writer. screenwriter. learning person. loves being human.
It says so right here. (Thanks to Jill for the link.)
I will also speak to the truth of this one — the 80’s are hugely popular at the club where I dance, and even if I am only an Irish guy, I do know the words to all those songs (with a particular soft spot in my heart for “Tainted Love”.)
Also, you cannot be a Real Lesbian in a dance club unless you can do the Electric Slide. I myself cannot (yet), but I’m working on it!
PBS. Shakespeare. Not exactly a combination that screams evil pornographic smutty filthy filth, now is it? Until you hear about Sir Ian McKellen getting naked as King Lear, and marvel at the mix of outrage and ewww that the notion seems to bring out of people. Just read the comments on the above linked post alone… and if you need more convincing that Americans are tight-assed about nudity, ask ten people in line at the supermarket whether it’s okay for people to get naked on screen or on stage or on the beach or in the fenced-in privacy of their own back yard.
Here, by way of contrast, is a thoughtful article and discussion (in the comments section) of real-live nudity and whether or not it’s artistically and culturally appropriate, aesthetic and/or harmful.
When I was 15 or 16, my high school bought a block of tickets to the touring production of Equus in Boston. Any student could sign up and go for free. A faculty member drove us in, fed us dinner, and herded us all efficiently into our seats. I didn’t know in advance that two characters (a young man and woman) would get naked onstage. And it wasn’t her nakedness that made everyone shift in their seats, it was his. I’d seen a penis before, but never a real live stranger’s penis loose in the wild, so to speak… and I remember the subtle shock that rippled through the audience. It was partly the sheer vulnerability of it, and partly the symbolic value — anything might now happen. And because of the staging — the play is typically done in the round, and the audience is essentially right on stage — the whole experience was very immediate. We could see the sweat in the actors’ armpits and the goosebumps on their thighs when the air-conditioning hit their bare skin… and suddenly the whole scene was so much more visceral.
That was 30 years ago, and things have moved forward. But this culture is still pretty damn confused in its response to public nudity. Nowadays it seems pretty much accepted for beautiful people to get naked, but let a non-airbrushed person show their skin and suddenly it’s icky and…. and what? I think that word we’re looking for is real. Nudity that we can objectify is fine. Nudity that makes a person more real instead of less — even in a completely non-sexual context — now, that’s scary.
And it is scary, that’s the thing. I say on the talk to me contact form that I won’t send people naked pictures. I’m not sure I would even take naked pictures of myself, not because I’m ashamed of my body, but because I have been socialized to believe that bodies are private. And also because so often women don’t have control over our own bodies, and so the idea of physical privacy becomes much more twined with ideas of safety and self-determination.
So I wouldn’t do a reading naked. I wouldn’t get naked to sell my books. But I might go to a naked beach one of these days. I would definitely skinny-dip with strangers (have done it before). And I would probably get naked on stage or on screen for a role, if it was what the story required.
So what’s the difference? What are the boundaries? No answers here, just questions right now, and curiosity about what others think and feel.
I have been a Stephen King fan since I was a teenager. I think, at his best, he is one of the all-time masters of story and character. He understands how the smallest moment or seemingly unimportant choice can utterly change a life. He can tell a hell of a story. And no one does a particular kind of American voice better. Stephen King books can scare the shit out of me every time, to the point that I get spooked reading them by myself at night.
Other horror books I love: Ghost Story and Shadowland by Peter Straub, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, Stoker’s Dracula, most all of Poe…
And every once in a while I’ll watch a horror movie. I like Alien, Aliens, Jaws, The Haunting (the 1963 Robert Wise film, not the cringe-inducing Jan de Bont 1999 remake).
All in all, a very short list from a very large field. I stopped appreciating horror when the splatterpunks came along in the 80’s. I’ve read the Books of Blood and the rest of the splattercanon, and you know what? Just don’t like it.
Today I watched 30 Days of Night. Well, I watched about 70% and fast-forwarded through the rest. It wasn’t offensive. It was a smart premise. And the violence was as much suggested as shown — it certainly earns the R rating, but it’s not the linger-lovingly-on-the-violence-in-slow-motion approach that made me turn off Robocop (and please, can someone please help Verhoeven with his issues? It’s getting so I won’t watch a movie with his name on it…).
But in other ways it was too routine to elevate it above the formulaic. A bunch of demographically-varied people get picked off one by one, some because they are stupid and some because they are noble. The nice touch was the ending….
