Prime Number Post, 3rd Day "What I Write"

What I Write (And How I Came To Write It)

What I Write

I know I’ve written some of this before, but it bears repeating. So, that means it’s important, right? (write!) I write to discover: the truth and the ending in both my stories and in my life. (check)

I write at the dining room (when possible) because I need a lot of open space and natural lighting. (check)

How do I write (which was the subject of an early Prime Post)? Out of my interests, emulation, personality, experience, and challenges. I write using the five writing steps and the six writing traits. I spend a lot of my time in revising, so I consider myself a REVISER rather than either a pantser or a plotter or even and/both pantser-plotter. I am a reviser, which is something different in my mind. (check)

Onto the new idea and meat of this Prime Number Post.

What I write.

I don’t specialize in any one genre. I do jump around a bit. But only a bit.

The genres I have written in include: fantasy, contemporary post-modern, science fiction-adventure ala Jules Verne, and ghost tales of the “shudder” variety. I have also written and recorded dozens of “alternative” rock and roll songs (sounding more like 60’s and 70’s garage punk hard rock) once upon a time.

No matter, what I attempt to write, I ground everything with a healthy dose of realism.

I view my writing and growth in a very linear fashion, so very much like the “How I Write” post, I started with emulation. Being a typical American boy of the early 1970’s, I watched plenty, in fact, way too much TV and movies, and read some comic books. I read only when I had to and didn’t like what I had to read.

Back in the twentieth century, we had just three TV networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC (they are all gone now, but in name only) plus in the St. Louis Metropolitan Area (or Metro-East, for me, since I lived near Belleville, Illinois), we had two local channels—KPLR Channel 11 and KDNL Channel 30, plus rare forays onto PBS (where I would get chased off by Subscriber Benefit Telethons). Newer movies would be played on some weeknights, especially on the weekends. And if I was able to stay awake long enough, after those Friday night movies, my older brother and I would try to watch the fabulous Night Stalker series. The old Universal horror movies (King Kong, Dracula, Frankenstein series, the Mummy, and the Wolfman) would get aired on the big networks along with new sci-fi epics like the original and wonderful Planet of the Apes series, Logan’s Run, The Three Musketeers and the Four Musketeers. Disney teased me with their rare Sunday showcases of Treasure Island and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea .

Channel 11 and Channel 30 kept me fed with a steady diet of western, war, Tarzan, Abbott and Costello, the Bowery Boys, Charlie Chan, Ma and Pa Kettle, the Hammer horror, and old science fiction movies. But certain movies stood out: anything with Ray Harryhausen special effects: Jason and the Argonauts, Mysterious Island, and his Sindbad series. As well, I favored any chance to see Journey to the Center of the Earth and Roger Corman’s series of Edgar Allan Poe movies starring Vincent Price.

Saturday mornings meant cartoons. Along with 1960’s classics, Johnny Quest and Scooby-Doo, Where Are You, there were rare live-action TV shows courtesy of Sid and Marty Krofft Productions. There were outrageous and colorful and bold and zany and sometimes dark stories where a boy fell into a portal fantasy and had the strangest adventures: H.R. Pufn Stuf, Lidsville, and their best and darkest, Land of the Lost.

One summer, my precious mother got a matinee pass for my brother and I that enabled us to see several science fiction and adventure classics like the ones I mentioned: Jason, Journey, Myserious, as well as Fantastic Voyage. It’s one thing to watch a movie (with commercials) at your leisure in your home, but quite another to see these rich visual experiences on the big screen where they belong.

The only thing that outdid that matinee summer festival was when she scored us tickets to see Go Ape! A one-time showing of all five of the original Planet of the Ape series in tandem. I made it through the glorious first movie, fell asleep in some of the sequels and woke up for the rousing fifth film (the first and fifth movies thus being my favorites).

There was a time when American imagination needed a big canvas to hold the flicker of light that would cast out such large stories to hold us in thrall. Now, we’ve substituted the big screen for a small screen to gaze down in our hand and receive notifications every five minutes while we are only able to digest small reels and bites of bigger works. Often the clips have been re-edited with mashed-in effects and an editor’s “oh, snap!” mouth agape. I am hoping that the younger kids coming up will shake things up and return to the auteur and artisan approach and make wonderful art for art’s sake that stokes their children’s imagination to attempt storytelling.

I soaked all these stories in. All these seeds were planted in my imagination. I would get absorbed in watching a movie and think it was real and lose myself.

My first attempts to capture all the scenes in my mind, which were simple replaying of the movies I loved to watch, was to draw them out on paper. “Submarine Blow-Up” was my first story that I drew with pencil. It was an adventure story about a submarine that had an internal fire and was sinking, as you can tell from the title. Since I drew it with stick figures, the bigger the fire and the more water that the submarine took on, the messier the drawing became.

