If There is Any Reward at all to Writing....

For me, there is no challenge to understanding why a story falls apart; the mystery is to understand how a story moves beyond competence (in itself, easy to explain by technical terms) into the mysterious realms of truth and beauty that mean so much to the individual reader.

Anyone can learn to write with an acceptable degree of clarity, as long as that person understands the value of clarity. A few other people can learn the tricks of construction, pacing, euphony, tonal consistency, economy of means, all of the methods that bring fire to clarity, that make a story worth reading to the final page. Again, these techniques can be recognized, studied, and learned, but only if a writer wants to learn. Many, it seems, have no desire to gain this competence.

Beyond competence lies the realm of personal resonance, and writers have no control over their choice of readers. Even the best writers and the most attentive, thoughtful readers can fail to connect, because they simply do not share the same emotional tonality, because their sensibilities are not quite aligned, because they have lived utterly different lives with different experiences.

Given the troubled circumstances, what can competent writers do?

They can study themselves, know themselves. They can remain faithful to their memories, their moods, their tastes, obsessions, and outlooks. They can speak to themselves while writing as clearly and as engagingly as they can for strangers. They can pull up dreams and threads of their lives, while adding a narrative context that might help readers to see and think and feel in similar ways.

The odds are against them. Sometimes very good writers can fail to gain readers, and this might sour their efforts; it might even compel them to stop writing. But even as they strive and fail, writers can meet the challenge of being themselves. If there is any reward at all to writing, it might be this.

Lessons From Garbage: Pour It On, La Spina!

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Illustration by Boris Dolgov, who deserved a better story.

Things I have learned by reading garbage in WEIRD TALES, Lesson Three.

Never hunt for the single right verb or noun. Instead, bloat entire paragraphs with fumbling abstractions and needless qualifications:

"Being older than either of my two guests, I had, possibly, learned to be diplomatic; sufficiently so, at least, not to have thrust myself unnecessarily into a situation à deux where my tactful absence would have been better appreciated than my presence. I had seen nothing, after all, but Peter's restraining hand on Hank's restive shoulder, and the disappearing swirl of a girl's abbreviated skirts and long cloak into a part of the woods where the low undergrowth was not yet entirely denuded of foliage. All I had heard had been Hank's exclamation, coming almost directly upon the girl's scream. Peter must have been quick in his reaction.

"'Take your hand off me, you damned young cub!' had shouted Hank, with uncontrolled passion for which I did not at the moment entirely blame him. No man relishes the admonishing restraint of a youngster, in front of a woman particularly, no matter how much he may have deserved it."

You can darken this narrative smog by avoiding the simple past tense or even useful infinitives, and by gumming up the prose with present participles:

"We three men were hugging the open fire closely. The raw chill of that November night had closed in around us and the blazing logs yielded grateful warmth.

"Peter Murray was leaning forward in his chair, looking absent-mindedly into the leaping flames that sent flickering shadows to dancing on the walls behind us. Hank Walters was staring at Peter and I was watching both my guests with curious speculation that had risen in me since that afternoon’s encounter."

Never use a clear, simple verb like "to say," when you can type anything else along with an adverb:

"'She's done it! I knew she would!' cried out Peter frantically, and that gripping hand of his began to draw me forward through the woods recklessly."

. . .

"'Poppycock!' I retorted tartly."

. . .

"'You know perfectly well he didn't mean it,' I objected lamely."

Lamely, yes, but remember -- if one adverb is good, then two or even more can be just dandy:

"That reddish luminosity was bobbing unevenly up and down, as if it came from a lamp borne upon the head of a person walking rapidly, swimmingly, across uneven ground."

Did you notice that awkward repetition, that almost-end-rhyme? Stylistic gold!

Above all, avoid any straightforward account of a story's narrative. Complicate, complexify, discombobulate:

"Knowing Hank's proclivities, I could reconstruct the scene fairly well. He must have come upon the girl before she realized his proximity, and mischievously pulled off her pointed cap with the tassel that hung to her shoulder, confidently relying upon his vaunted masculine charm to smooth over the situation if it should unexpectedly tend toward the unpleasant.

