This month I've been sitting down to write a tale of horror, and as I've been doing so, something has come to me: After this year, I do not want to write horror any more. If I had the time, I would write a loooong blog post about this, but I don't have the time. I'll be 40 soon, I could die at any moment. I don't want to go through the motions. There may be one or two more horror stories that I can just about squeeze out without going through the motions, but then, that's it.
It's arguable whether I ever wrote horror; I don't care either way. If someone wants to say I did, fine; if they want to say I didn't, that's also fine. And I'm not going to disown anything, either. It's all a part of me. Headbanging to Metallica as a teenager is a part of me, but I don't do it any more. It seems to me that people have strange ideas about what constitutes authenticity. A lot of people seem to think that authenticity means doing the same thing again and again and again. As far as I'm concerned, that's the opposite of authenticity, although it's true that a writer who writes the same thing all the time is more likely to sell work, as people know what to expect of him or her.
I've always been attracted to shadows, grotesque things, obscure things, the downbeat and the minor key. I doubt that will go away. I just never again – after this year – want to sit down and have it in my mind, "Right, a tale of horror!" For me, if not for other writers, if I write a tale of horror there's absolutely no point unless I mean it. As I said, one or two more, at most.
Life is short, and I yearn deeply to write more, much more, about:
Annette Funicello
Fairies
The fifties
The sixties
The seventies
Underwear
Necrophilia
Circus freaks
Hawaii
Japanese folk music
Dare Wright
The twenties
The forties
Tom Baker
Voodoo
Tap-dancing
Voodoo tap-dancing
Pin-up art
Ancient China
Languages of the future
Things too intimate to be mentioned on a blog
Etc.
“A lot of people seem to think that authenticity means doing the same thing again and again and again.”no no no dear fellow. authenticity is like honesty, individuality,changing,growing,acting from oneself. and you are right, the commercial world prefers sameness. i have been up against that all my life. it has to do with this horrible reality called ‘Brand’. they want us pigeon holed.i agonize every time i do something new… does this make sense? am i really behind what i do? even, why am i going to do this. consequently, my style is all over the place.creating is or should be a sincere search. that’s what i think. the work is just the trail i made in that searching.
Originally posted by I_ArtMan:i agonize every time i do something new… does this make sense? am i really behind what i do? even, why am i going to do this. consequently, my style is all over the place.creating is or should be a sincere search. that’s what i think. the work is just the trail i made in that searching.I know more about writing than visual art, but my favourite writers are often (not always, admittedly) those whose style is all over the place. Writers like: J.-K. Huysmans, Andre Gide, Arthur Machen.Bada Shanren’s an artist I like whose style is “all over the place”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bada_Shanren
i like him too.
I had figured that, with the advent of Chômu as a publishing venture, that you were headed out of the ‘genre ghetto’ anyhow.You should absolutely do your own thing and let posterity sort it out. For me, I always like artists/writers that are sui generis the best.:coffee: Have a nice cuppa.
I’ve never seen your work in any ‘genre ghetto’, Quentin. Whatever you need to go for, go for it, I say. 🙂
Originally posted by Nemonymous:I had figured that, with the advent of Chômu as a publishing venture, that you were headed out of the ‘genre ghetto’ anyhow.Well, Chômu isn’t genre. Genre is just so weird. I’ve come to think of this is a religious thing. The different genres are like different religions, none of which I belong to, and mainstream fiction (realistic literary fiction) is basically atheism – a genre that refuses to admit that it’s a genre. And I don’t belong there, either. People just love their labels. It drives me mad.But, having said that, not being genre is not the same as being compatible with mainstream success. The literary realist atheist mainstream basically thinks that you’re genre (religious) if you don’t belong to their genre. Postmodernism (I notice) is now being equated with mysticism, and being tut-tutted at by this orthodoxy – like I said, anything outside their own incredibly narrow genre, which they insist is universal, and they can’t take it.Originally posted by JohnRenard:Have a nice cuppa.I intend to do so.Originally posted by Nemonymous:I’ve never seen your work in any ‘genre ghetto’, Quentin. Whatever you need to go for, go for it, I say.Yeah, I will. Thanks. I wouldn’t be surprised if I feel one or two cold steel blades in my back, while a voice whispers, “Thinking of leaving us, were you?”But anyway…
Ironically (?), the story I’m currently working on (‘Scorpion and Butterfly’) could turn out to be my ‘darkest’, whatever that means. It does feel like my darkest, to me, at least, as I’m writing it.But the word ‘dark’ has a faintly old-fashioned, naive sound to it, in my ears now, like the word ‘groovy’ or something. I remember those conversations, staying up all night, talking about music, film, art. We would conclude, “But it’s interesting. Very… dark.” And we would laugh, pleased to have found something that would edgily gatecrash the mainstream given half a chance, and raid the drinks cabinet without asking. Reminds me of this:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj84tfS7ag4
dark… “we crawl on our knees towards our doom”.paricularly cute for me. :happy: now i am turned on to that show. “the fast show”.i suppose the twist in your story must be that the butterfly eats the scorpion? dark dark and black all black. :lol:the blurring of the lines between good and evil in light of the enormous hologram we live in?
