About to launch: The Demonologia Biblica

So I've been involved in this really cool project for the past four or so motion-blurred months: The Demonologia Biblica. A horror anthology from Western Legends Publishing featuring twenty-six stories by twenty-six authors about demons of all kinds doing all sorts of crazy evil things that only demons could do.

I was tasked to write a story featuring a demon with a name beginning with the letter F. After more research I care to admit to on some really geeky strange sites, I found my options were small. Like five options small, three of which were different spellings of the same guy. So I picked Furcas, a knight of hell who is known for teaching and wisdom and whatever else the old books purportedly claim according to those people who study this stuff. His simple folkloric appearance suggests that he is a harbinger of death, but he is also a calm rationale sort of guy. Who knew demons could be pleasant or nice?

My story, "Lies Under Skin," tells the tale of a seemingly good guy's encounter with Furcas on the road. Set in the autumnal wooded Hudson River Valley just north of New York City, it gives a subtle nod to one of the area's most well-known historic writers, Washington Irving. His work was one of my early influences that shaped my taste for fiction.

If any of you are wondering, I might have had something to do with the cover design, that seems to happen a lot. The incredible illustration credit, however, goes to the talented artist James R. Powell.

I will post more here when the book becomes available for purchase, should be by start of February.

Writing Craft: The Delicate Prey by Paul Bowles

Dark subjects driven by the dark psychology of the characters rooted in a common thread of loneliness. The short stories of The Delicate Prey are best described as “messed up” as someone noted in a short review I spotted on Good Reads. Artfully written bringing early twentieth century Latin America to life, contrasting the natural beauty of the land with the less-than-desirable living conditions of the locals.

An element of racism exists among those of Spanish descent toward the native people – known simply as Indians – adding to the tensions and demeanor of the characters, providing a sense of entitlement for some to act upon their ill intentions. In the first story, “At Paso Rojo,” an upper-class woman, Chalía, and her sister, visit their brother’s ranch after their mother has died. Chalía makes a game of emotionally manipulating and injuring a young Indian man who works for her brother. The specific root of behavior is not apparent beyond her open discrimination toward the Indians, though we learn of lying and deceptive behaviors through the story, and her desire to control others. The following passage paints a vivid portrait of Chalía’s diabolical nature.

Something dark lying in the road ahead of her made her stop walking. It did not move….as she drew near, she knew it was Roberto. She touched his arm with her foot. He did not respond. She leaned over and put her hand on his chest. He was breathing deeply, and the smell of liquor was almost overpowering. She straightened and kicked him lightly in the head. There was a tiny groan from far within. This also, she said to herself, would have to be done quickly. She felt wonderfully light and powerful as she slowly maneuvered his body with her feet to the right-hand side of the road. There was a small cliff there, about twenty feet high. When she got him to the edge, she waited a while, looking at his features in the moonlight. His mouth was open a little, and the white teeth peeked out from behind the lips. She smoothed his forehead a few times and with a gentle push rolled him over the edge. He fell very heavily, making a strange animal sound as he hit. (P. 18)

 “The Scorpion” was probably one of the strangest stories I read, and the most thought provoking. Two sons had left their elderly mother to live in a cave they dug out of clay for an undetermined length of time. She was left to survive with a bare minimum of supplies, her dreams, and her memories. Surrounded by scorpions in the walls and constant dripping water, she adapts to her solitude.

There were many things about this life that the old woman liked. She was no longer obliged to argue and fight with her sons to make them carry wood to the charcoal oven. She was free to move about at night and look for food. She could eat everything she found without having to share it. And she owed no one any debt of thanks for the things she had in her life. (P. 103)

Finally, one of her sons arrives to retrieve her, he seems surprised that either she is still there or alive; she refuses to leave at first. We don’t know why he is there for her, but it is clear their relationship is not good as she is not even sure of his identity.