"The girl had sprung to her feet, snatched for her cap, which Hank had thrust tormentingly behind him. Whereupon she had let out that eldritch scream. And the scream brought Knight-Errant Peter tearing out of the woods behind them, to remonstrate with Hank, who had naturally resented the interference. The girl had taken advantage of Hank’s momentary unguardedness to snatch, vainly, for her pointed cap, then had fled incontinently without it.

"With dismayed astonishment I had heard her scream, for it was not a scream of surprise; it was a cry of pure anger, of such depth and intensity that it started shivers running up and down my backbone. It was almost un-human in its expression of thwarted fury; arousing in me a powerful curiosity to see this girl who was so capable of such a strength of emotion. At the same time, I felt a dread of seeing her, as if she might prove to be more than my old eyes would care to take in."

Be your eyes old or be they young, may they soak up our lesson of WEIRD TALES garbage to the dregs.

-- Quotations from
"Death Has Red Hair," by Greye La Spina.
WEIRD TALES, September 1942.

Combined and Reduced Characters in "The Cat Jumps"

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Those of you who read my complaint about an August Derleth story crowded by too many characters most likely thought for a moment, and then said to yourselves, "Wait a minute, Dillon, what the hell are you talking about? What about Elizabeth Bowen? What about 'The Cat Jumps'?"

I agree with you! What about "The Cat Jumps?" Eight pages long, with at least thirteen characters (a few merely mentioned, but most of them active on the page), it somehow lets me process all of its people, and it keeps their story-functions clear.

Why does Bowen succeed where August Derleth fails?

In the opening pages, Bowen sets up two couples (the Bentleys, the Wrights), and establishes them immediately as two groups in opposition; in effect, she reduces four people into a clearly-divided pair, and makes their difference a central point of the story.

On page three, the Wrights welcome several guests. Here also, Bowen sets up two groups in opposition: Muriel (nervous, imaginative, and by the standards of everyone else, morbid), and the rest, who form a single unit of rational intellectuals not at all prey to the fears of Muriel.

(You could take this further, and say that we have only three groups to keep in mind: Muriel, the Bentleys, and everyone else who is unafraid and unconcerned.)

What we have, then, are thirteen people, but reduced into clear groups with clear differences between them, so that the reader has no need to stop and think about who is related to whom, or how so-and-so must not be confused with someone else. At the same time, the opposition of these groups, and their differing mental energies, turn the wheels of the plot.

The lesson, here, is that a crowded mess in one story can become a driving force in a second.

This, too: Almost any potential downfall in a story can be avoided or even justified by a writer's intentions and a writer's craft. Never underestimate the healing magic of skill.

Lessons From Garbage: Combine and Reduce the Characters

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Henry? Which one was Henry, again?

Things I have learned by reading garbage in WEIRD TALES, Lesson One.

Every character mentioned in a short story asks the reader to make a mental checklist of who is who, of who is related to whom, of who is doing what. This mental dogwork tugs the reader's attention away from details that might be more essential to the story; it also turns reading into a school assignment.

Combine. Condense. In a story five pages long, five characters could become three, or two. Even a longer short story can gain by having its characters reduced only to those needed for conflict.

Any reader willing to pick up a story deserves consideration. Be courteous and welcoming. Do not be August Derleth.

Roy Fuller, THE SECOND CURTAIN

Roy Fuller, THE SECOND CURTAIN, 1953, soon to be reprinted by Valancourt Books.

A few stray thoughts....

Every now and then, with reluctance, I begin to read certain novels if they are well under 200 pages long. Most I never finish, but Roy Fuller's Graham-Greenesque thriller kept me going to the end. How?

Fuller has never been one of my favourite poets. His war-time poems hold my interest by dealing with his own feelings and impressions; those written after the war seem less personal, and more preoccupied with other poets, other books.

