Advice to Writers, Including Me

I'll keep this short, but not modest.

All of us urban fantasy/dark fantasy/horror/weirdboiled/New Weird/Old Weird/whatever you want to call us writers need to really sit back and say something to ourselves:

Just because it's sick doesn't mean it's good.

Colloquially, of course, I'll disagree with that. I think a little flaunting of societal norms is appropriate, especially in art, which I see as necessarily addressing that which we can't address day-to-day. I think that evoking a reaction (other than "Jesus this story sucks") is important, and I don't care what reaction you aim for so long as you do it honestly. But do not think that just because you've/I've/we've written a story with something in it we think is a little gross means that royal-we have written something worthy of publication.

Writers, in my experience, particularly urban fantasy and horror writers, are obsessed with earning the moniker "twisted". This is rational, really; we all want to be powerful and memorable, and when we're striving for these kinds of emotions a little depravity goes a long way. It's not like you'll find many horrifying stories about going to the store and buying a puppy. Well, with the right twist ending maybe...

But in this as in all things it's easy to see the signifier and not the signified. It's easy to say that because Stephen King made clowns scary, one's story is scarier because it has a clown; or because eye-gouging is horrifying the phrase "he gouged out his eyes" makes a story horror. In both of these cases they aren't necessarily wrong—I've found both clowns and eye-gouging scary—but the trouble is the idea that these symbols are so potent that they'll make up for this little thing called "skill".

It's like gore in horror movies. For me the scariest part of the only Saw film I ever saw was the handful of seconds before each trap went off, when we weren't sure what it would do or how it would be triggered or if there was a way to shut it off. Horror is an emotion, and horror films, horror writing, should be trying for that.

Unfortunately, that's really hard; but it's not too hard to come up with some vaguely twisted idea and do that instead. Similarly, good direction and evocative music are expensive, but you can make gallons of fake blood out of a few simple ingredients. Both the states of affairs are unfortunate, and both of them disrupt the very mood they are theoretically trying to invoke.

The same goes for the flights of imagination fantasy is trying to evoke, and the unicorn-and-vampire-choked cityscapes that tend to spring up in its stead; or the technological playground of science-fiction that often just puts extra arms on the protagonist in lieu of plot development.

It happens in mysteries, too, and chick-lit and splatterpunk and everything else, but the point always remains: writing is about evoking a mood and telling a story, not cramming obvious symbols in as ballast.

My mantra is "horror is often twisted, but twisted is not often horror". I often fail to keep this in mind; but when I do, it always helps. And so, I share my mantra with you.

Now, once you're past the disconnect about depravity, we'll talk about gamer culture and its obsession with wolf packs...