An interview with the co-creators of Englewood After Dark, a brand new horror audio drama that just came out this October. New episodes of theirs will be coming out regularly, so check them out!

We talk about their creative and collaboration process, what they value in a story, and many other things.

You can find a link to Englewood After Dark podcast here, or else at their website here:

https://englewoodafterdark.com

Note: my higher quality audio recording was damaged and I had to use my backup recording. You’ll hear some noise when I speak. Sorry for that. This is not normal and won’t be present in other episodes!

About Englewood After Dark (from their press kit):

Englewood After Dark is a horror/drama audio drama.

College students Finn Nightingale and Eve Pemberly are on a mission to dig up the truth behind the murders on their campus, but the foundations of Englewood University are built on secrets for a reason. Will they uncover the roots, or be buried like the rest?

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If you see this in your email, there is a podcast episode. It’s up at the top.

The Interview

Ever feel curious about what goes into creating an audiobook? Maybe you have considered producing one at some point, but weren’t sure what goes in to it?

This is an interview with three people who worked on the Howls From the Scene of the Crime anthology audiobook (on kickstarter now). We talk about casting, recording, giving good performances, and a lot more!

The Kickstarter!

There is a kickstarter that is funding this anthology and it’s accompanying audiobook. Also, this anthology will contain my first published story! Please consider supporting it at:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/howlsociety/howls-from-the-scene-of-the-crime-crime-horror-anthology?ref=cjnpre

Even if you don't back the project, if you could at least come leave a comment, it would make a bigger difference than you think!

Extra information about our guests:

Meet…

Solomon Forse (he/him)

…is the founder of HOWL Society. When he’s not hanging on the Discord server or handling publisher and audiobook duties, Solomon spends his time role-playing horror with tabletop RPGs like Call of Cthulhu or shredding horror on the guitar in his Lovecraftian metal band Crafteon. Otherwise, he’s busy attaining pilot ratings or pursuing his new career as an aviation accident investigator. Find out about his horror fiction works at solomonforse.com.

The “HOWL Society” can be found at

https://howlsociety.com/

His website is at

https://www.solomonforse.com/

and he has music at

https://crafteon.bandcamp.com/

Christopher O’Halloran (he/him)

…is the factory-working, Canadian, actor-turned-author of PUSHING DAISY, his upcoming debut novel from Lethe Press (2025). His shorter work has been published or forthcoming from Kaleidotrope, NoSleep Podcast, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and others. He is editor of the anthology, Howls from the Wreckage. Visit COauthor.ca for stories, reviews, and updates on upcoming novels.

Pandora Beatrix (she/her)

…has been working professionally as a voice artist since a recent apocalypse made it difficult for immunocompromised folks to continue LARPing. Since then, she has worked commercial projects, performed for phone LARPs, video games, Actual Plays, some still-NDA’d animation pilots, ongoing featured roles in audiodrama (The Modus Files and Once Upon a Wasteland), performed plays and musicals on multiple theater stages, and narrated loads of amazing stories—including selections in the last three HOWL Society anthologies. She shares her Pennsylvania home with an extremely needy cat and talks to herself in mirrors a lot. See:

https://doratrix.carrd.co/

as well as:

https://www.twitch.tv/wouldbeheroes.

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I haven’t posted in a while. I think a lot of you know why. There was a post a while ago about it, but in any case, thanks to everyone for sticking around all this time. While I got my head screwed back on.

An Announcement!

I’m writing this to make a fun announcement (one you may have guessed, based on the title): I’m going to be a published short-story author soon! This is a goal that I’ve sort of always had. Probably since I was a little kid. And, well, I wrote a bunch of stories last year and thought it might be fun to send a few of them off. And, well, yeah.

“Selling Drugs to the Funny Kids” is going to take a major item off my bucket list! The anthology the story will be in is called Howls from the Scene of the Crime.

The Howl Society

If Howls sounds familiar, that’s probably because I’ve written about the Howl Society a few times now. Their full name is the Horror Obsessed Writing and Literature Society. I found them originally when scouring the internet for a group of writers who might be willing to trade feedback on their stories. It turns out that this is really hard to find. Everyone wants to talk about their own projects, but few are part of a community with strong enough bonds for people to stick around and try to contribute more than they take. In other words, you find a lot of ephemeral statements that go nowhere, or exchanges between people who never expect to speak to one another again, so nobody wants to be put out. So, it was a bit of a discouraging search. It took months to find a group like this one, but once I did, man. It was so valuable—it’s hard to explain in summary except to say that you learn a lot and feel a sense of community.

Anyway, this community releases an annual anthology, which contains stories produced during an extensive summer writing workshop. Check out the article from last year about it. I joined up, and, in short, my story was one of those blindly selected to be included.

(Thanks to all 9+ people who gave detailed feedback during that workshop. It really helped tighten the story up!)

Howls From the Scene of the Crime

So, this year’s anthology is about crime horror. And the kickstarter is live right now! I believe it was half-funded by the end of day two, and still has about a week to go. I’d love if you checked it out. There are some really cool stories in here.

The kickstarter is LIVE, so please check it out. If you shared the project, that would be even cooler. This is going to be their fourth annual anthology and it’s a good one

Audio / Upcoming Interview

As it happens, since I have this newsletter, I was able to trick some project members into agreeing to an interview about the audiobook version of this anthology.

Why about the audiobook? I’ll write a lot more about this soon, but the short version is: I wanted to feel less disempowered, and learning new things can really help with that. I decided it would be rewarding to learn about audio production so I could try to produce an audio drama. Maybe this summer, maybe in the fall.

Wish me luck.

Coming Soon— The Telltale Puppy, narrated and in audio format. This isn’t the audio drama, just a warmup to get used to recording.

Actually, there will start to be audio versions of most of these posts starting… soon? I’d make an audio version of this one, except I need to finish editing the interview in REAPER—

Anyway, expect another post in the next few days that will contain the interview. It is a good one: I got the producer of the audiobook / founder of HOWLs, a voiceover artist, and an author/voiceover artist/former actor/former chief editor of Howls from the Wreckage. If you have ever wondered about audio production or audiobooks, this was a great conversation.