THE SECOND CURTAIN is very much a book about a bookish life, but one that takes a hard look at its novelist hero as it dismantles him. The effect is both cruel and honest: this man, who fancies himself smarter and more insightful than most people, finds himself swamped and over his head in a crime that expands in both complexity and threat, and what is more, a crime that he has no competence to solve. Fuller shows the price paid for a life of emotional detachment and full devotion to books, art, and music at the expense of personal growth: a price too severe, a life too shallow.

The book moves rapidly, with a genuine, "pull the carpet from beneath your feet" surprise three-quarters through, an impressively-described pursuit through a crowded football stadium, a looming sense of risk. As a thriller, it functions through pacing and plot, and as a literary novel, dissects its protagonist and his delusions without mercy.

Still, from start to finish, what kept me reading was the solid British competence of the prose. Having squirmed and scowled through too many badly-written blobs, pulp and modern, I was held by Fuller's confident refusal to be "poetic" or convoluted, to sacrifice economy and clarity to market demands for bloated illiteracy. A modern writer, Stephen King or even worse, would have pumped this book into a 972-page mound of toxic waste, and made it dull, dull, dull. Fuller, to his credit and to my relief, wrote as much as the book needed, but nothing more.

As for the book's ending, I feel conflicted. The final pages are honest, which makes them perhaps grimmer than most readers would prefer. Yet as I lay in bed afterwards and thought about this ending, I realized that, from a certain perspective, it might actually seem hopeful. For the protagonist of THE SECOND CURTAIN, as for that man in a song by the Rolling Stones --

"You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, well, you just might find
You get what you need."

This, too, can bring a hint of necessary change.

Protonicus Moronicus

From the diary: Tuesday, August 2, 2019.

Last night, exhausted after a five-hour bike ride in this midnight heat, I took a shower, went to bed, and dreamt immediately that I was reading a play attributed to Shakespeare, called (and I kid you not):

PROTONICUS MORONICUS.

And now, three years later, for no good reason --

THE SPASTICALLY TRAGICAL HISTORY OF PROTONICUS MORONICUS.

PRINCE AVOCADO:
How fragrant are the roses of our state,
How dignified the columns and the laws;
Yet much, I fear, is undermined by day
And toppled in the dusk.

GRISTLE:
Beware, my prince!
These nagging undercurrents are the work
Of but one man, a blot upon the realm.

PRINCE AVOCADO:
Moronicus! Indeed, a warning cry:
For as the light of intellect will scatter
The scuttling roaches of the cellar crowd,
So too the pratings of an errant fool,
The bantam dance of squat, priapic bastards,
The twirlings of acephalic imposters,
Shall gad the wary mob to celebration.

GRISTLE:
Indeed, my prince. The blatherings of one
Incite the emulations of the many.

PRINCE AVOCADO:
Contagious are the dull, and dullest dire
Is he, Protonicus Moronicus!
Bring here this armpit of the nation state!

GRISTLE:
Bring forth Protonicus!

PROTONICUS MORONICUS:
Doy doy, doy doy!

PRINCE AVOCADO:
And thus I hear a simpletonic twang,
A string untuned upon a pea-brain's lute,
A siren call that turns our noble crowd
Into a hive of pixilated thick-ohs.

GRISTLE:
See how the common people prance and drool!

PRINCE AVOCADO:
Backbones of our grandeur! Citizens!
What would you have as pilots to your barque:
The pensive iambs of a bardic wit,
The dithyrambs cathartic of the great?
Or would you rather shuffle to a thud
Pounded by a pustule-minded clod?

CITIZENS:
Protonicus Moronicus! We want him!

PRINCE AVOCADO:
Oh fuck it all, this era falls apart!
The pratings of a dope are now anthemic,
High bugle tones for sheep and sheepish lice.

GRISTLE:
Hasten, Prince, an exit!

PROTONICUS MORONICUS:
Doy doy doy!