One dark day he looked up to see one of her sons standing in the doorway. She could not remember which one it was, but she thought it was the one who had ridden the horse down the dry river bed and nearly been killed. She looked at his hand to see if it was out of shape. It was not that son. (P. 103)

We never learn the names of the old woman nor her son, not even the anonymous old man who sits outside the cave occasionally without any interaction. Her closest interaction with another person is built on isolation:

One old man used to come from the village on his way down to the valley, and sit on a rock just distant enough from the cave for her to recognize him. She knew he was aware of her presence in the cave there, and although she probably did not know this, she disliked him for not giving some sign that he knew she was there. (P. 103)

We can only surmise the reason the old woman was sent to live in a cave by her two resentful sons far outside of town was that it was intended to be her tomb. What we do learn is implied through actions and the bitter dialogue; the specifics about their estrangement are clear. It’s best summed up in this exchange at the close of the story as the son leads his mother out of the cave and the surprised old man sitting nearby says “good-bye”:

“Who is that?” said her son.
“I don’t know.”
Her son looked back at her darkly.
“You’re lying,” he said. (P. 106)

Interestingly, the story “The Fourth Day Out from Santa Cruz” paints a dark portrait of loneliness and despondency not unlike the other stories, but with a happy ending, as happy as one could expect in the circumstances. A young man named Ramón signed on to the crew of a ship, working in the scullery.

Except for the orders they gave him in the kitchen, the sailors behaved as if he did not exist. They covered his bunk with dirty clothes, and lay on it, smoking, at night when he wanted to sleep. They failed to include him in any conversation, and so far no one had even made an allusion, however deprecatory, to his existence. (P. 106-107)

During a stopover in a port town, Ramón searches for the crew after he has finished cleaning the kitchen, hours after the crew had left the ship. He finds a group of them in a café. The following scene captures the anguish and anger Ramón confronts as it continues to build to a climax:

Ramón turned around and sat down suddenly at a small table. The waiter came an served him, but he scarcely noticed what he was drinking. He was watching the table with the six men from his ship. Like one fascinated, he let his eyes follow each gesture: the filling of the little glasses, the tossing down the liquor, the back of the hand wiping the mouth. And he listened to their words punctuated by loud laughter. Resentment began to swell in him; he felt that if he sat still any longer he would explode. Pushing back his chair, he jumped up and strode dramatically out into the street. No one noticed his exit. (P. 108)

As Ramón continues to find ways draw the sailors’ attention to no avail, he sees an opportunity during their fourth day out at sea. A tired bird far from land is desperate to land on the ship’s deck, but the gawking crew scares it from doing so. As they place bets on the bird’s fate, Ramón brings out the ship’s mascot, a large cat, and trains the cat’s focus on the bird to attempt to catch it. The sailors are impressed.

In a situation that appeared to be leading to some type of violent act of Ramón’s doing was cleverly displayed by the cat attempting to catch the bird without success. Yet, Ramón is awarded with the acceptance from his crewmates he craved.

At noonday meal they talked about it. After some argument the bets were paid. One of the oilers went to his cabin and brought out a bottle of cognac and a set of little glasses which he put in front of him and filled, one after the other.
“Have some?” he said to Ramón.

Writing Craft: Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson

The collection of short stories of Jesus’ Son is something of a paradox. The graceful and poetic language portrays dark and depressing situations occupied by people at their lowest points performing despicable acts. Fluid and sensuous prose carry the narrative forward effortlessly; the time it takes to read the book becomes irrelevant. This was my first time reading Denis Johnson’s work, and not knowing anything about him, I wondered if these vivid stories were pulled from real-life experiences. Either way, I was captivated.

Johnson makes a hospital orderly moving through his day in the story “Emergency” on a drug high sound warm and simple. He seemed to have reached a heightened state of bliss among a bleak and stressful world, while the dire risks of his actions were always prevalent.

