makes one wonder what could possible go right in a writing career if one isn’t spectacularly flawed enough?

But is it true? Must we be ruined human beings to be successful writers? Or perhaps the right question is: is it ever NOT true?

After all, part of being human is being flawed…is living. We are all damaged, to some extent, by our own navigations of life and by the intrusion of unwelcome others within it. Whether it is having the unloving, nasty family of Poe, or the loss of support family members and terror of racially different people like Lovecraft, we create our own mental baggage that we perpetually lug around with us in our writing.

Likewise, we experiment with different ways of soothing the open wounds, of denying the pains and humiliations of living.

Who among is NOT thusly shaped and affected?

Like with writing, it is what we DO with those bits of baggage that makes or breaks us.

It is always comforting to know other writers overcame, and that many needed to. It is sometimes helpful to know how, or to see that Art is shaped by the strain of battle…it is born in turmoil.

But it is always helpful to realize that living a life in the Arts by its very nature is one of struggle, that in fact it may well have called to us because we can SEE the intimate connection.

Yet when should we know the gory details?

How much is too much information?

The answer is not that easy. But Literary Critics have finally begun to address the issue themselves, and all because production of possible Literature is outpacing the number of Literary Critics needed to READ it all… a collision of facts derived from living authors and suppositions and allegations made about dead authors forced a radical idea to the surface.  Just how connected ARE authors and their lives to their works?

By 1967, we had so many more living authors producing published works, it became vividly apparent that knowing details about an author – especially ones still alive and verbally kicking – was having an effect on Critics. And French Literary Critic and theorist Roland Barthes wrote a detailed essay on why the knowledge of an author’s intentions paired with biographical facts should have no bearing on the Criticism of their works. https://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/Barthes.pdf

It is this very essay that created a schism in the school of Literary Criticism, which had up to this point used an author’s biographical information – facts like politics, religion, prejudices, preferences, lifestyle, class, etc. – to decipher their catalog of works.

But with the increasing amount of living authors, Critics began having difficulty divesting their judgment of author lives, of author intentions, and author blowback.

Tremendous verbal battles have spilled their vitriol all over the recent decades (most notably for Horror fans in the verbal barrage between esteemed Literary Critic Harold Bloom and Stephen King fans), and which has had a terrible effect on both the field of Literary Criticism and how we all see various authors and their works. In fact, the worse consequence had been the inserting of the uninformed opinions of the common reader into the Literary Critical academic process.

Once again, the function of Literary Critics is not to devolve into mudslinging arguments about writing quality with the secular crowd, but to present academic arguments to other academics for or against the admission of a work or catalog of works into the Literary Canon based on Literary Critical Theory.

The introduction of the concept of the author’s intimate life details having no bearing on the decision is an important one.

Because without it, we must keep asking that pesky question: at what point should we know, and how much should we know?

Maybe the MORE important question is: in knowing it, what should we DO with the knowledge?

http://enjoy-teaching.com/enjoy-teaching-biography.html

The Whole Dead Author Thing

One of the dangers of reading intimate details about a favorite author is never looking at their work the same way again.

Whether you are “just” a reader or a budding author or Critic, knowing the backstory is not always a good thing.

Words and situations take on new nuances. We begin to ascribe hidden meanings, possible subtext, and autobiographical details to stories we once loved for their own sakes. And we may get it all wrong…because then we begin to drag in our own interpretations based on our own experiences…which have NOTHING to do with the writer’s works or what he or she INTENTED…

The truth is, once we know about an author, their loves and losses, their frustrations and failures, we often lose the magic that their work represents. We start looking for the author inside their work.

And I can tell you as a writer, that is never the intent of the writing. The story is meant to stand on its own, to sneak up on the reader and send a familiar chill down their spines. I want them to see something of themselves in my stories, not something of ME in them.

Of course I am in them. They derive from my own memories, my own fears, my own revulsions and yearning for justice. But no one character is me. No one story is true. No one reader is invited to dissect me psychologically.

Therefore in my opinion, knowing “too much” about me as a writer and person might well get in the way of the magic I intend to conjure. It’s like having a pesky reporter behind the curtain with me in Kansas, giving away my tricks.

Yet I also can’t help but be grateful for the biographies I have read about other authors.

Could it be there is a time and place to know an author more intimately?

I do believe so. And sadly, for the most part I think that time comes after an author is dead.

While I also believe it helps to read biographies only after one has read a catalog of an author’s works, so as not to taint any reading of them, I find that reading such details as one finds in biographies leaves me reading new works and rereading old ones differently.

If the catalog is fixed, then I begin to look at them slightly askew like a Critic might look at them. But because I am not a Critic, I find it changes things in subtle, sometimes uncomplimentary ways. The work does lose its magic, and that is replaced by a study of and appreciation of technique.

Now, as a writer, that is exactly where I need to be. I need to see how the trick is done, and appreciate how a writer took some event or memory from their lives – no matter how major or how trivial – and turned it into something living.

But what I must resist doing, is making excuses for an author. And if we have certain details of an author’s life, that is exactly the natural thing to do…”of course, the book was not as good…his wife had just died, after all…”

We also tend to blanket “approve” certain sentences or paragraphs that the editor in us might suggest should not go unchallenged…assuming that it was the opiates, or the fury of battling unsympathetic Critics. If one is going to learn about an author’s technique from the finished product, we simply cannot be running in front of every word with a broom and dust pan.

And on the reverse side, we cannot devalue the importance of a work because we find out the author was, for instance, a bigot.

So at what point does knowing an author become detrimental?

I think it is when and only when we excuse an author for the wrongdoing.

Lovecraft is the obvious example in Horror. Many of his opinions were nothing less than offensive, odious attitudes toward immigrants and women.

But reading his fiction, we weren’t supposed to “know” that. Deduce it, yes. But to condemn Lovecraft’s writing on the basis of his failures as a human being is also to overlook the whole of the human condition.

We are – all of us – flawed. And history has come to place Lovecraft on the wrong side of political correctness, the wrong side of morality.

Yet as a human being, Lovecraft also reflects a period in our history, in our developmental growth and national psychology. At the heart of Lovecraft’s work is nothing less than irrational fear. That’s what bigotry, racism, misogyny and religious persecution is all about. So as sadly pitiful as his beliefs have come to be, he not only represents the time in which he lived, but sadly, even a subculture that exists still today in this country and all others.

Lovecraft is a lesson in humanity. His writing is a showcase of our flaws, many of which many of us still proudly display, and that should give us pause and cause for discussion.

But should we elevate the work of such a man?

I say with Lovecraft yes. The reason is because even in his writing Lovecraft was not advocating for violence against those he feared. He was simply displaying his fear by using some pretty amazing monstrosities and nightmares to emphasize the terror that beat in his bigoted, misogynistic heart. In other words, he reflected us…humanity….and our struggle to accept each other.

This is not the same as someone who “preaches” in their work to rise up and destroy other people, other genders, other nations, other religions.

The key here is whether a work is Literary by depicting or revealing a truth about ourselves or is a manifesto – incendiary and inciteful, meant to groom hatred.

If we started tossing out Art because of the thoughts of the Artist, we would be left with nothing to make us think.

Poe, like many writers of his time, was a drunk and an addict. If we throw out his work as ill-begotten gain born of drug trips and poor judgment, we need to lose the Beatles, Roman Polanski, and every Weinstein film ever made.

This is not to say we excuse the offender.

Rather, it means that we weigh the value of the message of the work. Some of the best Art has come from those dying for penance, whose secrets were the acid of their souls which in turn generated cautionary tales for the rest of us.

When a writer is still alive, it becomes a harder choice. Because then we worry about financially endorsing a behavior, for funding a lifestyle that may include reprehensible behavior. A look at how we are responding to Hollywood’s outing of sexual assault is the perfect example.

But we can also see when a writer is dead, that when his or her art imitates life – comments on it – it can elevate a work to Literature because of the mirror it becomes. It becomes useful. It becomes a teaching tool… a prompt for meaningful conversation.

Which brings us back to those little, abbreviated bios.

They should be honest. But they should also be constructed of things that are not presumptuous. Because in the end we will ALL be outted… especially if we (it turns out) are any good at what we do.

So When Should We Read Author Biographies?

I think the answer is: when it is helpful.

Biographies contain lives. They introduce flaws that will expose your heroes as human beings. You might discover that you like their work more than you like them. But you may also find yourself encouraged, inspired, comforted in knowing that this road you are on has been traversed by many.

You may find that failure is part of the process. That sometimes rejection is a blazing sword to the heart, and that like you – writers of the past have suffered from many of the same problems – be it writer’s block, bad parenting, cruel Critics, ill health, mental struggles, lost love, betrayal, poverty, addictions, homelessness, the question of self-publishing, the search for mentoring, and a belief that all may well be pointless.

You may find that some of them were Poe, or Lovecraft, or Dante, or Shakespeare. You may even find an awkward kinship with a select few.

Biographies will tell you things about why you feel as you do, about the commonality of lives lived in service of the Arts.

And it may cause you to realize that we might not really like our idols, especially on their worst days…Just as sometimes we don’t like ourselves, or fear being thusly revealed to others…

This is the case of Lovecraft for me… I adore his monsters, love the British Horror atmosphere he managed to transplant to America for us to savor. But reading him is to see the more distasteful aspects of his quirky, misfit personality, to realize how little we have changed. Reading him also makes me worry about myself, and my flaws. It makes me agonize over those darned little bios.

The trick is not to rationalize. We are none of us saints.

The trick is to take biographies for the lessons they offer us: that there is hope we can communicate our deepest fears and anxieties in story form, that we can entertain as well as educate, that we can hope to persuade and shape our times by holding up a hand mirror to those who need to see the images therein.

By all means, don’t deprive yourself. Just know that once the genie is out of the bottle, he will not be put back in. Be sure you are ready for the capriciousness of magic.

Beware the power of enchantment. And then go forth anyway…

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/320388960975160324/

Recommended Author Biographies

Ackroyd, Peter. Poe: a Life Cut Short. New York: Doubleday, c2008.

Franklin. Ruth. Shirley Jackson: a Rather Haunted Life. New York: W.W. Norton, c2016.

Gaiman, Neil. The View From the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction. New York: HarperCollins, c 2016.

Joshi, S.T. I am Providence: the Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft v.1. (& 2). New York: Hippocampus Press, c2013.

King, Stephen. On Writing: a Memoir of the Craft. New York: Simon & Schuster, c2000.

Montague, Charlotte. H.P. Lovecraft: the Mysterious Man Behind the Darkness. London: Chartwell Books, c2015.

Montague, Charlotte. Edgar Allan Poe: the Strange Man Standing Deep in the Shadows. London: Chartwell Books, c 2015.

Ramsland, Katherine. Prism of the Night: a Biography of Anne Rice. New York: Plume, c1982.

Skal, David J. Something in the Blood: the Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula. New York, Liveright Publishing, c2016.

Spark, Muriel. Mary Shelley, a Biography. New York: E.P. Dutton, c1987.

Sturrock, Donald. Storyteller: the Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl. New York: Simon & Schuster, c2010.

Winter, Douglas E. Clive Barker: the Dark Fantastic: the Authorized Biography. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, c2002.

Caution: Tentacles May Deploy Without Warning (or, How Your Age Informs Your Fiction Writing Success)

When I was a teenager, I loved horses. I rode competitively briefly, showing other peoples’ hunters… and I desperately wanted one of my own.

Standing next to a fellow rider once, I was asked if I had my own horse. I replied, no…but I hoped to have one someday. The girl snorted, looking down her nose at me. “If you really wanted one,” she said, “You would have one by now.”

