The Problem I'm Working On as a Storyteller

As a person I have a very diverse set of interests. I'm a true eclectic. However, I want to focus on my storytelling writing at this point, and then we'll either go back to talking about this list of influences I made, or I may take a nap for the night. So let me attack this as a set of problems, and we'll start with my basic one, and move on from there.

The Gothic Problem

As I've talked about, and as my list of influences might make clear, I have a real great love of the American Gothic style of literature. Poe is my ideal as a prosaic writer, at least when the music of his prose isn't falling into tartuffery, which it never does in his best short stories. If I had to put a point on it with prose style, I would like to get that near-poetic music that Poe achieved with his best prose with just a slightly more stilted contemporary style. I have a very specific sound in mind, and as I go over my writing, that sound has yet to emerge in my writing.

The problem with Gothic style prose is that it almost always lacks clarity and precision, which is why we go for a stilted, short and clear sentence structure in contemporary prose styles. I find that style overly dry. Another problem I face is that I have a tendency of using archaic word order because I spend so much time reading authors like Poe, who in his worst prose used false archaicisms, or grammatical structures that were archaic in his own time.

Another problem with "gothic," as a style is its ubiquity in our culture, as spoofed in my article on comic book history. Camp when done well is of course - lame - but the fun and the irony is in that "lame duck," quality. When "gothic," is done poorly, it becomes lame, and it fails to be effective at all, because that kind of gothic relies on its eerie and sinister quality, in other words, on people suspending disbelief and taking the gothic atmosphere created as serious business.

So as an author, I want to look at something like these original TMNT graphic-novels, with the ridiculous back-story and all of that "lame duck," but also with a grittiness that is very believable, as a group of teenage turtles perform "hardcore," ninja moves on the bad guys. In a story there are inevitable weaknesses, or at least places where one has to gloss over some content to keep the story from becoming, "Bible Tome, Part II," and if done improperly, my audience will find it hard to suspend disbelief, which is a very important principle in any kind of storytelling writing.

That is my first problem to chew on. Here I am, telling you, "I do not want to see even one more frame of a comic-book telepathic-migraine, or even one more cyber-samurai comic-book character with a 5 'o' clock shadow," but I'm also telling you that, "As a writer, I am fundamentally interested in the American Gothic style of literature." It really is my baseline in terms of my interest in storytelling. I look at it and say, "Trust yourself Gwyd, and write what you want, even if it doesn't make sense." To quote the Talking Heads from somewhere mid-1980's, "Stop making sense."

I am going to work with the Gothic style, but I'm not satisfied with just re-iterating all of this ubiquitous, cliched, Gothic style garbage. This is my most significant consideration at the moment, both in terms of prose style, and also in terms of how to tell a story, and I keep taking my notes and doing my "moltings," and we shall all just have to wait and see.

The "Too Many Genres," Problem

I was corresponding with a guy via email recently, and we were discussing how we both loved fantasy and sci-fi, but that we just loathed steampunk. Steampunk as a genre is a sort of gothic fantasy where the magic powers the sci-fi elements, and steampunk makes me want to blow my top only slightly less than a telepathic migraine frame in a contemporary comic-book. It isn't even just that steampunk has been done to death, it is more like that steampunk takes my three favorite genres, gothic horror, fantasy, and science fiction, and then puts them together in all the wrong ways.

One of the better and original steampunk worlds was Warhammer 40K, and I used to plow through the old Rogue Trader book another friend named J. owned and some of the early WH40k codexes, just to read the flavor-text that was mostly there to sell the figurines for the tabletop Warhammer game. Still, it somehow just isn't quite right. To quote a great poem about an English teacher's message from Heaven, "Almost perfect, but not quite."

This guy and I have stopped corresponding just a few weeks ago, but we came up with a speculation: "What would be a way to seamlessly integrate science fiction and fantasy fiction elements, or is that even possible at all?" So there sits that particular toad in my workflow folder, and I'm not satisfied to stop there. What I want to do is more like "Classical mythologies and fables + American Gothic + fantasy fiction + science fiction = something other than the overstuffed grab bag that ought to be - and also, something other than steampunk."

I just loathe steampunk. AAGH! My mind is burning! (Picture Gwyd with head in hands and little disjunct lines poking out of his skull.) I'm considering making a drama portrait and seeing if I can find a piece of shareware that will allow me to put some "emotion lines," and a comic book dialogue bubble into my little self-portrait to host here or at photobucket, just for good measure. I'll see what I can turn up.

I'm writing material while I try to figure out how to get this problem to add up, and I'm mostly working on the prose style problem I talked about previously, as well as just taking some stories and re-working them. I'm reacting to some pieces that have already been written, and that have by and large been written very poorly. Take a few notes, take a nap, read my notes over, write some notes, smoke chokes and drink coffee, take a nap. It's a strange life, but the silver lining is that I can focus on exactly what I want to do, and since I have that freedom - I do. Well, other than raising Caine constantly and not having to accept any responsibility for misbehaving. That would be more like exactly what I'd like to do.

The other problem I've decided to solve is that I'm probably going to focus entirely or nearly entirely on the short-story, and probably not very lengthy short stories. Most of my best works are of precis length, somewhere around 2 or less pages in length typed, but remember that a true precis uses an even more simplistic style of writing than contemporary style. It uses very short sentences and very short structures, and my own short pieces are nearly prose-poems, which is not really a precis form.

Still, I think pieces around that length, or no more than 12 to 15 typed pages, 16 standard font, double-spaced, will probably be my entire story-telling career. I'm also interested in building frames for the short stories, or connecting the short-stories in certain ways, and I dream of a sort of collection of my scribblings and maunderings of several volumes, each story with a little piece integrated with the others, and also, every story in an integrated constructed frame-'verse.

That leads to something I want to avoid. I want to keep my constructs very, very simple. I don't want to do Hobbit and god-horse genealogies and all this garbage like Tolkien did. Trust me, if you think "Lord of the Rings," is unreadable now, then you should have seen it before Tolkien's editors axed that book. I call that "Sauron-block." In other words, you have writer's block, but you just write and write the infinitely long book that has nothing in it of value worth saying.

I found "Lord of the Rings," hard to read, and I've been diagnosed verbally gifted since age 5, so trust me, you are not alone. We'll hit the Tolkien-schmolken later even harder than I am about to do. I do love certain things about LOTR and the Tolkien-verse, and a great big pile of the rest can go in the dumpster like smut, and smut is the proper definition for that great big pile.

I'm not ready for a nap yet, but I've got to find something in this house to eat. I'll be back.