Or vice-versa.
Q: “Most people say you should ‘write what you know.’ Do you agree?”
A: In a way, yes. With certain qualifications.
Let’s take the case of “Hidebound,” for example—first published in Transversions #5 (ed. Dale Sproule and Sally McBride), then optioned for adaptation by The Hunger (the resultant episode aired during the show’s 1998 season.) Now, I’m very fond of this one, even though I had no (official) input into its screenplay adaptation—primarily since it has dry-voiced, perpetually unimpressable, blessedly full-figured Brooke Smith (probably best known as “the girl down the well” in Silence Of The Lambs) playing main character “Lee,” better known as “Gemma with a slight dye-job and far more obvious ass-kicking capabilities.” But “Hidebound” is also rife with autobiographical elements—liberal use of details gleaned from several sites I worked as a security guard, “Lee’s” painful break-up with her fiancé forming a continual subplot to the considerably more dramatic pseudo-werewolf foreground, etc.
So: Do these elements add or detract, in the end? Or, considering most readers who don’t know me can’t possibly know what’s “based on a true story” and what’s not unless I tell them, do they even matter?
I don’t really think you can ever avoid putting bits of yourself into original characters; obviously, some turn out more “you” than others, but the “you” parts will always be the parts that make things work, essentially. They’re the parts that resonate. And it took me a very long time to accept this fact, because it sounded so much in my mind like that “Why don’t you write what you know?” thing Mom always used to say to me, and I always used to resent so bitterly: I write fantasy, I don’t write reality. But the fantasy spirals off from reality, and it’s that little core of “real” that makes the fake that much better, more original, more rooted in some sense of a larger, understandable reality—that makes the impossible more possible, in other words.
The older I get, the more I realize that the reason I wasn’t able to finish some earlier projects had less to do with a lack of invention than with a lack of emotional understanding which can only come from actual, physical, real-life experience. Inevitably—when I revisit abandoned stories, screenplays, whatever—I find that the true fault lay in an inability to see exactly why and how the things I somehow knew had to happen would, or could, happen: the subconscious, synaptic connections between instinct and impulse, action and reaction, which take actual human beings years to untangle.
So often, we rarely understand our own motivations except in hindsight—and things only become more complex, less black and white, the further we move away from them. In other words, the events themselves don’t change, only the way we perceive those events . . . and the way we perceive them only changes because we change enough to recognize the distance between who we are now, and who we once were.
All of which is utterly essential, to my mind, when trying to create a realistic, resonant character. Because if your characters can’t be at least as marginally self-aware as you yourself are, then what’s the point of writing them at all? The more detailed and realistic the character, the more the reader—a detailed, realistic character him/herself—can identify with them, developing an empathy for their situation and problems which goes far beyond the easy evocation of shallow sympathy most simplistic stereotypes evoke.
Weirdly, the more specific a detail, the better it travels; people somehow know that it’s just distinctive enough to ring “true.” Which is why, in the end, you should never be afraid to “write what you know.” . . even if your mother once told you to.
“Hidebound,” partially based on my break-up with one fiancé, was written during my break-up with another. A year after the episode premiered, my second fiancé ran into me at a party and boasted about how his Dad, watching late-night TV, had been appalled to realize that this scenario about a woman making sure her ex got ripped apart by supernatural beasts (the patented “whammo!” ending, added in translation for maximum Hollywood North effect) was based on something I wrote. “’No, no, that’s about Gemma’s other ex,’” my second fiancé told me he’d assured my former prospective father-in-law, then laughed: Pretty funny, eh? Oh yeah, I agreed—adding: “And the really funny part is, I actually just sold them the one that’s about you.” (That’d be “The Diarist,” first published in Transversions #7 [ed. Dale Sproule and Sally McBride]; the episode based on it aired during The Hunger‘s 1999 season, shot from a teleplay written by yours truly.)
Another “writ[ing] what you know”-type trend I’ve stumbled across recently in my work is the deliberate evocation of script format, as in “Folly” (written for the official 2001 World Fantasy Con CD/ROM, ed. Nancy Kilpatrick, on a theme of “Ghosts & Gaslight”), “Job 37” (first published in Dark Terrors 6, ed. Stephen Jones and David Sutton, from Gollancz) and ”Seen” (first published in The Narrow World Chapbook for World Horror Con 2001, ed. Stephen J. Barringer, Quantum Theology Publications.) On the one hand, I teach screenwriting for a living these days, and format really counts; the biggest struggle, for most of my students, is simply having to accept the fact that what they’re writing is basically more a list of suggestions than any kind of holy writ—a blueprint for a coalition of other artists to enlarge upon, over which you have little or no control after the first draft is sold. On the other, this means that getting your point across is a real exercise in directness and subtlety . . . and since I often think I overwrite anyways, in terms of trying to render the sensual “reality” of a given situation as exactly as possible (I remember once reading a section of Caitlin R. Kiernan’s Low Red Moon ‘blog in which she lamented having spent approximately half a day trying to get one of her characters to cross a room and flick off a light switch, and thinking: Yeah, that’s about the size of it), having to occasionally keep everything strictly “off-stage” is good for me.
