Obviously, when I started this blog, it was meant to be something more personal. This was started out of the frustration of having to restart my life as I approach 30. I'm still in the process of doing that, but I have to admit, I'm feeling a whole lot more comfortable with my life then I did when Square Zero began.
Eventually Accidental Demon Slayers, and the serials, took over after a while. There was a reason for this, though.
The reason is... I love to write. I don't mean I enjoy it. I mean, I LOVE it. I absolutely love writing. It has been one of those things in my life that has always brought me joy. Well, almost always...
I've been writing stories since I was a little kid. Being able to disappear into a world of monsters and mysteries was my greatest escape. Writing helped me explore more mature ideas, like dealing with death, as well as ideas on sexuality. Writing gave me a freedom growing up that nothing else could. If I wasn't writing stories, I was dreaming them up. I still do that. 90% of my day is me thinking about the next story I'm going to write, or developing an idea that I've had stewing around in my brain for years.
The only time I ever felt that joy diminished was when I was in college.
I went to Columbia College Chicago for a degree in Fiction Writing. You would think that spending every day thinking about writing, talking about writing and actually writing would be my dream. I thought it would be. Instead I left that school never wanting to write again.
If you have read any of my stories EVER, then you know I love writing genre fiction. I always have, and I'm guessing I always will. My stories tend to include massive amounts of monsters, blood, guts, sex and swearing. I enjoy writing stuff that is over the top. While I respect authors who want to create great works of literature that reflect the human condition, and explore the depths of the human psyche, I would prefer to write about sex crazed zombies invading a home for nuns who moonlight as strippers. The problem is, the program I was in looked down on genre fiction. It wasn't all the teachers, mind you, but a good chunk of them.
There was one teacher in particular who not just looked down on genre fiction, but, at least in my eyes, seemed to actively hate it. Of course, I would have this teacher (who shall remain nameless), for not one, but three classes through out my time at Columbia.
Now, before we get into how this teacher made me never want to write again, I need to kind of explain the atmosphere in a college writing program. In the Columbia program there were a few types of writers.
First, you had your "edgy" writers, who wrote what I liked to call the "young drug addicts in love" stories. These were the stories where everyone was peachy keen till someone shot up, vomited and then spent the next two chapters detoxing while their significant other sat by their side, equally sweaty, gross and most likely reading their lover's upheave like tea leaves into their destined, tragic future. An off shoot of these stories was the "quirky serial killers/sadists". While the story itself may be labeled as a thriller or horror story, the general tone was more like a Wes Anderson take on Silence of the Lambs by way of Brett Easton Ellis. While they played with the idea of genre, their focus was squarely in the more literary. With this group you were looking at your hipsters and faux- Sex Pistols fans who bathed rarely, and always looked like they had just rolled in from a three day bender of speed balls and cheap whisky. Required reading for them was most likely Requiem for a Dream and American Psycho.
The close cousin of the "edgy" writer is the "social ills". These were the people who were using their fiction to bring down the man, man. It was storytelling with a heavy dose of jumbled liberal arts humanities thrown in. These people wanted to start a revolution with their stories, or at least appear that way so they could pick up chicks (or dudes). They had a point to make, and eventually they would make it... if you could pick it out of the jumbled mess of their stories. They wanted to create pieces that would freak people out and wake people up. Their stories usually involved a lot of trippy visuals, subtext made text, cryptic messages and massive amounts of creepy sex, and symbolic violence. These were the people who worshiped at the altar of Hunter S. Thompson, William S. Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr. (who also wrote Requiem for a Dream). Their stories were usually nihilistic and nasty, because life was nihilistic and nasty. They had feelings, too. Usually those feelings came out as anger, despair and disgust. Politically they went both ways, though. So, at least they were a diverse bunch.
Then you had your "sensory" writers. These were the writers who not only wanted you to envision the world they were creating, but also taste it, smell it and live it. They wanted you to feel what they felt when they wrote, cuz damn it, they have feelings, and they want to share those feelings with the world. Unlike the "social ills", the "sensory" writer tends to express more romanticized versions of feelings. Sure, they can feel angry, but they are only angry because the person they love with all their heart just can't seem to catch a break. These stories were squarely placed in reality, with very few breaks into any kind of surrealism, unless someone dropped acid during a 70's flashback. Then you could expect four pages talking about the colors they saw, and how, for the first time they truly felt connected to every human on earth. These stories aimed to bring up some Stand By Me style nostalgia, with imagery that usually involved wind rustling through tall grass, and a storyline that focused on a sick parent/sibling/friend/pet, or that last summer before the main character started high school/college/ their adult life, and feelings. Lots of feelings. They would use sweeping, beautiful language... that would drag the pace of their story to a snails crawl (The teacher, whose name is being withheld to protect the snobby, was very guilty of this. Sitting through a reading of one of her works in progress was like taking a sleeping pill.) An offshoot of this was the urban "sensory" writer. Take that wind rustling through the grass and replace it with an open fire hydrant on a hot summers day, and you pretty much get the idea. The not so fictional "memoir-light" novelists fall into this group, too. (While the stories they write are fiction, the basis is always connected to a singular event that shaped the author's adolescence.) These were the quasi-hippies, the future yuppies and the more straight laced kids. For them, it was all about creating a realistic, emotional experience while hopefully landing in Oprah's book club. These are the "next great American novel" types.