By The Way-

PS: another substack author has interviewed various Howls anthology authors—including me! Here’s a link:

Writing Thoughts

Interview with various authors of HOWLS FROM THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

I had the pleasure of reading an ARC of Howls from the Scene of the Crime, a new anthology forthcoming from the HOWL (Horror-Obsessed Writing and Literature) Society. I’m a fan of crime stories, and the stories in this anthology are great explorations of the genre…

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2 years ago · 4 likes · Ivy Grimes

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I started this SubStack approximately a year ago to study writing. Along the way, I read and studied a lot of things. What were they?

I actually didn’t keep a list, so this isn’t a complete list, but, anyway: here’s about a hundred things.

Why did I read them? Well, it’s prior art. Can’t write something distinct and different without immersing yourself with the great works already out there.

I learned a lot from these stories, and a lot of the posts over the last year were inspired by them.

Graphic Novels

It isn’t fair to only list the writer when the book is a graphic novel, but I’m studying writing so that’s what I’m listing here. Without great art these stories would not be the same however.

1. Batman: Year One, by Frank Miller

2. Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller

3. All Star Batman and Robin, by Frank Miller (don’t judge me)

4. The Authority, by Warren Ellis

5. Swamp Thing Vol 1, by Alan Moore

6. Swamp Thing Vol 2, by Alan Moore (50% complete)

7. Black Science Vol 1

8. Locke and Key Vol 1

9. From Hell, by Alan Moore

10. The Courtyard, by Alan Moore

11. Neonomicon, by Alan Moore

12. Providence, by Alan Moore

13. The Little Blue Kite, by Mark Z. Danielewski

Video Games

Games with significant stories that I’ve studied to some extent in the last year. Does not include 100 or so that were more gameplay oriented.

1. Emberfate

2. Gilded Shadows

3. Life is Strange

4. Lake

5. Detroit: Beyond Human

6. Oxenfree

7. Tyrion Cuthbert

8. Ace Attorney

9. Hades

10. Signs of the Sojourner

11. Man of Medan

12. Little hope

13. House of Ashes

14. The Quarry (15% done)

15. Amelie

16. Sunless Sea

17. Doki Doki Literaturę Club

18. Tacoma

19. 80 Days

20. Heaven’s Vault

21. Sorcery! 1

22. Sorcery! 2

23. Sorcery! 3

24. Overboard!

25. Plus about 80 others that were less narrative focused—part of my day job involves game design. Yes, this was too expensive… but the novels weren’t free either :p

Screenplays

1. The Hateful Eight, by Quentin Tarantino (screenplay)

2. BAIT, by Bret Easton Ellis

Novels

1. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, by Quentin Tarantino (novelization)

2. The White Company, by Arthur Conan Doyle

3. Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

4. Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis

5. The Informers, by Bret Easton Ellis

6. Glamorama, by Bret Easton Ellis

7. Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis

8. The Shards, by Bret Easton Ellis

9. American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis

10. Imperial Bedrooms, by Bret Easton Ellis

11. The Favorite Sister, by Jessica Knoll

12. Razor Strike, by Lee Sarpel

13. Play It As It Lays, by Joan Didion

14. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

15. Running with the Demon, by Terry Brooks

16. The Most Dangerous Place on Earth, by Lindsey Lee Johnson

17. Crooked Little Vein, by Warren Ellis

18. Normal, by Warren Ellis

19. Gun Machine, by Warren Ellis

20. Elevation, by Stephen King

21. Later, by Stephen King

22. Joyland, by Stephen King

23. The Colorado Kid, by Stephen King

24. The Long Walk, by Stephen King

25. The Silent Patient, by Alex Michaelides

26. Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer

27. Authority, by Jeff VanderMeer

28. Acceptance, by Jeff VanderMeer (25% done)

29. Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl

30. Night Film, by Marisha Pessl

31. Neverworld Wake, by Marisha Pessl

32. Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk

33. The Cipher, by Kathe Koja

34. Dark Factory, by Kathe Koja

35. Kissing the Bee, by Kathe Koja

36. Going Under, by Kathe Koja

37. Strange Angels, by Kathe Koja

38. Seventh Mansion, by Maryse Meijer

39. Numerous chapters from a writing group

NonFiction

1. Theory of Fun, by Raph Koster

2. Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences, by Tynan Sylvestor

3. Into Thin Air, by John Krakauer

4. On Writing, by Stephen King

5. A LOT OF GDC TALKS

TV and Film

Again, since I’m studying writing, I am only listing the writers for these projects. These only include works I count as study materials, not things I casually watched

1. Castlevania, by Warren Ellis

2. Guardians of Justice, by Adi Shankar

3. M Doll, by Imagination Rabbit

4. Heartstring Marionette, by Imagination Rabbit

5. Discovery of Witches, adapted from novels by Deborah Harkness

6. Night Gallery, by Rod Serling

7. The Society, by various

8. Luckiest Girl Alive, by Jessica Knoll

9. You, adapted from novels by Caroline Kepnes

10. Devil in Ohio, which must be based on a novel

11. So many more, I don’t want to list them

Short Stories (and a few essays)

1. Why Read, by Oleg

2. The Divider, by Oleg

3. Hand Above the Pan, by Oleg

4. Layers of Unseeing, by Oleg

5. Loneliness of the Headphones Man, by Oleg

6. Shadowboxer in the Park, by Oleg

7. (an unpublished story), by Oleg

8. Six secret stories by six great authors as part of a workshop

9. Snow-Fox vs. Leukemia

10. The Telltale Heart, by Edgar Allan Poe

11. Devil in the Belfry, by Edgar Allan Poe

12. Masque of the Red Death, by Edgar Allan Poe

13. Howls from the Dark Ages

14. A whole bunch more... see the short story roundups or the summary

Poems

1. charge of the light brigade

2. The Bells, by Edgar Allan Poe

3. Annabelle Lee, by Edgar Allan Poe

4. Light, by Maddy Robinson

Just for Fun

Some a few books I read without studying them. Things that were just for fun. A way to relax.

1. Bird Box, by Josh Malerman

2. Red Rising, by Pierce Brown

3. Golden Son, by Pierce Brown

4. Morning Star, by Pierce Brown

5. Iron Gold, by Pierce Brown

6. Dark Age, by Pierce Brown

7. Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk

8. Lots of actual play rpg podcasts, although some of those were for study too...

9. Fifth Season (50% done, for a book club)

What have you read or studied over the last year?