Everybody had a different idea about exactly how to approach the problem of removing the knife from Terrence Weber’s brain. But when Georgie came in from prepping the patient—from shaving the patient’s eyebrow and disinfecting the area around the wound, and so on—he seemed to be holding the hunting knife in his left hand. (Loc. 694-696)

Duality is consistently portrayed in an illustrative storytelling motif throughout the stories through an inebriated perception of people and self, and their relationships to the environment. This is a polar extreme to the clichéd my head felt like a balloon and floated from my body and over the green pastures type of hack:

Under Midwestern clouds like great grey brains we left the superhighway with a drifting sensation and entered Kansas City’s rush hour with a sensation of running aground. (Loc. 39-40)

It was a long straight road through dry fields as far as a person could see. You’d think the sky didn’t have any air in it, and the earth was made of paper. Rather than moving, we were just getting smaller and smaller. (Loc. 451-453)

All senses are engaged. Johnson places the reader in the environment through deliberate figurative prose. Landscape description appear frequently, along with the integration of nature, setting the tone of the immediate physical world and then on a higher existential level consistent with the protagonist’s thought process. Consider these examples:

The road we were lost on cut straight through the middle of the world. It was still daytime, but the sun had no more power than an ornament or a sponge. In this light the truck’s hood, which had been bright orange, had turned a deep blue. (Loc. 753-754) 

What word can be uttered about those fields? She stood in the middle of them as on a high mountain, with her red hair pulled out sideways by the wind, around her the green and grey plains pressed down flat, and all the grasses of Iowa whistling one note. (Loc. 567-568)

Descriptions of settings often take on a stream of consciousness quality through the protagonist’s altered perceptions while incorporating actions and people as part of the holistic environment. In this way, Johnson effectively animates common activities like riding on a ferryboat or a subway train:

The day was sunny, unusual for the Northwest Coast. I’m sure we were all feeling blessed on this ferryboat among the humps of very green—in the sunlight almost coolly burning, like phosphorus—islands, and the water of inlets winking in the sincere light of day, under a sky as blue and brainless as the love of God, despite the smell, the slight, dreamy suffocation, of some kind of petroleum-based compound used to seal the deck’s seams. (Loc. 1000-1003)

I sat up front. Right beside me was the little cubicle filled with the driver. You could feel him materializing and dematerializing in there. In the darkness under the universe it didn’t matter that the driver was a blind man. He felt the future with his face. And suddenly the train hushed as if the wind had been kicked out of it, and we came into the evening again.(Loc. 948-951)

People are treated in a similar descriptive manner giving them identifiable realistic traits leaving no room to question their authenticity:

He stood hugging himself and talking down at the earth. The wind lifted and dropped her long red hair. She was about forty, with a bloodless, waterlogged beauty. I guessed Wayne was the storm that had stranded her here. (Loc. 560-561) 

He walked with a bounce, his shoulders looped and his chin scooping forward rhythmically. He didn’t look right or left. I supposed he’d walked this route twelve thousand times. He didn’t sense or feel me following half a block behind him. (Loc. 920-921)

I found the following quote in “Happy Hour” fitting to wrap up my take on Jesus’ Son. By intention or not it seems Johnson was poking fun at the style of his writing and its juxtaposition to the subject matter:

I stayed in the library, crushed breathless by the smoldering power of all those words—many of them unfathomable—until Happy Hour. And then I left. (Loc. 1147-1148) 

Add to your Halloween reading: Unnatural Tales of the Jackalope

It's the season for all things dark, scary, and fun. If you haven't already done so, please consider adding our crazy book to your reading list. Help support a bunch of indie writers by purchasing Unnatural Tales of the Jackalope, a short story anthology filled with horror, dark humor, and intrigue, from Western Legends Publishing. You won't be sorry. It includes my short story "Johnny Versus the Creatures."

Amazon: http://amzn.com/1477451919

Western Legends: http://westernlegendspublishing.com/ 

Writing Craft: Defining Noir

I love noir. It contains or shares elements of various genres I am drawn to and tend to write in, like disturbed and unusual psychological issues, dystopian themes, hard-boiled character-driven drama, brutal honesty, and gritty realism when it comes to the human condition. I selected several stories from The Best American Noir of the Century, a 731-page short story anthology edited by James Ellroy and Otto Penzler, for this craft-base blog entry.

