Excise

Felt like sharing an old poem I submitted once to a Canadian website named Poets Against War. I am wary of poetry as I hold it in such high regard that I feel completely inadequate in my admittedly rare attempts at the form. There's a purity to it that is almost intimidating. Anyway, this one is decent, nothing more. But since I am committing more time to my blog (two or three faint and hesitant cries of "yay" drift from the peanut gallery), I need to come up with more content, so consider this an adequate placeholder, no more, no less.

Excise

It's in the rubble

dubious patterns

for those eyes becoming fluent in

the patois of woe.

It's in the drinking men

in dark bars

who never offer their backs

to the bright doors.

It's in the quick flinch

of children

the sudden narrowing stutter

at a backfiring car.

Emergence. Chaos into patterns.

Seismic events

at first merely shudder.

Recognition

begins with one blink

of a clear eye

soon to be jaundiced

as the queasy map of infection

around an untreatable wound.

It's in the blood and the bond

the heart the hearth

the fond slow burn of the kill

it's deep although

(listen, still)

we may yet have something new to learn.

The Uber Cannons of Snark

© Miramax Films, 1994Okay, I’m going to go full douchenozzle in this post. You may know me for my mildly snarky yet oddly gentle sense of humour, but enough’s enough. Time on this occasion to unleash both barrels of the Über Cannons of Snark.

No messing about, here are eight dick moves for writers, and once you’ve read them, please stop doing them. Now. And I’m turning the barrels on myself, too: I’ve been as guilty as anyone with a few of these. Well, a couple, at least. Okay, one of them.

8. Quit trying to earn your book nerd cred. Telling people you don’t own a television and that you don’t even miss it doesn’t actually make you look the erudite techno-rebel you think it does. Or the noble ascetic, either. Or whatever other worthy character your inner movie is projecting on the murky screen inside your head. No, it makes you look more like an elitist luddite and an extremist bizarropod. Guess what, folks? You can own and even occasionally watch a television and you might on occasion be entertained or learn something or catch a great Seinfeld rerun or discover how badass the honey badger really is (wait, that’s YouTube) or marvel at Lionel Messi’s close ball control or weep uncontrollably at an old classic movie… or at Mitt Romney’s awkward and obvious avoidance of any questions with the letters T, A and X in close proximity… and none of this will prevent you from also reading books. One does not exclude the other. May I repeat that? One does not exclude the other! Blaming TV for all the pop culture trash out there is like blaming the internet for porn… oh wait…. Think I broke my brain again. Give me a second…

7. Speaking of pop culture trash, bemoaning the fact Snooki has a bestselling book to her name does nothing for you other than to raise your blood pressure a few notches. It’s stupid and pointless. As, indeed, you believe the young lady herself to be. But let’s reframe it: she is an example of a young person from a generation many older folk dismiss as unmotivated and entitled. Did she sit around in various bars and clubs in Seaside Heights getting hella crunk like you assume most of her contemporaries did/do? Well, okay, sort of. But the key is, she did it on camera, even getting punched in the face for her troubles, and did it all with enough tawdry poignance that people couldn’t help but notice her. And try watching the scene where she’s so achingly (and at that point, pretty much deservedly) lonely she wanders the boardwalk barefoot, literally begging for someone to party with her, without feeling even a twinge of genuine pity in your black and empty heart. Just try it. Anyway, she bootstrapped her decidedly odd and needy defiance into something lucrative. Fair play to her. So what? Move on, that’s what.