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In 'The Hobbit' (the book), little hairy people live in cozy houses and spend all day gossiping, eating, and being respectable. When a wizard arrives, a modern reader might expect fireballs to start flying all over the place, but instead Gandalf is really good at blowing smoke rings and telling stories.

When the group gets a magic sword later, the sword doesn't fly or talk or have a gun hidden inside it—it glows when certain monsters are nearby. This is unspeakably cooler than any vorpal +4 sword of lich-slaying with the ability to summon and command dragons.

Later in the story when Bilbo gets his ring, it is the most exciting, magical, and even scary thing in the world. Rings of invisibility are always fun, and in an rpg, lead instantly to mischief, but they’re a dime a dozen, and Bilbo’s ring didn't feel like that at all. This ring felt special.

"Magic" doesn't usually feel special. Fantasy settings are so full of magic and whimsy that its not exactly news-worthy when something 'arcane' happens. It's the daily weather—clear, with a chance of forked-lightning, but there is an orc front coming in that could put a damper on the festival if the heroes don't get back from that dragon riding competition in time.

Also, a word from our sponsor:

The innkeeper is now carrying a +5 vorpal sword of dragon-command, so those of you with the +4 model that is getting sort of old can finally get that upgrade we know you have been waiting for.

Tolkien's world is one of the most magical fantasy worlds out there, but its not because its overflowing with magic—there is actually very little outright magic in the world, and the strangeness is situated in space such that most characters would never encounter it. The world is magical because its sort of mundane. The humans don't live in a whimsical fairy land—most have never even met Dwarves or elves, and the things they worry about are political bickering and land disputes. Battles are things of legend, not the thing you might attend this Saturday if nothing better comes up.

We instinctively worry that a mundane world is a boring one, but the world of Tolkien isn't boring at all. The black arrow that takes down Smaug is not some magical dragon slaying artifact, its closer to a lucky coin—and that makes it more magical than any lightning storm that an archmage could conjure up to strike the dragon from the sky.

Not mundane enough? What about the pleasant but shy neighbour, that guy who sort of keeps to himself, how when he comes over for a little neighbourhood get together, starts talking about vegetable gardening, and he just keeps insisting there's no great skill to it, just time, and when pressed, he laughs and tells them about some of his tricks. He talks to you about how you can keep pests off your garden vegetables by making little homes for toads in your garden out of old coffee mugs, and then you won't need pesticides, and he's showing this nerdy humble-old-man joy at being able to talk about his hobby while laughing at himself that is just charming.

(the story above is describing a scene from a CoC actual play podcast called "Into the Darkness")

Imagine that some strange blue weeds start to take over his garden, killing one plant after the other, and this guy gets a little ill at the same time. That's something to investigate, that's weird. What is going on? Even a few weeds can become interesting and scary.

But if you imagine instead that the sky is raining swords, then a few weeds and a sick old guy doesn't really raise an eyebrow. Thank goodness he only has evil plants to deal with. We have The Solar Sword Slinger to contend with.

Magic can't exist without a backdrop of normalcy. The experience of magic, more than anything, is an experience of contrast. If everything is magical, nothing is.

That is, anyway, if you are going for that feeling of 'magical magic'—if you are going for a different experience, like action or surreal creativity, or magical realism, or want to use it as a literary device, or explore a what-if, then magic gives you a lot of freedom to create what you like, which is great.

Note: Its possible I've forgotten some parts of The Hobbit since I read it last. But I do recall their main super power is the ability to eat more meals than anything else in the land.

Commentary

I wrote this two years ago, and I now only half agree with it. I have slowly acquired a taste for high-fantasy settings. I may not understand them, and they’re not my favourite in general, but I’ve encountered enough good ones now that I can see the appeal. It pays to be open minded, I’ve really enjoyed some of the things I’ve read since back then.

Although, in most of my stories, I do like a backdrop of normalcy… just personal preference at this point, maybe even just a habit.

What’s your preference? Why?

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Imperial Bedrooms (2010), by Bret Easton Ellis, is a dark mystery/thriller where a man named Clay returns to L.A., where he grew up, while working on a movie and reconnects with the people and the culture there. Which means he attends parties, does drugs, gets mixed up with really dangerous people, begins to quickly get followed, and who meets a young actress who tries to seduce her way into a role on his movie (not necessarily in that order).

This book is the sequel to Ellis’ first novel, Less Than Zero, and was the last novel be intended to ever write. Shortly afterwards, he pursued a career as a screenwriter and podcaster, which paid well, but in 2023 he became tempted to write novels again and released The Shards.

This novel, Imperial Bedrooms, differs considerably the work it is a sequel to. Less Than Zero is a wandering story, inspired by Didion’s Play It As It Lays, about a young man hanging out with friends in L.A. over the course of a few months. It is a stark look at how empty and nihilistic that lifestyle is, and it has no narrative. Imperial Bedrooms is more or less the same thing, except the book isn’t about the nihilistic lifestyle—it’s about the plot. It’s a captivating mystery-thriller novel, not a social commentary, and I think a lot of readers didn’t expect that and didn’t know how to respond.

It is one of the only books this year I have binge-read because I was unable to put it down. I finished it in either two or three days. I couldn’t put it down. I’ve actually read it three times since it came out thirteen years ago.

Note: if you would like to read my notes for Less Than Zero, the article is here:

Barbarian Grunge

Notes on Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis

What is this Book? Less than Zero is the first novel by Bret Easton Ellis, published back in 1985 when he was twenty-one years old. It describes a young man from Los Angeles who had been in New Hampshire for college, but who has come home to visit his friends and family for a month at Christmas. His stay is unpleasant; he moves from scene to scene exhibi…

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3 years ago · 4 likes · Nathan Schuetz

What Was Noteworthy?

Tension through Style

The style is similar to Less Than Zero, yet is very different. This time the prose is harsher and has sharper edges. At first, I found this less engaging, but this style of prose has a secret power that was revealed later in the book: you can take this harsher, sharper prose and ratchet up the tension to a stunning degree. Ellis eventually begins to omit almost all punctuation, and begins writing paragraphs in place of sentences, and then pages in place of paragraphs. This prose advances forward with such a breakneck, heart-squeezing rhythm that it felt like there was no time to rest. It was frantic, and as Clay moves from merely anxious into full panic mode, we feel it.

