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the more they would fill in the blanks with their own nightmares. As such, learning to imply the true depth of horror rather than rub my audience’s nose in it should be my next step. Carr’s writing may therefore, teach me two techniques rather than one!
- Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth by Stephen Graham Jones has been the greatest read of recent memory, inspiring me to create more short stories, unburden myself of the urge to fill in every blank. Instead, I’d like to just create interesting concepts and scenarios and see where they take me, providing what details are needed for the story to function and ditching the rest. Jones’ compilation is one big showcase of the above, able to effectively deliver on a number of wonderful sci-fi premises without sweating the small stuff.
I was most struck by “The Sea of Intranquility”. This tale features giant crabs, lobsters and shrimp living on man-made lakes on the moon. What’s more, these creatures serve as giant databanks storing human souls downloaded from dying hosts. This piece is stuffed with such wonderfully weird concepts, but steers carefully around any hard science fiction attempts at explaining the mechanics of its madness. Why do shrimp grow to the size of blimps when in low gravity? Because. There is plenty of authorial ‘hand waving’
in this one, with things allowed to be the way they are for the sake of telling a great story;
however, rather than come off as childish or ridiculous, it manages to be on the serious side of things and even make quite profound social commentary.
This is all attributable to the author’s clever choice of a classic noir private eye as narrator. A grizzled flatfoot would neither know nor concern himself with the science behind giant space shrimp, and so the narrative logic is allowed to stand without issue.
Similarly, grand world-building elements (which I might have thought important to at least hint at some pages before they become relevant) are simply circumvented in a few lines. One such example being that earth in this story has a planetary defence system to protect against space bandits. However, when a lobster the size of a plane grows wings and flies from the moon back to terra firma, it smashes its way through this defence grid.
Why? Because it wasn’t designed to stop giant lobsters from space. It is never mentioned again, yet the story would undoubtedly be weaker were it not mentioned at all. All of this is possible because the narrator is believable in what he chooses to speak about in detail and what he chooses to gloss over; it fits his character. This is such an elegant solution to the problem that I found myself completely immersed rather than having to suspend my disbelief every few minutes.
I feel I have a newfound appreciation for the importance of the narrator. Much of what I wrote in my most recent assignment felt permissible, even profound, because I wrote with a voice that suited the subject matter, gave it authenticity. Neither omniscient third person nor the author’s own angst, the narrator was a character. Similarly, much of what
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takes place with Jones’ giant space lobsters is only convincing because the narrator is well crafted. I am struck by how many pieces of memory I have stored indefinitely, and how many fun ideas I have tucked away in the proverbial trunk, all gathering dust because I hadn’t thought of an appropriate framework to slot them into. I think I might simply write many of these things now, with far less concern for whether or not they fit into a grand narrative or say anything particularly meaningful. Do they entertain? Do they prompt interesting lines of thought? If so, they should be probably be given the chance to occupy some page space; the only question is what voice I can best conjure up to speak them.
- Altmann’s Tongue by Brian Evenson has been a watershed reading for me, redefining my thinking in terms of the kind of writing I’d like to do, both in terms of style and subject matter. I had previously only been able to vaguely refer to my preferred genre as horror or fantasy, feeling that if one were to venture to the darker corners of the human psyche, one had best do so through more magical means. Yet here, Evenson appals me without a single zombie or alien in the mix. I had also previously maintained that creative writing should have a meaning or message of some kind, that conveying emotion alone was self- indulgent. I see now that disturbing material need not always be paired with fear or social commentary. It can simply be allowed to stand on its own, as so many of Evenson’s stories do.
Each is a little tableau of madness, a window into one of the many self-made hells which humans construct for themselves. One might view “The Father Unblinking” as a
portrayal of grief so profound that it cannot be analysed, justified or storified; a girl is dead and her father buries her and the sun keeps shining and the world keeps turning, heedless of the loss. “The Cat Killers” shows us that, try as we might, we cannot be complicit in bloodshed and remain morally aloof from it. They utterly resist closure (and in some cases, resist comprehension too) but this is okay. They all succeed in unsettling me, teaching me that I can go to dark places in my writing without revealing a monster waiting behind the bushes, or uncorking a dystopian zeitgeist from its bottle. While Evenson’s stories do tread into these territories, they do so with restraint, and without being self-conscious, content to present their strangeness and have the reader make of it what they will. I feel I can learn from this, let my ideas stand without the need for quite so many qualifiers, or quite so much window dressing.
Evenson also provided further insight into what makes a good narrator. In “The Munich Window”, he tells a dark story of child abuse, but finds its true punch not in the
emotional weight of its theme, but in the strength of its narrator. The abuser speaks throughout, the story defined by his endless justifications, rationalizations and generally warped takes on the world around him. Most importantly, he abides only by his own
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internal logic, fiercely denying any guilt or personal flaw to such an extent that no other character is ever given their own direct speech. It is all one man’s highly biased story of murder and abuse, and it is captivating. We know he is a monster, yet we are fascinated by how he explains his innocence. In short, the man’s monstrousness is best appreciated from behind his own eyes; part of what makes a good narrator then is to really get inside that voice and tell the story through their logic, their lens and sense of self.
- I believe I have found my voice, at long last. While matters such as first and third-person narration are still an issue, I have a much clearer sense of what my stories should contain and where my strengths lie. The key lies in narrative drive, a willingness to move a series of events forward instead of being bogged down in set-up or self-analysis. It need not make sense, start at A or end at Z, it should simply move forward. Similarly, a bizarre or morbid idea need not be made obscure or artful in order to be ‘allowed’; I can simply write it, however I please. My colleague Graham’s writings were exemplary in this regard, with severed heads and chewed fingers aplenty, all written in a very matter-of- fact manner. Horror, science fiction and general fantasy it is then, though with a focus not on weaving an epic narrative so much as simply executing a concept. Many an idea that I might have discarded for lack of a grander plot can now be a stand-alone story; merely having a good idea and delivering it in a compelling fashion is enough. Having spent much of the course worrying and wondering about what I “should” be writing, I now know that I can write of a hundred Red Riding Hoods and have a hundred wolves devour them.
My key learnings in this category pertained largely to stylistic format and focus, drawing inspiration from existing authors to build my own brand of fiction. Short stories and shorter sentences were found to be useful in preserving pace and emotional impact, while the narrator’s voice proved an important factor in terms of both launching stories and sustaining them. The purpose of my stories was found to lie neither in social commentary nor self-exploration, but rather in the unpacking of interesting concepts, ideas which excited me. Narrative drive was crucial. A piece should not slip into purple prose or overstay its welcome, simply deliver on its most compelling elements and then be content to stand as such, having depicted what it set out to show, but not striving to make an impact beyond that.
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