Little did I know, this was how the world would be looking at my writing forty years later.

If you were any good, you would be published by now…

To my Horror, I actually believed that for an ungodly long time.

 

The Truth About Age in Fiction Writing

I have often wondered why no one ever discusses age (like race) as a contributor to Horror fiction.

I have often wondered why once we are ensconced (read trapped or buried) in other careers, relegated to merely dreaming about our writing, we stop believing publication is possible. Or viable. That we come to believe success in writing is only for the young among us.

Some of this is the fault of the marketing machinery of Big Publishers, who like to advertise new writers as “the next Stephen King”… implying that such a writer is a youthful puppy, a keeper, a long termer, a veritable gold mine of future works to be immortalized in film. And sometimes this is because Big Publishers NEED another Stephen King… because some day they will have to navigate our genre WITHOUT him…

But many times it is also because those of us who are right now the Old Writers struggling in the genre grew up with a totally different concept of success – actual examples of lives lived writing… even writing even mediocre Horror fiction. We grew up with the 1970’s Boom, and so to us, success means writing a novel or two in our twenties and transcending into being a Professional Writer. To us, success has been painted as being able to not only make a living off our work, but living well…

Yet if that scenario failed to play out, we start doing the math. After years of listening to the many criticisms and following the life-plans dictated by other people, we wonder: is there still time? Will we live long enough to woo Big Publishers into paying us Big Money contracts (the kind that don’t exist anymore), and didn’t we miss the boat already if we can’t be young and flaunt it? To do all of the things we wanted to do as rich, successful authors?

Old writers are often their own worst enemy…

But then we have had a lot of help in twisting our own self-images.

Because I have also wondered when it became okay to associate older, unpublished writers with failure…to make it an inside joke.

And why is it “proof” of talent or vision to not only get published, but to be young and rich and published? Only some of us are old enough to remember when that was even possible…

It’s not like editors know the ages of submitting authors either… So it must be coming from ourselves.

We have bought into the mythology that unless we are published when we are young, and are thereby a “Professional” (and rich) Writer well before we are thirty, we are simply not good enough…We didn’t want it badly enough. So now we don’t deserve to associate with Real Writers…

Suddenly there is an accompaniment of snorts and sideways, condescending glances… Suddenly we are out of the loop, out of style, and unable to gauge exactly when that moment of stellar success was supposed to have happened.

To make things worse, we keep moving that secret Age of Success, the one that marks the moment we should resign ourselves to other jobs and other careers… Whose idea is that?

Writers of our genre come in all genders, ages and colors, all geographic locations and climates, all political and religious bents. Yet time and again we are given a prepared profile of the Professional Writer… in our genre, typically still a Caucasian male, young enough to remember his youth and still writing about it and his own young adulthood.

Women writers of Horror, it seems, are more readily painted as Young Adult writers, or writers of fantasy. We are to be seen and not heard, demure… nurturers of young readers. We have, apparently, even lost our genre identities as the mistresses of the ghost story. We are not to be taken too seriously.

It gets worse the older we are…

Collectively, we have lost our voices as men and women unafraid to write as older men and women. It is kind of like being in Hollywood… as though we are being (in not-so-subtle ways) coached to disguise our ages (when not our genders) by writing about youth, as though the only ones interested in reading Horror are the very young people the Establishment tends to claim don’t read anymore…

These are all lies, I tell you…lies!

Not only is Stephen King the proof, but so are writers like Ramsay Campbell, Anne Rice, Richard Matheson, Dean Koontz, Neil Gaiman, Tanith Lee, Dan Simmons, Clive Barker, Bentley Little, and Robert R. McCammon… all of them “vintage” and still carrying our genre…even in backlist titles.

As a reader of many of them, I have watched a good many protagonists creep up in age… leaving behind that New Adult thing that has tried to insert itself between Young Adult and Real Adult fiction. Our own writers have tried to drag Horror back into the Adult arena, dancing with Literary values by writing stories which are in themselves proof that some of the best Horror gets written after we grow up. Everywhere there are signs being downplayed and ignored… Horror is growing up.

So why does the myth of youth persist when defining New Writer Success in our genre?

Who has commandeered the profile of writers to suggest that if a writer has not “made it” by the time they are in their twenties and “established” by their thirties, then Fate is telling you they are not worthy?

The truth about age in Horror fiction writing is this: youth is where we learn about what scares us the most; old age is where we learn about confronting that fear… So while we may have great scary ideas as young writers, and we might write boldly about those things, as older writers we know how to throw and receive a punch. We are, in fact, more likely to generate Horror fiction with Literary elements.

Why?

Because it takes some living to write what you know.

And it takes even more living to write what you believe.

The truth about old writers, published or not?

Writers, like fine wine, improve with age…

Getting Past the Stereotypes

Like most Horror writers, I started writing pretty early – toying with ideas when I was a teenager, heavily influenced by the many writers of our second Golden Age of Horror and Science Fiction in the 1970’s Publishing Boom. This was the time of the paperback – what book peddlers call Mass Market paperbacks, and what was then bursting onto the scene as “Pocket Books” – those small paperbacks for under $5 that were on racks and spinners in every grocery store, hospital, drug store and airport.

This was when fiction was so mass-produced that the impression was left on many a young writing hopeful that there was a living to be made writing fiction and an unending world of story to be savored out there. Who would have thought it was a phase? Who would have thought that pulp stories would be pushed out of our immediate consciousness and that book prices would rise precariously, nearly putting fiction out of reach entirely, and severely limiting our choices both professionally and as readers?

Sadly, the demise of the age of the Mass Market paperback came with another price: the end of the Mid-List Author, the complete and utter destruction of writing careers, of publishing careers, of…writers.

Many of us were left adrift with our dreams. We had nowhere to go… And when former industry standards are being laid off, let go, and dicked over, when top editors are being unceremoniously dismissed… What hope is there for unknown writers?

Most of us were forced to abandon our dreams, to sell them out for “real” jobs, coerced into believing that because “anyone can write, writing is no worthy talent.”

So we spent decades writing stellar letters, correcting CEO’s bad grammar, creating easy to understand Standard Operation Manuals and Employee Handbooks. Later, we did some awesome presentation materials, edited scientific reports for style and grammar, we made the coffee, we cleaned the bathrooms.

And all the while Stephen King kept writing, kept being published, kept proving that it’s the story, dummy… it’s all about the story…

So pardon my generation if we took a little while to find our way back to sanity. It only took being sold out by every generation that went before and half of them coming after, by losing our alternate “careers” and retirement savings and being passed over for real jobs no matter how often we returned to schools and collected degrees, and maintained GPA’s our younger classmates seldom did.

It took realizing that we have been had… that we have been cheated and tricked and bribed out of our real purposes in life…

It took realizing we sold out…

That means that yes, my generation is in the midst of an epiphany.

And no matter what other well-meaning folks or scheming cads intended by saying what they said to us… We did this to ourselves. We abdicated…

And we are all the more miserable for having done so.

I think if older writers have one message for the younger ones shyly coming up behind us it is this: stop listening to the “experts.” Especially today, the rules are being rewritten, flaunted, disposed of.

Make your own. Take your own life by the horns and don’t look down, don’t look back, don’t let go…

This means that just like this old Horror writing woman, you have to decide what will be important in your life: holding onto what makes you, you… Or pretending that “someday” will come before you die.

It means whether you are male or female, you cannot believe in stereotypes… like old people will only write fiction other old people will want to read (like filling a niche is a bad thing), or that old people can’t write fiction that relates to younger readers.

Pish tush.

It only means we really, really shouldn’t try to write in “modern” slang, to believe our own stereotypes about young people.

We Ancient Ones have had quite enough of the stereotypes, anyway. And if you are a woman, chances are you have been hearing them since you lost that 20-something baby fat and your front end alignment started needing annual adjustment.

The Eldritch Uprising

You may not have noticed, but there is a movement afoot. A bunch of old folks have gone rogue and started looking for “second” careers… (I am on number 39, thank you, Silicon Valley.)

We have realized that we are NOT our jobs, but our jobs may in fact be US. Who we are at the end of the day comes down to what we believe about ourselves, about happiness.

So many of us who tried to be writers just in time to become other cogs caught in other machinery have begun to come home. Just in time, too… because now we don’t need the Mass Market boom, or the classy sassy editor, or the big New York publishing machinery – it would be nice, but we don’t need it.

Because the same technology that vampirized our savings accounts and fake careers, has also provided us with the ultimate put-up-or-shut-up opportunity: self-publishing.

And ironically, what we hear from traditional publishing is a whole lot of whining about quality.

For sure, the price of self-publishing sometimes comes at the sacrificial altar of quality… But if we apply what we learned working in all of those endless clerical jobs about editing and presentation and layout and marketing…

Come on. You fellow old folks know exactly what I am saying… we already ran companies, offices, projects…

And if we can do them for others we can darn well do them for ourselves.

We just have to keep ourselves from getting giddy – drunk with excitement and anticipation, blinded by the possible rose-colored glasses of delusion.

Sure maybe we are J.K. Rowling’s long lost Literary Twin, the New Stephen King…

But most likely not.

So our rebellion must be tempered with humility. Don’t rush to publication. Don’t assume your writing is “good enough” without having others (who don’t care about your feelings) read it. Pay people to judge it. And learn how to fix the things that are found to be wrong…

As Eldritch Ones, we must realize that we may indeed have missed the boat in the quest to have our work to be well-read and to die famous, to quit the day job and live adequately on Social Security.

But we have not missed anything of Life. We still have the capacity to break barriers, to create something new in the vacuum of modern genre writing, to be… rebels. Old rebels, but rebels nonetheless.

Maybe that’s especially true for older women…Maybe nobody ever suspected you had Horror stories tucked away in your cookie-baking apron, or that you’ve fed every co-worker who ever got you laid off to the most unspeakable of monsters…

The bottom line is this: when writers get old, they write what they think. It’s a miracle. We stop caring what other people think.

 

Your writing is what you say it is, not what others say it is. It is also where you say it is… there is NO timeline, no age limit constructed by people with questionable motives and possible psychological issues of their own.

We also come to realize that by doggies we have opinions that do not have to conform, that we are as writers generally not conformists as a rule… that maybe, just maybe we should have been torching our own underwear with protest groups a long time ago instead of letting the Herd think for us.

Maybe that is how we turn it around. We realize maybe to our own perverse shock and joy that all of these years we really were feminists, or conservationists, or advocates for the unlikely and un-preferred.

And then things like Literature begin making sense… becoming even more mysterious, carrying codes and secret language we never before picked up on. And we realize with giddiness that we can write that way too…that it is the unwritten, unspoken challenge of the profession to do so…

Suddenly we realize we have actual opinions about the way things have played out in wars, in society, in the ways we treat each other right here in our own generational decades.

Suddenly our age informs our writing… and we cannot stop it.

And we begin to build monsters, looking for ways to say what we have by evolution come to realize: that we are where we are because we did not speak up when it counted, when it was for ourselves. We believed the mythology. And there is only one way to break out of our self-imposed misery…

We write. We are writers. That is what we do.

Don’t be surprised if there are tentacles.

We warned you.

 

In Search of the Interdimensional Beings of Horror: Where Are Our Writers of Color?

Most of the time, when we read Horror, we are simply looking to be spooked – to be creeped out, to be disturbed. That superficial-ism is largely the damage done by the 1970’s Horror Boom, when we rediscovered how very fun it was to turn out the lights and scare ourselves. I was there, reading and keeping myself awake nights by suspiciously regarding shadows that seemed to move when they should not.