Or so I explain it to myself.
In terms of inspiration, meanwhile, “Seen” is related to an old Irish fairytale about a midwife called upon to deliver a fairy baby retold in Georgess McHarque’s The Impossible People, while “Folly” owes a roughly equal debt to The Legend Of Hell House (with Roddy McDowell!) and an article on cthonic rituals in ancient Greece I read in an issue of Archaeology magazine, or somewhere similar. “Job 37” is the result of an interview read in Harper‘s magazine, extensive web-searches on crime-scene clean-up, and probably too many episodes of CSI: Crime Scene Investigations.
Q: “How come so few of your main characters are nice, likeable people?”
A: Are most people “nice” or “likeable,” generally? I know I‘m not. Are you?
It’s funny. On the one hand, I’m increasingly willing to admit that being a hero is probably ten times harder than being a villain, in much the same way that the Dark Side of the Force always beckons twice as hard and seductively as the . . . Um . . . Not-Dark Side; anger, hatred and fear are such easy emotions to evoke, after all, just as compassion, balance and hope are such incredibly difficult ones to sustain. But admiration only takes me so far: In the final analysis, it really is always a bad-ass that makes (this) girl’s heart beat faster. I like slippery people, difficult people, self-justifying people—people with issues, yo—and thus the characters I choose for my protagonists usually end up fitting that particular bill.
“Blood Makes Noise,” first published in Transversions #11 (ed. Dale Sproule and Sally McBride), evolved because I started thinking vaguely about how cowards rationalize their own behavior—is “the fate worse than death,” whatever it may be, really all that worse
(especially if you’re scared shitless of dying)? Regis Book himself, meanwhile, owes an equal debt to Alex Krycek from The X-Files—I was at Ad Astra, Toronto’s biggest yearly multifandom geek romp, when I got the initial idea—and the conspiracy rants of Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra; many details about deep sea life come from William J. Broad’s The Universe Below, amongst other sources.
And speaking of Ad Astra . . . “Pretend That We’re Dead,” first e-published in The Three-Lobed Burning Eye #7 (ed. Andrew S. Fuller), is the direct byproduct of a Shared World Project developed by myself, Sandra Kasturi and Jason Taniguchi for the 1998 version of said convention. I’d therefore like to acknowledge their input into this piece, thank them for their support and friendship generally, and gently bug them to fix up and submit the stuff they wrote that year within what we came to call the Toronto: The Infestation universe.
Q: “Okay. What next?”
A: Aw, you know. Same old same old.
I’ve been writing—and publishing, amazingly enough—short stories for about fifteen years now: Won an award and carved out a bit of a name for myself, just like I once made the equivalent of a whole year’s salary with a single sale (my own script adaptation of the story “Bottle Of Smoke,” for [you guessed it] The Hunger)—which probably, if I dare say so myself, isn’t something a lot of other people can claim to have done. People tell me the next logical evolutionary step is to write a novel, and I believe them; this collection, along with another one I have coming out from Prime Books pretty soon, is sort of designed to help hothouse what last few short stories I still have lurking around on my hard drive to ripeness and fruition, so they’ll stop interfering with that all-important process. I guess we’ll find out if it works.
Which brings us neatly to the last story here: “Dead Bodies Possessed By Furious Motion,” first published in The Narrow World chapbook (ed. Stephen J. Barringer, Quantum Theology Publications.) I see it as a return to my roots, somewhat . . . pseudo-science fiction, liberally larded with those anti-Rice vampirism theories I talked about earlier. A bit thick on the metaphor rather than the logic, but I’ll freely admit I love Elder and her febrile world dearly; it’s maybe two-thirds the visual sense and style of Stephen Norrington’s Blade mixed with Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, but the rest of it is mine, I tells ya . . . alllll mine.
(Oh, and watch for at least one of these characters to pop back up in The Worm . . . as well as making a not-so-cameo appearance in that book I’m already currently laboring on; no, no hints. It’s so much more fun that way.)
At any rate. The leap into the long, cold dark, with only hunger for your friend and guide: A good note to end on, don’t you think? And so, farewell. Thanks for listening.
You’ve been a most gracious—and attentive—audience.
The Night the Comet Hit the Library:
An Afterword to Kissing Carrion and The Worm In Every Heart.
Michael Rowe