Category: Quick Note

A Little Halloween Melancholy

It’s the beginning of November, and I’m sitting on my front porch writing this. My children have co-opted my laptop to play Minecraft, so I’m tapping with thumbs on a little phone screen. I don’t mind. It feels like a good day to take things slow.

It’s unseasonably warm out for Minnesota November, although “unseasonable” seems to have less and less meaning these days, thanks to climate change. If you talk about Halloween weather with any middle-aged Minnesotans like me for more than two minutes, they will inevitably bring up the Blizzard of ‘91. I remember trick-or-treating, trudging through knee-high snow, wearing a cowboy costume over my snow pants.

Today, we’re past Halloween, but it feels like it could still be late summer. But even with the warm weather, Halloween feels like a moment of transition. There’s a reason for the long tradition of fall festivals at this time of year. We may feel more disconnected from the natural world as modern humans, but there’s still something in our bones, in the shadowy recesses of our lizard brains, telling us that this is a time to prepare for death and sleep, and short, dark days. We feel it just as much as the squirrels and birds in my yard, frantically storing up supplies for winter.

Halloween is an oddity among the holidays. Where winter holidays tend to be saccharine joyfulness and spring and summer holidays are all about growth and life, Halloween is a mixed bag of ideas and emotions. It’s Samhain, harvest festival; All Saints Day, festival for the dead; a time for parties and for ghouls and goblins and sometimes fear and horror. Gourds and candy and blood. It’s a mixed-up melancholy holiday.

It may sound odd, but melancholy is my favorite emotion—in the things I write, in the books I read, and in the movies and TV I watch. If you want to grab me with a story, a melancholy ending is a great way to do it. If the protagonist wins, they better have scars.

This Halloween, with the changing climate so readily apparent and another round of seemingly critical elections just days away in America, it feels like it may be even more of a season of transition than usual. I work in an industry that is deeply impacted by AI. I see its effects every day. This week ended with a major downturn of the market, as Big Tech continues to incinerate money in a seemingly endless AI buildout with no near-term prospects for profit.

The future feels deeply uncertain. It’s hard to know what is good and what is bad. Perhaps things are getting worse. Perhaps people are fighting back. There are good reasons for both optimism and pessimism.

There seemed to be fewer kids out trick-or-treating this year. Some are chauffeured from house to house by parents in minivans. A few have homemade costumes, but most are off-the-shelf Spidermen and princesses. It seemed like fewer houses were lit up and giving out candy, and fewer kids out ringing doorbells. Maybe it was just a side-effect of the drizzly, wet evening.

All of it feels somehow more distant, more disconnected, less wild and exciting and faintly dangerous—which is how it felt to me to go out trick-or-treating with my friends as a kid. I wonder if we’re all still recovering from Covid and social distancing. I wonder if we’ll be recovering for the rest of our lives.

Then again, I’m quickly becoming an old man, with a bad back and a propensity for melancholy. It’s easy to see things change and think they’ve gotten worse, when they’re really just different. My parents certainly had times when they knew things had gotten worse. So did their parents. We’re only able to gauge those changes clearly in retrospect.

For the moment, I’m content to enjoy an unseasonably warm day, sitting on the porch and writing, smelling wood smoke from my neighbor’s fireplace. Tonight it will be cold and rainy, and a day closer to winter. And that’s alright too.

Musical Writing Prompts

Fine. I admit it. I hate most writing prompts.

Why? Well, that’s a good question. I enjoy thinking up ideas for stories. But I rarely find that “traditional” writing prompts help me do that. I suspect that the skills for creating a good writing prompt are further from the skills for writing a good story than we might expect.

Many writing prompts start with a core idea that’s too specific. Most of my Story Idea Vault entries fall into this camp, sad to say. It can be hard for someone else to come up with their own spin on the monster beneath the monastery that kills the monks and whispers the future, or the student biologist who has to learn how to recognize thousands of deadly forms of alien life on sight. How do you find the twist on that to get you excited and feel like it’s now yours?

I think a good writing prompt needs to contain not quite enough information. For me, a good story idea starts with an unexpected leap of logic or connection between unexpected things. It starts in the gaps.

I like the Story Engine because it provides very small bits of ideas and shuffles them up randomly. Often, when I use it to generate story ideas, I find that the new ideas are inspired by the cards, but often don’t quite fit all the parameters. From a full sentence with characters and actions and setting, something like the phrase “architecture bomb” will lodge in my brain and grow into something else entirely.

An even simpler exercise that I like for ideation is to generate two long lists of words or phrases. Then align the lists randomly and start reading the combinations. What is a skeleton jar? A Rickroll engine? Sky games?

Again, it’s not anything like a full, coherent idea; more like a high-speed collider for linguistic nuclei. It’s that unexpected connection between unrelated ideas that tickles the muse.

Recently, I discovered another exercise in the same vein—something almost, but not entirely unlike a writing prompt.

Go into the music app on your phone (or your record collection, or a Spotify playlist depending on how old you are) and put on some music. For each song, try to come up with the “story of the song” before it’s over.

I don’t mean summarizing the lyrics (if there are any, and they actually tell a story). Those words might contribute. Is there a person on a bike? A mother? Jilted lovers? An old truck? A fast car and a gun?

You might find yourself picturing little scenes or images. They could relate to the lyrics, or they may be soundscapes. Check the band name, the song name, the album name. Look at the cover art.