SPOILER ALERT
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… in which the hero realizes that he has to become a monster in order to be able to fight them (they are really strong), so he injects himself with the tainted blood of a victim in order to induce a transformation. He saves his ex-girlfriend and the obligatory orphaned child (yep, same old instant-family routine), and then dies in her arms as the sun finally comes up. No last-minute reprieve.
I wouldn’t watch this movie again, but because it bored me, not because it offended me. And I can certainly be offended. I won’t ever watch the Saw movies or Hostel or Funny Games any of the other torture-porn/let’s-get-sadistic-on-someone’s-ass films that seem to be the new splatterpunk.
If it’s true that horror films help us cathartize (is that a word?) deep cultural fears, allow us to bleed energy out of some personal demons, then maybe it makes some kind of sense that so many of these movies are about random, sadistic violence. The kind of thing any of us are helpless to prevent or to control, that we can only try to survive. Maybe that’s how we’re all feeling about our world and our lives right now. There’s a line I heard that to me is a perfect example, from the new movie The Strangers, in which the heroine asks one of the random masked-into-facelessness strangers, “Why are you doing this to us?” and the stranger says, “Because you were home.” It doesn’t get any more pointed than that.
But I fucking hate those movies. In the worst moments (mine or theirs), I leave them feeling both compartmentalized and complicit in something nasty. I feel flattened. Reduced. I hate the whole story ethic that trivializes human violence by making it “just because” and then making that the center of a story. To me, that’s a rotton core. To me, it’s the same nihilism as the root of splatterpunk — let’s just think of worse and worse things to describe, to witness, to be on some level engaged with, and the first one to blink and turn away is a wuss.
That particular kind of human violence is too frightening and too real to treat that way. I don’t want to see it turned into entertainment, any more than I want to see rape turned into entertainment. But clearly a lot of people do want to see it. And I’m curious why. Anyone who has theories to share (actual theories as opposed to judgment of the audience), I’d really like to hear them. As a storyteller, it’s something I’d like to understand even if I don’t ever want to do it.
I am interested in writing a horror novel someday — but it’ll be more King than Saw. I’d like to explore the kind of scare that seems to be out of vogue right now (typical Eskridge timing) — the fear of the unknown and unknowable, the unexplained, the monsters that scare us because they come from deep within us, or because we are tempted to let them that far in. I hope there will still be a place for that when I get around to it.
What horror films or books have you liked? Can you tell me why? I’m interested in refining my own notions about these things.
So the Wall Street Journal (not the last bastion of cutting-edge cultural hipness, to be sure) thinks that big bad bear markets are responsible for hard rock.
Maybe so, although I’d like to think that I fell in love with Aerosmith in the 80’s because I was 15 and full of hormones, not because someone in Manhattan was losing their shirt on steel shares. Oh, and because of “Dream On,”, still on my favorites list.
Note the last line of the WSJ article, which implies that no great hard rock bands emerged from the dip in 2001….
I beg to differ.
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, “Love Burns” from their debut album B.R.M.C. 2001.
You can, if you like, imagine Noir listening to BRMC on the bus…
(Oh, and will someone please let me know if the WSJ article link doesn’t work? It’s not clear to me whether the WSJ blog section is public or subscription-only…)
In my house, we haven’t watched television news for more than 10 years. Seriously. Because TV news has become a sad and disgraceful circus of whipped-up frenzy where all headlines are breathlessly delivered with great import, and the news is “teased” during prime-time commercial breaks with summaries intended to scare the pants off god-fearin’ white heterosexual middle-class home owners, where everything comes down to the terrorists, e coli, or Danger To Your Children.
So I get my news from NPR and the BBC, from Nicola (who gets hers from The Economist), and online — in this case from John Scalzi, who wrote about Fox News taking a racist swipe at Michelle Obama last month, and expressed himself so well that I just want to point to it and say, Yep, what he said.
I’ve been meaning to link to this ever since I read it, but I dropped off the grid for a while right around that time, so it’s taken me until now to return to it. And isn’t it weird that I feel like I have to apologize for being “late”? Yeeps, internet culture is so… immediate. But there’s unfortunately no shelf life on racism, and there shouldn’t be a shelf life on smacking it down either.
And in the spirit of giving it up to one’s art, and giving it up to someone else’s, here’s U2.
This is “Where the Streets Have No Name,” live at Slane Castle in 2001. I adore this performance. The band is tight, Bono is gone on the song, the crowd is practically lifting the entire country of Ireland into the stratosphere… It’s a great performance musically and a chance to see the artists living right in the core of their art.
If the tech from “Dangerous Space” existed, this would be a performance I’d want to feel. Sometimes I just yearn to mainline other artists….