The anthology is filled with so many great authors and stories I had a hard time deciding where to begin. As the anthology is assembled chronologically by publishing dates, I settled on the earliest works, ranging from 1923 to 1952, to determine what common threads exist between these various stories that classify them as noir. Otto Penzler explains in the Foreword, “noir … is virtually impossible to define, but everyone thinks they know it when they see it. Like many other certainties, it is often wildly inaccurate.” I love this fact about this genre. Its definition seems to reside somewhere in our collective subconscious, an area where the darker side of humanity dwells and occasionally surfaces to disrupt everyday life. Penzler finished the Foreword by saying, “If you find light and hilarity in these pages, I strongly recommend a visit to a mental health professional.” I wouldn’t say I found anything light and hilarious, but I was fascinated by these stories.

Penzler’s statements issued a challenge: what defines noir and makes it so appealing? After reading the stories from Tod Robbins, James M. Cain, Steve Fisher, MacKinlay Kantor, Day Keene, Dorothy B. Hughes, Howard Browne, and Mickey Spillane, the common thread I found was a casual attitude toward death: either the thoughts of killing, driving someone to suicide, or following through with emotionally charged murder, with or without remorse.

In Tod Robbins’s “Spurs,” the short story that was the basis for the controversial 1933 film Freaks, Jacques Courbé, a seemingly harmless circus-performing dwarf, is capable of breaking his wife’s vitality and spirit in exchange for her teasing during their circus wedding and subsequent plans for his wealth. The beautiful, strong, and talented Jeanne Marie only married him for his inherited fortune, he quickly found out. She found him to be a joke as she was determined to keep him at bay and eventually cause his death and take ownership of his inheritance. A year after marriage when the circus was back in town, Jeanne Marie runs to the aid of her old boyfriend the charming bareback rider Simon Lafleur, the “circus Romeo,” to whom she planned to return to after Courbé was dead. Courbé, with the help of his wolf-dog companion whom was also his performance partner and mode of transportation, tracked them down and killed Lafleur.

M. Jaques Courbé cleansed his sword on a kerchief of lace, dismounted, and approached Jeanne Marie. She was still crouching on the floor, her eyes closed, her head held tightly between both hands. The dwarf touched her imperiously on the broad shoulder which had so often carried him.
“Madame,” he said, “we now can return home. You must be more careful hereafter. Ma foi, it is an ungentlemanly business cutting the throats of stable boys!”

In the 1946 story “The Homecoming,” by Dorothy B. Hughes, a strong jealous rage causes the protagonist, Benny, to kill his girlfriend Nan and an old war hero boyfriend who visits her after returning home from Korea. The whole story is focused on Benny’s jealously of Jim, the celebrated war hero and popular kid from high school, as he walks to Nan’s home, climaxing in their unintended deaths. At least he thought the murders were unintentional, despite carrying a gun to the home with the intention to put Jim in his place.

There were lights in most of the houses. You’d think the neighbors would have heard all the noise. Would have come running out to see what was going on. They probably thought it was the radio.

They should have come. If they had come, they’d have stopped him. He didn’t want to kill anyone. He didn’t want even to kill Jim. Just to scare him off. Just give him a scare.

She couldn’t be dead. She couldn’t be, she couldn’t be, she couldn’t be. He sobbed the words into the wind and the dark and the dead brown leaves.

Mickey Spillane’s 1953 story “The Lady Says Die!” portrays a story of a wildly successful Wall Street broker, Duncan, an otherwise good man, who exacts revenge upon an old schoolmate and rival Walter Harrison who took his fiancée away from him through a course of one-upmanship and married her for a short time. He reveals to a detective over drinks his desires and the course of events that led to Walter’s death.

God, how I hated that man! I used to dream of killing him! Do you know, if ever my mind drifted from the work I was doing, I always pictured myself standing over his corpse with a knife in my hand, laughing my head off.

Playing off his rival’s weakness of getting everything he desired, a well-planned series of seemingly causal and innocent events drives Walter to suicide on the anniversary of the date he had stolen Duncan’s fiancée.

