Tag: other people’s stories

The Control Group

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I’ve been really digging Emily Carroll’s horror comics. My favorite so far has been the very ghoulish “Out of Skin.”  Her wife Kate Craig’s comic “Heart Of Ice” is great too, especially if you love arctic horror (and who doesn’t?).

emily carroll

I really admire artists that can draw scary things, mostly because I can’t imagine possessing that delicate of a balance between creative expression and mental control: I am pretty confident that if I ever created anything like one of Junji Ito’s comics, I would immediately burn it for fear of it coming to life. Not that this isn’t something I worry about with writing too – even though I write what I broadly classify as horror (I prefer “dark”), few things that I’ve written actually terrify me in the way that Ju-On, for example, terrifies me, and I think there’s a little part of me that doesn’t want to push that envelope because I’m afraid of my fears manifesting in real life. There are enough horror movies about writers who go forth to learn what fear is and cross one bridge too many (see also: reason I’m not about to go live in an old house for three months to pound out my final draft).

Of course, I have written stories featuring elements that frighten me – “Red Goat Black Goat” probably being the prime example, since that was based off a childhood story that scared the shit out of me, although “Girl I Love You,” “The Five Stages of Grief,” and “Pugelbone” also creep me out – and I haven’t gone crazy. I have “retained control” (get back to me if I ever write a story about crawling ghosts, though).  I’m sure horror illustrators don’t go crazy either (although I still think there’s something about image that is much more powerful than written text). They created it, after all; they control it. I think this is actually at the heart of the reason a lot of people tell horror stories – whether in text or art or film or music – they want to conquer some fleeting thing, some image, some sentence, some idea, that scares them. They want to wrangle it into something they can understand and control.  Which gets to something that Emily Carroll talks about in this interview, something that I’ve sort of dealt with too when people ask me to explain a story like, say, “Absolute Zero”:

So often people will treat that story like it’s a mystery with One True Solution, as though the final panel is a puzzle to be solved, but it really isn’t like that at all. And that was on purpose – growing up, my least favourite part of any horror story was the part towards the end that explained all the scariness away. Because I want to keep away from that in my own work, I made the conscious decision to leave the ending of that story (and preceding events, really) ambiguous and unresolved, in an effort to create a haunting feeling even after the comic ends.

how I learned to stop worrying and love the written word

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Written two years before I was born, Lorrie Moore’s “How to Become a Writer Or, Have You Earned This Cliche?” strikes awful close to home, and is probably more useful than any earnest how-to guide.

In high school, I once had a creative non-fiction assignment given back to me riddled with “C”s, for cliches – it was horrifying.  The grade was “Writing = A.  Creative Non-Fiction = F.”  Luckily the whole class by-in-large failed the assignment, so I got the chance for a manically-written do-over describing, in entirety, what I saw on television as I channel-surfed, so there was something about Tiger Woods and something about Applebee’s, I think.  I got an A that time.  Dr. Cognard was the best teacher I’ve ever had.  She also memorably told me, “why should we give a fuck about [one of my two main characters]?”  Tough question!

  • First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/ missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age – say, 14. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at 15 you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire.
  • Make up anagrams of his old girlfriend’s name and name all of your socially handicapped characters with them.
  • The only happiness you have is writing something new, in the middle of the night, armpits damp, heart pounding, something no one has yet seen. You have only those brief, fragile, untested moments of exhilaration when you know: you are a genius. Understand what you must do. Switch majors.
  • Say: ”Mom, I like to write.”  She’ll say: ”Sure you like to write. Of course. Sure you like to write.”
  • Be glad you know these things. Be glad you are not just a writer. Apply to law school.
  • From here on in, many things can happen. But the main one will be this: You decide not to go to law school after all, and, instead, you spend a good, big chunk of your adult life telling people how you decided not to go to law school after all. Somehow you end up writing again. Perhaps you go to graduate school. Perhaps you work odd jobs and take writing courses at night. Perhaps you are working and writing down all the clever remarks and intimate personal confessions you hear during the day. Perhaps you are losing your pals, your acquaintances, your balance.
  • Scowl fiercely. Tell them you’re a walking blade.

love hurts

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A very sweet post from Alex Berenson on a main character who’s been with him for years:

All of which is another way of saying that John Wells has markedly enriched my life — an impressive feat for a man who doesn’t exist. Sometimes I fear our relationship is as one-sided as “The Giving Tree.” I take from him ruthlessly. Over the years, I’ve destroyed his relationships with his son, his fiancée and now his new girlfriend. I’ve forced him to beat up innocent civilians, people he’s never even met before, because they’re in his way. I’ve made him accept that his superiors are using him for their political ends, and that he can’t stop them. I’ve shot him, tortured him, broken his bones. I’ve converted him to Islam, then stretched his faith in Allah to the vanishing point. Through it all, he perseveres, though sometimes I know he’s looking at me, Job-like: Why must you hurt me so? To which I can say only: It’s this or nothing. Besides, I get you through the worst of it.

The Best Story I Have Read This Year

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Well, it’s from 2005.  In my defense, I was graduating high school then and definitely not reading The New Yorker.  But I digress: “Commcomm” by George Saunders.  It won the World Fantasy Award.  You will laugh and you will cry.  It’s like Catch-22, but with ghosts.  It’s the future, and our future.  Just read it.  It’s perfect.

I turn on Tape 9, “Omission/Partial Omission.” When sadness-inducing events occur, the guy says, invoke your Designated Substitute Thoughtstream. Your D.S.T. might be a man falling off a cliff but being caught by a group of good friends. It might be a bowl of steaming soup, if one likes soup. It might be something as distractive/mechanical as walking along a row of cans, kicking them down… My D.S.T. is tapping a thin rock wall with a hammer. When that wall cracks, there’s another underneath. When that wall cracks, there’s another underneath.