I want to feel sunlight on my face,
And see that rain cloud disappearing without a trace,
But I can dance, dance, dance in the dirty rain
Where the streets have no name.
I met my friend Dave Slusher back in the early 90’s in Atlanta, when he interviewed Nicola for his radio show Reality Break — a very very cool program that was also nationally syndicated on NPR for a couple of years. Those of you who have been in sf for a while may well remember it, and may well have been interviewed by Dave.
And the good news is that Dave has recently revived Reality Break as a podcast that will feature a mix of archived shows and new interviews — including, in a month or so, an interview with me done about a year ago, after the release of Dangerous Space. I’ll post a link as soon as the show is available.
In the meantime, go listen to Dave’s interviews with Will Eisner and Cory Doctorow. Dave’s a great interviewer — he knows speculative fiction, comics, and internet culture inside out, reads thoughtfully and widely, asks good questions, makes a real conversation out of it. He’s in love with writing and writers, novels and comics, deep questions and far-flung ideas…
And P.S., I love Cory Doctorow’s notions about how the internet makes us all weirder!
[Here’s a follow up to the original question from Barbara, no longer anonymous…]
P.S. I have read a good deal of your speculative fiction and was excited, moved and intrigued. I want you to know that I have read sf, horror and fantasy since I was a child, and I did not mean to imply in any way that science fiction is lesser fiction.
Barbara Sanchez
Gosh, no, I didn’t take it that way at all, and I hope my answer didn’t sound as though I did. I thought you were asking what we call in our house a “real question,” meaning one with no implied judgment or agenda. If I’d thought you were being snarky about science fiction, I would probably have answered very differently (smile), and you wouldn’t have got to see any work in progress, for sure.
It’s interesting putting up work that isn’t “finished”… A few years ago, I wouldn’t have: too much pride. That’s been pretty much hammered out of me (well, okay, not completely) by the screenwriting process, in which total strangers read work that I do in days and treat it exactly the same as work done in weeks or months. No quarter given. A real learning experience in very many ways.
When I was a beginning writer, I wanted everyone to love everything I did, because if they loved it, it must be good. And so the response became what I worked for, which is backwards and bullshit, but I didn’t have anyone to tell me that the point is to do the work so well, with such skill and focus and intention, that it will speak clearly to those who read it. And then they can judge for themselves whether it’s good for them or not.
The best thing a new writer can learn to do is open wide and take the criticism in. Learn to listen through the embarrassment, the anger and the defensiveness. Try to hear beyond what people say (because sometimes it’s badly expressed, or focused in the wrong place) and work instead to understand what they mean. Suffer and rage and bang your head against it long enough to finally learn a) how to write better and b) how to filter good criticism from crap criticism (because not everyone can actually help you make your work better, and some criticism really is crap).
Genuine, thought-out criticism is a gift, even when I decide that it’s not for me. It’s hard in this culture to criticize someone’s work. Criticism basically says that the artist has failed to achieve her goals (or to achieve the goals of the person offering the criticism, which may or may not be something I need to listen to…), and we don’t like hurting people’s feelings with the word failure. I have found this to be true even in Hollywood, where I had expected criticism delivered with little attention to the niceties… instead, I’ve found people being so careful of my feelings that I’ve started being explicit about the fact that I don’t take their comments personally unless they become personal. I will say, You can hurt my feelings by telling me I’m a crap writer. You won’t hurt my feelings by telling me that something in the script isn’t working for you.
Of course, sometimes that’s a lie. Every once in a while, I do get my feelings hurt or I do get pissed off. I do it in private and keep it to myself. Becoming defensive just doesn’t move things forward…
I am not a new writer by any stretch, but I’ve been a new screenwriter for a couple of years now, and have been crawling through this particular mud again, and so I’m very glad that I have already learned some of these lessons in fiction, where there aren’t so many people stirring the pot. If I’d gone through this screenplay thing for the first time in my 20’s, I probably would have run screaming. Now I just hang up the phone, give the entire state of California the finger if I need to, and get back to work.
And (trying now to return to some semblance of connection to the topic at hand) that’s why it’s okay now to share more of myself and my fiction at a less-than-seamless stage. I wouldn’t do it for something I was actively working on right now — but this is more a maybe-someday work, and I find that acknowledging its flaws doesn’t make me feel any less like a real writer. In fact, it makes me feel more like one.
Congratulations on your anniversary. Twenty years is some kind of record in this age of planned obsolescence and instant gratification.