God I wish that the Fast Show was on Netflix!:lol:
E.S. writes:Allo Quentin, I have thought of much of your work as “horror,” but for me “horror” is an expansive term for much that is dark, gloomy, and exquisite. You were never an oogie-boogie author for me. And whilst I would never fault an artist for following his/her muse, I must say that with this announcement, Ligotti’s fall into silence, Matt Cardin’s spiritual transformation possibly ending his writing career, and Mark Samuels’ slow retreat from writing . . . I am most saddened. But I do question the validity of such a conscious decision. If a tale, ostensibly horror, were to seize you would not you write it? Hopefully that somewhat Machen-esque strain of the mystic and transcendent remains in your work, but I suppose whatever path your writing takes I should follow; after all, it is difficult to dilute the strange.-E.S.-
Originally posted by anonymous:But I do question the validity of such a conscious decision. If a tale, ostensibly horror, were to seize you would not you write it? The answer: Yes, I would.Any statement of the above sort (my blog post) is incomplete because there is always something outside of the picture frame. It wasn’t really a conscious decision on my part, so much as a realisation followed by a decision. That there has to be any ‘decision’ at all arises from this simple fact: Genre. Before I got involved in any scene, things were simple for me. It was possible to love genre because I didn’t realise that genre required loyalty and was so bound up with market. I don’t feel ‘loyal’ to… the colour blue, say, but I think if I were a painter, I’d probably love playing with that colour. And that’s how I’ve always felt about genre.But then I discover… I can’t even really describe it, but because the first stories I had published were horror (the first stories I wrote were not horror, I just happened to be in full horror mode at the time when circumstances and my writing development enabled me to get published) there’s a kind of pressure and expectation that you are a ‘horror writer’, which, it sometimes seems to me, I hate above all things. Some people are fine with that – I’m not. I don’t mind if it’s just that people call whatever I happen to write horror. However, if I then write something and someone says, “This isn’t horror. I thought you were a horror writer!”, that’s the point at which I wish to go and hang myself or something. I don’t understand that attitude to reading, or to art in general: “This isn’t horror – I paid for horror.” I hate that.One point in what I wrote above which may be overlooked is this, that I never want to sit down again and think to myself, “Now I’m going to write a tale of horror.” Increasingly, I feel like that’s a kind of… pose. Other writers can do it and it works for them. Lovecraft did it – the same story again and again – and it worked fine for him. But conscious decision – in a way – is precisely what I want to avoid. In particular, with horror stories, it feels to me like a complete waste of time if I’m not into it. I could write a realistic novel as some kind of ironic exercise or something like that. But if I do that with horror, it’s not horror. There are better things to do with my time. Either it’s got that eerie feeling, or it’s just a load of juvenile words about spooky or gory things.I don’t know if any of this is coherent. When you’re a writer – I believe – you really have to work by instinct. Your own instinct may look weird or ‘self-conscious’ to others. Anyway, this is my instinct.Originally posted by anonymous:Hopefully that somewhat Machen-esque strain of the mystic and transcendent remains in your work, but I suppose whatever path your writing takes I should follow; after all, it is difficult to dilute the strange.-E.S.- Thank you. I appreciate it. I believe there are far stranger things in me to write than the things that have so far been written and published.
Originally posted by I_ArtMan:paricularly cute for me. now i am turned on to that show. “the fast show”.It’s a good one. The title denotes an almost throw-away attitude, and they relied heavily on repeated catchphrases, but, in fact (so it appears to me and others), The Fast Show has so far stood the test of time, whereas more recent catchphrase-based comedy sketch shows have become boring while they’re still in transmission, showing the thinness of their material.Originally posted by JohnRenard:God I wish that the Fast Show was on Netflix!I wish I was Netflix.Originally posted by anonymous:I must say that with this announcement, Ligotti’s fall into silence, Matt Cardin’s spiritual transformation possibly ending his writing career, and Mark Samuels’ slow retreat from writing . . . I am most saddened.Incidentally, this sentence has a poetic quality to me.I should also probably point out that, at the rate that things get published, there’s still probably another decade’s worth of unpublished material that I’ve already written. So, that’s ten years more of the material I wrote (have written) before I made the above decision. And by the end of ten years the world will probably be over anyway….I hate life.
Happened to re-read part of ‘Tzimtzum’ the other day. When did I write that? 2009 at the latest… probably 2008. Anyway, I noticed that even in that there is a passage that expresses a tiredness with horror. I’m sure I’m being hypocritical as I can whinge and moan and gnash my teeth with the best of them, but I’m just a bit tired of wallowing in bleakness, etc. etc. It all seems like a dreadful, unimaginative cliche to me now.
following your reasoning i wonder what you will tackle next. not the extreme opposite probably. it will be interesting to see what you come up with. :happy:
It will take time, because writing is such a slow business. It’s hard to take anyone by surprise when you move so slowly, but… perhaps creeping at this pace amounts to stealth, and the castle will be captured while the guard is sleeping.But anyway… I’ll be interested to see what I come up with too. I really hope it’s something surprising.
Originally posted by quentinscrisp:and the castle will be captured while the guard is sleeping.this has an uncanny true ring to it. :happy: we have to let the process find it’s own course don’t we?