Triple the Scare and Half the Cheese

by

Julie Demoff-Larson

 

Wet popcorn brains, peeled-grape eyeballs, basement haunted houses and black-cloaked teachers reading Poe by candlelight; 1981 horror through the eyes of a nine year old.  Tame by today’s standards if you ask anyone over the age of thirty-five. But let’s face it, the lack of horror preparation I received in early childhood has left me still anticipating mental psychosis when terror pops up unexpectedly. Relieved only when I make it through to the end, because after all, there were no Monsters Inc. or Coraline’s to help bridge the gap between myself and the “other.” But that is what makes horror scary, right? The “other” is supposed to be an unknown entity capable of leaving you damaged psychologically and fearing your physical world. So, why aren’t my kids afraid of monsters, ghosts, or vampires like I was at their age?

The thought of Tim Curry, slashers, and that vampire scratching at the bedroom window in Salem’s Lot sent me far under my blankets at night up until six months ago. So how is it that my teenager can watch a movie triple the scare and half the cheese of what I was offered and walk away unscathed? My children, like so many, have had the convenience of horror genre in a multitude of mediums since birth – well, practically. Horror is capable of working itself into the central nervous system through a series of stages.

Stage 1: Monsters are our friend s– Monsters, Inc.,

  Reality check – It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

 

Stage 2:  Don’t worry, people are creepy and weird in real life too – Coraline,

              

Stage 3: Scare the pants off of them for two years until they are immune – Goosebumps (books

               and television)

 

Stage 4: You can look like a monster – Monster High dolls and accessories

              You can love like a Monster, too – Twilight

Why don’t you just act like one while you are at it? – They are teenagers by this point, so pick anything horror and go with it.

 

The surplus of horror fiction has made today’s youth fearless – this does not include seeing their parents dancing in public. Writers are continuously upping the ante in order to keep their audience interested. That is really hard to do considering the reader/watcher has so many reference points to draw upon. I know, it sounds almost condescending, but actually having to push the limits of horror shows that our youth love that stuff. However, sometimes they are left feeling unsatisfied, not from the writer lacking in craft or originality, but from wanting horror to be steeped in reality. How do we – parents, educators, writers, booksellers – keep them engaged? Keep them reading? How about throwing new titles at them until they find something that has them talking, thinking, and dreaming about the things they fear. Most fear stems from the “other” resembling something familiar, and the reality is kids today are exposed to scary things going on around the world, even more than we were. Media bombards every possible frequency it can occupy with visuals that we fear. There is nothing scarier than what can truly reach out and grab you, affect you, and change you.  If kids can’t seem to find the excitement and fulfillment they crave, then encourage them to write their own. Let’s just hope it isn’t about your dancing.



The Horror of Writer's Block

by

Gordon Stamper, Jr.

 

One of the writing life’s potential horrors is writer’s block.  The departure of the muse, the well running dry, the gaping void of the blank page—all could be used as descriptions for the terrifying affliction.  But this blog entry will leave the land of metaphor and look at two practical reasons for writer’s block, one unavoidable, the other utterly avoidable.

 

Life can silence your voice as a writer.  Illness, whether it is yourself or someone you love, happens.  If you have a career and/or a family to provide for, and you don’t have the luxury of writing for a living, your writing output can be significantly reduced.  If you have children and there is no trust fund to pay for the nanny, you may not be able to crank out that great idea for a novel.

 

Tillie Olsen wrote about this in her excellent nonfiction work Silences.  She was an expert on this subject, being a working class mother, wife, and political activist, and when life’s demands allowed her, an award-winning short story writer.  Olsen posited that talented working class people were burdened by demands of life and the need for income when they wanted to write, particularly women until the later 20^th century.  In her 50s and 60s, she was able to publish more works and eventually become a respected college instructor, but there were decades of gaps between her published works before the 1970s.

 

Then there is “I can’t think of anything to write about.”  This faux affliction is illustrated by Joel and Ethan Coen’s film character Barton Fink.  Assigned to write a screenplay for a “wrestling picture,” Fink is stymied and longs for his more sophisticated New York projects as a playwright.  Fink misses out on many potential sources of inspiration, including a hulking and maniacal traveling salesman who loves wrestling and happens to be Fink’s next door neighbor.

 

When you are a writer, you should be an observer.  Have a dedicated notebook, be it paper or electronic, to jot down bits of inspiration in journal or notation format. How could that nasty exchange between an angry customer and a cashier turn into a potential scene for your story?  As a poet, what kind of impression did the lone crane make on you as it flew over the busy highway? This could serve as that later wellspring of ideas when your imagination is running dry.

 

And when all else fails, try heuristics, writing prompts, and freewriting.  Reporters’ questions can help generate and expand new ideas.  Books such as the excellent Writer’s Block by Jason Rekulak have invaluable prompts to kick start writing, such as creating your own definition of words and composing an expository essay from what is happening in a photograph.  Even the old standby of freewriting can help, tossing away self-correction in favor of creation.

 

An old professor of mine who was also a pen-named romance novelist, Richard Hull, told us the writer’s adage that was passed down to him:  sit down on your butt and write.  When life prevents you from sitting on your butt, it cannot be helped.  But any other writer’s block is curable by a world full of ideas, if you take the time to observe and write about them.  Then writer’s block is not a terror anymore, just a paper tiger.

 

Gordon Stamper, Jr. is an adjunct faculty member of Ivy Tech Gary, limited-term lecturer at Purdue University North Central, a published writer, and moderator of Highland Writers’ Group, which meets in Griffith (Grindhouse Café) and Valparaiso (Blackbird Café) on alternating Saturdays.