It never occurred to me to look beyond the pages of the books I was reading to the race of the author, or to wonder why minorities – if they appeared at all – appeared primarily as characters in cameos, as early-plot monster-fodder, as the sinister representatives of secret, exotic societies of monster worshippers – but hardly ever as writers.

It simply never occurred to me to wonder why…

Waking Up the Sleeping Princesses

It is like minority voices and/or those of people of color belong to some Lovecraftian interdimensional place in undefined space, beings who we cannot see, do not engage with, and cannot relate to except when they reach through that thin veil of our reality to hurt or insult us.

But it also like we have fallen asleep in our own fairy tale.

Hmm…. Perhaps WE are the problem?

No, of course that couldn’t be it; after all, the Publishing Industry has long been telling us why things are inevitably the way things are – because the voices of color “simply aren’t telling stories The Market will bear…”

“In terms of my own justifications, I find marketing interesting—that’s in Apex Hides the Hurt and John Henry Days. The marketing of culture—how we relate to it, how it finds us—is something that preoccupies me.” Colson Whitehead https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/10/colson-whitehead-on-zombies-zone-one-and-his-love-of-the-vcr/246855/

Oddly, when minority writers turn up writing Horror stories, they are inevitably consigned to the general fiction section, pitted against the whole of Literary Writing as though it has already been decided that minority writers don’t write Horror; therefore minority writers must be Literary instead. So minority-written Horror becomes all about “slumming it” in the genres.

Way to insult the both of us – genre writers and Literary writers. Are we supposed to be jealous or critical of these “outsiders” come to create in our genre? And why is anyone making it matter?

Rest assured, ‘Publishing has its reasons,’ we are informed; most of them dollar-informed reasons.

And indeed, in Publishing there are many arguments made and offered up for why minority writers are not as prominent. For example, we are often told not as many of them are writing. But isn’t that in defiance of where so many of our stories came from?

What are the odds, I wonder… that so many minorities do not produce published writers because the seed of storytelling is not in their genes…

Talk about your fairy tales.

And to brand all minority writers as Literary because they can’t help but write about minority experience which includes any number of fine Literary Theories, is – well – awfully racist sounding.

Are we revising minority voices out of our fiction?

Every culture in the world has stories. Every culture in the world has had them ripped off in some manner or other by modern-day published writers… From The One Thousand and One Nights, to the Aboriginal Dreamtime to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, we have been ripping off campfire stories since Homo Erectus rubbed sticks together.

No, I cannot believe that there are not people of color telling stories meant to be heard, inspired as every writer is by older, traditional tales. Right now, as they always have been.

We are also told that minority writers tend to tell stories that are not-inclusive of the bulk of The Market… But isn’t that in itself the purpose of good writing – to write to and for an audience that is known? To educate the rest?

I mean it seems racist yet again to assume that I as The Market’s pristine representative want to be catered to, and see no merit in “Other” or “Ethnic” writing.

Aren’t writers supposed to speak to an audience they know firsthand and cherish? To provide them with a warm blanket of prose and poetry with which to endure and navigate the world? Pardon you for speaking for me… someone smart enough to recognize that the work in question was not written specifically for me, and here I am the Other, open to giving a story its own space to inhabit…

Furthermore, are Publishers really going to suggest that there aren’t enough minorities to support (at the very least) a healthy niche Market of publishing if They are not as The Market seeks to define Them?

And why is anything in today’s business environment a failure if it at least breaks even or makes a modest profit? And what about all of those sermons to writers about the quality of the work for the good of humanity if Publishers won’t stand behind it, loss accepted?

Then we are told that (just like with our own rejected writing) only the Best find publication – as though we should overlook but subordinate the implication that minority writers tend (like all of us currently rejected) to not be good writers.

But how many really good writers do you commonly encounter who cannot or will not fit the whimsical parameters of a fickle, one-trick-pony Market? Does artistic choice make a writer truly “bad” or “unmarketable”? Or just make The Market and its machinery lazy and unimaginative?

No More Excuses: Now We’re Talking Kids, Futures, and Dreams

We are too often told that their children do not read, and so they do not read as teens and then as adults… therefore, there is no real Market for any of their fiction which may surface, or it is too negligible to finance.

Now this really ticks me off.

And which summons the paradox: do minority children read less, or read less when they discover they are not being invited to participate as readers? And then would they read more if we gave them more relevant stories to read? Would that in turn lead to more adult readers? And fan the already hot teen market?

Clarifies Jonathan Gottschall in his book, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, “Children the world over delight in stories and start shaping their own pretend worlds as toddlers. Story is so central to the lives of young children that it comes close to defining their existence. What do little kids do? They do story.” (7) And eventually, they do us. So why are we processing writing through a filter of white culture that ignores all others?

And exactly why the heck do we always expect minority children to identify with white characters, and believe it either doesn’t happen or shouldn’t happen the other way around?

Debbie Weldon/AP http://www.phillyvoice.com/boy-trying-trick-teacher-haircut-goes-viral

“In this Feb. 28, 2017, photo, 5-year-olds Jax, left, and Reddy smile after Jax got a haircut similar to his friend’s at the Great Clips in Louisville, Ky. The story about the two boys and their racial harmony went viral online after Jax told his mother that he wanted to get his haircut like Reddy so that their teacher wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. “

Ah, don’t tell me children don’t get the real story…

But the rumors don’t stop there. They go on to sprout the theory that even if more minorities did write stories, the Market wouldn’t be able to interpret them – laced as they would be with cultural jargon and slang, and life-situations that The Rest of Us simply could not relate to… like Straight Outta Compton, the message would be lost on The Market, with no chance of Recognition or award; that the characters would not be identified with.

But at what point does something become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Wouldn’t it be truly amazing if we could learn something about each other through our art?

And that quickly, we are right back where we started…campfire myths.

Only this time, the Neanderthals are us.

Wake up, Sleeping Beauty.

The Publishing Industry is first an industry: it aims to protect itself by serving a market it perceives to want certain things.

It self-censors…

Maybe it even believes its own manufactured trends…

But it endlessly quotes what it refers to as “Market Demand” or “Public Interest.” Now, part of this is fairly and rightly rooted in a publisher’s need to make money, because making money allows for the payment of authors, artists, printers, editors, warehouse folk, transportation folk, bookstore folk, library folk, etc. But it is also rooted in a very dated idea of just who “The Public” and “The Market” really is….

For example, we hear how “people don’t read print books anymore” and that “people want certain types of books with certain types of heroes – read: stories about white heroes in white cultural situations…

My life has been so full of white people, I never noticed…Worse, I never noticed that people of color had little choice but to read the same…I’d like to think I was too busy reading, but the unavoidable truth is that somewhere in my own egocentrism, I chose to not-see.

And it is past time we started to realize that there is a whole universe of beings out there that we have been relegating to the fringes of our publishing dimension.

And some of them just might be…gods… Perhaps, crusty, cranky ones like Lovecraft’s versions…but perhaps ones whose voices we need to make us tremble in awe…

I look with the eyes of a white child raised in the 1960’s and 1970’s, whose father fought in Vietnam, and who accidentally encountered a Vietnamese-American writer like Violet Kupersmith, only because someone left her book at the desk to be re-shelved… It was Horror – told the old-fashioned way, cloaked in traditional myth and storytelling.

Her bio: “Her mother’s family fled the country by boat following the communist takeover of Saigon in 1975. Her parents met in Houston, Texas, where her father was a librarian and her mother was living in a convent… Violet attended Mount Holyoke College, where she injured herself many times playing rugby and began writing the ghost stories that would eventually become The Frangipani Hotel.”) http://www.violetkupersmith.com/violet/

I wonder what I am supposed to not-get as a representative of The Market. What was I supposed to resent? Why wasn’t she in my genre? We need voices like hers.

I get it.

I got it.

I loved it.

Like it or not, our world is changing. We are homogenizing, we are beginning to see enough value in each other that color is beginning to fill our families with rich, new cultural diversity. You can rejoice, or move to another planet.

The question becomes:

Are “people” not reading anymore because less people are exclusively living the white experience? Do today’s potential readers want to see themselves in books that are NOT being published?

One has to wonder. Even I wonder… And working in a bookstore, I can testify that yes, it appears that Publishers are right, and our customer base is largely white…

But then who wants to come into a 50,000 square foot bookstore and be directed to one tiny little section devoted to history, or sociology/cultural affairs, or psychicly deduce which writers of the rows of stacks are of a given color, and which of those were “allowed” to depict true characters and real experiences?

Listening to the Flutes and the Chanting

What is blatantly clear to me, nested all comfortable in my Horror genre, is that writers of color – especially in Horror – are excruciatingly hard to find.

From educational disparities, to vacuums of encouragement and mentoring, to “pressure” from the Ivory Tower (pun intended) to congratulate the self on “rising above and never looking back to save the drowning people who will surely overturn the boat,” people of color face unique challenges – additional challenges to being published that those of us in preferred shades of color do not.

And we don’t want to admit it because doing so makes us feel like that much more of a failure for having the advantage and still not getting the job done…

This is a tool our own race uses against us constantly to exploit our own sense of inadequacy, and to keep our heads turned, our noses to the altar stone. We are teased by an implied if not implicit wink and a nod… even as we are rejected. Always it is the fault of …The Market, the one god in this dimension whose whims select but a few for Eternal Fame.

Daniel José Older photographed by Ashley Ford.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/daniel-jose-older/

Says Daniel Jose Older in a wonderful essay on the matter titled, “Diversity is Not Enough: Race, Power, Publishing”:

“The publishing industry looks a lot like one of those bestselling teenage dystopias: white, and full of people destroying one another to survive.” (238-239)

It’s true: look at how the acolytes of The Market, the would-be priests to the beast, rip apart and publicly dissect even the successes in our industry. Look at the sour grapes and the bitter envy.

Meanwhile, locked outside are writers and readers of color – a whole ‘nother Market…

I don’t tend to think that this is insidiously planned, although I could be wrong. I think we have become insidiously institutionalized to believe that this is the Way Things Are and that Nothing Has Changed. We have been asleep at the wheel , waiting for the kiss of the prince– even if not especially – at the wheel of the Horror Van.

Horror has long been a Literary tool for expressing dissent with the norm, with exposing the horrors of real life by the manufacture and exploitation of monsters. It has been the venue for feminism and civil rights, for truth-telling and condemnation of unacceptable social behaviors. So why have the most powerful voices of those issues been largely silenced or minimalized to the point of pulps and limited interest publications? Why do we label authors and not works? Why do we not trust readers to find the works designed to speak to them?

I can’t help but think this is a self-perpetuated problem inherent to the Publishing industry.

Older continues, “The publishing industry, people often say as if it’s a gigantic revelation, needs to make money and as such, it responds to The Market, and people don’t buy books about characters of color. This is updated marketing code for ‘you people don’t read,’ and its used to justify any number of inexcusable problems in literature…” up to and including commentary such as “The Market, I am told, just doesn’t demand this kind of book…because white kids won’t buy a book with a black kid on the cover – or so The Market says, despite millions of music albums that are sold in just that way…” (237)

Older further states that when agents and editors are typically asked what they might do to mend the lack of diversity in publishing, the conversation degrades into a blame-the-victim mentality, deftly managed with comments such as, “the change is going to have to come from within those who are affected” which as Older clarifies, “is the language of privilege – the audacity of standing at the top of the mountain you made on the backs of others and then yelling at people for being on the bottom.” (237-238)

Where publishing argues that people of color do not read, perhaps the substantiating argument is backward. Perhaps people of color would read if there was something out there that they could relate to.

More importantly, why isn’t it important to publishing to inspire people of color to read, to improve reading scores because reading stories that matter to them naturally leads to reading more, more often and better.