Interestingly, one story in this selection had self-awareness for the noir genre, in that human death could not occur as one might suspect. “Gun Crazy,” published in 1940 by MacKinlay Kantor, follows the life of Neslon Tare, who is obsessed with guns from the age of six. He develops amazing dexterity and shooting accuracy, eventually giving way to becoming an outlaw robbing banks and using his trick shooting skills to his advantage to evade capture. The twist, as is revealed by the characters who know him best having grown up with him, is that he cannot hurt a single living soul, he is incapable of shooting people or even rabbits during a hunting trip as a kid. This weakness leads to his eventual capture and imprisonment, and no one, surprisingly, dies.

“You’ll Always Remember Me,” by Steve Fisher, published in 1938, was perhaps the most disturbing of the stories I read. Told in the first person, the 14-year-old protagonist Martin Thorpe reveals his penchant for torturing and killing, both animals and humans. He has a history of being thrown out of schools for causing problems, only accepted into the current military school because his father is wealthy and paid double tuition. He feels remorse for the older brother of his girlfriend about to be executed for his father’s murder, the central theme of the story. However, Duff Ryan, a young detective, senses Thorpe is behind the murder, using a gruesome tactic to prove his suspicions.

Duff walks Thorpe to a chapel on the school campus discussing his violent past school records, beginning the conversation that they had a job to do, to "kill a kitten," one that had been severely injured by a car and Duff kept alive with an injection to reduce pain for this scene.

I could see the funny twist of his smile there in the moonlight. His face looked pale and somehow far away. He looked at the cat and petted it some more. I was still shaking. Scared, I guess.

He said, “Too bad we have to kill you, kitten, but it’s better than that pain.”

Then, all at once I thought he had gone mad. He swung the cat around and began batting its head against the pillar in the chapel. I could see the whole thing clearly in the moonlight, his arm swinging back and forth, the cat’s head being battered off, the bright crimson blood spurting all over.

He kept on doing it and my temples began to pound. My heart went like wildfire. I wanted to reach over and help him. I wanted to take that little cat and squeeze the living guts out of it. I wanted to help him smash its brains all over the chapel. I felt dizzy. Everything was going around. I felt myself reaching for the cat. 

With the awareness that Duff was testing him, he manages to restrain himself and not partake in the cat’s killing. Soon after, Thorpe is able to act on his desire to kill, when he pushes Pushton, a younger kid who plays the bugle each morning, out of a dormitory window to his death. Thorpe is eventually caught for the murder of his girlfriend’s father and takes pride in the fact that he cannot go to prison or be executed because of his young age, reform school was his only punishment. To his frustration however, no one believes he was behind the death of Pushton as much as he brags about it, as it was attributed to an accident.

The blatant unapologetic honesty of human desire and controlling the fates of other people’s lives is central to all of these stories. Filled with emotional and psychological complexities based around human relationships and perceptions, noir contains an incredible gamut of storylines and settings, each story as compelling, even more so, than the last. And the beauty of it all is that these stories are timeless, as human nature has not changed in the past century, if not millennium, and probably never will.

Carver’s realism in fiction

I don’t often find myself holding such deep empathy for characters as I did while reading a selection of Raymond Carver’s stories in Cathedral. The man was brilliant at capturing the human condition with stripped-down language and few words. He animated the ordinary and mundane; uninteresting people suddenly become complicated and intriguing characters on the page fueled by such strong emotions as loneliness, resentment, and grief.

As suspense continued to climb through each story, I kept wondering what a particular character was going to do next. In the story “Preservation,” I was waiting for the wife to snap in response to her depressed husband who spent three months on the couch after losing his job. I really thought at one point she was contemplating violence, yet, it’s never once suggested in the words on the page. Anger and frustration are portrayed through her actions and observations of her husband’s despondency, but it’s between the lines and paragraph breaks where her violent thoughts reside.

The underlying emotions and mental states in Carver’s stories are incredibly real, yet only touched upon in the words themselves, if at all, like the clichéd iceberg analogy I won’t bother to recite, you’ve heard it more than once. Likewise, I found similar empathetic responses in other stories, particularly the heavy grief-weighted sadness of “A Small, Good Thing.” It would not surprise me if this story had a reputation of drawing tears from readers. The fright of two parents coping with their severely injured child in the hospital and the unknown outcome is not an easy one to portray. This story left me in a somber mood; there was a lot to rationalize and digest.