6. In fact, stop being envious, period. Of sparkly vampires or soccer mom spanking sessions. Lamenting your own obscurity while publicly calling out examples of undeserved success is not a good look. Who gets to decide the “undeserved” part? Do you really want to end up looking like those hoary old classic rock bands in the ’70s who turned up their noses at upstarts like… the Sex Pistols? The Clash? The Ramones? Again, we don’t have to take sides, we can listen to both, capiche? Even if we’re a dinosaur (and at some point, everyone has to take his or her turn in the Dino-dome), it’s better to be Neil Young than Ted freaking Nugent, after all. And I’m not even saying that because I’m Canadian. Honest. Embrace it all and stop experiencing life in narrowcast (or something… sometimes I worry even I don’t know what I’m talking about). And when it comes to music, thanks partly to the whole iTunes revolution, we seem to have collectively gotten that message at last. Now we just need to extend it to books and realise how much of this is simply down to subjective taste and stop reinventing hierarchies that only ever succeed in pissing everyone off or, worse, intimidating new writers into quitting before they’ve ever had the chance to learn and hone their skills. Stop telling people who’s allowed to eat at the big folks’ table. Besides, the big folks’ table looks a little dull. And you can’t even put your elbows on it.

5. Oh, and the corollary to that last one: if you do begin to experience a measure of success, be gracious about it. Don’t set odd little traps for others. Don’t suddenly act like the King or Queen of I Am Bearer Of The Ultimate Secret and start rubbing your friends’ faces in it only to then turn around and imply they’re acting jealous when in fact they’re only being aghast and uncomfortable at your embarrassing hubris. No, this is bad behaviour all around, stop it. Sure, success can be down to hard work, but there’s often a measure of sheer random luck involved, right-place-right-time kind of thing. Many writers work their typing fingers to the calcium-depleted bone with relatively little success. You gonna tell them they don’t deserve it? Some of them? All of them? And even more pertinent: you cannot know whether this relative upsurge in your own fortunes will last. What is that thing they say pride comes before? You know exactly what I’m saying. Show a little humility, fool. Be kind.

4. Back in the day, writers were sticklike figures barely subsisting on the rotted cotton wadding inside an old stained recliner they dragged to their meagre garret from an alleyway before the rats could use it for nests. They were isolated and flea-bitten wrecks, drinking methylated spirits until blindness finally destroyed their only chance at literary fame and fortune. Okay, not really, them’s stereotypes, but indulge me. In place of unbearable loneliness, we now have…. Facebook. Social media. Which we’re told to use relentlessly, to connect with people like a string of special and—thanks to inactivity and the universal accessibility of Cheetos—increasingly odd-shaped snowflakes. Snowflakes with orange teeth. And we do it. We even befriend people, genuinely. It’s a social thing. We’re a social animal. The artificial divide between writer and reader is now virtually gone (sorry, pun not intended). Which is great and everything, but now we can bite back… snipe back directly at the suddenly malicious critics and readers who attack our precious babies. We can use the very tools we’re most adept in—words—to strike, like Jules Winnfield, with great vengeance and furious anger on our foes. Everywhere. On Amazon. On our personal blogs. On Facebook. Twitter. Mwahahaha, we are The Forgers of Words, hear us roar… Well, no. We really shouldn’t do that. Not even once. It will have no effect other than to convince a sizeable number of silent observers that we’re an arsey little hosebag. And, wherever you are posting or commenting on the interwebs, never forget the vast, silent bank of lurkers. Their eyes are beady and mean and they will watch you and they will judge you. It’s sheer professional suicide to act like a handicapped badger’s spleen… and besides, you know that cool “lay my vengeance upon thee” Ezekiel-schtick in Pulp Fiction? Tarantino made it the hell up. ‘Nuff said.

3. Now, with this one I don’t fully see eye to eye with many of my writer peers. I’m talking about politics and religion. And unlike others, I don’t think you should avoid these topics. In fact, they’re pretty much the motherlode for any discussion of the human condition, the sacred and the profane… which is what we as writers should be eating for breakfast. Before moving onto philosophy and existential eel porn by lunch time. So don’t avoid them. But… be tactful. If someone disagrees with you, try not to call him a rabid baboon’s esophagus. Quite honestly, the only writers I would advise to STFU on this stuff are the true bigots: the racists, the sexists, the homophobes. They just need to sit down, be quiet, watch how normal people work, and learn how utterly futile their pathetic attempts to swim against the prevailing winds are, almost as excruciatingly failworthy as my last metaphor, in fact.