It was amazing.

An excerpt related to him trying to figure out who his stalker is:

It’s raining lightly when I leave the party and I forget where the BMW is and then I finally find it parked against a curb a few blocks away on Washington Boulevard and as I’m about to pull out a blue Jeep rushes by and slows to a stop at the light behind me on the corner. I make a U-turn and pull up behind the Jeep and my hair is wet and my hands are shaking and I can’t see who’s inside the car and it starts to rain harder as I follow the Jeep up Robertson toward West Hollywood and through the windshield wipers the streets seem emptier because of the rain and on the CD Meghan Reynolds burned for me last summer Bat for Lashes is singing “What’s a Girl Gonna Do?” and lightning illuminates a turquoise mural on a freeway underpass and then the Jeep makes a right on Beverly and I keep checking the rearview mirror to see if someone’s following me but I can’t tell and then I force myself to stop weeping and turn off the stereo concentrating only on the blue Jeep as (…)

Another note: that excerpt has a very strong rhythm.

Apophenia Via Style

A detail about what is shown and what is not: Ellis buffets us with detail, but that detail is mostly surface level. He refrains from sharing information with us about what lies beneath the surface, and especially, what lies within Clay’s heart. The longer we go without those crucial pieces of information being provided for us, the stronger the vacuum becomes until it draws you in to fill in the gaps. This is one of the keys to Ellis’s style: it’s not always about what he says, but what he omits that gets our imaginations working.

In game design, we call this apophenia. It is when the storytelling is suggestive rather than explicit, and it invites the audience to imagine more than what is shown to them. Tynan Sylvestor (known for Rimworld) explains it here:

Rain Turner

There is an actress who wants to star in the movie Clay is working on named Rain. I found her to be really alluring. But why? What made her so incredibly likeable?

She is pursuing a relationship where somebody is exploiting her, but she knows that he’s exploiting her and is not in fact some hapless victim. She is trying to exploit him too. She recognizes the game, opts in, and confidently tries to turn the tables on him. Despite her situation, she has a lot of agency.

She’s powerful.

Dramatic Tension—and a Plot

The story itself was loaded full of dramatic tension.

My understanding is this: we begin with the ending, revealing that the story will end with a major character’s death, and then we rewind and foreshadow some issues Clay has and some problems with the city. Being prepared for some Badness to happen, we add in one ominous mystery after another, and while Clay works to answer his questions, more ominous questions arise, and it stacks and stacks.

To ratchet this up, the world is incredibly mundane (if Hollywood flashy), so that when something ominous happens, the contrast with day to day life is starker. This tension is reinforced by the style—see above.

While I understand this in outline, I would not be able to reproduce it. There’s more to it than what I’m seeing.

Literary Devices

There are some literary devices in play: the book is meta to less than zero, and is one where its author, Bret, is a scary individual. This lets the book be an explicit commentary on the older work in addition to a sequel, while also redefining itself. Very cool. I suspect that the Bret referenced here may be the same Bret from The Shards.

The Ending, Expectations, and Ambiguity

Finally, the ending was jarring and dark and I misunderstood it the first two times I read it. But it keeps me thinking about it. My expectations about the book each time had a huge effect on my enjoyment of the book—I don’t think the book itself or it’s description prepares the reader for the material, and many people found the book jarring because of this.

(By the way, this is one of the most common causes of negative game reviews on Steam.)

In the end, it’s hard to know how to interpret the book. And that’s good. It makes it stick with you.

Other Notes

• there are subtle hints throughout about Clay’s dark side, but they are so subtle that you don’t know what any of it means

• One reason I read this when I did was because I was sick and couldn’t concentrate and this was the easiest prose to process among any books I owned. Surprising for a book with page-long sentences.

• Extreme violence

• people say it exactly mirrors Less Than Zero but I’m reading them in parallel and it’s not true. The parallels are deliberate but are evocative, not descriptive of the actual story. I’m not sure those reviewers were paying attention when they read both books.

Some Quotes by The Book’s Author

On Raymond Chandler:

Well, so I’d been reading a lot of Raymond Chandler, and you know what? The plots really don’t matter. The solutions to mysteries don’t matter. Sometimes they’re not solved at all. It’s just the mood that’s so enthralling. And it’s kind of universal, this idea of a man searching for something or moving through this moral landscape and trying to protect himself from it, and yet he’s still forced to investigate it. The plot comes into play during the outline stage, where the story tells itself.

More about Chandler:

I’d been reading a lot of Raymond Chandler, and that was my big influence.

How the book got started:

the only thing that I really took out of that experience of sitting down with my books and reading them was, “Oh, where’s Clay? What’s he doing now?” And it began to haunt me. I was thinking, “Do I go there? Do I really want to go there?” But ultimately, you don’t make the decision. Emotionally, you become invested in this idea, and you start to make notes, and then you’re questioning whether this is going to work or if it’s going to be something you want to spend a couple of years with. Then it makes its decision for you. And I never thought of this as a sequel. I thought of it as exploring where this character is 20 years later. That was the one driving point. I didn’t want to write a sequel and I don’t think it is. Well, I mean, it is and it isn’t. It’s narrated by him, sure. But I guess I could maybe have switched the names around and it could stand alone.

On the experience of writing it,

That was extremely personal, I was going through an extremely painful period in my life, a midlife crisis you might call it, and yet i went to this book every night after dealing with this horrible movie situation I was involved in and whatever was going on in my life, and for a couple of hours every night that was kind of a therapy, kind of this thing i went to to heal myself, to exorcise all these negative feelings (...), and by the time i finished it, and it was a very short very short book, 160 pages, it took me 3 years to get, i didnt really care any more, i didn't really think much of it; but i picked it up maybe 3 years ago and i was shocked by how much i liked it; i couldn't believe how spare it was, how every word was screwed into place, it had this kind of a haiku feeling to it and this pain just radiates off the page; it is in some ways a very ghastly book (...) a reflection of my disgust at the time.

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I haven’t written here much lately, and I started to worry that everyone would think this newsletter is abandoned. I think that sometimes when a regular poster stops regularly posting. Writing is a lot of time and effort. Sometimes people quit.

