Tuesday, February 05, 2002
Today, a break in the monotony. Not a thousand words, but almost 1500. Which is extremely unusual. I've only written that much at one sitting on a very few occassions. The night I started the short story, "The Long Hall on the Top Floor," I wrote that much at once. But I begin to distrust myself after a point and make myself stop. I begin to feel like I'm rushing through the prose, not paying attention, getting careless. I could have done 2,000 words today, I suspect, but I'm pretty sure it would not have been a good thing. Whenever it starts to feel too easy, I'm pretty sure it's time to slow down. Let it sit. Come back tomorrow.
I don't mean to be coy with this talk of Anne Radcliffe. Honestly. I'm letting certain ideas percolate, and they are not yet whole. Just bits and pieces, sort of like the beginnings of a novel, or a new paleontological project, a theory, an hypothesis, a model. Slowly, it seems to be coming together. But it could suprise me and never amount to anything at all.
It has been my experience that a lot of people, especially people who think of themselves as genre writers and/or genre readers begin to get uncomfortable if the conversation turns to literary theory. They get far more uncomfortable when you begin to talk about the possibility of moral and immoral fiction. We are wary of any restraints on the perceived sanctity of self-expression, and yet, as John Gardner pointed out, there is an essential tyranny in all art.
It seems to me this is serious business, telling stories. Walking the fine line between expanding the soul, as Ms. Radcliffe said, awakening the faculties to a higher degree of life, or causing that same soul to contract, recoil, pull in upon itself and all but annihilate the ability to feel.
That great difference.
The possibility that dark fiction, in one form, may either lead to a sort of mental loop, an existential shock, that gradually numbs the audience to pain and wonder. And the possibility that, in another form, it may perhaps be capable of opening our minds to awe, to the sublime.
Whether I love or hate writing (and my entries here should make my feelings fairly clear), it is something I have chosen to follow. I'm not the writer I was when I wrote The Five of Cups in 1992, because I'm not the person that I was in 1992. Nor am I precisely the same person that I was when I wrote Silk (1993-1996). The stories, the world, and me, we play this game of leap frog. The world changes me, the act of writing stories changes the stories that I write, and the stories I write seem capable of effecting at least very small changes upon the world. I'm not even the same person who finished Threshold and every day, as Low Red Moon unfolds in that infinite space between my fingertips and my hard drive, I see that change more clearly.
Writers, all writers, have responsibilities. If we cannot honestly see ourselves, we cannot ever hope to be true in what we write. And if what we write is not truth (which is not to say fact, because many factual things are false and many truths are entirely beyond the realm of fact), then we're in the wrong line of work.
By the way, a special thanks to Darren McKeeman and everyone else at Gothic.net, who have given this journal, as well as my website, a home. They keep things together. Check out their site (www.gothic.net) if you aren't already familiar with it.
And don't forget to vote for Edgar Allan Poe . . .
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