The Mirror's Gaze

© Thomas Harris“Here is a list of terrible things,
The jaws of sharks, a vultures wings,
The rabid bite of the dogs of war,
The voice of one who went before,
But most of all the mirror’s gaze,
Which counts us out our numbered days.”
― Clive Barker, Days of Magic, Nights of War

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I did promise a while back that I’d return to the theme of horror fiction, undoubtedly my favourite genre. As a result, this somewhat horror-related post will be lacking the lighthearted humour of my usual fare, so please skip this if you’re not in the mood for heavy and ponderous (you can’t even imagine how much I wanted to add a “LOL” at the end of that sentence).

It’s going to be frankly impossible for me to write this post effectively or accurately unless I come clean about certain autobiographical facts, or full disclosures, or whatever journalistic convention dictates they’re referred to as. For anyone who has read my book, this won’t exactly come as a shock. For, existing somewhere in the mostly buried and certainly haphazard detritus of my personal history is a barely legible doctor’s note (aren’t they all?), diagnosing me as suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and clinical depression. Now, here and elsewhere, it’s been endlessly discussed and largely established that creativity tends to be accompanied by emotional and mental turmoil, so I’m not going to recross that familiar ground this time around, fascinating though it is.

No, I want to address something else. I belong to numerous online writer’s groups, from Facebook to LinkedIn, and I am noticing a recurring question that frequently gets asked by novice writers, but perhaps surprisingly, not solely by novice writers. Usually presented in a tentative manner, it basically asks whether certain painful topics are off limits, whether writers ought to refrain—through simple good taste, perhaps, or more worryingly, as a duty toward readers’ sensibilities?—from discussing certain painful aspects of the human condition, or even whether writers should avoid certain words (to me, the latter is akin to asking a painter to ignore specific colours). Now, I generally avoid these conversations as I literally don’t have the time to indulge in the lengthy handwringing that almost inevitably follows. And, quite honestly, I am not partial to being misjudged, as so often occurs on all sides when this topic is raised. So, in place of my usual silence in those conversations, here’s a placeholder for my views on this, henceforth to be considered my definitive position. After which, you have my permission to go do something a lot more fun than reading my tortured and over-earnest opinionating.

So, what of those opinions? In one sense, they’re simple: censorship, even self-censorship, is anathema to a writer. Anxiety and second-guesswork over the reception of anything you create will only shackle and smother you. Write the book you want to read—even if zombie gnomes, electric can openers, and baby nuns feature heavily—and damn the torpedoes. Now, obviously, I’m not talking about children’s books, here; fluffy bunnies drenched in gore and cursing like inebriated sailors is never a good look. Well, hmmm… at least in that context it isn’t. But let’s assume we’re talking about adults writing for adults. In which case, I don’t think anything should be off the table. And I mean anything. Some of the best and sharpest writing I’ve read has refused to pull its punches in this regard, from Clive Barker’s Books of Blood to Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian to Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones to Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door. These books deal with cannibalism, cruelty, murder/rape, madness, child abuse and serial murder. Not exactly pleasant stuff. They are definitely upsetting. But are they well written? Do they stand comparison with other good or even great literature? Would I recommend them? Absolutely, yes to all of the above. The thing is (and not that this should matter, either): all evidence points to the fact that these authors are well-adjusted, generous, and compassionate people. Stephen King himself, who once wrote about a man who literally ate himself, is a wonderful human being, by all accounts. Conflating their subject matter with their personalities is as wrong-headed as inferring Shakespeare was a sadist (or a racist!) for describing Iago’s treatment of Othello. Or for assuming that Marshall Mather’s worldview is identical to that of Slim Shady (remember, people did this. Quaint, huh? Probably not, if you were Mr. Mathers). Such readings are depressingly shallow. It ought to go without saying that a writer can explore scenes of unmitigated horror without endorsing their real life equivalents. And in most cases, the writer’s outraged humanity is the fuel behind such explorations in the first place. If I hadn’t been hurt in certain ways, my own scrutiny of our tenuous connections and adult sorrows alongside their roots in childhood trauma would probably ring hollow or skewed or inauthentic. Perhaps they do anyway. But, as Stephen King so succinctly said once, “We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.”