2. Spam. You just knew the pink, lukewarm meat of doom was going to make an appearance, didn’t you? Look, I get it. We’re told, exhorted in fact, to promote our work across a kajillion social networks with names like Tinglr and GoodFellas and FaceSpace. So we sign up for most of them and then… we go nuts. This isn’t one can of Spam, oh no, this is a cloying, gelatinous, somehow horribly sluggish, pink slough of the stuff. For the love of all that is holy, calm down. Breathe. Okay. You’re in a vast hall, and there are small groups of people scattered around. First, you don’t stand in the middle and randomly start yelling “Guys, I’m so excited! Got a 5 Star review on Smashwords today. Squeeee.” Right? (In fact, please don’t ever say squee, period, okay? Unless you’re five and like to wear tiaras.) You certainly don’t shoulder your way into a group and say “I just sold three copies of my book on the Lithuanian version of Amazon this week!” No, you find a conversation that interests you, and you politely join in when there’s a lull. It’s really that simple. Do the stuff yo’ mama taught you. Check you don’t have spinach in your teeth. Wash behind your ears. Say please and thank you. Don’t interrupt. Don’t fart and blame it on the server. Be nice. And guess what? People will like you. After which, there may come a time when someone turns to you and asks “so what is it you do?” Bingo! The online world really is but a reflection of the real world… only with way more kitties… and lots more naughty stuff. But yeah, it’s common sense, really. Moderation. Balance. If you feel you’ve crossed the line this week, cool your jets next week.

1. I was going to talk about dodgy or questionable ethics surrounding the whole recent reviews controversy, but I think I’m going to leave that to someone who will do it far more justice in a longer post than I ever could here. Instead, I’ll end somewhat anticlimactically on a subject that will make most of you sigh and look at your watch and say “oh, is that the time?” Namely… editing. Yes, go ahead, scurry away, you horrible little wordworm, but you know what’s coming, don’t you? I can still see you, so I’mma shout at your retreating backs: “HIRE AN EDITOR!” Now, this final item is in no way self-serving (cough, Be Write There, hack), but it cannot and should not be avoided. If money’s tight, go the beta reader route… something. Can you imagine if God himself had thought “You know, in the time it’ll take me to find an editor, I could have this thing up and running and put through Coker’s meatgrinder twice over, and besides, I think I’m a pretty good writer, possibly even the best. Nah, forget it, who’ll even know”? You might have gotten something like this:

1. At the start, God made up heaven and earth.

2. And teh earth was without from, and void; and drakness was up all over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of teh waters.

3. And God says, Let their be light: and thurr was light.

4. And God seen the light, that it was a’ight: and God partitioned the light from teh darkness.

5. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he thought about for a bit and eventually decided to call Night.

6. And the evening and the mourning were the 1st day.

Wait, the evening was the first day? Um… help? Someone? Where’d that editor go?

Off The Hook

You’ve probably already heard that wonderfully creepy urban tale about a teenage boy and girl making out in a car in some Lovers Lane in Anytown, USA, and how the boy starts telling the girl of the “Hook Murders” in the area, whereby amorous teens are being killed by an insane, escaped killer with a hook for a hand. Perhaps not the smartest move on the boy’s part, as his girlfriend gets all distracted by fear, going from initial anxiety to eventual near-hysteria, resisting his advances and demanding they leave that instant. Which he eventually does. He’s all bummed, they bicker on the way back, arrive at her place, she jumps out, slams the door…. and screams. He runs around to her side of the vehicle…. and sees what she sees: a single bloody hook dangling from the door handle.

Creeped out? Good, because I am, and a good haunting is no fun alone.

So, already predisposed to think of hooks, I was struck by a thought the other day. This is by no means a common event, so I don’t want to minimize its surprise value. Along the lines of Barry Eisler’s recent advice to read like a writer, I was considering opening lines—of both short fiction and longer—and how well they draw the reader in when skilfully crafted. But my mini epiphany occurred at the moment I realised an opening line isn’t always a hook… although it probably should be. Certainly in shorter fiction. But even in a novel, you might really want to get your hook in no later than the first paragraph.