Surprisingly few songs tell a straightforward story. They’re often full of loosely related tidbits with little gaps and dark voids in between.

If you look carefully, there are stories in those gaps.

Thoughts on Fiction, Read Aloud

Reading to my Kids

The first time I started regularly reading books aloud in adulthood was shortly after my first son was born. Books for the under-three crowd aren’t exactly high literature, but that’s okay. Babies aren’t discerning consumers, and I wasn’t an amazing narrator.

Still, it was clearly valuable. My oldest could turn the pages and recite his favorite books from memory long before he could actually read any words. All of our children have become voracious readers, and that literacy is an asset in school and life. Plus…you know…it’s fun to read.

My oldest child is now a high schooler, and no longer interested in me reading aloud to him. My youngest is also losing interest, although he still listens occasionally, when we find a book that piques his interest. For now, my middle child is the one who asks me to read to her. She’s a smart middle-schooler, and we mostly read adult sci-fi novels. It’s a gift to be able to share the books that I enjoyed at that age, and revisit them through her eyes.

I know those days are numbered. I suppose I’ll miss it when I no longer have someone asking me to read to them.

Reading fiction aloud for 30-60 minutes most evenings has made me much better at it. I know to shift my tone to better separate external and internal dialogue. I know to adjust my voice to differentiate between two characters in conversation. I know how much space is needed to create a scene break. Sometimes I even know when I’ve gone too far with the bad accents and silly voices.

I’m no professional narrator, but I’ve improved through 15 years of practice.

Audiobooks

I recently made a conscious effort to start “reading” audiobooks. They’re going through something of a renaissance. Enabled by the same streaming and on-demand technology that has upended movies and radio, audiobooks have also helped fill a sizable hole in publisher profits left by the rise of e-books and precipitous decline of physical (and especially hardcover) sales.

Audiobooks also happen to fit well into our current culture, where it often feels hard to sit down and dedicate time to reading, but there are still plenty of opportunities to connect a phone to the car radio during commutes, or put something on the headphones while doing laundry or mowing.

For me, including audiobooks in my reading diet has at least doubled the number of pages I consume. Maybe more. It has given me more opportunities to try new authors without adding to my overfull bookshelves.

I’ve also been slowly noticing the ways that listening to a story alters the way I perceive it. I have a harder time keeping track of different characters and remembering their names. It’s much harder to skip back a chapter and reread something for context.

Stories, Spoken

When humanity was young, storytellers were part historian, part wizard, part priest. Stories were a way for us to make sense of a confusing and  malevolent world, to preserve knowledge and wisdom, and to build a shared worldview. For thousands of years, all stories were spoken.

Even in modern times, when the world is more literate than it has ever been before; even as a writer who most values the written word, there is clearly some special power in a story, spoken aloud.

Writing Advice

Some oft-quoted advice for writers suggests the value in reading your work in progress out loud.

“It will help you find the parts of your prose that sound off.”

“It will help you hear the rhythm of your words.”

“It will help you find your characters’ voices.”

“It will help you find your own voice.”

Like most writing advice, I think these pearls of wisdom will work well for some and not for others.

My opinion these days is considerably broader. As a writer, I think there’s value in consuming many kinds of stories in many different forms and formats, just as there’s value in writing drabbles, flash, novellas, novels, and series, composed by pen or typewriter or computer, or even dictation.

I think writing fiction is an activity where generalists and jacks of all trades excel. We open ourselves up to the world and gather as much as we can, so we can sift it for notes of truth to sprinkle on the page.

And I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least dabble in the original medium of stories, the only one that has persisted since before humans were recognizable as human: the spoken word.

What do you Want from Writing? — Quick Note

I’ve been reading Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife, and I was struck by one of his anecdotes. He had secured a limited edition 500-book print run of a novelette with a small press. To promote the release, he arranged an interview with Wired.com, and a quick blurb on BoingBoing.com. To get these, he worked with the publisher to provide a link to a free download of the same story in PDF—a link that would eventually be clicked 20,000 times.

VanderMeer’s description of the back-and-forth of promoting his story wasn’t what surprised me, it was my own reaction to it. My first thought was that it was a bit of a waste. Surely some of those people downloading the story would have bought a physical copy, right?

He was pleased with this result, at least partly because it led to other opportunities down the road. But I had to interrogate my own reaction. Why did the free download strike me, at least initially, as a bad idea?

The answer, of course, has to do with money. My thought was that this is a fairly successful professional author. Why give work away? The actual answer is complex: the high number of downloads led to later opportunities, the promotion helped sell out the print run, and the market for novelette-length work is very limited (and was even more so ten or fifteen years ago when this occurred.) However, my own reaction made me wonder if I’ve become overly-fixated on getting paid as a measure of the value of writing.

Like many amateur authors, I’ve spent years wondering what it would take to be able to write as a full-time job. Writing is a competitive field, and on the whole, not well-paid. It’s no surprise that so many of us become laser focused on seeking any opportunities we can find. But is that really why we’re writing? Does getting paid do us any good if it becomes the reason to write?

I realize these are not new questions. Artists have always struggled to find balance between art and commerce, and that isn’t getting any easier in a world hell-bent on commodifying art into “content.”

It’s good to sit down every once in a while and think about priorities. Is it better to be paid, or be more widely-read? Is it better to be published, or to improve your craft? Better to write in the format that has a market and a readership, or in the format that interests you? Are you motivated by making the stories you love, or the ones someone else wants to read?

In short, what do you want from your writing?