Yes, there is exploitation. Yes, there is insensitivity. Stupidity, even. Those are matters for the writer and his or her conscience. And for readers to embrace or shun as they see fit. But freedom of speech is essential to a democracy, and especially to our current very flawed versions. Without even that, freedom itself would only further adopt the worryingly illusory mantle it’s already begun to.

Again, so I am not misunderstood: I’m not telling you what to do. As a writer, you might have your own (personal, religious, ethical) limits with regard to what topics you allow yourself to explore. That’s fine. Some writers aim only to entertain, and I mean it, there’s nothing wrong with that. I may disagree with what I see as misguided morality but I respect your right to it. But those of us who dig around in the entrails sometimes need to feel our discussion of the world’s sharper edges or bleaker corners will not be interpreted as endorsement or approval of such horrors. I have always believed that art mirrors life and not the other way around. Those of us damaged by events in our personal lives (I’m hazarding a guess that’s most of us) need this blighted avenue in which to explore our various wounds. Who knows, without that opportunity, and without the misplaced judgement of the misinformed and the judgmental, maybe more of us would end up being the Hannibal Lecters of the world instead of the Thomas Harris’s.

Look, it’s a lonely enough profession. I sometimes think I write to combat the loneliness more than for any other reason. It’s an attempt to self heal. Okay, I just ran out of steam, so I’ll end on another fairly pertinent quote by our old friend Mr. King:

“Alone. Yes, that’s the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn’t hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.”

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A version of this post appeared on Indies Unlimited on August 3, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

The Good, The Bad, The Indifferent

"When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk." © The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, 1966I’ve discovered a potentially fatal flaw in my personality. I mean, outside the more obvious ones (no need to point them out in the comments section, folks). Put simply, I like genre and I like literary. In musical terms, I like teen pop and modern classical, Spears and Stockhausen, Avril and Arvo. But this post is neither a demonstration of my “amazing” pop cultural eclecticism nor a reflection of my mental health anxieties; we like what we like, after all. No, this post is an attempt to reconcile two apparently opposing impulses in the world of writing; the aforementioned (alleged) impasse between genre and literary fiction.

For anyone who has attended a university-level creative writing course, even a single workshop, this dichotomy might already have raised its slightly distorted head. I majored in English literature and I’ve also attended a one-year certificate course in creative writing at a local university, and I don’t regret either of them. My purpose here is certainly not to trash the rarefied air of academia. Far from it. Because I genuinely learned a great deal about writing—about what works and what doesn’t work, about the inner alchemy and the outer pragmatism of this eccentric world—from those two experiences. Not to mention the confidence boost of sharing your work among motivated and engaged peers as deeply in love with the written word as you, alongside the equally essential practice of reading in front of an audience so you don’t forget that word’s spoken nature either.

But. There’s a prevailing wisdom within such circles that genre is inferior to literary fiction. It’s either implied or stated overtly. That one is entertainment and one is art. One is frivolous and disposable, the other profound and eternal. (Interestingly, we hear the same, equally dodgy “received wisdoms” in music criticism. A received wisdom is usually an unexamined one, after all.)

I’ve thought about this long and hard. Which isn’t especially easy for me. So bear with me. I write in many forms. I’ve written music reviews, poetry, many styles of fiction, nonfiction, journalism, articles and essays. Although I’ve been told my own writing style is “literary”, and believe there is plenty to admire in that category, I don’t ever intentionally set out to write “literary” fiction. I love the writing of Ian McEwan, which is considered predominantly literary by those who define such things, but I also read Stephen King’s predominantly genre material every bit as avidly.

I sometimes wonder whether we’re overly restricting ourselves.