We must admit, there is nothing – and I mean nothing – more frightening to white privilege than an articulate, well-read person of color who can aim their vocabulary with laser precision at issues of social concern. But it seems sad to think that this is why “of 3,200 children’s books published in2013, just 93 were about black people according to a study by the Cooperative Children’s Books Center at the University of Wisconsin.” (236)

And yet if the question is occurring to me, I have to wonder what people of color are thinking…

So how do we fix this…really fix this?

http://www.azquotes.com/author/44523-Judith_Ortiz_Cofer

Dimensions Are Right Next Door

Unfortunately, the editors and agents may be mostly right. Change will have to start with writers of color, and the motivations of their intended audience. But they are wrong to think it stops there.

It stops with US. It stops when we don’t see the potential rising right in front of us and give it a chance.

In an essay by Laura Tohe titled “The Stories From Which I Come,” we see how what we start in the classroom is framed by Publishing choices. Tohe states:

“In the early 1960’s I didn’t read indigenous writers; I didn’t know any existed. Every day at reading time, out came the further monotony of Dick, Jane, Sally, and Spot…Hearing and reading stories in English regularly, I thought only non-Indians were writers or could be, even though when I was twelve, I secretly longed to be a writer. What stories could I tell? Who would be interested in my stories? How does one become a writer? Instead I told my parents I wanted to be a pediatrician when I grew up.

I didn’t realize until much later that my writing life really began with my mother’s stories and the stories my relatives told as I was growing up. Not until I graduated from university with a degree in psychology did I stop writing ‘in secret.’“ (176)

Imagine how she might have soared being seen and nurtured as a young writer. And how many others just like her are in classrooms right now, or lost to other “professions” by hopeless default because their writing doesn’t “fit” a myopic, colorblind Market?

http://www.sonorannews.com/archives/2015/151104/comm-laura-tohe.html

I love Horror. I don’t care who writes it, as long as it scares me. I love it when I learn something in addition. I cannot imagine that I am alone, and if even a percentage of The Market as currently defined agrees with me, then why aren’t we all worth courting?

Perhaps publishers are thinking that now is just not the time to take that kind of a chance… But I can’t help thinking maybe it is precisely the time. Here we are in the bonanza of all marginalist times since the 1800’s, with antagonism and horror being done to so many people of color and differing religions and cultures… when coincidentally and suddenly The Market isn’t buying much of anything at all…

Why not give the new majority something to read, to talk about, to inspire and educate the rest of us? And why not market to this Market?

So where are our writers of color? Right beside us… Where they have always been – pushed into an alternate dimension by our own desperate jostling for recognition. The question is more accurately not about where they are, but why isn’t their own voice, their own way of storytelling valued for what it can teach the rest of us?

Pucker up. I don’t know about you, but I feel horrified. And maybe even a little cheated.

References

Gottschall, Jonathan. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Boston: Mariner Books, c2012.

Older, Daniel Jose. “Diversity is Not Enough: Race, Power, Publishing.” Manjula Martin, ed. Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, c2017.

Tohe, Laura. “The Stories From Which I Come.” Janet Burroway, Ed. A Story Larger Than My Own: Women Writers Look Back on Their Lives and Careers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, c2014.

Lovecraft, the APA & Horror: a Manifesto of the Greater Rocky Mountain Horror Writers APA

Writing is one of the most personally punishing of the professions we could choose. We learn in a vacuum, taught by other people who are also feeling their way along because those “in the know” haven’t a clue on how to tell us what they want without belittling our every effort.

So how do we “preserve” what we do if we cannot get published? When you are ready to look back on your Life’s Work, will it be with an eye to the next winter’s fire, hidden in an attic, or bequeathed to a reluctant relative?

Who will know what you wrote? And what if it’s not that it was “bad” – it was simply not in style when written?

The Same Thing Happened – to LOVECRAFT

I am not saying that we are the best judges of our work, or that an unsuspecting public deserves to be inundated with substandard creations. I am saying that – contrary to many editors’ professional opinions – we don’t have the magazines and pulp base that writers held up to us today had in their day with which to preserve at least some of their work.  “Trash” magazines, pulp magazines, anything with writing that is less than Stephen King, less than Bram Stoker Awardish simply do not survive. So to find a publication accepting of amateur work – let alone genre-busting work – is virtually impossible, effectively eliminating one source of what has been preached to us as traditional “dues paying.”

I am saying that the constant rise and fall of lesser magazines and so many publishing houses also means that there is nowhere for the average writer to find employment in the industry that teaches writers about writing, about editing, about the industry of writing. And this goes for writers of all levels of education. What used to be an entry-level job is now a “plum position” no matter how you slice it. And in many cases, it is becoming an industry once again famed for “who you know.”

I am saying that virtually every magazine out there today boasts that it is the best, and only accepts the best of the genre, that there is no room for midlist-type writers, for also-rans, no matter how fun or fair the story.

I am saying that if you get published on the internet, because of the nature of technology (and the subsequent ease in which you and everything about you can be libeled and slandered, edited, pirated, censored and/or deleted) your work may be altered without your permission or simply may never be found when the gods of S.E.O. change their linens, or the power goes out, and there is no print magazine to be discovered in a dusty old attic.

Talk about your tentacles… this is the one problem Lovecraft had no trouble with.

I am saying that as writers, we develop a massive catalog of our work –good, bad and in between – which fades in our file cabinets or which we carelessly trust to “live” on virtual reality clouds. I am saying that even if it all deserves to go nowhere, it is who we are and what we did with our lives. And sometimes – just maybe – it matters.

It certainly did with Lovecraft. And that is why I took a much closer look at how we almost lost him…

The Need For APA’s in Our Genre

There’s a reason I really like Lovecraft – besides his monsters, I mean.

I like Lovecraft because he was not a bashful, easily intimidated writer of our genre hopefully waiting to be discovered. He wasn’t exactly stable, either, but then how many of us are after a few years in the trenches?

Lovecraft was a perfectionist, a notorious grammar hound haunted by his own insecurities – once even asking an editor for his stuff back as a second thought… He knew that what he wrote was not the flavor of the day, and admitted that he probably only had a handful of readers who liked what he wrote.

That is important, folks. Because he also believed that those readers deserved a well-crafted story in which the writer was deeply invested – so much so that Lovecraft constantly preached (liked Literary Critics) that a writer should never write for the money…

And while many of us can point out that Lovecraft descended from wealth, he also descended from a degree of madness and landed in poverty like the rest of us. He did not make a living as a writer.

Read that again: H.P. Lovecraft did not make a living as a writer.

He made his living as an editor, and a ghost writer for other writers. Just like some of us work in retail while writing, or write blogs, or work at newspapers, or become contract employees for firms that need copywriters, or tech writers, or web content writers.

H.P., in his flawed way, was one of us.

So I became interested in his “story.” How did a writer of such modern genre importance keep his writing safe in a world that almost completely rejected him?

The answer: he joined amateur press associations – both the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA) , and the National Amateur Press Association (NAPA). These were associations created for journalists…and yet Lovecraft managed to use them for his own purposes… for fiction writers. Under his tutelage, his participation in APA’s morphed into what had to have been one of the first writer workshop groups.

He and several other writers from around the Northeast pooled together to write and exchange their writings for internal critique and internal publication in a newsletter. The object was to improve each other’s writing and preserve it in limited run publications within the group. The result was Lovecraft’s work being collected by co-member and dedicated fan August Derleth and later to be preserved by Derleth’s publishing company Arkham House – created specifically to preserve and publish Lovecraft’s work.

Read that again: without being in an APA, there might not have been the fandom of Derleth, the creation of Arkham House, and the rest of Lovecraft’s essays, letters, and work not published by Weird Tales.

Without Derleth and the APA, we might have lost Lovecraft…

Few “experts” of his time valued his work. Fewer liked him personally. Yet who do today’s experts thrust eagerly in our faces?

How do we know how many Lovecrafts are actually out there now? Being rejected? Maligned? Self-publishing?

The answer is: we don’t.

Any Lovecraft who might be out there won’t likely find out he or she was a Lovecraft until long after they are dead and their work is “discovered” lying in a heap of e-papers or discolored print. This is a sad reality of a life in the Arts: new developments that actually advance the genres of any of the Arts take time because Critics need time and distance to see the common thread that is advancing said genre. It simply cannot be done with any guarantee during the writer/artist’s lifetime. Derleth was right, but he also got lucky. Lovecraft, however, died poor and unrecognized.

There but for the grace of Cthulhu go we…

With the effect the National Amateur Press Association (NAPA) and the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA) had on his work, I am wondering why APAs fell out of favor… because in reality, they were working writers groups – serious writers groups. They were among the first to utilize writer workshops and peer review through critiques.

And in all other academically-infused professions, peer review is the way things are done.

I am not saying APAs are gone: both the NAPA (http://www.thefossils.org/horvat/aj/napahistory.htm ) and UAPA (http://www.amateurpress.org/ ) still exist, and new ones have cropped up for other genres… But I am saying that from what I can see they are often dysfunctional. One problem I see is that the sheer number of members tend to overturn the lifeboat. This is complicated by the fact that aside from the NAPA and UAPA, other genre APAs tend to be untended gardens where wild growth distorts the tight control needed to help every member writer. It’s almost as those either the ambition was not carefully channeled, or there is so great a need that everyone is rushing for the rescue boat.

Worse, I have been unable to find a standalone Horror APA…instead, our genre succumbs to invitations to join other genres. And I see a problem with this: how can writers from another genre productively critique Horror writing without understanding all of the tropes and conventions therein?

I am thinking it is time to revive APAs for the sake of the history of our genre. I am thinking Horror deserves its very own, dedicated APA.

Why? Because who is being published is not necessarily providing the body of work spawning the future of the genre.

You heard me. I am among the many who believe that The Best are not always the best… only that they are the best of those that made it across a given editor’s desk, that fitted the personal preferences of the moment – i.e, Lovecraft would not have been there.

This thought disturbs me. It keeps me awake at night. And let me make it clear I do not think of myself as a Lovecraft. But it bothers me to think that a Lovecraft may be out there right now – without his or her August Derleth to save THE WORK from oblivion.

Because it really is ALL ABOUT THE WORK – not the author…

The future of the genre has always risen from the muck of amateur writers trying to tell better stories… it is in the sloppy craft that comes with enthused storytelling, and the determination to improve upon that craft, with the ignorance and exuberance of youth. It is in the gritty plasma seas of writers who tell the kind of stories that prove they don’t know better and didn’t know they couldn’t or shouldn’t… It is in the warm primal pools of creativity that come in lives without editors and Critics… incubated in the minds of writers who have whole mythologies and lineages in their heads… tortured in the nightmares of the isolated and oppressed.

It scares me…how many good writers I have met, read, and seen vanish back into the woodwork working in retail, in fast food, in cubicles, cleaning hotel rooms, repairing my car… people who have whole finished manuscripts, screenplays, portfolios of artwork, graphic novels… people who don’t know if it is yet good enough, or how to take the next step…

Published writing – as wonderfully validating as it is – is just a collection of work that a handful of star-making editors are able to present to the public eye. It is not the whole of what is being written.

Those of you who abhor what you see being published…Lovecraft may be out there. He may be you…

And although I – like many – like to see what modern “experts” think is good, solid, capable writing in the genre, I also miss the tales told with campfire enthusiasm. I miss the stories like we used to see in Weird Tales and Amazing Stories.