Writing History: The 5th Annual IWC Banquet

Do you ever think of your place in history as you write? You should. That was the gist of last Thursday night’s message by Indiana Poet Laureate Karen Kovacik.

Indiana Writers’ Consortium held its fifth annual banquet on October 10 at Avalon Manor in Merrillville, Indiana. The evening began with networking and book sales and ended with an entertaining open mic, and everyone enjoyed the conversation and the food. But the highlight of the evening was Karen Kovacik’s talk titled “Falling Through Time: Writing the Self into History.”

Karen started by telling the audience that our task as writers is to pack as much of history into our work as we can. She challenged us to create an archive of past and current existence for the benefit of our readers. She then gave us ten strategies writers can use to make their works an archive of existence. Here is a brief summary.

1. Include dates and place names in poems and stories and other works.
2. Write about family heirlooms and ordinary items that are products of their time.
3. Explore the origins of our surnames.
4. Write about the private lives of public figures.
5. Study new and old maps for what they reveal and what they conceal.
6. Write about the impact of a historical event on our lives or those of our relatives.
7. Use pop culture artifacts to evoke a historical moment.
8. Visit a historical site, paying attention to what remains and what has disappeared.
9. Study historical photographs, including family ones, for unexpected insights.
10. Bring together an autobiographical story with a larger historical panorama.

As Karen talked about each strategy, she gave examples from Indiana writers. If you follow her advice, a future talk may mention you.

I’ll close this post with a few more pictures from the banquet.

Karen Kovacik talking to IWC President

Janine Harrison and Michael Poore.

 

Pre-meal networking.

 

Learning about each other--starting

the evening with introductions.

 



Back It Up and Away--Part II

A TV commercial shows three men watching the news on an iPad they got from Dish Network when they signed up for the Hopper. The action starts in the kitchen, where the men listen to a female news anchor announcing that the kitchen may be the most dangerous room in the house. In the next scene, the men have moved to a tree house when the same anchor reports that a tree house is even more dangerous than a kitchen. The final scene has the three men under a bed and the anchorwoman saying, “Think you’re safe under a queen-size bed in the guest room? Well, you’re dead wrong.”

We can never be totally safe, and neither can our manuscripts. Still, documents have an advantage over people because text can be in several different places at the same time.

So what is the best way to back up your manuscripts?

Each solution has its problems. In the long run, the best response is to make sure you have a backup that is likely to survive if the original is lost.

Last week’s post mentioned the problem with storing the hard copy in the same office as the computer. If the computer crashes, the hard copy survives. But if there is a fire, both copies are gone.

One solution is to back up your manuscript to a thumb drive and carry it with you at all times. If you burn up in the fire, you probably won’t care about your unfinished book. But if you get out, your backup copy will, too. Of course, this isn’t always a good solution. Imagine taking a flash drive into the shower.

Or you could keep the thumb drive in your safe deposit box. Practical for completed manuscripts, but less so for your work in progress. Still, as long as you switch out the flash drives often enough, you will have a recent version to start from.

Another solution is to e-mail yourself a copy of the manuscript. Then it will be available on your e-mail server if something happens to your original.

Or you could back it up to a “cloud,” which may be similar to what happens when you e-mail it to yourself. As a non-techie, I don’t understand this concept very well. I have heard people say they don’t even keep a copy on their computer because they can always retrieve it from the cloud. But what if you lose Internet connectivity? And if your “cloud” is located on a remote server, it could crash. I have even heard horror stories about the government “seizing” servers operated by service providers who are suspected of encouraging copyright violations or other illegal behavior.

So what is the best way to back up your manuscripts? Do whatever works for you, but keep these two principles in mind:

(1) make sure you have at least one copy besides the “original,” and

(2) keep them far away from each other so that the same disaster won’t affect both.

Even though our manuscripts can never be totally safe, good planning can minimize the possibility of loss.

Back It Up and Away--Part I

Have you ever lost the only copy of your manuscript? A tragedy, yes, but also a lesson. So now you make a backup copy.

Safe!

Don’t be so sure.

Imagine that you have a hard copy sitting on your desk next to your computer. If your computer crashes, you still have the hard copy. It may be a pain to retype it, but at least you don’t have to start from scratch.

But what if your house burns down and melts the computer to an unrecognizable mess? The hard copy isn’t likely to survive, either.

Ernest Hemingway understood the value of backing up his manuscripts. In the days before computers, he made a carbon copy of each of his stories. That would have worked if they had been kept in two separate places. Or if his wife had understood the reason for a backup copy.

Hemingway tells the story in his book, A Moveable Feast. It was early in his career, and he and his wife, Hadley, were living in Paris and holidaying in Lausanne, Switzerland. Hadley decided to take Hemingway’s manuscripts along as a surprise so he could work on them during the holidays. She took the originals and the copies and put them all in her suitcase. Then someone stole the suitcase, and Hemingway’s manuscripts were gone.

I assume that both Hadley and Hemingway learned a valuable lesson about keeping the original separate from the backup.

The financial industry learned this same lesson on 9-11. It was already common practice to back up trading records and account documents, but some of the copies were only a few floors or a few blocks away. When the towers disintegrated, it didn’t matter how many floors separated the records. And even those records stored in a building down the street became inaccessible for days or weeks when the entire area was cordoned off.

So don’t keep the backup too close to the original. 

Join us next week for a post on how and where to back up your manuscripts.