(Obviously these descriptions are very basic, and loaded with snark. What? Me, bitter? Never!)
Finally, you had the genre writers.
Now, what do I mean when I say genre writer. A genre writer is someone who focuses a specific audience type. They tend to be the kind of books you see in mass market paperbacks at the end of check out lines, or at the airport. They can be highly regarded literature (think Dracula or Frankenstein) or fun beach reads (James Patterson and Dean Koontz). The main thing is they are trying to tell a specific TYPE of story, be it sci-fi, horror, fantasy, romance, erotica, suspense, mystery, thriller, etc. In the world of the Fiction Writing department, these were the nerds. While everyone else was reading Toni Morrison and Tom Wolfe, these kids were reading Bentley Little and Nora Roberts (bet you never thought you would see those two names in the same sentence). Genre, at least in the world of Columbia, was considered low end, while Literary works were considered high end.
Anywho! I'm getting off track.
So, while I was in college (and now...) I loved writing horror. I didn't write horror to be ironic. I wrote horror to be horrifying and gross and nasty and fun. I grew up loving ghost stories, slasher movies and comic books like Tales from the Crypt and Dead World. I didn't want to write about the strength of the human spirit, I wanted to write about evil spirits testing the strength of co-eds who decided to spend the night in a haunted dorm, even though the school headmistress told them it was dangerous, and guess what, she was right! I wanted to write trash. Not ironic trash, but full on John Waters by way of Roger Corman level trash.
So, I wrote trash.
I didn't aim to be the next, great American author. I wanted to be the type of author who wrote paperbacks. The kind that don't stay in print long, and end up doing the rounds in used bookstores, getting read over summers, or late at night. The kinds of books with tawdry, tattered covers that showed the years of wear on them with pride. I didn't want to write a book that would be studied in classes around the world. I wanted to write the kind of books that people hid under their mattresses, or in the sock drawer because they didn't want their friends to know they liked "that kind"of book. I wanted to write the kinds of books that I loved when I was a kid, like Midsummer by Matthew Costello, Suffer the Children by John Saul or The Cold One by Christopher Pike (all three are amazing books, by the way). I wanted to create something that would give people that same, forbidden thrill that my friends and I felt when we would sneak volumes of Hot Blood out in chapel. (Worship songs and erotic horror are odd mixes).
I mean, I wanted it to be well written trash, but I wanted to write what I wanted to write, and what I expected from my teachers was someone to help me build the tools to write the best trash possible.
What I got was a whole lot of side eye and shade. I felt like my writing was constantly being shuffled to the side or dismissed because it wasn't "literary". Sure, I had zombies, but they needed to be zombies with subtext. What did their hunger for brains say about the human condition and our consumer society? What did that topless, vampire cheerleader mean? What did her blood covered, heaving bosoms reveal about the heteronormative patriarchy that is our society?
I honestly felt like only two or three teachers at Columbia ever really got me. They were the ones who understood what I liked to write, the types of stories I wanted to tell, and they tried to guide me in the right direction in telling them. (When I say I want to write trash, that doesn't mean I want to write shit. I still want to create interesting characters and a fully fleshed out story. I still want to create something that is well paced and enjoyable.) Three out of how many teachers, and they weren't even teaching any of my core classes.
I was doomed in that program, and the one teacher, the one who really made me never want to write another sentence again, was not only running three of my classes, she was co-head of the Fiction Writing department, and her taste in writing was reflected in the majority of the classes available, and the instructors hired. As the song goes, I was totally fucked.
When I got out of college, I was a wreck. There were a billion and one reasons why, but part of it was because I really didn't feel like there was any reason to be bothering with this crap anymore. It all felt so pointless.
I didn't write again for a couple years once I graduated. I tried, but I could never really bring myself to get a story going. What was the point? I had already spent four and a half years of my life pretty much being told that my writing just wasn't worth it. It was just silly stories. I wasn't saying anything profound, so what was the point?
It took me two years before I finally said fuck it, fuck them, and fuck the idea of being a serious writer. I enjoyed writing when I was a kid because I wasn't writing for anyone else. When I was at Columbia my writing suffered because I wasn't writing for myself. I was writing for my teachers, and my peers. I was writing stuff to make them respect me. I tried to change my style to fit their mold so that I could get that same recognition I saw my peers getting. In reality, I ended up writing total and complete shit. It wasn't my story anymore. I wasn't asking myself what I wanted to write, I was asking myself what I thought they wanted to read, and it backfired horribly. As much as I want to blame my teachers, and the program for my two year, self imposed exile from writing, it wasn't entirely their fault. I lost sight of what writing had really meant to me.
As a kid I was writing the stories that I wanted to tell, and the fact that my friends got a kick out of them was just icing. It took me two years, and finding a folder filled with my old "Claw" stories, for me to finally start writing for myself again. That's why I wrote Fashion Victims and Spirit Lake all those years ago, and that's why I write the Accidental Demon Slayers stories now. While I appreciate the people who come here and enjoy my stories, and I am grateful that people will even give my writing a chance. I am far from great, and I know I will never be the next Stephen King or Bentley Little, but what does it matter? Telling stories makes me happy, and I write to enjoy myself, to improve and to grow. I write to let my imagination run wild.
I write because I love it.
No comments:
Post a Comment