So now, my self-imposed challenge is to accomplish at least half this reaction from readers of my own stories.

A writer’s maturation of character

Last week I wrote about drawing influence from published writers. Over the weekend, my latest influence revealed itself. Last week through Saturday morning I had been reading Robert Stone’s Fun With Problems, a collection of short stories dealing with heavily flawed characters existing in the darker side of humanity whether or not they even realize it. In some incredible feat, I spent at least ten hours on Saturday writing, rewriting, and revising a short horror story. I don’t get to spend that much time writing in one day usually, it was a strange feeling when I had wrapped it up for the night, like I had stepped out of time and reality. I didn’t want to come back at first, but my family came home, we needed dinner and so on.

The revelation came as I was reading the story aloud. Stone’s book influenced my approach to incorporating my protagonist’s backstories; slowly revealed details layered one on another creating a complex persona in as few words as possible. Without this awareness during the process, I found myself striving for new depths in character creation. Not to say I’ve never dug deep before; this was different.

I found specific intent in what I wrote about his past actions and their effect on the current-day storyline. Writing this horror story has become a psychological study of this heavily flawed character, seemingly laced with lessons in morality, maybe even spirituality. Good versus evil in this story became a thick pool of grayness, a viscous organic byproduct of several visceral systems malfunctioning in tandem. My flawless victim of circumstance born of mediocrity in the rough draft matured into a well rounded, wonderfully dark, and flawed character with the charm of a successful door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman and the patience of a hungry cat. I leapt over a hurdle I never knew was there.

Perhaps my protagonist, as different as he is from me, is my reflection or a second personality buried in my subconscious. We shall see.

Scary Scribes Radio Interview

Scary Scribes with host Kristi Peterson Schoonover interviews four book authors – Jeff Strand, Sephera Geron, Fawn, and DT Griffith from the anthology, Unnatural Tales of the Jackalope. Originally recorded and broadcasted live on July 29, 2012.

I sat in my car with windows shut in the heat in a family member's driveway during this interview. There was no way we would make the one hour drive  home in time for the radio show. Of course that didn't stop my daughter and little cousins from approaching the car to distract me as a question was posed to me. It all worked out well.

Thanks to Fawn for putting this video together!

Radio interview tonight to support Unnatural Tales of the Jackalope antholaogy

Hey everyone, in the name of shameless self-promotion I will be one of a handful of writers tonight interviewed on Scary Scribes. The live show runs 6:00 – 7:00 PM eastern, after which, a podcast will be available. If you have the time please check it out: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/paranormaleh/2012/07/29/scary-scribes-ep-7

Unnatural Tales of the Jackalope is out!

Front cover art by Jason Mones, design by D.T. Griffith

I am excited to to share the news that my short story, "Johnny Versus the Creatures," is now published as part of the new anthology Unnatural Tales of the Jackalope, edited by John Palisano. This marks my entrance into the fiction publishing world. 

Please check it out on Amazon and considering buying a copy at: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008H76GIS. The ebook is available now, paperback due for release very soon.

Keep up with news from Western Legends Publishing on Facebook. More books due out this year!

Back cover: list of contributing authors.

A Writers Exploration: Where I Am

Find this and other shots on my Instagram acount: dtgriffith

I am here in early May as my MFA Writing program spring semesters wraps. I have definitely come out ahead from where I started, making a few self-discoveries along the way. For instance, I learned that I am a natural at writing horror and suspense in my fiction life, something I never touched on until recently. I had always aimed at the slice of life, somewhat absurd, realism in my earlier days of writing, mixed with elements of surrealism for the unexpected. Rejuvenating my writing style in the psycho thriller and horror area story feels like a natural progression for me, one that I just took the risk and succeeded at. Who knew? My first story in this genre will be published soon, details to come.

I find myself filled with far more knowledge about the discipline of corporate communication and PR than I had ever anticipated. The things that come out of my mouth on this subject at work or during casual conversations catch me by surprise sometimes, only proving that my MFA endeavor is anything but futile. I now have a solidified foundation in communication that I have already begun to build upon, which will only continue upwards as I finish my schooling and grow in my professional life.