There are many forms available for your narrative hook, from similes and metaphors to character dilemmas and overt questions, even quotes and anecdotes. But the real world of books contains some incredible examples of opening hooks, thirty of which I’ll now itemize here for your enjoyment (the numerical order isn’t significant). Some are long and involved, although most are short and, at least on the surface, simply describe something essential to the story, without adornment or prevarication (yet don’t let that fool you; some of these writers are wily foxes). I’ll throw in the odd stray opinion as I go, usually as to why I find the words so damn compelling.

30. “The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door.” — Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

(This immediately alerts the reader to two things: McCarthy will invent compound words like there’s no tomorrow, and the vision behind this is going to be both cinematic and literary.)

29. “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” — Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis

(Sounds almost like a children’s fable, doesn’t it? Uh, keep reading. Which you almost can’t help doing after reading that particular opener. Which is the point.)

28. “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.” — Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

(With one word, “unfashionable”, Adams transforms this opener from potential mundanity into something richly comedic.)

27. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” — Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

(I have to admit, some of these opening lines take on incredible poignancy and significance in hindsight, via an almost insane level of initial understatement.)

26. “They murdered him.” — Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

(I love it when someone cuts right to the chase. Or does he? He actually gives us almost nothing. Who is the victim? Who are “they”? We simply have to read on.)

25. “It was the day my grandmother exploded.” — Iain Banks, The Crow Road

(Um. Okay. Intriguing, you have to say. And who, aside from volatile, unstable grandmothers, won’t read on?)

24. “Call me Ishmael.” — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

(Again, simple. But why call me Ishmael? Is that not the protagonist’s name? If it were, he’d surely have written “My name is Ishmael.” What trickery is afoot here? Oh, and yes, the novel’s title really is hyphenated, I Googled.)

23. “Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men’s eyes, the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed; in the shriek of what followed, in fact, was forgotten and perhaps not connected to the horror at all.” — William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist

(Well, I got chills.)

22. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

(Could be another example of an opening line taking on all the subsequent cultural baggage unleashed not simply by the book itself, but by the movie adaptations and HST’s real life exploits. Still good, though.)

21. “On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.” — Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

(One of my personal favourites. Post-apocalyptic and primitivist, another coming-of-age fable for grown up children. You know he’s gonna make you work but if you can grok these opening words even a little, you know the rewards will be there for you.)

20. “Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.” — Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

(Well, if you love words and storytelling, you just can’t fault that as an opener, can you?)

19. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” — Genesis, The Holy Bible

(Well, duh. They sound pretty sure of that. No pyrotechnics, though. And, given the stakes, probably the most understated opening line ever.)

18. “Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face.” — Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen

(Yeah, it’s a graphic novel, and some of the impact is lost without Gibbons’ artwork, but it’s still an evocative opener.)

17. “The great grey beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.” — Clive Barker, The Thief of Always

(Elusive and allusive, Barker’s technique alone will make me read on, even without such a startling metaphor.)

16. “A screaming comes across the sky.” — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

(It grabs you in a visceral way, for sure, and it also becomes much clearer as you read on. I do lean toward the succinct openers, it seems. There’s no real warning here of the approaching complexities of Pynchon’s prose.)

15. “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” — Stephen King, The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger

(Not only simple, rhythmically pleasing, cinematic even, but it points to something later on that I won’t even elaborate on for fear of spoilers. Just read this series, is all I can say, and this line will return to haunt you, again and again.)

14. “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, 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

(And here’s the exception to my general preference for short and pithy. This is fine writing. And creepy as hell. Those of you who read my post on closing lines might even recognise this. Oh, that “not sane” gets me every time.)

13. “Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.” — Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

(I love this. If you haven’t read this novel, please let the airy, expectant poetry of this opener convince you to do so. And what an audacious line to use in a fictional work.)

12. “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” — Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

(Again, this contains information that is essential, but it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the events behind it. A badly broken elbow may in itself seem a weighty topic to such a very young narrator, but… yeah, read on.)