Let’s, for the sake of argument, deny that a firm delineation between the two even exists. Why would one contain more “art” than the other? Fiction itself is a genre, alongside its siblings and cousins poetry, lyric prose, creative nonfiction, journalism, etc. Likewise, writing itself is a kind of genre, alongside music, dance, theatre, film and the visual arts in general.

See where I’m going with this? I hope so, because I don’t.

But seriously, why would we arbitrarily assign less significance to any one particular level or manifestation of “genre”? We don’t tend to ascribe a deeper resonance to writing over, say, dance. Or sculpture over theatre. Nor do we elevate detective fiction above, say, science fiction, other than for admittedly subjective reasons of personal taste. Then why this line drawn between “literary” and “genre”? What does it mean, and what does it say a) about us, and b) about the works we assign to each category.

My experience has been that between the extreme caricatures of navel-fixated ivory towers on the one hand and outright penny-dreadful hackery on the other, most fiction writers fall into some great amorphous blob somewhere in the middle. Who is to say whether Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is genre (horror, western, adventure, western horror adventure) fiction or literary fiction? And in a very real sense, who (aside from literary critic Harold Bloom) the hell cares? We either love it or hate it in the end, which is great, and perhaps the only failure, ultimately, is the work that leaves us indifferent. Similarly, we can take an acknowledged genre writer like Dennis Lehane, and ask why his works would necessarily lack any more of the beauty (or truth, or mythology) of art than those of [insert currently celebrated literary darling here]… And, like I say, I’m not even all that sure we can use “art” as a legitimate criterion or signpost here, anyway.

Indeed, there have been times in the history of English literature when the distinction was as plainly meaningless as I’m arguing here. Stories and storytelling were not politely revered in some airless grand hall, but were populist mass entertainment, gaudy and messy as medieval marketplaces, and this is nothing to be ashamed of. Without such street theatre, the single greatest practitioner of the written and spoken language, William Shakespeare, would probably not have emerged from his decidedly average education and lower middle class roots. Similarly, without the Bardic tradition of songs, poetry may not have evolved. Why would we wish to unravel all that—the music, the words, the rhythms, the art, the entertainment, the colourful cultural detritus both good and bad—so we can score meaningless points over something that ought not be a contest in the first place?

Perhaps language itself is the problem here. As in, we’re using it wrongly. For the sake of argument, let’s take science fiction as an example. There is hack science fiction and there is good science fiction. No one would argue this. Perhaps, therefore, we should be merging our terms and speaking of literary science fiction. In other words, if something is written well, its subject matter and even genre conventions become less important. Good, bad, indifferent. These are the only distinctions that matter. And quite honestly, I reserve more opprobrium for the latter than I do for the first two. I prefer full-on bad to bland and safe. But that’s just me.

Anyway, apologies for getting all philosophical this week—I certainly don’t claim to have had the last word on this and may indeed revisit it in future posts, and welcome further thoughts, or even mass ridicule. Although, be gentle with me, I’m far more fragile than I look. But hey, in the interest of fairness, let’s just say there’s a hint of truth lurking within the distinction. In which case, we may give the last word to Stephen King (whose work has fallen into either category over the course of a long career), who memorably and respectfully summarized the difference between the two in a way that avoids any declaration of war:

“I have no quarrel with literary fiction which usually concerns itself with extraordinary people in ordinary situations, but as a reader and a writer, I’m much more interested in ordinary people in extraordinary situations.” [From the Afterword, Full Dark, No Stars, 2010]

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A version of this post appeared on Indies Unlimited on May 4, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

I Have No Idea

So you got this deadline for your latest blog post/writing assignment and all you can hear in your head is a sound resembling the distant whine of an overclocked laptop crossed with Mariah Carey conducting elaborate experiments involving helium and canary embryos. Essentially, a combination of blind panic and a sheer lack of anything resembling an idea. You briefly consider opening your carotid artery while gargling with paint thinner before saying to yourself “way too dramatic”, so you dial it down and rock back and forth making mewling noises instead.