Now that such magazines are being lauded for finding canon-elect authors of our genre, they no longer accept the same type of unknowns… they also are The Best Looking for The Best, if and when they revive and fold and revive again. We have no new Weird Tales… no magazine that is rich with the pulpy roots of who we are as a genre looking for the raw voices of new tales, no magazine just satisfied to put stories out there for simple digestion. What pulp there may be we cannot find before it fades…It is not that we don’t want it: it cannot survive in the vacuum that happens before its audience can find IT.

Writers cannot hope to make a living with modern magazine markets – who now keep your work for almost a year while they think about it, remind you that they only seek the best of the best, and are proud to pay a whole ten-spot for the privilege. Even if you are published, that paycheck doesn’t even buy a print cartridge.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t see the need to be published traditionally? That we didn’t put a minimum dollar amount sold on our right to write in our own genre?

That – like Lovecraft – we simply saw the importance of writing what we honestly felt and in pursuing the execution of it capably, certain in the knowledge that a handful of our trusted contemporaries might accidentally or on purpose be the source of our work’s preservation?

It is clear to me as an older writer that we cannot continue to depend on the technologically-imposed isolation that the modern world is heaping upon us to create stellar new works. On the contrary; with everyone shoving the whole educate-yourself paradigm in front of us, maybe it’s time we did exactly that.

Nowhere in our genre are we getting guidance, yet criticism abounds as it always did – in personal attacks and elitist organizations too great to assist in the training of our neophytes. So why don’t we help ourselves? Let the Elite be the Elite in their Elite Bliss. The rest of us have to work for a living.

So let’s band together. Let’s help each other. Let’s quit courting those who don’t want to give us the time of day. We don’t need attitude, we need constructive criticism, we need professional support, we need markets that really want our fiction, and we need other pairs of eyes to help us be sure we are worthy of getting there.

We need the attitude of Lovecraft. And maybe we deserve to keep our money in our own pockets by using the skills of each other to get what we each want.

That is what an APA can offer. It’s the choice of the members what will be the goals and what will be accomplished. It is a working writer’s group…not an exclusive rewards club. It is a place for writers to write, to meet and support each other.

 Never Fear, Lovecraft Was Here

It’s okay to still love traditional publishing and the myth that goes right along with it. But Happily Every After is pretty much a fairy story for most writers. The pyramid is still a pyramid and the point is just not big enough for all of us to perch upon.

Combine that simple truth with the convoluted messages today’s publishers are sending, and there is a whole lot of fiction being written in the large shadows of What Worked Before…

Part of the problem is that traditional publishing serves two masters: the fickle public, and the Call to Elevate Literature. The two could not be more dissimilar in their wants and needs. On one side, the very powerful lure of Hollywood and bestseller paychecks for all have the allure and power of drug money…with the equally damaging delusions and mixed messages. On the other is the confusion and disillusionment with the Literary establishment, with its lack of communication in not only what is desired, but how to accomplish it.

Writers are famously criticized for improperly overinflating the importance of magic in our writing processes, and yet the examples we are given as Literature are held up to the sun and moon as Divine Creations only True Geniuses could construe.

No wonder so many writers drink, have mental breakdowns, and get the other kind of Weird.

And what if that isn’t you? What if you have muttered in the dim glow of your computer monitor, “I don’t write what I am seeing published”? What if you agree that what you write doesn’t fit the creative climate of the three magazines taking submissions for the Best of the Best? What if you are shocked and/or appalled at what you do see being published – not because you think you are better, but because you expected a helluva lot more out of all that bragging?

What if you write in a subgenre that is suffering through professional and critical doldrums? What if you cannot find a place for what you write but you still want to master your subgenre and want to push the envelope a little?

All of these things contribute to your personal Hall of Rejections. They contribute to the isolation, and the fear you have that when you die, nothing will remain of all of your efforts. Maybe you are not looking for fame (although the fortune sure as heck wouldn’t hurt), but to be the best that you can be, and maybe birth something new and unusual…

Keep reading, if you are he or she.

We also hear how overwhelmed publishers, editors and publishing venues are… that positively everyone thinks they can write and by golly sends their masterpieces to them…that they are drowning in so much substandard matter it is a pure miracle anyone is ever fished out of the muck to be “discovered.”

We also hear that there are a wondrous amount of “good” authors that must be routinely passed over for the “great” simply because publishing is expensive and positively must earn a decent return for the publisher’s investment… that there is simply not enough in the publishing coffers to experiment on as many newer authors as in the “recent” past (i.e., the 1970’s and 1980’s).  Previously fair-performing, decent midlist authors were laid off, after all, as well as so so many good to great editors in all genres.

Where does this leave a writer like you?

Everyone – including those same publishing professionals “explaining” why they are so busy and you are so unpublished – points to the internet, to online magazines they will later condemn publication in, to subsidy and vanity publishing, to self-publishing and rival independent publishers as options. And then they will condemn those choices for all but the few who capture national attention and elusive bestsellerdom.

So do you abandon the traditional route in absolute frustration and total ignorance of where you are on the scale of potential success and pony up the funds to self-publish or co-publish? Do you fade into obscurity? Or bet the rent on one last story contest?

I’m telling you that the state of publishers, editors, and ever-materializing and vanishing venues is not your fault. For one thing, if some of us didn’t provide the stark contrast between good and stellar, between fair and truly incompetent, how would the real geniuses stand out? And more importantly, how would we learn the ropes, since everyone is so busy to otherwise teach us?

But I am also telling you, this is not a new situation. Writers have historically been here time and again. The only difference is that for most of us, our collective “recent memory” of the history of writers in publishing has been all about the rise of publishing… and here we are in the decline of it.

But there is something to understand here.

Tech people like to talk about adapting, when tech people tend to obliterate every choice that does not involve something they are selling. Here’s the fact: publishing is not going away – but it has had to slim down due to the masses “buying into” the mythology that reading is done, and print is dead.

Neither are true. But what is true is that the 1970’s and 1980’s are dead and will likely never return. Gone are the big author advances, the multi-book contracts, the writer who lives big on one great success. So today if you want to be a writer, you have to mean it. You will probably do a lot of it sandwiched between minimum wage jobs, personal challenges, and clinging to dreams of discovery. But many of us – whether we are “good” or classically pulp, or simply not good at finding our way in today’s confusing world – are going to have to make peace with a certain level of anonymity in our chosen profession.

Never fear. Lovecraft too, was here.

The Rejection Merry-Go-Round

We’ve all been there; and sometimes – perhaps more often than we’d prefer – we might even have belonged there – among the rejected. But the problem with rejection is that there is no standardization of the process – except in the cold anonymity of it, the simple “not for us” default. It makes it difficult for a writer to get honest feedback: should he or she find another career, or is it a matter of learning how to tweak an otherwise salable piece?

We’ll never know, because – we are told—editors are busy people. Apparently, writers live lives of leisure and incredible wealth by comparison. And only genius talents – who are of course born rich –  should be allowed to see print. Apparently, we should deduce the psychic sonar that goes along with a rejection – from the “you almost had it” to the snort and sneer – and behave accordingly, so we can stop gumming up the publishing machinery.

So then I have to wonder, how hard is it to create a standardize piece of paper with critical answers to writer’s rejection questions, all lined up next to boxes the rejecting editor could instantaneously check?

Wouldn’t that be of more service than haphazardly plying publications with different stories harboring the same technical problems?

Just sayin’…. I mean if time is really of the essence and you really know why you are rejecting a piece and aren’t afraid to or are longing to say so…

Simple issues like “wrong format” or “sent to wrong editor” or “proofread before resubmitting” or “craft issues” or “genre issues” or “no supportable story arc” or “overdone concept” or “no visible concept” or “editor personally dislikes” versus “not our type of story”…

Adding boxes like “worth revising” “please revise and resubmit” or “salable but not to us upon revision” would be additionally helpful. “Future submissions welcome” versus “More work on technical and craft issues needed before submitting further pieces” would also be helpful…even if not everyone read them or attended to those issues. Many of us would. Especially if we kept seeing the same boxes checked time and again…

Not to worry, Lovecraft may have had it worse… In a world where the publishing community, writers and editors and critics knew each other more intimately, many writers like H.P. lived with stinging criticisms and sometimes very personal attacks.

This was why he valued the APA. He knew that his fellow writers were on his side, knew something of and appreciated what he was professionally exploring. They also were writers. They knew when something wasn’t working and could deign to tell him. He would not feel under any obligation to “do as he was told” but to take all criticisms under professional advisement.

Wouldn’t that be great to find without having to fork over six figures for a master’s degree? Without having to sacrifice virgins in the hope that your next sale would be enough to qualify you for paid membership in the Professional Association of your genre?

Well, if you are a Horror writer you don’t have to.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

I’ve had it. Really. So I decided to do something about it.

As of October 2016, I am founding the Greater Rocky Mountain Horror Writers – an APA. The domain grmhw.org has been purchased, an email account established at grmhw.org@gmail.com , and a preliminary website set up at https://grmhwapa.wordpress.com.

It’s going to start small, most likely. It is not going to be regionally restricted, but it will be regionally located in the Rocky Mountain region. It will be based in my office in my writing room until it no longer fits, if that should ever happen. It will start with a small website on WordPress, and if it grows and is able to sustain a requirement for dues (not to be more than $25) then a larger, maintained website will be designed. Publication will ensue within the group, which will have chapters if locations or subgenres need to be served.

This is a wait and see proposition. I am taking names and email addresses. Please visit the site available October 1. You –no matter who you are, no matter where you write Horror – are invited to join.

Knock Knock. Who’s there? Cthulhu. Cthulhu who?

 

 

 

Crisis on the Leng Plateau: the Struggle for the Soul of American Horror

Maybe it’s Lovecraft’s fault… After all, he did it so well.

But lately I figure somewhere there must be an explanation as to why in contemporary American Horror, the weakest point of the story tends to be the monster. I’ve fallen for blurbs, for cover art, for Famous Horror Writer recommendations. Yet time and again the monster just isn’t scary, or eerie, or haunting. If I come away with any manner of emotional displacement, the author (or the concept) tends to be from an earlier period of Horror history, or not to be American at all.

Could it be that we are so excited about what we hope to write that we forget WHAT we are writing? Are we that ignorant of our own genre history? Is it possible that we don’t even know what genre writing is anymore?

Monsters – By ANY Other Name

The genre of Horror has actual history… it has a bloodline and a marked route of exploration and developmental growth. During its earlier years when the term “Gothic” or “ghost story” would no longer adequately encompass what was being written, writers and editors and publishers began calling what was being produced by new and confusing names – Supernatural Fiction, Spectral Fiction, Strange tales, Weird tales, Terror, and Horror.

True to form, everyone had a different interpretation of definitions and definition boundaries even then. And this confusion continues a bit to this day, but now more in the Critical quarter – because remember that it is the Literary Critic whose job it is to decide how to categorize Literature for the sake of Literary analysis. And we now have actual Critics in our genre corner…

With changing times, the former discourse between writers of subgenre fiction seems broken, its writers (new and seasoned) now scattered about in genre isolation with less publication venues to offer dedicated subgenre havens, fewer informed editors and actual examples of subgenre fiction. So the rest of us just tend to pronounce ourselves as writing this or that with no real forethought or thorough Literary understanding of the definitions we use.

But today we are blessed to have S.T. Joshi and China Mieville in our genre corner. And it is the coming of these two Literary Critics that has lifted our genre from the stage of Literary argument (is Horror Literature) to the stage of Literary analysis (which Horror is Literature and why). Of the two, I find the most useful published Criticism by S.T. Joshi (although I really would like to see something more and intense by Mieville). And it is Joshi who has started me thinking – well, Weird.

