Writers On Writing Volume 2...

Crystal Lake's Writers On Writing is a series of ebooks where "authors share their secrets in the ultimate guide to becoming – and being – an author". And I'm proud to say that that the second volume, which is out today, features a piece by me called Embracing Your Inner Shitness. 

It's more positive than it sounds... honest. It features Hemingway, Spiderman, and a paragraph where I imagine readers of it calling me a wanker. More seriously, it's about how I approach my first drafts of a story.

Writers On Writing 2 also features articles by Brian Hodge, Mark Allan Gunnells, Lucy A. Snyder, Daniel I. Russell, Theresa Derwin, Paul Kane & Jonathan Winn and is edited by Joe Mynhardt. Take a look (UK | US)

BlogHop: Three Things I Don’t Write (& Three Things I Do)

Another one of these author blog hops thingies, this time on the theme of three things I don't write about, and three I do. I was nominated by the always ace sci-fi author Neil Williamson, who also nominated Chris Beckett and Keith Brooke (who's such a swot he's written his already). My own nominations are at the end of my piece. 

So without further ado...

Three Things I Don’t Write About:

• Real Places: I set stories in real places where the story itself seems to demand it, but most of the time I don't feel the urge. A lot of my stories are set in unnamed urban settings; recognisably British maybe, but not somewhere you could actually recognise as being Nottingham or Basingstoke or Widnes or wherever. As long as the readers recognise the details of the place that I'm using for atmosphere - the lonely bus-stop or the graffiti ridden alleyway - then I don't think it needs to be a specific town or city. Indeed I think such detail in a short story, where everything needs to dovetail together, could be counter productive. As I said, there are exceptions in my work such as Home Time (very specifically about the contrast between Oxford and a Nottinghamshire mining village) but even here it's what the place means to the character and the story that's important, not accurately depicting it as is in real life.

• ‘Monsters’ That Might As Well Be Real Animals: A lot of horror deals with death, and so obviously a lot of horror deals with things that kill people. But what bores me is to write the kind of horror where the ‘monster’ – be it vampire, psycho, or blob from the plant K – is just a physical threat which people either run from, fight, or get eaten by. As far as the plot goes, the monster might just as well be a wild dog. Which isn't to say physical beasts don’t feature in my work; it's just I like my monsters to mean something and for the characters to be fighting for more than their brute survival – for their sanity, perhaps, or their view of the world, or to preserve their illusions. I especially like to write about horrors that might not be physical at all – The Other Room being an example.

• Cthulhu & Co: For a writer who portrayed cultist as mad degenerates, it’s ironic how much of a cult has built up around HP Lovecraft’s so-called mythos. I find it odd how Cthulhu and the like, vast and literally indescribable beings who induce awe and madness in equal measure, have been minimised by later generations into generic horror tropes, or t-shirt designs, cuddly toys or RPG monsters with their stats spelt out for you like a kobold’s. Some authors, obviously, have taken Lovecraft's ideas and twisted them to their own ends – TED Klein and Ramsey Campbell spring immediately to mind – and Neil Gaiman’s inspired spoof Shoggoth's Old Peculiar is brilliant. But in general I don’t understand the urge to write ‘straight’ Lovecraft homages nor do I have much interest in the plethora of anthologies called things like Cthulhu In The Wild West or Dagon In The West End. It seems doubly strange because it’s so obvious from reading his work that Lovecraft was using the imagery of his mythos to help articulate a highly philosophical and personal view of existence. He wasn't just thinking Ohhhh Godzilla with a squid for a head – cool!

 Three Things I Do Write About:

• Doubles & Doppelgängers: I think anyone who’s read even a fraction of my work will probably have picked up on this. There’s the obvious doppelgänger stories like Falling Over or New Boy, where there’s a physical copy of someone (maybe)  but there’s also the Jekyll and Hyde like parallels within people’s personalities that I exploit in stories like The Other Room and The Time Of Their Lives. Coming at it all from a completely different angle is Dark Reflections (forthcoming from Knightwatch Press next year) which, as you can possibly guess from the title is about that doppelgänger we all have on the other side of the mirror… There’s also a second aspect to this, where two different stories serve as partial reflections of each other – for example in the collection Falling Over, the story The Time Of Their Lives tells of some sinister adult behaviour from the uncomprehending point of view of a child… whereas Sick Leave shows an adult protagonist struggling to grasp the equally incomprehensible behaviour of a group of eerie children… I didn't write these stories to be conscious reflections of each other (indeed, they were written years apart) but when putting together a collection of stories I like finding these kinds of echoes in my work and to exploit them where I can.