But the ticking clock is relentless, and something has to give. This is your last chance to become a mother… oh, wait, different story altogether. Sorry. Got my notes mixed up… So, anyway, what do you do? Well, you consult my newly patented Top Ten List of Idea Generators and Writing Exercises, is what! In the spirit of heroic cartoon supermice everywhere, here they come to save the day…

1. You are an international jewel thief. You have just fenced enough ice to re-sink the Titanic. You are flush. You receive a phone call in which a heavily disguised voice says “I am stranded in the Philippines. I am not Stephen Hise, never even heard of him in fact, but just so you know, the awesome website Indies Unlimited could sure use some serious funding right about now.” What do you do?

2. Push an elderly lady into traffic and describe the aftermath. An alternate version would be to record the sound of an audio-assisted crosswalk, find a home for the visually impaired next to a busy street and wait for the residents to emerge, at which point you press Play on your recording device. Remember to describe the ensuing events in loving detail. It’s the hilarious aftermath we’re looking for in particular.

3. Ponder this simple question and then write down your thoughts: why is the word “phonetically” not spelled phonetically? And, for a bonus: why does “succinct” have two syllables? Do you think words can commit fraud? Did Emily Brontë completely make up the word “wuthering”? And, anyway, how badass is it that she has umlauts in her name?

4. Eat something you hate, such as boiled wombat elbows or rancid yak butter. Make sure the very thought of it already induces a degree of nausea. Follow it up with a plate of traditional English cuisine. Yes, that is redundant, I know. Drink a bottle of cod liver oil. Follow that up with a few shot glasses of hot sauce. Nurture some genuine anger in the pit of your stomach. (If you find you are unable to do this, turn on FOX News.) Locate a trampoline. Bounce on it repeatedly. If you possess sufficient athleticism, perform a few backflips. If not, keep bouncing. Dismount. Find a giant canvas and stand over it. Or squat, your call. Let nature take its course, in whatever way it chooses. Then, in 500 words, describe the resulting art work.

5. Write a Petrarchan Sonnet that includes the following elements: a banjo, a dispirited clown, two befuddled paranormal investigators, a lighthouse keeper with bipolar disorder and a lukewarm vat of seahorse droppings. Please remember: use iambic pentameter and an octave of

a b b a a b b a

and a more flexible sestet of

c d c d c d

or

c d d c d c

6. Free-write longhand for ten minutes. No cue, no topic. Just write. Do not take your pen off the paper. Go!

7. Write a series of short literary mashups. Why should musicians have all the fun, after all? For example, mimic the writing style of Ernest Hemingway while employing the subject matter of H.P. Lovecraft. You may call the final product The Old Man And Cthulhu, for instance. Or combine the style of Cormac McCarthy, perhaps, with a Dr. Seuss theme: “The sun did not shine. The Cat in the Hat raised his face to the god-abandoned day. Thing One was uncoupled from its shoring, everything grey in the world’s last dawn. Oh Fish in the Pot, he whispered. Oh Fish.” You get the idea.

8. If you write horror, try a chick lit story. If your preferred genre is paranormal romance, write a western. The world needs more Gucci zombies and levitating cowboys, after all.

9. Write a long piece outlining your thoughts on why JFK’s assassination might have been connected to an obscure standard bearer in the Duke of Wellington’s army at Waterloo. Be sure to include the rare yet incisive commentary by one Dwight Z. Finkelheimer, who famously postulated that the bell jar in Sylvia Plath’s famous novel was actually a metaphor for hair metal band Motley Crüe’s insistence on delivering tanning beds to orphanages, all of which culminates eerily in architect Frank Gehry’s blueprint for cloning Lee Harvey Oswald, providing him with a blowgun filled with toxic paperclips and setting him loose amid a throng of Jesuit priests riding gloriously oblivious and slightly dim alpacas, the prized wool of which will one day clothe the very standard bearer mentioned previously. Woah. I don’t know about you, but I got goosebumps.