As part of his job as a Critic, and one of the first in our genre, Joshi has taken the necessary step of attempting to tackle the definitions of genre and subgenre work in Horror and to nail them down. In his book The Weird Tale, he takes the opportunity to present an argument to clarify his rationale for chosen categories in the genre, and to open the discussion on how the genre should be Literarily argued. What is exceptional here, is Mr. Joshi’s attempt to include the modern Horror reader and writers in this discussion.

He does not “talk down” to genre fans and writers; he simply explains how he sees the parsing of the genre for Literary analysis and –most importantly – why he believes his rationalizations are either correct or ripe for discussion. Yet isn’t it awkward that most of us have no idea what Joshi is talking about? Or know that he is talking? This ignorance of our own literary progression has left our imaginations (replete with monsters) high centered on a plateau of mediocre fiction…a Leng Plateau…

I’m saying that the reason we don’t know is exactly why our monsters are in crisis, why our writing has lost its authoritative voice, why the British seem to have a strong sense of place in their fiction and we seem to be nomads. We have disconnected with the past; we are balloon writers floating above the plains of Leng…

It is also why we have lost our Horror section.

We have allowed ourselves as writers (sadly, sometimes innocently enough) to be led by the public, by publishers’ guesstimates of what the public wants, by editors who might be coerced into finding the next Stephen King instead of the next genre-changer. Worse, we have allowed ourselves to be led by the promise of Hollywood and merchandising. We have committed the greatest sin in Lovecraft’s eyes: writing for money…

Okay, so let’s be clear: Lovecraft desired publication, he submitted stories, he was occasionally paid for them, he lived off an inheritance and a wife as long as he could, then was reduced to editing other authors for a living. Lovecraft was not saying he was against publication. He was saying one doesn’t change the story to get it published. He was saying a writer needs to pursue the higher art offered by the story, no matter how many rejections that equates to; that a writer should be true to his or her vision. In this case, he is firmly in alignment with the Literary Critic.

Yet how many of us actually have cultivated a vision for our writing? How many of us think in terms of legacy instead of simple solvency?

The problem is, no one is out there teaching us about the history and mechanics of Horror. No one except our very own Critics right now. We need to read them. We have artistic decisions to make.

Golden Age writers knew what they were writing, where it could find an audience, what publications were their choices… Today, we just write, and submit to any publication that we can find. Most of us cannot categorize ourselves, let alone our fiction, because to categorize our work would be to narrow our choices, our sense of opportunity.

Example: I recently visited a website for a regional writer’s group, looking for Horror writers. What I found was the comment “is willing to write Horror.” WILLING to write Horror?! Where is the writer who unabashedly is PROUD to write Horror?

Sometimes I think we lost our own section in Horror because many of us have lost the understanding of what we are intending to write. And marketing departments are only too happy to pronounce the demise of genre writing.

So why does the very thought cause us an instinctive knee-jerk reaction? Is it because the meandering away from genre conventions is an accidental misstep and that we never meant to abandon genre? Yet is that also why our monsters have lost their teeth and grown human appendages where tentacles should be? Do we know how to get back into formula?

My Weird Tales Epiphany

Maybe it’s time we listened to our elders – the genre greats who started a conversation that just seemed to evaporate in the 1990’s altogether, and which has been resuscitated in part by S.T. Joshi. Have we forgotten the rabid dedication many authors and editors once had to the argument over terms and subgenres?

Today if a writer doesn’t research the genre personally or trip over key essays chances are he or she just hasn’t a clue what has gone before and where we are now. For instance, since the genre began to grow in popularity in the 1930’s and 1940’s, there have been arguers and defenders of the usage of the terms Horror, Terror, Supernatural, Strange and Weird to define the many types of writing we may do.

Did you even know that there has been an internal unrest about what our genre should in fact be calling itself for quite some time?

This is the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Because if you write Horror, you are on the battlefield up to your Muse. Shouldn’t you be at least aware of your place in the tradition? The British (our main competitors) seem ever to be…

While a large part of writing – most specifically drafting – is drenched in magic and mystery and wonder, in the end we need to know as ­authors of a story exactly what we are trying to say. Then we need to revise to be sure we are saying it. Only then can we be certain that the genre is worthy of its name – whichever one is ultimately chosen.

The name “Horror” has taken a beating for a while now. It and “Terror” in its turn has been commandeered by current events to the point that many are reluctant to use it. It has driven genre fans in droves back to more “antiquated” terms like “Weird” and “Strange” to defend and salvage the genre. But I think we shouldn’t be letting “world events” distort our genre to that effect. I think the conversation of what we are writing is germane to what we choose to call it. And I don’t think we can call it something if we don’t know the definitions of those terms.

Horror itself has been keelhauled for being an emotion. Why, ask its detractors, do we want to name our genre with an emotion when almost all other genres are described by nouns or adjectives? I believe that the word – emotion or not – encompasses all that the genre tries to inflict upon the reader – an emotional response. In that capacity, it is like Thrillers, Suspense, and Romance. It is asking the brain to explore dark corners, to revisit the primal place of fear, terror, revulsion, disgust, dread – you know – horror.

But some genre experts (those who have duly earned their stripes as writers, editors, and Critics of the genre) sometimes feel otherwise, that Horror is more about gore and dismemberment – fear of our fellow man or human-ness than that which merely disturbs. They will argue for other terms – like Weird. I’m thinking we are arguing over semantics here, over connotation and denotation... But what is important is agreeing on what our genre is and should be called, what its conventions and formulas should include or exclude. There should not be any question in a writer’s mind.

Enter S.T. Joshi, Literary Critic and the best friend Horror has in Literature right now. Joshi, perhaps the world’s greatest contemporary expert on all things H.P. Lovecraft, has embraced the Weird. Like his object of research, he has come to believe that Horror is more a subgenre of Weird fiction than the other way around. And he uses Lovecraft to explain why. Whereas according to Lovecraft “The crux of a weird tale is something which could not possibly happen” (Joshi 6), Joshi states, “I begin my own study with a rather odd assertion: the weird tale, in the period … (generally 1880 -1940) did not (and perhaps does not now) exist as a genre but as the consequence of a world view…” [his emphasis] (xiii).

Most assuredly, that is the Literary Critic in Joshi talking… because it is the presence, the omniscience of a world view that elevates a work from genre to Literature. And if Weird fiction is more commonly Literature than average Horror fiction, then is it not the tree from which the apple falls?

You can see how quickly this conversation becomes interesting and relevant to all genre writers and fans. It is why Joshi has put his work out there. Discussion is the key to movement… to breathing life into the Critical process.

But it is also integral to creating new Lovecrafts. We all have to be on the same page. And at a time when we seem to have lost our national genre compass, shouldn’t we get on board with this very basic Critical idea – the naming of parts, the re-establishment of genre, the enforcement of boundaries and celebrating rebellions against the very same? How else can we commit to writing a story we can encapsulate with a category name if we don’t know the terms of surrender?

Believe it or not, many of us as Horror writers have never really considered this, and it may be the deserving reason we get rejected.

Here’s a thought based on that statement: to elevate a story beyond the genre, to be genre-changing we must first be able to write genre.

Can you? Can you structure a monster based on a subgenre? Do you know what that means? I am not so sure we do, because I don’t see any establishment figures laying out the formula they claim is criteria. I see allusions to formula, partial lists of conventions, scattered tropes…I do not see a book or website or rule guide dedicated to defining the genre as only this and never that. A writer should not have to piece genre formula together like a quilt, over decades of rejections and gleaning gems from essays and editorial forwards and interviews. Yet only the subgenres of Weird (pardon me for the classification liberty) and ghost story/Spectral fiction have easIER guidlelines to find…

Editors have pronounced themselves too busy. Universities are teaching and preaching against genre. Workshops are a gamble, writers groups may “accept” but don’t generally specialize in genre writing, how-to’s have Gone Hollywood. What’s a genre purist to do?

If you want technical assistance, you need a Critic: read Joshi.

If you want written examples, read Golden Age genre writers – read Weird Tales from the day.

That’s right. Under the scales and leathery wings of the greatest of all Literary Horror monsters (Horror being the overarching term I am predisposed to), beats a heart of pulp.

Get thee to a collection of early Weird Tales… I recently found a copy at a used book shop, one edited by famed genre editor Marvin Kaye, who back in the 1990’s also edited several anthologies of the subgenres including Terror, the Supernatural, the Unknown, Ghosts, Witches, Devils and Demons… I remembered having read many of the stories when I was a kid, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I assumed I would read them, smile in remembrance, and move on.

Wrong.

I was awed. Stunned. My imagination was RE-filled with the passion that started my love affair with the Horror genre. How did we lose this? I wondered aloud. How did we lose this awesome ability to tell tales that in mere pages can keep us up and night and hungering for more?

Is it because authors in those days had a bevy of magazines whose “bar” was set a bit lower to acquiring and keeping a basic readership – not set to making an author’s or an editor’s Big Break, not set to doubling its subscription base annually or it is a “business failure,” not reliant on burying writing among ads just to stay in print… not set to the equivalent of tossing a bottle out on the ocean so it could be “discovered in its excellence” by the masses who would theoretically spend lavishly to keep it on the internet ocean?

Is it because it was “just pulp” and not overreaching to call itself high Literature, its writers happy to just spill its monsters into cheap prose to see what else might hatch? Is it because no matter how poorly writers were paid, writers could by being prolific, actually make a poor living doing it?

Who knows? But those very circumstances led to some of the absolute greatest writing of our genre – some of it now admittedly Literature…

It also inspired contemporary writers – like Stephen King and Ramsey Campbell – our current models of success with totally different styles. It set the standard for Horror in Literature by revisiting Poe and Lovecraft, Machen and Blackwood, Dunsany and Bierce. It made all of us want to be Horror writers…

Calling Central Casting

To perform at our best, to exercise the boundaries of genre and flirt with the meaning and power of Literature, we cannot be trying to manipulate our fiction so Hollywood can use it. We cannot be motivated by fame and fortune. We cannot allow ourselves to be told we either “write for Hollywood or for Critics.”

It’s not about starving. It’s about producing ART, not mass producing drivel. Because if that is what we are teaching ourselves to write, then we roundly deserve the stinging criticisms of editors and Critics. We are rolling our monsters out on a rack time after time and expecting a different result.

Stop the insanity!

We need to write for ourselves. For our genre. For our audience.

When you read fiction written for you, there is no doubt; you are sitting next to the campfire, the storyteller is looking at you right in the eye, and the monster is drooling just at the edge of the darkness. You can feel his breath on your neck, imagine his fangs tearing at your flesh…and anything is possible…even the impossible.

So are you writing Weird or Horror fiction? Or are you perhaps writing in the subgenre of Terror or Strange tales?

And if you don’t know, shouldn’t you be finding out? Because right now our monsters are suffering from a clear identity crisis. We don’t seem able to write them without it looking like we are attempting a parody or poking fun. American monsters leap, crawl, and ooze onto our literary theater with the impact of a stage magician pulling a very tired old rabbit out of the hat. We have lost something besides the element of surprise.

Surprise! Storytelling is an art that has its own rules. I say again…look at pulp.

Stories fail for so many different reasons. They should not be failing because we glimpse the monster, or we rolled him out on a rack. That should be a moment of pure Terror. Horror. Weirdness. FEAR.

Surely, we can still manage that…

 

References

Joshi, S.T. The Weird Tale. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, c 1990.

Montague, Charlotte. H.P. Lovecraft:the Mysterious Man Behind the Darkness. New York: Chartwell Books, c2015.

Weird Tales. Marvin Kaye, ed. New York: Barnes and Noble, c1988.