I hid my desire to tell stories until I was seven. Then in 1977, the first (and my favorite movie ever) Star Wars movie came out. It changed my world forever, next to being saved. I lived, breathed, and ate that movie. I read the comic books; I listened and acted out the story soundtrack. Over and over again.

By the age of ten, I knew I wanted to be a story teller and be a published author.

I attempted my first story: this time half-prose and half drawings (managing to attempt some scale and objects beyond stick figures). This was Conquest 2000 (remember, this was back in 1980, so I was still twenty years out from being out-of-date). There was a sequel, Conquest 2000: Galaxy Five and an incomplete third story: Doom!

I was (and still am) a slow reader and was behind in my writing skills. I was sent to resource class to catch up. My parents were adamant about me putting down comic books and reading “real” books.

My mom has always been my encourager and cheerleader in my writing. She is my main reader. My dad sometimes reads my writing, but offers the harsher criticism. After attempting to read Conquest 2000, he said, “What is all this K-Pow! and Boom!for?” I told him that was the fighting between the spaceships. Then my dad gave me some of my earliest and best advice: “Show it to us. Describe the action. Don’t report it.”

So, I put down the comic books and picked out my first fantasy series to read: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson. It is an epic high fantasy triology, first published in 1977. As a church-going Southern Baptist, words like Chronicles, Thomas, Covenant, and Unbeliever stood out to me as I knew the words from church sermons and Sunday School lessons. I thought, You mean, someone can write about these subjects in a fantasy book?

I attempted my first fantasy novel, The Dark Dragon which came to be about four hundred and ninety some odd pages handwritten. It inhaled vigorously because the plot changed and was influenced by whatever fantasy book I was reading that week. I was learning by emulation and learning what not to do and to stay away from clichés.

After that, some other important events coalesced in my life. One, I met two Air-Force Brats who loved to read fantasy, watch sci-fi movies, emulate Monty Python comedies, and play Dungeons and Dragons. We shared books, recommended our favorites, defended our likes and dislikes, went to movies together, and played more Dungeons and Dragons, plus the wonderful and lesser known Traveller sci-fi game. Two, I didn’t understand a lot of the words in Donaldson’s books, so I asked for a dictionary for Christmas 1981.

My parents were thrilled: “We have a nerd for a son! Yes!”

I have still that dictionary.

After Donaldson and many other fantasy writers, I stumbled onto Stephen King (reading most of his then published works up to It). After which I read everything I could of Edgar Allan Poe by 1984, my freshman year in high school. In 1985, my grandfather died and my own writings turned to horror (looking back now, it was an attempt to cope with my loss).

By now, another important element had come into my life.
Music: in particular, rock and roll music. I got my first radio in 1981 and locked onto KSHE 95 as well as watching the new music video channel: MTV. (“I want my MTV!”).

Now in addition to wanting to be a published writer, I wanted to be in a rock and roll band.

My favorite band was Rush, followed by Blue Oyster Cult. I was quick to snap up Yes and when Asia came out, I investigated all their parent bands: King Crimson, Yes, U.K., and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. Throw in some Genesis, too, and I became steeped in progressive rock.

So, by the time I was sixteen I had two dreams: to be a published author and be a rock and roll star.

I pursued both.

But being a writer is a quieter hobby and there is only my ego to deal with.

My childhood and teenage helped to form the writer I am today.

I write in several of these genres that I read or watched as movies.

In trying to find out what I could write, I found, though, that I needed a strong base of realism to root me in trying to make it as real as possible for the reader before I put in the weirder elements. The more real the setting and the character and the problem, the more interesting the character and their problem became. The more it mattered why the problem had to be solved for the character.

Also, my forary into song writing and lyric writing taught me emotional honesty. It has to cut in order to make a connection with the listener.

In college, I studied history (and have written about Daniel Boone, William Shakespeare, and Jesus Christ). I have spent a lot of time in bars and playing in clubs, so that shows up in my writing. I put in a lot of biographical elements: parts of people that I know, dislikes, likes, family names, second-hand stories, first-hand accounts, places I visited, places I lived, places I have researched. I have spent a lot of time in church and in church basements or just basements in general.

The stuff in my imagination, by large, comes from what I’ve seen and heard (sometimes, dreamed, too). How it gets spit back into fiction and lyrics, I can’t quite tell you. Only that I am sometimes aware and sometimes not aware. But I am open to shaping the material as my muse sees fit. I try to follow the muse. I don’t ask too many questions, but I do sometimes smile when I realize where the idea has come from and am amazed at how it gets transformed.

I am learning to trust the Almighty Muse and put in elements of redemption. Characters, as we all are all in the story of life, need some redemption.

There may be more about “What I Write” to come.