11. “Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.” — Albert Camus, The Stranger

(Okay. In the merest handful of words, Camus suggests dislocation, dissociation and indifference, or some awful combination of them all. If you don’t want to read on from here, your curiosity engine must have seized on you.)

10. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” — J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

(Up there with the Bible, in its way. What the hell is a hobbit? Did he just misspell “rabbit?” Oh, he’s a wily one, he knows exactly what you’re thinking.)

9. “It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression ‘As pretty as an airport.’” — Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

(Ha! When in doubt, crack your audience up from the get-go. Dry, sardonic, just very funny, even the title itself.)

8. “The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.” — William Gibson, Neuromancer

(Perfect use of metaphor, and so apt in a book that had such a huge influence on the Matrix movies.)

7. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

(It’s all about that “thirteen”, isn’t it? I mean, wha—? This guy got a thing about numbers?)

6. “When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.” — Cormac McCarthy, The Road

(Again, more poignant in retrospect, but very much in keeping with the quietly relentless monochrome tone of the rest of the novel. That seed of love is there in the very first sentence. Carrying the fire.)

5. “All this happened, more or less.” — Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

(Thanks Kurt. So did it or didn’t it? Now we must find out, you sly dog, you.)

4. “First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.” — Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

(Brilliant. Making “first” literally the first word, it’s almost a step on from “once upon a time”. And again, plenty of information in so few words.)

3. “I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way.” — Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden

(This is a remarkably accomplished novel considering it was McEwan’s debut, and this line shows all the assurance that, as a pure technician, he’s never relinquished.)

2. “Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I’m a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster.” — Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

(This is intriguing enough… and then you get to the very next line, which is italicized, and it’s like the sun emerges from behind a cloud. Context, indeed. Wanna know what it is? Ask me in the comments section.)

1. “Ten thousand bombs had landed, and I was waiting for George.” — Rawi Hage, DeNiro’s Game

(I like this juxtaposition of the ordinary with the apparently extraordinary. This is a very beautifully written novel, incidentally.)

Oh, and speaking of strange juxtapositions, here’s a bonus pair:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” — Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” — Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

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A version of this post appeared on Indies Unlimited on August 17, 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.

Fear and Loathing No More

Long before the interwebs dubbed them “epic fails”, I used to collect such stories in the dimly-lit, ironic laugh-a-thon I call my “mind”. Like the bank robber who wrote his holdup note on the back of an envelope that not only displayed his own name and address clearly and almost heartbreakingly, but also that of his parole officer, upper left corner, return address. Then… he left the envelope. Or a different guy—surely related via some spectacular yet hitherto undiscovered boneheadedness gene—who held up the teller with a rifle… but left the cork plugged proudly and prominently in the end of his painfully-obvious-to-everyone toy firearm.

Anyway, that’s a trip down Fail Boulevard. And highly amusing as that journey undoubtedly is, I want to explore another part of town: Success Street. Success. Even the word itself sounds like it tastes good (cf: succinct, succumb, succour, succulent). Yeah. Did I ever mention how much I love words? So much so I want to eat them. With bacon. And chocolate-dipped seahorse roe.

But I digress.

Look, without further ado, here are seven awesome ways to totally guarantee your writing success.

7. Whether you write fiction or nonfiction, insert the word “Game” in your title. It certainly worked for Orson Scott Card (Ender!), Clive Barker (Damnation!), Tom Clancy (Patriot!), George R. R. Martin (Thrones!), Neil Strauss (seduction!) and Suzanne Collins (Hunger!). Although I suppose the jury’s still out on Herman Hesse… not altogether surprising, given The Glass Bead Game‘s so not-intimidating German title (Das Glasperlenspiel) as well as the novel’s popular and frothy mix of existentialist, epistemological and ontological themes. Ahem. But the overall idea is sound. If it’s not already taken, I suggest something like The Hungry Game of Patriotic Seduction. Kind of puts you in mind of a Clancy/Kundera collab. Which would be magnificent. Oh, and for your sequel, you might want a title that somehow incorporates girls with interesting tattoos and frustrated soccer moms just beginning to explore the pain/pleasure dichotomy.