Recommended Websites:

Weird site: http://greydogtales.com/blog/?p=1336

Horror site: http://www.thisishorror.co.uk/category/columns/

 

Horror and the MFA in Creative Writing: Vanity Degree or Elevation of Genre?

I’ll be the first to admit my head was turned.

I was about to graduate, drunk with ambition and that sense of promise a newly minted college degree inserts into the psyche. It had been a long and perilous journey – the muse had almost drowned in other peoples’ opinions and swamps of guilt trips. But I had finally realized that writing wasn’t a dream – it was a vital part of who I am. Several professors had suggested I seriously consider pursuing a Masters in Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing. And I found myself seriously considering it.

At the precise moment a person realizes that they are a writer because they are a writer and not because someone else gives them permission, an insatiable hunger forms – the hunger for craft.

I know, I know. Most writing elitists would never believe it: the proof is in the pudding, they would say, most novice writing stinks — genre or otherwise. But amazingly enough, when a person starts to write they inevitably become part of a very old argument:

Can great writing be taught, and if so, should it?

Born This Way (or Not)

Believe it or not, this is actually part of an argument tossed about by Literary Critics – those crazy fiction fanatics whose job it is to dissect prose in the academic pursuit of the secrets of invention. They have ignited a firestorm of passionate discussion about what makes a writer a Writer of Literary standard – are they born with it? Is the birth of a Literary Work a spontaneous act of innate factors valued above the talents of a common writer who needs to be taught?

Critics are indeed Purists…the High Priests of Prose. They love and protect Literature, and see themselves as the most likely to find that answer.

But I wonder sometimes how far they think about what they are really saying.

If one looks at author biographies for Literary works, what one finds consistently is a group of  elite writers who grow up in some kind of informed community – other established Literary Writers, teachers, activists, printers and publishers, poets, religious groups, artists, philosophers…critical thinkers of their time.

In those groups the young writer is nurtured, mentored, emotionally supported. And being raised around the humanities boosts the moral imperative to create and to create powerful vehicles of communication and thought.

A far cry from what we offer young writers today. Or old ones, for that matter.

Today, we expect Literature By Divine Intervention… prodigies only are the real artistes… Everyone else is a hack.

No wonder most of us have fled to the genres. Why bother to try if your pedigree is going to be a factor?

Arts – of which writing is one – flourish in community more than in isolation. We learn from each other — successes and mistakes. We learn and share technique, we withdraw from the world and hang in enclaves that carry us through the creative doldrums and celebrate our victories as part of a community. We mentor each other, experiment with the limits of craft.

Except that today, most writers don’t. We get ‘A’s on papers early on, mystifyingly amazed looks from teachers, vague comments that encourage but tell us nothing, and are left to fantasize about writing…not to learn about it. We wind up eventually believing the myths created by people who either do not understand the tidal pull of the arts on the soul, or who (for our own good) wish to kill it. We work in jobs that eviscerate our imaginations, and use us up until there is nothing left to use to write – not even in our “spare time.”

We spend years trying to understand whether we are writers because we need to write, or whether we are writers only if we sell $20’s worth of fiction… Which sounds easy until you can’t find $20’s worth of magazines to submit to (i.e., that are accepting submissions and/or accepting them from unknowns). Just sayin’…

And that conundrum pushes us further into private hells that have no exit except in writing…so we do. We continue to write and practice writing badly because no one teaches us how to write well. No one teaches us how to properly construct a story, develop character, follow arcs, adjust tension, manage dialogue, or even defines what Literature IS and what it DOES.

We spend hours trying desperately to be in awe of The Classics and Literature Reading Lists, trying to scry from oceans of antiquated prose why everyone thinks this is GOOD…to figure out what teachers are REALLY looking for in term papers and literary analysis assignments….

We don’t know because none of this is taught.

In the Big Rush to not contaminate the “pool” of possible prodigies, we have thrown away generations of writers who just needed sustenance and common instruction in technique.

How sad is that?

But amazingly, we have the CIA to thank for considering education to be the key. In fact, the story is that if it weren’t for the paranoia of government officials about the Soviet Union outperforming the U.S. in the development of national Literature, we would never have gotten the Iowa Writers Workshop and its illustrious and original MFA program (number one in the country, mind you).

Literary-worthy Writers were examined, allegedly three were chosen, and their styles became the models for American Literature to emulate.

And it was exactly that discovery about style that began to un-turn my head about the MFA.

Yet this MFA position has taken the pendulum to the other side of the argument… Given enough money, ANYONE can be a writer by learning to write.

Maybe we just need rescue from these particular academics for a few moments…

Because after all of my research – and I did a lot of research – I was left with the question for MFA programs nationally: why are you teaching style instead of technique?

Writers come in various sizes of style. But we all have to learn technique.

Not so, think Critics… talent is innate. Yep, it is. But if no one ever taught me to hold a pencil and shape letters, how to form noun + verb + adjective, where and when to place a comma… So go ahead. Take away the crayons from your prodigies and let’s see how much Art you get.

Good or bad, I already have a style, thank you, and young writers deserve to find their own within and between the ghosts of the whole and entire scope of Literary choices. I don’t mind learning about a successful Literary Style, but I don’t want to be identifiable as a certain MFA program graduate – like I was a suit rolled out on a rack. I don’t want to write like someone famous….I want to write like me.

Needless to say… doubt began to erode my MFA dreams. I found myself stalling my old professors who kept asking where I had applied for an MFA.

The Assault on Speculative Fiction in MFA Programs (or Why I Remain a Genre Writer)

For me, part of the problem is that I love and write genre…maybe not strict genre, but genre nonetheless, which I discovered begets yet another complication for MFA students: one of the other kind of style. I am fine with being a genre writer. I like genre writing, although I also like Literature and enjoy my genres with the occasional Literary overtones. I am certainly not ashamed of writing Horror – at least, not anymore.

For years I found myself apologizing for what I do and who I am (“I’m sorry…I write Horror”) watching hopeful enthusiasm turn into crestfallen faces that had a serious similarity to the expression of disappointment. But these are people who don’t understand the genre, and worse – who seriously underestimate the Literary contributions of Horror. For centuries, Horror has been a constant driver of Feminist/Gender Literature and what used to be called Freudian but is now called Psychoanalytic Literature. It lurked throughout the Gothic Romances, exquisitely tortured the Victorians, exploded all manner of social issues using monsters and ghost stories.

Horror – even modern Literary Critics finally acknowledge, has the occasional work that exhibits the highest Literary merit. It is a genre with tremendous Literary potential, even as it produces the most generic and luxuriously sloppy pulp. Horror has range. And it has writers that ride that range.

Yet academia – being a product of government-style structure – moves ever so slowly. Educators (like MFA instructors) often spend their entire lives in the system, sometimes self-reinforcing their personal beliefs and rejecting new ideas that challenge their own. So instead of arguing the merits of both, they dismiss and insult…and most of the MFA program graduates who have shared their experiences in recent books reviewing MFA programs have stated repeatedly that instructors and mentor and professors had belittled, trashed, forbidden and condemned genre writing as…crap.

While it is admittedly not always Literature – sometimes joyously so – it is not “crap.” It is genre. It is formula. It is common at worst. It is also storytelling, albeit sometimes bad storytelling. But then, pulp writers are not trying to write Literature. Venom needs to be reserved for those who might roundly deserve it – and that most certainly is not a genre writer sitting in an MFA class hoping to learn better craft and Literary Technique.

So why do we have this abyss between Literature and Genre? What should be a peaceful and tolerant co-existence has been fanned into a Style War. And maybe there is so much genre-writing because writers can figure out genre writing a heckuva lot faster than they can figure out Literature and Literary Criticism.

Imagine if Literature and Literary Criticism were actually taught in high schools? Wouldn’t that education automatically bleed over into the genres? Up everyone’s game?

Is THAT what Literature Purists are afraid of? A little competition?

Well wheel out your prodigies then. It’s Junior Rodeo on…

The current environment of genre-bashing that seems rampant (if not bragged upon) by MFA programs is off-putting to say the least. And while many programs may prefer that it be thus and prefer to communicate that folks like me are not welcome unless I am willing to join in the genre-bashing and convert to Literature… I have to question their motives.

And that made me wonder if I DID set aside genre — just for the duration of the degree, just to learn craft – would it ruin my voice and inject the ghosts of dead American Literary Greats into my prose which I might not be able to exorcise? In other words, would it ruin writing for me?

Ultimately, I chose not to take the chance. Wrongly or rightly, I don’t want Raymond Carver in my head…Or any spark of the alleged other two (again, the rumor being that all MFA programs are modelled after three preselected American Literary giants, and the helpful application hint being that a writer needs to understand which writer which program emulates in order to find the best “match”).

I mean I’m sorry but all of a sudden we are talking about idols and how to mimic them – and not about craft, technique, LITERATURE. THEORY…. All after fielding a cost of some $35-50,000 for the privilege of sitting in a classroom…you know – where open-minded learning is supposed to take place…

How can I possibly be a rebel if you are teaching me to be a conformist? Even if we are talking style?

Again, I chose NOT to take the chance. Even when I found ONE program that proudly announced it supports Speculative fiction writers. Because it proudly denounced LITERATURE.

It’s like watching a tennis game. And all I wanted to do is learn better craft. To infuse my genre writing with Literary elements and improve as a writer. Silly me.

Silly Critics if they think that this academic solution is any kind of solution. We don’t need more polarizing thoughts and behaviors.

We writers – genre and Literary – need to be on the same side as the Literary Critic, who needs to be on the same side as writers who want to learn to be better writers.

We can’t help each other if we set up schools to teach novices how to insult each other in some giant argument from ignorance.

Proof in the Pudding (or, You Get the Monster You Create)

So I had begun to think that the authors of The Portable MFA were right: a writer just might be better off saving the money one would use for an MFA in Creative Writing and buy a better computer, more printer ink, more 20-lb white bond paper.

And such thinking was further reinforced when I tried an experiment of my own – reading the published works of MFA graduates. (Here, working in a retail bookstore became an advantage. And I purposely read “first” books by MFA grads whose programs I neither knew nor researched.)

The result was shocking. Shockingly disappointing. Sometimes even…bad. It was like reading genre fiction without the “spark” of genre…watered down, lackluster yet eerily “perfect” in construct…I couldn’t really argue with structure… But most of the time characters didn’t “pop,” prose didn’t engage, and I had to force myself to finish even ghost stories. Ghost stories for Poe’s sake! I mean didn’t these people read the British canon of Literature?

Like the Critic I am starting to wonder if we are doomed…

And I was left wondering how these writers managed a publishing contract. Perhaps it was one of those “networking” sessions with agents and other publishing professionals so heavily promoted as a benefit to MFA program participation. Maybe it is the high influx of MFA grads who (thereby) get jobs in publishing who “grease the wheels” for fellow MFA grads… Several books I used for research made mention of exactly that sad possibility, and which in turn in my mind further tarnishes just such a degree.

Doesn’t that reduce the lofty intention of the MFA from one of increasing our Literary output to a sad paper mill for a vanity degree?

And shouldn’t it matter to the writer IN an MFA Program that what gets published gets DESERVEDLY published?

I admit that I did not research the published fiction of MFA grads who went back to the genres… But if what I am seeing on the bookstore general fiction shelves is any indication of what MFA programs are churning out, then I am FINALLY glad that so much Horror has been re-disseminated into other genres. Because I don’t want any association with what I am seeing – not as a Horror writer. And no worries about Literature, either…one course in university –level Literary Criticism taught me that most of that MFA-produced stuff isn’t going anywhere but the remainders pile. One INTRODUCTORY COURSE in Literary Criticism, mind you…

No harm, no foul? I think differently. Because that was the final nail in the MFA coffin for me.