•   Ambiguity: I love endings where you're still not sure what will happen next, or still not sure what has happened, and especially endings where you're not really sure what it all means. There's lots of different types of ambiguity in narrative, and I've argued before that if anything distinguishes 'weird fiction' from straight horror it's ambiguity. That's not to say that my stories simply just stop, or become so weird as to be impenetrable - trying to get the emotional kick of an ending whilst not tying everything up with a neat bow is what I'm going for. 

•  Flawed People: God, is there anything more boring to write about than happy well-adjusted people? Or even worse, people with so many abilities and advantages that they overcome everything they face? This is something Neil included in his three things, actually, where he said he’d never write about superheroes and I completely see his point. Even where people in my stories do have abilities beyond the ordinary (Regina in The Watchers for example) their ‘powers’ are as much a curse as a blessing, and not really under their control. But I'm not much drawn to this theme, and much prefer to write about flawed, two-faced, self-deceiving and even downright repellent people in my fiction. Part of his goes back to the idea that the horrors of the story should have some connection to the protagonist, and part of it is the much simpler horror trope that an unpleasant protagonist should get their comeuppance in the end.

Passing The Baton...

Up next are Mark West, Amelia Mangan, and Jennifer Williams. Fabulous writers one and all, so do see what they have to say for themselves.

My Writing Process

So, I've been tagged by MR Cosby (author of the forthcoming Dying Embers from Satalyte Publishing) in this Writing Process chain thingy. The idea is that I answer the following four questions on the same day as Martin's other chosen writer (Mark Fuller Dillon) and then tag some other writers to continue the chain. So without further ado, the questions...

1) What am I working on?

I'm on the second draft of a new novella called Other People's Ghosts, which is about poltergeists and guilt and all sorts of dark and fun things like that... Structurally it's one of the most ambitious things I've written, because the timeline is deliberately non-chronological, and there's a lot of work and trial and error going into getting that right at the moment.

I'm also working on a short story called Premonition which is a bit of a Dorian Gray style-thing.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

God, that's a hard one to answer without sounding like a smug idiot. I'm not one to sing my own praises... I don't deliberately set out to write something 'different' or genre-bending, I think it's just a case of reading and thinking about as many books as I can (not limited to horror) and then just trying to write true to that and to my own experiences and beliefs. Weird fiction is a very personal type of writing, I think, because you rely on subconscious and non-logical judgements sometimes, so I think it's inevitable writer's personalities and sensibilities come through when they're writing. So in the sense that we're all individuals, originality comes for free. Of course this kind of 'originality' doesn't mean that it's necessarily any good...

3) Why do I write what I do?
I don't particularly feel like I have a choice, to be honest. The ideas for stories come to me - sometimes fully formed, more often a nebulous image or intriguing first line - and those are the stories I write. Of course there's conscious decision making after that, and I spend a lot of time thinking how horror fiction works and try and apply that to my work, but the initial moment of conception is pretty much spontaneous. Every time I've tried to force myself to write in a particular mode or genre, it's been a failure.

That's not to say that the initial moment of inspirations is completely beyond my control; for example I've been mulling over writing something novella-length for awhile and deliberately reading other people's work at that length before the ideas for Other People's Ghosts fell into place. So you you can try and 'hack' your subconscious. Invites and submission calls for themed anthologies work in the same kind of way.

4) How does my writing process work?

I think "process" is a rather grander word than whatever I do deserves. But usual it's a little something like this:

I mainly write all my first drafts by hand, because I prefer the speed and spontaneity, plus psychologically the words feel less fixed scribbled onto paper than neat on a screen, and so it helps me be ruthless when rewriting and editing. It forces a certain discipline because it means that every sentence gets rewritten and re-thought out. I might do a second handwritten draft to sort out the more structural problems, and then the third draft is where I type it up and fix all the sentence level stuff.

That said, neither of the two things I'm working on at the moment have followed that process at all! The above is probably my ideal process, each story deviates from it by varying amounts. 
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I'm supposed to pick three writers to keep this blog chain going, but as of yet I haven't and because I'm full of cold I don't think I'll manage to do so in time. So if you're a writer reading this and I like you (and if you read my blog then I do like you, automatically and without reservation) then feel free to take up the baton.