I’m not quitting, but I’m adjusting what I’m doing. There will be a followup article about the details, but it involves more writing instead of less. This isn’t me saying something like “this newsletter is going into a lower gear for a bit.” More like the opposite.

What this article is about is why I have been posting inconsistently, and to say that I’ll be posting reliably again.

The Sad Part

The reason my motivation is weaker is that the past 12 months have been a nightmare for me. It would feel like complaining to go into too much detail, but the outline of things is below. In short, I feel my inconsistency has at least a bit of a good excuse:

• In August last year, our dog got cancer, and we had to say goodbye a month or two later. It was so upsetting that it put me into a funk that I only just started to get out of. I spent all day with that dog, with multiple hour-long walks every day. There was a massive hole in my daily life after he was gone

• A few months after, in December, our eighteen-year-old cat died. Kidney disease. She was the most annoying cat, but she was our annoying cat

• Shortly after, in January I think it was, my grandpa died from cancer. He was something else. An exceptional human being. A leader, an inspiration, a life and world-changing guy

• Around this time, a friend contracted… something. There doesn’t seem to be a name for it. I don’t want to go into details, but his life is probably a living hell right now, and his wife and kids must really be struggling. This is bringing up some memories of my concussion ten years ago, which took eight years to recover from, so I can imagine, at least a tiny bit, what he’s going through. And I imagine it’s bad

• Perhaps it was January, perhaps it was February; a friend’s dad died. She came to stay with us for a little afterwards. I feel terrible for her

• In April or May, my grandma died. She had pretty bad dementia, but after my grandpa stopped visiting her every single day, I think she stopped hanging on. It hit me pretty hard for some reason. I didn’t write much for a while afterwards, not until recently I guess

• Not long after this, my brother’s dog died. I drove into town and went to the vet with him and cleaned his house and got to listen to my family tell me how much they missed him for weeks. This made me relive part of losing my own dog, and it was harder than you might expect

• Next (how long can this go on?), my dad was diagnosed with a chronic disease. It might turn very severe in as soon as a few weeks, or maybe it will be a few months. He’s seeing doctors weekly for it. He’s also had a fractured back and has had COVID-19 for 12 months. I don’t know how long he’s going to be around, but things look sort of bad at the moment

• EDIT 1: between writing the draft of this, and publishing it, a new thing came up. It might be the worst of all, or it might be nothing. I don’t know yet

• EDIT 2: between last edit and now, something brand new: a very close friend, but who I haven’t seen in a long time, unexpectedly died. And somebody dumped her body in a park. Do you even believe me? Or is this too over the top? It sure seems like it can’t be real, doesn’t it? What’s next, you might be wondering. It doesn’t feel real to me either. If it wasn’t on the news for a week, I’d still be in denial that it happened. I had a hard time messaging people about it because I was worried it wasn’t true and I was mistaken. I think my brain was broken. I wish the funeral was sooner, it’s still a month away for some reason

God, what a list. I’m sure I even missed something in there.

Anyway, when you feel awful, analytical research isn’t always the most helpful thing to do. A better thing to do is this: create something.

Actually, this SubStack started after I wrote the beginning of The Alienation and the Black Stones. I wrote it shortly after Banjo got cancer. It is a story about facing the inevitability of severe loss; loss that isn’t okay, loss of something critical and close to you and involved in every part of your day-to-day life; loss that can’t be avoided. The story structure reinforces this, and the first chapter of the novella is actually the conclusion of the story. So, you know how it is going to end. That’s the point.

Although, now that almost a year has passed, I think that this novella might be the first in a trilogy, and that the third instalment deserves a happy ending. Because we need happy endings after tragedy.

Not want. Need.

But the reason I wrote it is that it helped me process what was happening. You’ll find a lot of horror authors say the same thing. I’ve spoken to many of them over the last year, and you’ll find some of the same sentiments in interviews I did recently. Reading/watching or creating horror is soothing for certain kinds of people. In fact, two of the biggest horror fans I know have PTSD. The horror makes them feel better.

(That’s why all these attempts to shelter traumatized people feel so wrong to me. Traumatized people sometimes seek harsh experiences, in a controlled way, to help them process what they’ve been through. To gain a sense of control over it? So, when you ban stories to protect people, you’re taking that away from them. Let people make up their own minds about what they read and watch.)

Anyway, I’m Still Writing

The point of this post is to say that I’m not going to let all this stop me.

The thing I learned from my concussion was this: when the world kicks you down… and, apparently, kicks the people you care about much, much harder… well, there’s a lot of nasty things to say here, but the gist of it is that you have to pick yourself up and move forward. Even when you can’t. And this isn’t some stupid ideal of behaviour; it’s because you have no choice.

I want certain things in life and I’m going to go get them.

So, I’m fully back to work and writing a lot.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve written thousands of words, end edited far more than that.

I have two finished stories waiting to be published:

• The Telltale Puppy (short story; an homage to Poe)

• The Spiced Isle Massacre (short story; I want to get this one traditionally published)

Two that are almost finished:

• The Princess and the Fierce Beast (a fairy tale about a bad childhood)

• (Secret project as part of a workshop)

And several in-editing at the moment:

• The Alienation and the Black Stones (novella)

• A BLIZZARD. RED SNOW. WITCHCRAFT (novella that explores unreliable narrators and layered narratives)

• The Hitchhiker (short story. Closely related to the blizzard story. Probably will be bundled with it as a series of related stories)

• The Bantam Skulls #1: The Fever Jungles (first of what will hopefully be a serialized series of swords and sorcery novellas. Premise: what if we didn’t have to protect nature? What if nature became scary again, and fought back? And not in some noble way. In a vicious, wild way. I think many of us sort of dream of this kind of world. It’s a world of meaning and danger instead of guilt and hopelessness. And, besides, I think we deserve to be hit back after everything we’ve done to the planet.)

• The Fascination of Rue’s Gimlet (a novel, exploring obsession)

• a couple of others

My goal right now is to turn all those in-progress stories into finished stories that I can publish in some way or another. And soon.

There are some changes to this newsletter I have planned. But I’ll be posting weekly, you can count on that, unless some new tragedy new comes up—and if so, after a while, I’ll come back yet again. I’m a pretty stubborn person. At this point, I can’t promise this won’t come up.

