Regular readers of The New Madness may have asked themselves this morning, "Hey, where's the weekly update? It's never been late before!" My answer to that question is, "Um, yes it has. Once." Or, I suppose, now I should say "twice".
It wasn't from lack of trying, though. I started no less than four unique posts, but all ran into the same problem; namely, who the heck cares? The more blogs I read the more I get tired of hearing the same old complaining and micro-status updates. Does anyone care if I wrote 100 or 1,000 words today? Does it matter if I'm on draft seven or eight of a story? I mean, matter to anyone but me? I doubt it. And right now, while I'm in the midst of things that preclude the type of submissions that might provide occasional content, I find myself left in a limbo where I've nothing much to say that I haven't already said.
With the above in my head, I took a break from the blog to watch the film, "Let The Right One In". This I did the day after watching the film, "Twilight". Both were about vampires and love (and really how often are vampire stories not about love) but they are two completely different films. Completely. During my meditation on the two and their similarities and differences, it occurred to me that a vein of posts here I've never really mined is the content of my fiction. I don't mean the tools, I mean the clay. Anyone who's read a few pieces of my work knows I don't write about vampires or werewolves or zombies. I suppose one could argue I write about ghosts, but the term "ghost" is itself so vague and ill-defined that it encompasses too much to be a descriptive descriptor. The traditional "ghost story" is not something I tend to write. Which isn't to say that one couldn't boil down other tales of mine to fit into the previous categories. After all, I've always considered my tale "Something New" to be a vampire story, and "Off the Hook" has the closest thing to a zombie in any of my work, but by and large the monsters in my work, when and if they appear, are more like animals than people. I suppose this is because they are emissaries from the fringes of reality, and part of me wants to makes sure the reader recognises them as such. These things, they are not foreign to our world, just mysteries within it, like the creatures scuttling the deepest depths of the ocean.
There are writers I like and respect that have written unabashed tales of vampirous creeps and the lumbering undead and I don't want to appear as though I'm disparaging their work. I realise that there is still room in the tropes for something new to come of them every once in a while. But that said I'm also aware that there's a great number of writers out there working who have no interest in exploring the tropes for new material, and instead are content to recycle the same material. And, of course, there are readers who soul interest is in consuming that material. I am not one of those writers and I do not target those readers.
Depicting monsters in fiction can be done in a multitude of ways, and though the common belief is that suggestion is key, that less is more, I don't subscribe to that belief, not when monsters are concerned. Instead, I'm much more fascinated with them, with lingering over their details slowly, almost scientifically, to inform the reader what is there before them. I'll describe the rows of teeth, the tiny eyes, the blue-black skin. I'll mention the sheen of light on its surface, the smell of it foul putrescence, the sound of its wet footsteps on the hardwood floor. To me, there's a poetry in a loving description, and I'd much rather read that than a gory disassembling of another character by said monster. I've no interest in the description of grue. Instead, the first sight of that monster is what's most intriguing. Generally, this coincides with the witness's shock at what is before him or her, so the slowing down of the story to accommodate these descriptions also serves to create a sense of "tunnel-vision" in that witness, as though the sight is so horrible he or she cannot look away, and instead stares in terror.
As for trope creatures — werewolf, vampire, zombie — if I use them it's often in as stripped down a way as possible. The essence of the monster, if possible, inside a form that's unexpected. The best example is the vampire in "Something New" that seems so unlike what a reader of vampire stories would expect. That's what appeals to me: surprising the reader with a trope. The first version of "Something New", still (thankfully) unpublished, played the connection up even more, with plenty of signs of the tale's vampirism, but I stripped them away when I did the rewrite as that sort of trickery doesn't appeal to me any longer (one day I'll write the blog post about pyrotechnics in writing that serve no purpose).
I can sense I'm losing you reader as my thoughts continue to diverge from the subject. Feel free to discuss your own takes on monsters in fiction in the comments below.
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