{"id":4564,"date":"2021-03-27T18:31:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-27T22:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/?p=4564"},"modified":"2021-05-18T19:52:54","modified_gmt":"2021-05-18T23:52:54","slug":"you-are-capable-of-telling-better-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2021\/03\/27\/you-are-capable-of-telling-better-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"You Are Capable of Telling Better Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

I should confess at the onset: I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve swiped the title of today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s newsletter from GB \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Doc\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Burford and his excellent essay, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You Are Capable of Writing Better Horror Stories<\/a>.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And though I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m going to tell you a little bit about it here, I strongly encourage you to go read the whole thing.<\/p>\n

Burford is a video game consultant and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153narrative designer,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and his essay springs out of a sense of frustration that came from playing a number of video games that all felt the same:<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153So, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s this protagonist, and he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just arrived at an isolated location. Maybe there are some people around, but usually not many. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s far from civilization, desolate, probably dark. He cannot get help\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 [T]hen lo and behold, some spooky stuff happens, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s horrifying, and then oh no, suddenly it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all a metaphor for the guilt he feels over some bad stuff he did or was involved in a long time ago.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I get where he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s coming from, because when I stumbled onto his essay, I had just finished reading my second horror novel in a row that started out with some exquisitely tense variations of Lovecraftian horror spilling over into the real world in all their vivid\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 well, glory\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not the right word, but you know what I mean. Anyway, they start<\/em> out that way, but they both build up to what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s basically a climactic action-movie shootout with the Big Boss and his toughest minions, and though much is extracted from our protagonists they somehow squeak through, wounded but perhaps a bit wiser about their ultimate standing in the universe.<\/p>\n

I mean, I suppose there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not much else you can do<\/em> to end this kind of story, unless you want to end it the way Lovecraft did, with your protagonist\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s rational mind overwhelmed by the sheer cosmic terror of the Old Ones. But when everybody\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s doing it, as with the amnesiac or cagey protagonist forced to confront their horrific past, it becomes very obvious very quickly.<\/p>\n

Burford has much to say that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s specific to the horror genre, but much of it also applies to any mode of storytelling, and this is one quote that stopped me in my tracks:<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153For me, great fiction is as Tarkovsky says, a way to harrow someone\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s soul, preparing them for death. It is a means of granting us emotional experience and hopefully release.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I wish I had a more comprehensive understanding of Tarkovsky, so I could speak that in its context, but for now here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the original quote, from Sculpting in Time<\/a>:<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to the good.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It reminded me of a line from Harold Bloom that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s stuck with me since reading it a quarter-century ago: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153All that the Western Canon<\/a> can bring one is the proper use of one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s confrontation with one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s own mortality.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Bloom doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even profess to care about becoming \u00e2\u20ac\u0153capable of turning to the good\u00e2\u20ac\u009d through experiencing great art; for him, that experience only \u00e2\u20ac\u0153enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

In my younger days, I might have leaned toward that position, or at least embraced it ironically in a loud and swaggering manner that probably made me insufferable at parties. Now, to the extent that I understand that fragment of Tarkovsky, I think he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s probably on to something.<\/p>\n

That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not<\/em> to say I believe every novel should be a transcendent experience\u00e2\u20ac\u201dmore like every novel should try to offer you the opportunity to see something in this world, through emotional engagement, you hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seen before, and once you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen it, you can no longer continuing living quite the way you did.<\/p>\n

Or, as I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve written elsewhere, every novel makes a philosophical argument about the world\u00e2\u20ac\u201dit professes to show us a way of living, a way of responding to certain stimuli in the world around us. It can be a negative argument (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153all is lost\u00e2\u20ac\u009d), or a positive argument (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153things work out\u00e2\u20ac\u009d), an ostensibly neutral argument (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153and so it goes\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) or an optimistic argument (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t it be great if\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d).<\/p>\n

Horror fiction tends to spend a lot of time in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153all is lost\u00e2\u20ac\u009d territory, although at least half the time things work out by the end. (When they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t, and so it goes.) Until you get to a hard-won resolution, though, the horror narrative is filled with harrowing uncertainty about whether good will prevail over evil\u00e2\u20ac\u201dor whether the human spirit will, for the time at least, prevail over entropy.<\/p>\n

But even romance fiction, which is in many ways the opposite of horror in that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s explicitly, from the beginning, about fulfilling the vision of an enduring and satisfying relationship, tends to work best when the narrative path is full of harrowing uncertainty about whether that relationship will come together. Yes, everything works out, and the romance reader picks up the novel knowing<\/em> everything will work out, but we still like to be made to worry, just a little bit, about how<\/em> those lovebirds are going to pull it off, so we can be all the more satisfied when they do have their final clinch.<\/p>\n

I posted an abbreviated version of the preceding thoughts on Twitter right after reading Burford\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s essay, and then the science fiction author John Barnes shared a story from his career that\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m still in awe, really. Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how it starts<\/a>: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153[The] fourth novel I ever finished was WARTIDE<\/em>, a time-travel men’s action adventure for which [the] title and cover art had already been done and then the contracted writer had bailed with nothing written.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

\"John<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I wrote Wartide<\/em> in 8 days,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Barnes continues. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It is my shortest novel, my most violent, unquestionably my worst.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And yet\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 two years after it had come out, he got a letter from an Air Force sergeant recuperating in a burn unit, who found inspiration in Barnes\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 slapped-together stories of a soldier sent back in time to redeem his past lives. That letter blossomed into a correspondence, and Barnes was able to see, over time, how the sergeant was able to transform his own life.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153To this day,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Barnes wrote, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I think that if I had only known the book was going to matter to anybody, broke and desperate though I was, I might have done a second draft. Also that one should always write as if a book might mean something or matter to somebody, because, unlikely as it may seem, it’s always possible that it will.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

That feels like a good note to end this on, and send you to your own writing.<\/p>\n

(Although, if you have an Xbox or Steam, you might want to check out Doc Burford\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s new video game, Adios<\/em>, in which you play a pig farmer who has been disposing of dead bodies for the mob but has decided to stop doing so, and must explain his decision to the professional killer with whom he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s worked most closely over the years. Burford describes the tone of Adios<\/em> as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153melancholy\u00e2\u20ac\u009d rather than horror, and when it comes to my computer platform, I believe I will give it a try. Also, remember how I said at the top of the newsletter you should read his whole essay? You really should.)<\/p>\n

Wartide<\/i> cover art: BestLittleBookHouse.com<\/a><\/font><\/p>\n

This post was first published in “Destroy Your Safe and Happy Lives,” a newsletter I’ve been writing since 2018. If you’d like to subscribe and get every new installment delivered to your email (free!), you can do that here<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I should confess at the onset: I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve swiped the title of today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s newsletter from GB \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Doc\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Burford and his excellent essay, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You Are Capable of Writing Better Horror Stories.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And though I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m going to tell you a little bit about it here, I strongly encourage you to go read the whole thing. Burford is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1128],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4564"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4564"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4584,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4564\/revisions\/4584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}