I hope you’re all well

Give this a heart or a comment if you read this. I want to know whether people are still reading these after I went offline for a month or two.

After all, my article about the shark attack script was really good, but it was one of my least read, least-opened, least-liked articles of all time, so now I’m worried I’ve lost everybody. Go back and read it, it’s about a really interesting script!

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Prologue

Let’s set the mood.

In July of 2023, stories of shark attacks flooded the news…

Global News:

Monday and Tuesday saw a spate of shark attacks off the coast of New York’s Long Island that reportedly left five people injured, including two 15-year-olds.

Forbes:

Videos and photos of recent great white shark sightings (...) take the historic step of closing the popular Nantucket beach Great Point to swimming.

The Sun:

So far, 19 people have been bitten by sharks in American waters this year, which experts fear could be the beginning of a new record.

Hindustan Times:

Nurse Delia Yriarte, 42, was bitten by a shark while snorkeling near the Galapagos Islands. She received medical attention and fortunately did not lose her leg

These stories are harrowing and tragic. But they interest people. These stories became international news for a reason.

The oceans are some of the only places on Earth where nature can still scare us. And I think, for some reason, people find that endlessly interesting.

Introduction

BAIT is a script by Bret Easton Ellis from 2011 about horrible people getting what they deserve with the help of some sharks.

The script interests me because Bret Easton Ellis wrote some incredible novels and short stories. However, after switching over to writing for movies and T.V., he’s had a lot less success. Only a few of his scripts were made into movies, and only one of those turned out well (in my opinion).

So, I’m curious: are his scripts good, and they’re just being implemented poorly? Or are the scripts just not that good?

I dug around online for a bit and tracked down a single script. This is what I found.

Synopsis

What happens, basically, is there’s a guy named Cole who gets “mistreated” by a group of students (to put it lightly). This person then arranges to be on a boat with his abusers the next day. He helps steer the boat towards some shark infested waters, and, well, let’s just say he has plans.

Do you know anybody, or know of anybody, who pushes your buttons? Somebody who needs to get what they deserve? Do you have nostalgia for shark attack movies like Jaws? Are you curious about how the author of American Psycho would write a revenge tale at sea?

If any of this applies, read on.

I’ll try to be light on spoilers, and will jump right into story structure.

“Movies Are About Structure”

Bret once said,

Scripts are about structure and novels are about consciousness.

In that case, what is the basic structure of this script?

There is a cycle that repeats twice in the movie. Its job it is to create necessity, and specifically, the necessity that some person or group needs to be punished because they are the worst.

In the first cycle, we meet those worthless students who, first, are stereotypical jerks, and second, who “mistreat” Cole pretty severely. These people are paper thin stereotypes, aggressive brutes who should be in jail, and their girlfriends, rather than turning them in, go home with them afterwards. They have no redeeming grace at all, nothing to give the hint that they have depth or charisma. Nothing for the audience to latch onto.

I hate these people. I can’t explain how mad I was. This story is garbage, I thought at the time.

I actually had to stop reading and take a short break. The only reason I came back was because I hated them so much, I had to go back to make sure they didn’t have a happy ending in the story.

This is the first checkbox complete: the audience now has to finish the story out of pure hatred. We are now invested, no matter how unhappy we are after going through the first part of the story.

Here’s the note I wrote:

I’m only reading because I want all these people boiled in acid

We really need Cole to step up here and destroy those pieces of work.

This is interesting, isn’t it? The hook that is being used to invest you in the story is one that makes you really unhappy and uncomfortable.

There are two other examples of this I can think of off the top of my head, and I found each of those worked well also—both are video games.

The first is Scratches, an old first person horror game where you inherit a house and spend a few days at it. There is nothing to do. You are bored mindless. You are, in fact, so bored that you become desperate to explore the house. You find a room you can’t get into, and next thing you know, getting into that room becomes your goal in life. You will move heaven and earth to get inside, because you will go mad from boredom otherwise. Your character goes to extreme lengths to investigate, and you are so fully in sync with this. You’re both completely invested in getting to the bottom of it all, and, next thing you know, there is a mystery to solve.

The second example of using pain as a hook is one of the legend of Zelda games. I forget which, possibly the wii one. You are a bored kid in a village where everything is boring. It plays out the same way: out of desperation, you start exploring, and things go from there.

In both cases, it was majestic.

So, yeah: it’s a bold choice to make the audience so uncomfortable, but I find it can have a huge payoff.

Back to structure.

So, the students need to die in a fire. Cole is going to make them pay. We NEED him to make them pay. We’ll do anything at this point, including continue reading this really unpleasant story, to make sure it happens. But then something happens.

Cole begins to seek out his revenge, and… we learn that he’s somehow worse than the people he’s getting revenge against.

This is quite a feat, and I don’t want to spoil the details, but you eventually start to feel sick and even become empathetic to the students he’s going after.

These students are worthless psychos, but, I mean, this is too far. Somebody has to stop this freak. It’s getting uncomfortable to read again.

This is the second cycle playing itself out: the audience is now invested in making sure that Cole is stopped.

The audience is now rooting for the horrible people from earlier!

So, the first cycle was about creating a need in the audience for revenge; and the second cycle was about creating a need in the audience to get revenge against the avenger.

Does Cole get what’s coming to him? Can’t say. That would be a spoiler.

“Novels Are About Consciousness”

If the success of a movie depends on its structure, does that mean that’s all there is to a good movie?

Nah.

His speciality, from his life as an author, is character writing. He’s an expert at nailing extreme voice and vividly portraying the sorts of people that you can’t even imagine in your nightmares.

His other speciality, which this structure actually reinforces really well: he seems to enjoy making you empathize with the most horrible people he can imagine, while at the same time allowing you to detest them.

He doesn’t try to convince you that, boo hoo, this villain is a victim. He doesn’t try to spin the person’s bad actions as actually being justified, at least in their own mind. He doesn’t paint a picture of a world where different people have conflicting values and needs, yet resources are limited so conflict is tragic yet unavoidable—that’s more of an Orson Scott Card thing.

Ellis makes villains, and then makes you see them with empathy and sometimes even appreciation, while letting you simultaneously know they are villains and that the world would be a lot better if they were dead.

These people are so evil, you can scarcely believe it.