Most important, I find myself a more confident writer, no longer afraid to take risks and voice my opinions. Risk-taking led to my upcoming first horror publication and brought out my contrarian nature in the world of critiques and classrooms.

Recently, my classmates learned that I couldn’t assimilate with the accepted norm; rather, I innately challenged the authenticity and validity of a big Hollywood screen adaptation to a great Stephen King novella, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. Surprisingly, most of my classmates respected my opinion and did not appear as upset as I had expected considering the Shawshank Redemption film is so highly revered. I did write my review with the utmost respect, after scrapping the scathing first draft. What can I say? I’m an obsessive purist in my artistic roots, it’s who I am. The movie on its own was good, but did not capture the complexity and the many shades of gray that is human nature as depicted in the book. But that’s a whole other discussion.

So, here I am writing my last blog entry for the spring 2012 semester. It’s sad to see a great semester come to an end, but exciting to know I have accomplished so much and gained some new friends along the way. I am already eagerly anticipating the next semester and reconvening with my classmates at our next residency in August.

As for this blog, I will carry on regularly.

A Writers Exploration: The Rules are the Rules are for Breaking

The concept of rules in writing has circulated in my head this past semester, some thoughts seeing the light of day on a previous blog post. My obsessive nature makes me want to be a purist, following all regulations on grammar and sentence structure to the extreme. But the proverbial devil on my left shoulder, who’s persuasion over me has been quite successful in recent months, has helped me deviate quite effectively. Taking risks in my writing has become my normal, sometimes it works well, leading a short on its way to publishing soon, and other times it falls flat on the iced-over concrete resulting in a few bruised ribs and a shattered ego. But that’s okay; “live and learn,” as someone once said before it was repeated a billion times.

I recently read a few stories written outside of the mainstream when it comes to point-of-view and tense that jarred my attention. These stories felt odd, foreign beyond earthly limits, stimulating my imagination as I prepare to work on my current pieces.

The first story was written in second person in the present tense. Yes, you read that correctly. How often do you find yourself reading about yourself placed in a life that you never lived? Fiction is traditionally written in either first or third person, generally dependent on the author’s preference and intent, but second is a whole other world. Check out the following published story, “Sacrifice,” written by Jenn Powers, a peer in my MFA program. Whether or not it was intended, the story plays off the double portrait concept, in which the author paints a portrait of another person who is connected by some type of relationship and thereby creates a self-portrait through responses and interactions. I highly recommend reading the brilliant essayist Philip Lopate to learn more on this subject. Moving back to the story, the reader assumes the role of the protagonist’s ailing and embittered grandmother, grieving the loss of her long-time husband. It is a tragic story conveying a lot of emotion. As I read, I learned about the protagonist’s strong bond with her grandmother and the endearing sadness caused by the current situation. I got to know the protagonist as a result.

A second story that transported me into in another part of the animal kingdom was Tim Weed’s “Snarl.” Tim is a writing mentor in the Western Connecticut State University Writing MFA program. It’s written in the first-person present tense with an additional twist – from the perspective of a hyena. The story moves in real time as it is read, time lapses represented by extra line breaks. Humans are seen as strange and foreign creatures called “skin-monkeys” with their “fire machines” and “false suns.” Essentially, Tim has created a sci-fi story resembling the enslavement of humans by an alien race; only the humans are the aliens here. I fell into this story in the first few paragraphs; the vivid sensory elements placed me in the head of a hyena with his mate on the run from a fenced-in enclosure, presumably a zoo – a sort of Bonnie and Clyde scenario only ore visceral than bank robberies.

The rules exist to provide structure and guidance as we develop ourselves as creative beings regardless of our chosen discipline. Traditional methods, such as writing in past tense and third person exist to provide stability and a level of comfort while exploring the craft. When you have mastered the craft, you must master undoing all of those rules and traditions to find your voice, to let your nature shine through your art. In other words, break the rules when you know how to do it well and with intent. Show no fear.