6. Don’t just make your vampires sparkly, make them iridescent. In fact, make them musical. So they walk into a room accompanied by the ominous baritone strains of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”. Also, give them love interest. Try to avoid thinking about how skeevy they actually are, given their deathly pallor and propensity for amorous violations of the species barrier. Along these lines, make them handsome and/or beautiful so your readers completely overlook the fact they resemble something that died in its parents’ basement a long time ago. Writing is stage(d) magic, right? As in, sleight-of-hand and misdirection. Readers are suckers. Just never say that last part again. Ever. Not even with your inside voice.

5. Worry about how your target audience will react to everything. Pander to them. Shy away from profanity, sex and violence, and assume your readership is as rigidly and deeply puritanical as a fingerwag of church ladies at a Calvinist Convention… in Alabama. Actually, forget that last one: violence is your birthright as an American. As the aforementioned George R. R. Martin aptly put it: “I can describe an axe entering a human skull in great explicit detail and no one will blink twice at it. I provide a similar description, just as detailed, of a penis entering a vagina, and I get letters about it and people swearing off. To my mind this is kind of frustrating, it’s madness. Ultimately, in the history of [the] world, penises entering vaginas have given a lot of people a lot of pleasure; axes entering skulls, well, not so much.”

4. Take a stand on the big publishing issues of the day and stick to your guns, even in the face of any contradictory evidence. No, wait: don’t just stick to your effete, feeble Saturday night specials—amass bigger and better versions! Fully automatics. RPGs. Decide whether this issue is black. Or whether that one’s white. Never grey, nuh-uh. I mean, really, how does one choose a specific shade of grey when they are essentially infinite (certainly more than a paltry fifty, Ms. E. L. James)? Simple: one doesn’t. So, go ahead, decide that the traditional publishing houses are ancient, threatened elitists dripping with unctuous literary pretension or decide that independent authors are a talentless hollow-eyed Noob Army of wretched hacks who are to fine writing what Justin Bieber is to fine musicianship. But decide. And don’t dare waver or show nuance. Nuance is just another word for “liberal pantywaist do-gooder”, after all. No. Save “flexibility” for your special yoga moments.

3. Defend your brand. Your brand being you, obviously. If someone has the audacity to dislike one of your books in a review, take the fight to Amazon. Or beyond. Argue and defend it all over the interwebs. It’s your baby. You are almost literally advocating for your kid at the most dysfunctional school board meeting you’ve ever attended. You need to make horrible threats, maybe even personalize the conflict by accusing your reviewer of having a balloon animal fetish trying to ruin you. Use every rhetorical trick in the book to belittle your attackers, pull no punches. How can you be the bully when you are one and they are many? Right? It’s more important to demonstrate your passion than your professionalism. Just ask Gordon Ramsay.

2. Spam. I mean spam the living hell out of every Facebook group, every Twitter account, every Goodreads and LinkedIn group you can conceivably sign up for. Cover the online world with your bland, pink, lukewarm meat. Make sure you log in every day and repeat the same blurb about how your book is the bestest and most awesomest book since Stephen King and J. K. Rowling teamed up to invent rabid St Bernards who eat bespectacled young wizards in deserted Colorado hotels. Use multiple exclamation points. And don’t make friends. They take up too much of your promo time.

1. Die. This is the most surefire yet simultaneously most drastic way to achieve success in the arts, and only recommended when all else fails. Actually, I don’t really recommend it at all; it’s generally a stupid idea and will make people cry. Unless you are already known for crazy. And even then, it’s worth pointing out that what worked for Hunter S. Thompson may not work for the average person. This is a man whose body contained more drugs in his lifetime than all of Bristol-Myers Squibb and Pfizer combined, a man whose remains were fired out of a cannon to the tune of Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky”. I think it’s safe to say his example was pretty much an outlier by any measure you could choose to make.

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A version of this post appeared on Indies Unlimited on August 10, 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 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.