10. Notice that writing is not an art or a science; it’s an exercise in sheer futility. It is a slow, quiet, lonely torment; less a long, dark night of the soul and more a longer, grey afternoon of the spleen. It is reminiscent of the feeling you might get if a beaming child-faced serial killer peeled off your skin a layer at a time while reciting the complete works of obscure Scottish poet William McGonagall and sprinkling apple cider vinegar on your exposed, suppurating flesh. Reminiscent, albeit not exact. It is possibly the world’s most stupid human activity, and considering those activities include Australian dwarf tossing and British shin-kicking contests as well as Japanese game shows featuring a Snooki lookalike and a man disguised as Rasputin performing disquieting rituals inside giant hamster balls, that’s got to be pretty stupid. It all just makes you want to cry for your momma, not only now, but every single moment that remains of your miserable life. Now, once you have absorbed this, go away and write a counter argument, providing rich examples of why I am wrong, while being careful to note the fact that none of this will matter to you in less than a hundred years, since you will be dead. Which may be ugly, but it’s the truth. As ugly a truth as the one about Mother Teresa and the one-legged insurance salesman in that Calcutta alleyway. But don’t write about that. Write instead of how the mind goes, of its inevitable ruin. Oh look, a flower. Florentine death squads. The Mitt Romney remix. Castigation. Fuel. Aphids.

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This post was originally written for Indies Unlimited but was deemed unsuitable. A version of it appeared on the website BlergPop instead. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

Ten Endings

I want to talk about endings. How important they are, obviously; but more because I simply want to share some of my favourites. A lazy post, in a way, but perhaps a fun or enjoyable one. I love a well-crafted passage of writing, wherever it occurs in a book, and most who love language would probably concur. Yet more satisfying and occasionally beautiful still are those final lines of a novel that both summon and summarize the themes and rhythms of the entire narrative in a handful of incredibly wrought, startling, sorrowful exquisite, elegiac sentences.

Some quotes stand alone, gorgeous synecdoches; others require the full context of the preceding novel. No matter. Beauty is beauty, and in my own writing I use these as perhaps unattainable benchmarks for how I want my language to develop and move throughout a piece. I say unattainable, because for me a sublime failure is still more interesting than a bland success. If I had written anything even approaching the brilliance of any of these, I might just retire happy… or not. Yeah, probably not. I offer these without commentary or void even of my usual lame attempts at humour. Savour them and please add your own favourites in the comments section.

(It ought to go without saying, really, but here there be spoilers!)

1. “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” — J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

2. “Then there are more and more endings: the sixth, the 53rd, the 131st, the 9,435th ending, endings going faster and faster, more and more endings, faster and faster until this book is having 186,000 endings per second.” — Richard Brautigan, A Confederate General from Big Sur

3. “Everything had gone right with me since he had died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry.” — Graham Greene, The Quiet American

4. “We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.” — Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

5. “He fits himself around her, her silk pyjamas, her scent, her warmth, her beloved form, and draws closer to her. Blindly, he kisses her nape. There’s always this, is one of his remaining thoughts. And then: there’s only this. And at last, faintly, falling: this day’s over.” — Ian McEwan, Saturday

6. “Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember. Think of the vine that curls from the small square plot that was once my heart. That is the only marker you need. Move on. Walk forward into the light.” — Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

7. “So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.” — Jack Kerouac, On The Road

8. “I lingered round them, under that benign sky;  watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.” — Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

9. “Hill House itself, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.” — Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

10. “It had ceased raining in the night and he walked out on the road and called for the dog. He called and called. Standing in that inexplicable darkness. Where there was no sound anywhere save only the wind. After a while he sat in the road. He took off his hat and placed it on the tarmac before him and he bowed his head and held his face in his hands and wept. He sat there for a long time and after a while the east did gray and after a while the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction.” — Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

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A version of this post appeared on Indies Unlimited on February 24, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.