Suspension of Disbelief

Speaking of scarcely believing how evil these people are, suspension of disbelief is handled in a really unusual way in this story.

There’s limited foreshadowing, but when things happen, they seem so totally random that I wanted to stop reading several times. Except, I was invested in making sure somebody got what was coming to them, so I kept going.

Later, the character traits that caused the unbelievable behaviours get reinforced, and the character continues to act in a way consistent with their earlier actions.

Somehow, by doubling down on the things that seem crazy, the audience eventually accepts what happened as not just plausible, but as real.

You go through mini-cycles of 1) see event, 2) think to yourself, “no way, that is ridiculous,” 3) the character acts so consistently, or even doubles down on what they did, so that 4) you become a believer in the story, like you just went through a mini period of shock and denial that ends with acceptance.

But your acceptance happens after the fact.

Here are some notes I wrote while reading this script, before I changed my mind and decided it did actually feel real/believable later on:

And

But I can’t criticize it. It worked wonders in the end, and suspension of disbelief ended up being great. I really wish I knew more about why this worked. To repeat: suspension of disbelief, by the end, was really good.

Some Miscellaneous Notes

• Voice and prose style: it’s a script, so there is none. There is still a sense of authorial voice and style in other senses, but it’s not quite in the words themselves. It’s weird reading a script where those things are mostly absent after reading novels for so many months

• There’s almost zero descriptions of mannerisms, inner-character, or body language. Those things are left up to the actors and director. So, if the actors and director don’t do a great job of interpreting the script, I suspect you’d end up with shallow results. And, actually, some of his movies feel like this. I suspect the subtlety in his work requires an especially good director to translate

• Lazy character design: why med school? Can our sympathetic female lead not go to school for something that isn’t the most stereotypical major of all time for sympathetic smart female leads? Why not Agricultural Science or Chemistry or Art History or Military Science—anything, really. Med school is such a trope at this point

• I read all 100 pages in a single sitting, minus a break to temporarily rage-quit. I almost never do that. What I’m saying: the need to see these people punished or stopped was so strong that it glued me to my seat. This was a really good read

• Taking advantage of (theoretical) captive audiences: at a theatre, you sit down and you stay there for 90-9000 minutes (depending on how ambitious the production team was). That means you can have a slow opening, one that doesn’t have a super strong hook right off the bat. With movies in theatres, this is pretty safe. Other media forms, the audience is more prone to giving up after a slow opening and leaving to do something else

• This movie was never made. It looks like it’s had a variety of production people and directors connected to the project, but even twelve years later, there’s no movie. If it ever gets made, I’m going to see it twice though. My wish list: cast Edward Norton as Cole, and Brad Pitt (from Se7en) as the asshole jock, directed by Damien Leone.

That’s an awful lot to say about a movie that does not exist. If you can find the screenplay online, check it out. I think it’s great.

I hope you found this analysis interesting!

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Garrett Francis is the author of a literary newsletter that features essays, short stories, and serialized novels. He’s also founded several digital journals and publishing projects over the years, which released work by over seventy contributors, as well as a few book-length works by new and emerging authors.

When I came across his newsletter, I read  Trisomy, one of his short stories. Immediately, I was a fan. Not long after that, I asked him for an interview and he was good enough to oblige.

1. I Asked About His Process

GF:

My process usually begins with a quick note in my phone that, I think, tries to start explaining something that’s gnawing at me. Most of the time, what’s gnawing at me is an image. There isn’t really a pattern—at least from what I can tell—of what that image is, but most recently the image is of a point in the plot. It might be the end of the story. It might be the beginning. It could be somewhere in the middle. But there aren’t any faces. No characters. Just a situation, really, and if I find the image of that situation strong enough, I’ll keep building off of it. 

So in that way, even if it isn’t a formal outline of the story, I do spend a fair amount of time building ideas and timelines well before I open up a new document. 

2. I Asked Whether His Process Differs Depending Whether it’s a Novel or a Short Story

GF:

I definitely approach them in the same way, largely working off of images that come to mind. For me, characters come later, and, though that seems to go against convention (at least the conventions passed down to me), I don’t think that that makes characters any less important. It’s just an order of operations kind of thing.

I’m working on a novel now, and have been off and on for about three years. And by “working” I do mean that I have maybe half of a draft actually written, and then three years of notes on my phone building off of one another—which I’ll of course have to sort through and weigh/measure at a later date. I’m sure many will be discarded, but it has helped me feel like I’ve still been able to make progress on the thing when I don’t actually have time to wrestle the draft together (I work full-time and am a dad to a two-year-old, so time can be hard to come by).

3. I Asked Whether He Strives for Unity of Effect, or Whether He Prefers To Interweave Multiple Impressions

GF:

That’s a good question. And I think the easy, boring answer is: both. 

I think I tend to consciously strive for my stories to have an overarching point they’re trying to make, or some overarching purpose. Because, for me, I think to be motivated to write a story, there’s something gnawing at me that I think needs to be said in some way. Part of the process of writing said story is me figuring out what exactly that is. 

But at the same time, I do hope that my stories are complex enough to give the readers more than just one big, bold point. I hope there’s more there to be chewed upon, if that makes sense. 

4. I Asked Whether He Uses Literary Techniques When Writing Essays

GF:

Definitely. I think the one I rely upon most often is the manipulation of time. It can of course be a tactic that easily becomes overused, but sometimes I tend to find something being told chronologically a little stale. Not always! But sometimes. And I think that, though our bodies experience time linearly, our brains really don’t. We’re constantly thinking of the future. Constantly comparing it to the past. And so I think that nonfiction should sometimes do the same. 

Plus, from a drafting perspective, sometimes asking my essay’s narrator to speculate on something that has yet to happen can uncover a whole new strand of thought. 

5. I Asked if He Had Any Strong Opinions About Style

GF:

As a reader, no, not really. I think I’m really open to style, and find experiments in style to be really refreshing, even if they pose challenges to readers. I mean, I tend to think that good storytelling will always challenge readers in some way. Does that need to come by way of style experimentation? Not necessarily. But sometimes there’s a great payoff in it. That said, a piece can occasionally become “too experimental” for me, and when that happens it usually means that the style has become the author’s focal point. The primary objective is to thrust forth a new style, not to tell a story that’ll move the reader in some way. 