Maybe I should have title this essay “How I Decided Against Pursuing an MFA in Fiction…”

I only know I don’t want to be published at any cost. I want to be proud of what I write and be satisfied that it was good enough to pass the muster of traditional editing (from line to content). What I don’t need is an albatross hanging around my neck…an albatross that should have stayed in a drawer somewhere.

If that means no fame and fortune for me, at least I won’t live my life in embarrassment. Because there is a LOT to be said for the value of the editorial talents of the old major publishing houses. Especially if we have now simply created yet another Good Old Boy’s –type system that has nothing to do with Literary value.

Ironically, a lot of us unwashed masses laboring in the genres have THAT in common with Literary Critics. Isn’t it time we joined forces? Isn’t it time we got our game back?

I mean… not to be inflammatory, but in the name of healthy competition…The British have…

Just sayin’…

 

References

Affording the MFA [blog} https://affordingthemfa.wordpress.com/

The Gotham Writer’s Workshop. Writing Fiction: the Practical Guide From New York’s Acclaimed Creative Writing School. New York: Bloomsbury, c2003.

Kealey, Tom. The Creative Writing MFA Handbook: a Guide for Prospective Graduate Students. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd., c2008, 2005.

McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, c2009.

MFA vs NYC: the Two Culture of American Fiction. Chad Harbach, ed. New York: n+1 /Faber and Faber, c2014.

The MFA Blog. http://creative-writing-mfa-handbook.blogspot.com/

The New York Writer’s Workshop. The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. Cinncinati, OH: Writers Digest Books, c2006.

Olsen, Eric and Glenn Schaeffer. We Wanted to be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, c2011.

Wiedbrauk, Eileen. Speak Coffee to Me [blog] http://speakcoffeetome.blogspot.com/

Embrace the Horror: Life After the English BA

So I was walking around my bookstore, straightening shelves and adjusting product when a customer suddenly approached me and confessed regretting every English degree she had achieved – right up through the Ph.D.

Nothing had turned out like she planned. People got in the way, had foiled her at every turn, and now she was questioning every move she’d made professionally. Never, she’d said, would she allow her children to major in the Arts and waste their time. Never.

Know what my thought was? (Prepare for irreverence…)

Then you’re not using it right.

What IS an English Degree?

An English BA is a wild, carefree trip through the Humanities. It allows the student to explore their undecided side… perhaps fiction, or philosophy, journalism, or psychology, religion or art, history or politics, law or logic. It allows the student to try on a few hats, test their interests and abilities, see if anything “calls” to them.

The problem is, sometimes something does. And in today’s world, there is nothing like a degree in the Arts that translates into poverty for most of its graduates.

Why is that? Because we no longer value people who critically think in this world. Thinkers are dangerous people. When they see something that is wrong they are wont to try and change things. And there is usually Big Money and wanton Power attached to things done wrong.

If you want to kill an army, you need to cut off the supply train. (See? I was paying attention in history class!)

Arts people are the canaries in the mines. Often times we make bold, scary-to-parents statements. We rattle cages and in some countries we risk our freedom or our lives just to make a statement.

Nothing scares people who love you more. Because they want you to have a nice, cushy life in the suburbs, and hope that you will be (in better ways) a nice little carbon copy of themselves to carry on the magic and fairy glamour of American Life.

And Technology is out there promising you that you too, can be smarter than everyone else and with the right career choices in math and science, can live in the Big House, safe and away from those huddled masses of unemployed, trouble-making Arts people.

But getting a degree in a Tech field as an Arts person really solves nothing. Tech people know their own, and if you are an Arts person in Wolf’s clothing, you will not be embraced even if you get the job.

Today’s world does not want thinkers, it wants drones. Like the bee kind… That work to death and are tossed out of the hive at Christmas (only they will call them lay-offs).

An English Degree then is a degree in Critical Thinking. You will be taught how to and be required to dissect everything you read and everything you think. You may find out you don’t think like you thought you did. You may discover something deeply important about yourself by what you dislike or prefer, in hearing a tone of voice in your own verbal arguments.

It also teaches you how to express those thoughts and opinions – graciously to not offend, or disguised as metaphor for your secret audience, or angry as a polemic. It shows you how to use words or pictures or cultural beliefs to communicate….anything.

And it teaches you that people are complex biological factories of precarious thought and driven by powerful, life-altering emotions; that we are subject to our neurobiology and our psychological quirks, religious views or lack thereof, limits or expanse of geographical and economic horizons…

A degree in English is a degree in seeing, describing, illustrating, comprehending and communicating with…people.

No wonder the tech world dislikes us. No one abhors the vacuum of html space like an English major.

(Why? Because it’s not the troll online you have to worry about. It’s the radical terrorist invading your country and condemning your right to speak freely, to converse, argue, condemn, endorse, explore and experiment… because if your words, your actions, or your ambivalence made him or her feel justified, then to reduce the number of terror candidates you better know it and know how to unmake him or her and whether or not you should…a task that is not on a computer game.)

An English major will teach you that words matter. They have the capacity to incite, to wound, to inform, to heal. It will teach you to see and recreate the difference.

How You Know You’re An English Major

You know you’re an English major when you’re just standing on the street corner and you see things. You see poverty, injustice, inequality, and homelessness in the richest country in the world – when you work forty hours and can still see homelessness from your back porch and bank account. You know you’re an English major when you can’t wait to read something for yourself – whether it is a novel, a political treatise, or the Trial of Socrates. You know you’re an English major when you’d rather read Dickens or Austen or Morrison than the latest Star Trek novel (even though you have an extensive Star Trek novel collection).

You know you’re an English major when you’ve tried not to be and you keep running screaming back to the English department, breathing a sigh of relief when you are finally seated in a rhetoric class because you know the definition of rhetoric.

You know you’re an English major when you love language, the way it works and sounds and looks on the page, when linguistics excites you, when you read dictionaries and thesauri. When you love saying “thesauri.”

You know you’re an English major when you can read and appreciate an opposing viewpoint because it is well stated and well argued. And especially if it changes your mind.

You know you’re an English major when you know you are nothing else. So stop letting other people make you feel ashamed. Own it. Do what you were meant to do and stop looking for wealth (Most of us aren’t going to get it anyway: you might as well be happy.)

How You Know Doing Something Else is Worse Than Everyone Else’s Disappointment in You

One thing the world has taught me is that for every job out there, there is someone who has made it their dream and life’s purpose.

And there is nothing worse than living someone else’s dream… Unless it is applying for the job that you don’t get (no matter how much it means to you) because someone who’d rather be doing something else gets the job instead. Or maybe it is working with that person…

But work – when it is done right – takes a lot out of you. What you will have left at the end of the day will determine what kind of life YOU have…family? Kids? Career plans? House? Decent car? Best-selling novel?

The sad truth is that if you are an Arts person, the economic deck is stacked against you. Not only has the American economy morphed into a tech-loving, art-stomping beast, but it has lost its middle class and that necessary plateau of jobs needed to support people who kind of don’t know what they want to be when they grow up. In this economy, you either “have it” or you “don’t”… and there is a good chance that if you are an Arts person with an English degree, you will be not in the right category. Who knows how long this will last? How many shifts flipping burgers have your name on them with or without a degree?

However one thing is for sure: happiness is the only way you’re going to survive whatever lies ahead. Dreams are the pathway to finding that happiness. I’ve gotten a lot of forty-hour mileage out of dreams.

Maybe there aren’t enough jobs in publishing right now, or enough opportunities to support all of the writers already out there. How do the rest of us fellow-writers and English majors know you aren’t The One who will shock it all back into sense? How do we know WE aren’t?

The only thing we DO know, is that when and if the world ever comes back to its senses, if there is any chance at all that you can make a living writing or with your English degree…you will need to be prepared. Do it now.

Really. The Zombie Apocalypse could happen at any moment. Wouldn’t you rather have your English degree when it does?

What You Can Do About It

Number One: Stop listening to other people who want you to be as professionally miserable as they are.

Number Two: Trust that somewhere out there is your ideal job and that your English Degree is required for it.

Number Three: Don’t stop until you FIND it.

Number Four: If you don’t find it, consider creating it.

Why You Should

The Arts are not dead.

And while you are toiling away at that data entry job, or trying convince yourself that you can do I.T. better than a person whose dream it is to be an I.T. person… other people out there have been honing their Art…and making money at it…working their way to some measure of fame. You – on the other hand – are still waiting to write in your spare time, hope that by Divine Intervention instead of practice you will do as good or better with your one offering to the world (if you finish it), and still believe in the myth that even one published book equates to a lifetime of riches.

The hard fact is, any career in the Arts requires years of study (not necessarily academic study, although that can help make you a better student of the Arts). There is no free lunch, and prodigies are indeed a rarity (contrary to the message of social media).

You may have talent, or you may not. You may have more talent than people getting published or not. Success in the Arts is shaped like the very same pyramid you find in the regular workplace, sometimes with plenty of cult priests with butts to kiss perched on the steep slopes, sometimes with rare Oracles you can barely hear dangling off a brick, and sometimes there is that pebble in the sand – the editor who likes your style and talent enough to gamble on you and approach their boss on your behalf. But you must always remember it is a pyramid, because not everyone is going to wind up on top – even if they climb over you to get there.

So you must have faith in your goal and your plan for getting there. Stop waiting for angels to descend and carry you topside. You are going to have to work harder than you’ve ever worked before, and probably do a lot of self-education to grow professionally.

A good start is always a BA in anything. But the BA in English is a nice, round humanities degree. It is the perfect base degree for many Master’s degrees, and thereafter for Ph.D. degrees. Getting a BA in English for a writer is boot camp. It will help you decide how far you want to go with your education (in any field), while teaching you about your passion and your ability to listen to and apply criticism – something you will need even as a novice writer submitting stories to magazines, book editors, or agents.

Keep in mind there are actual jobs out there that require a BA in English – such as those still remaining in publishing, Library, retail bookstores, technical writing, journalism, education, Literary Criticism – and many of which do require higher education thereafter.

But also keep in mind there are a lot of English majors applying for those, and there is the same kind of (let’s call it “competition”) for those positions as there are for other jobs.

So you need to know you. What do you want? Because it should never involve a single other person’s interests. Because you are going to have to live with yourself no matter what you choose.

Choose wisely. Choose what makes you happy, even if you have to struggle against the tide the rest of your life. Trust me, the tide is elsewhere too. Pick your own tidewater. If you’re going to make it up that salmon ladder or get eaten by bears trying, it might as well be for what’s in it for you.

How do I know this? It took me thirty years to get my BA in English. And I don’t regret a minute of it.

What I do regret is all of the time I lost following other people’s suggestions for how to make myself less of an English major and more of a cog in someone else’s money machine.

Would I still be working at the same retail bookstore for lower than stellar wages? Probably. Only now I would be a manager with a retirement plan instead of an economic refugee with a lost retirement and no chance of strolling about my own bookstore with a coffee cup and a wry sense of humor.

I am sorry I did not have the courage when I was young to be what I am – a writer. Of Horror fiction. Who works in a bookstore. I am sorry I didn’t have the courage to seek out teachers of fiction and fellow writers in workshops and conventions. I might still not be big-published, but I bet I’d be writing better fiction, and that would make me happy no matter how many shifts I worked.

No, I would never discourage anyone – especially a young person – from a life in the Arts. That IS life. Gritty, poor, honest. What could be a better inheritance than a life well-lived – the one that leaves YOU loving YOU.

So yep, I told this lady wandering my bookstore I had not a single regret about going back to college for my English BA. I told her why.

She asked if we had any openings…