Michael Potts's Blog: Bits and Pieces: Book Reviews and Articles on Writing, Horror Fiction, and Some Philosophy - Posts Tagged "fiction"

Have you been busy at your job or driving and had what you thought was a great idea for a story? Suppose you get lucky and stop what you're doing (and stop your car at a safe place if you're driving), and you're able to write down your idea. Or perhaps you are at a writing conference that inspires you, and you leave, excited about developing the writing ideas you gleaned. You get home, put the ideas aside, and life intrudes. You forget about the ideas, misplace your notepad, or worse, lose what you've written down. All those great ideas--wasted.

I have had that experience many times. It is rare that I have totally lost ideas--usually I find a notepad months later. Resentment at having to be so busy at other things and anger at myself for not following up on an idea soon after developing it invade my thoughts--but such negativity does no good. Further reflection reveals that some of the ideas were not as brilliant as I thought at the time I wrote them down. Sometimes a few lines of poetry are good, and I am able to take off from what I'd written and write a complete first draft of a poem. Story ideas are more difficult--I find if I don't write the story immediately when I have the idea, it is difficult to return to it, at least with a short story. Ideas for novels are easier for me to follow up. Could I, or other writers, deal with busy lives in a way that allows them to develop their ideas into literature.

I first suggest that if you have an idea for a poem, make sure you complete a first draft of a poem that same day. You should at least add a plot outline and notes to your story ideas so that when you return to them, you will be able to continue where you left off. Have a file or some other place you can easily find where you place your writing ideas. Look through them from time to time, eliminating those that are duds and working on an idea you find promising. If I followed my own advice, I would complete many more writing projects. From now on I will try to follow my advice. This advice may help you, but all writers are different. Adjust any advice to your personality, work habits, and style. As long as you are producing quality work, you are doing something right. May all your good writing ideas come to fruition.

I suppose one of the first things for which an author of a new book searches online is reviews of the book. For me, I search for reader reviews on Amazon first, and later regularly check for reviews on Google. If you do something similar and worry about the quality of the reviews you receive, remember one thing: good or bad, a book review allows more people to know about your book. Some people may be intrigued by a bad review's description of the content in the book and want to buy it in spite of a negative review. They may wonder if the book is really as bad as the negative review claims--and they check out the book for that reason. Positive reviews help, of course, but readers tend to suspect a book that gets only "all fives" reviews.

Reviewers vary in quality. In general, the most consistently good reviewers of fiction are those who are well-grounded in literary fiction. This may include genre reviewers who also read a great deal of literary fiction outside their particular genre.

Horror reviewers are no exception. Since the advent of the "New Horror" in the 1990s, there has been a division in the horror fiction community between those who want to see a higher, "more literary" style of horror fiction and those who remain in a more limited genre mode. A few years ago at the World Horror Convention I saw a confrontation between a writer of more literary horror with a more traditional panelist over rules of writing. The literary horror writer was more willing to bend the rules when needed, while the more traditional genre-oriented writer was more legalistic in approach. Some horror reviewers do not like for a horror novel or short story to explore aspects of universal human experience--they prefer old-fashioned scares and that's about it. Such reviewers would disagree with my position that Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness can count as a horror novel.

Literary horror reviewers may not appreciate a book that offers scares but fails to provide, through the story (show, don't tell, applies to all fiction writing) insight into human experience. I tend to get better reviews from either literary fiction reviewers are more literary oriented horror reviewers. More traditional genre reviewers tend not to like my work as well.

The approach of the reviewer makes a fundamental difference as to whether you receive a good or a bad review. I am trusting that you have done your homework in making your book as good as you can be--that it is a quality book. Some people, no matter who well-written your work, will like it; others will not. Reviews are opinions that are sometimes, though not always, backed up with facts. Take them in stride, and remember that any way to get your name out into the public, even though it might be through a negative book review, ultimately works in your favor.

Should a writer focus on writing beautiful prose? I am thinking of such writers as James Agee, in his book, A Death in the Family, or Ray Bradbury in Dandelion Wine. The first part of A Death in the Family consists of an earlier work by Agee, Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and is the most beautiful piece of fiction I have ever read. It is unmatched in atmosphere. You feel as if you are present with the boy, Rufus, and his father as they walk the streets of Knoxville on a summer evening. The language is the closest to magic, I think, in all of American literature.

There is a danger in writing beautiful fiction--an author could try to substitute beauty of language for good plot and characterization. Some critics of contemporary literary fiction have claimed that a great deal of current literary fiction has this problem. Much depends on what the author's purpose is--not all literary fiction has traditional plot. The fine book by Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men, is a character study, something the movie faithfully represents. That did not please all audiences, as I discovered after watching the movie and overhearing comments after the end. It is possible, however, if a writer is good at crafting beautiful lnaguage, for that writer to become lazy about plot and character development. The result is beautifully written bad fiction, which should be no author's goal.

Beautiful language can distract some readers from the flow of the plot. Although plot is not an issue in most poetry, I find Dylan Thomas' poetry to be so beautiful that I sometimes lose the meaning of the words in the beauty of the language. Personally I think it is up to me, the reader, to re-read until I can follow the meaning. As a writer, I would rather be criticized for my language being too beautiful than for not having a coherent plot or convincting characters.

Among horror writers, Robert McCammon is the best stylist in language--and his novels also do an excellent job at plot and characterization. Bradbury's early horror works are good, but are not as beautifully written as some of his later works. Vivid imagery is essential to horror, thus skill in word crafting is important. I find that McCammon or Stephen King have better use of imagery and beautiful language than Dean Koonz or Peter Straub. I will say, however, that Koonz has improved a great deal over the years, and Straub is grows on me.

My advice to a writer is to write as baautifully as a story will allow. If the writer has good language skills, some beauty of language will come out in the first draft. For me, that is the case, but many revisions are necessary to tweak the language. My goal, whether I am writing Southern fiction, or horror, is to use beautiful language that elicits images in the reader's mind. Transporting a person to another world is part of the task of fiction, and beautiful language should be part of that transportation.

Smithy by Amanda Desiree

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


"Smithy" is a fine horror book in the tradition of Henry James and M. R. James. The horror is a slow build to the climactic scene, and the result is well worth the wait. The thesis is unique--what if an ape in a sign language study seems to see something that is seemingly not there. Does Smithy (the nickname for Webster the chimpanzee) really see a preternatural apparition or are there other rational explanations that would fit. The use of ambiguity is skilled throughout. The book is also unusual in that, like "Dracula," is is an epistolary novel, in the form of letters and memos. I highly recommend this unique haunted house story.



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