Will you ever consider writing anything besides sf?
Anonymous
Thanks very much for your good wishes, and your patience waiting for this response. I’ve been trying to answer your question, only to find that it’s a very slippery one indeed… so here we go down the slide.
I call my published work speculative fiction: I need a broad category, because the stories wander in the spaces between science fiction and fantasy and horror. I’ve had people over my career question (sometimes heatedly) that what I write is sf of any kind, at all. And I never identify myself as an “sf writer” — I call myself a writer, and when people ask What do you write?, I tell them that I write fiction and screenplays, as opposed to saying I write science fiction…
Am I trying to repudiate speculative fiction? Absolutely not. I’m proud of my work and proud to be in a field that so many extraordinary writers call home. But is it my home? I dunno, I think I’m with Nicola and William Gibson on this one. I come from sf, but am I really sf? I don’t think so. Maybe it’s only that I don’t like being categorized, but I think it’s more than that. I think it’s about my concerns as a writer.
To me, sf writers have sf-nal concerns. For science fiction writers, creating alternate realities or new technology or building worlds is part of the point, part of the jazz. For me, it’s just part of the work, and I do it only as much as I need to in service of the characters and the story that wants to be told. Speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, what have you) is a wonderful shortcut — I can create whatever paradigm I want in order to turn the characters loose. I can be extreme. I can create a character whose sexuality is tied into violence (“Eye of the Storm”) without having to explain it in terms of twenty-first century psychological models; I can make a whole city fall down just because it’s right for the story (“City Life”).
But really, when I take a closer look, my work is grounded in the real, in the now — music, martial arts, how the el trains work — and, most importantly for me, in real-world human feelings and experiences. That’s where I always start and end as a writer. That’s my jazz.
I have written non-sf. I just haven’t published any. After Solitaire came out, I began work on two different mainstream novels. I wrote 17,000 words of one and 45,000 words of the other — finished words, proposal-to-my-publisher quality. I wrote detailed outlines. And I was pleased with them both.
I showed them to Nicola. She thought they were pretty good, but slow. In-dwelling, she said. Not enough narrative drive. I showed them to my agent. She thought one was pretty good and hated the other. Practically spit on it. Said my protagonist was “whiny and pathetic,” which I suspected was her version of “in-dwelling.”
I sent the non-spat-upon proposal package to my editor at HarperCollins, who liked it but thought it needed work. And she was right. And I tried to work on it, but I didn’t at that time have the absolute burning passion that I do now for work, and I had no internal compass to tell me what was wrong or where to go from there. I lost my way, and I lost my heart for both novels.
It’s been years since I put them away. And for a long time after that, in terms of writing, I just kicked a metaphorical tin can up and down the sidewalk, until I told Nicola one day that I thought maybe I wasn’t really meant to be a writer after all.
But you know what? I was wrong about that. How I reconnected with my writing soul is another topic for another day, but I am definitely a writer.
But am I definitely an sf writer? (Hah, bet you thought I’d completely lost the thread…) Nope. I’m a writer. I’ll write whatever I write, and I’m making no plans about whether that should or will be speculative fiction or not.
And so the answer to your question is not just I don’t know, it’s I don’t need to know. It’s a huge fucking triumph for me to be a writer. And I’m very clear now on what kind of writer I want to be — as I said in the recent interview at Enter the Octopus:
What are your longterm career goals?
To write fiction and screenplays and essays that make me and you feel bigger inside, that make us dream and burn and bring us closer to ourselves. The rest â the big money, the glam, the pretty prizes â either comes or it doesnât. I canât control who buys my books or my scripts, but I am totally in charge of what I write and how I feel about myself as a writer. Thatâs the career I want.
And if this screenwriting thing works out, I might even be a consistently-earning writer, which would be pretty cool too.
And — thinking about your question has made me look at those novels again. The one that went to my editor, nah, I think that’s a goner. It just doesn’t speak to me anymore. But the one my agent hated, well, there’s something there. Not in its current form, but… I read it and I can see the people in my head, hear them, feel their connections and their longings. If Jane feels whiny, well, that’s because I haven’t given her enough to do yet. But there’s something there that makes me sit up and pay attention, and I just might have to go find out what it is one of these days.
In the meantime, if you’d like to judge for yourself, take a look.
If I do ever take it up again, the funny thing is that at least one path could be a ghost story, in which case I would still be writing sf after all. And here I go again, with answers that only expand the questions. Ah, that’s life.
If you’d like to ask a question or start a conversation, please do what this person did — use the talk to me link (also on the sidebar) anytime.