As a writer, I wouldn’t say that I have strong opinions on style either. I do make it a point to try something new, stylistically, with every piece I publish. I think it’s important to always be experimenting, and to be pushing yourself in that way. Something I deeply fear as a writer is becoming predictable, or complacent, so I naturally fight like hell against that. 

6. I Asked ‘What Makes a Good Story’?

GF:

I think, generally, people read in search of connection. Not necessarily because they’re looking to become pals with the author. Or because they’re missing something in their lives that they expect a work of fiction to fill. But they are searching for something, and often that “thing” is point of view: either a point of view that’s going to confirm something within their own point of view, or something that can expand it. 

And it isn’t quite that simple, I think. It can’t be binary like that. But again, speaking in what I feel are general terms… 

I think that why people continue to turn to reading, versus, say, just consuming visual media, is that they want to be active participants in the storytelling process. Meaning: when you watch a film, or a TV show, what you’re experiencing is someone else’s visual interpretation of a text, be it an original screenplay, a book adaptation, etc. When you read a book, or a short story, your brain is called upon to interpret what it is you’re reading. It’s a commitment—finishing a book can take ten hours of your time, for example, while the film version of the same story can be condensed to two hours. But for that reason I don’t think other storytelling mediums can match the depth of connection that can be made when a book really resonates. 

As for what makes for a story that CAN resonate with readers, that’s tricky. I return to point of view, and think of what has worked for me as a reader, at least recently, and I point to a book’s narration. I think that the narrator must be treated with the utmost care by the author, maybe even more than the story’s protagonist. Because even if you have unforgettable characters and a deep, tightly-wound plot, if your narration isn’t working, readers just won’t be able to find a way in. 

Note: he replied to this question a second time for this article:

Closing Thoughts

I interviewed Garrett months ago, but life got a little messy and I’m only posting the article now. I want to thank Garrett for taking the time to answer these questions for me back then. His newsletter is excellent and I definitely recommend it!

Garrett Francis

Trisomy—a short story

CONTENT WARNING: This story contains explicit language. Please be advised…

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3 years ago · 2 likes · 3 comments · Garrett Francis

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Razor Strike, by Lee Sarpel, is a cyberpunk novel about the relationship between two well-meaning characters with violent careers. One of them, Trez, is dealing with a financial situation that drives her towards dangerous jobs, and the other, Eric, is worried about her and wants to save her. The story is completely character-driven and unfolds naturally from these two seeds.

What stood out to me about this book was how distinct the experience of reading it was.

With most books, it feels like I’m in a story and like I need to put in the time to move forward in that story. Or, failing that, move on to a different book. When reading Razor Strike, it felt instead like I was visiting a relaxing, interesting place that I wanted to return to regularly over the course of a few months. When I wasn’t reading the book, if I thought about the book, I wasn’t always wondering what would happen next so much as thinking warmly about the characters and wondering whether I should visit them again soon.

I’m having trouble describing this.

Reading Razor Strike felt like having friends or neighbours who you care about but who you don’t see every day. Two of them are forming a relationship, and you really want it to work out. Despite caring how this will turn out, you don’t go visit them every day to get an update; you continue to live your life. Then, once in a while, you check in to see if there have been any developments, and you really hope for good news. But their lives are hard, and complicated, so the news often isn’t good, but you root for them to be doing better next time you see them. And you worry about them sometimes. Maybe you even lose a bit of sleep over it (see below).

By contrast, many other books feel like you are in a panic to keep up with things.

Typical books aim for a different, more intense, reading experience, maybe something like this: you have friends or neighbours who are in a crisis and you have to rush over to their house every time you have a spare moment to keep an eye on things because one of them is laying bleeding on the floor and apparently somebody shot out the windows, spilling glass shards all over the floor, and icy wind is blowing in, and this bleeding person, whose breath is coming out as fog, is going to freeze to death before the ambulance arrives, so you want to board up the windows but you don’t have time to because there’s smoke filling the building and the kitchen is on fire and you need to make sure the flames don’t spread…

Which is good, but it’s a completely different experience. The first is more pleasant, with the most potential to be deeply unnerving, while the second is more urgent.

Potential for Tension

The story feels very real. That means, most of the time, that things are not going crazy. However, because it feels so convincing, when something bad might happen, or does happen, it can hit a lot harder.

The book had a nice ending in a way but the characters had to live with a few consequences, and had some continuing life stress to look forward to, and although nothing was about to explode, I felt a mild panic for hours (or days?) afterwards and had trouble sleeping.

This is after all the story of Trez and her impossible responsibilities pushing her beyond her physical and emotional limits, so when the ending isn’t the end of their troubles… it felt a little too familiar and hit me hard.

This wouldn’t have been possible in a less character driven, less realistic story.

Other Notes

• You don’t feel urgently like you need to babysit your characters because their drama won’t come until they choose to act—the drama waits for them, because they’re the ones who are causing it. This is the opposite of the timetables of events I use in dnd to make sure the game moves forward whenever the players stop acting.

• The plot has no contrivance, which I can’t say is common. Ie, the characters never break character to make the plot more convenient.

• The story was fully outlined, despite flowing very naturally from character decisions (I asked)

• Trez is appealing because she doesn’t act to make her people or the reader happy. She acts at odds with other characters and confounds them—and for a good reason. She’s a killing machine, but that’s deemphasized, and instead the focus is on how she’s a woman with emotions and with needs and who is doing her best and at the end of her rope. She’s really strong but is likely to accidentally kill herself soon. Vulnerable but strong

• The push to work at the cost of your health reminds me a little too much of a personal situation. The setting feels right, but is not emphasized. I enjoyed the dynamic of strikers using drug cocktails at unsustainable degrees makes for an interesting world

• characters are surprisingly compassionate towards each other. What creates conflict is conflicting life situations and larger forces, not random hostility

• I think it might be the most distinct, memorable novel I read this year due to how character driven it was

As always, if you liked this article, make sure to like and subscribe. And if you’re a SubStack author yourself, there’s nothing I find more flattering and helpful than a recommendation. It really makes a big difference

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I went looking for some writing groups online last year. I joined maybe a dozen Discords and left maybe eleven of them. The one I stuck with was the the Howl Society.

This is a community of horror authors that is unlike anything else out there. They welcome newcomers. There is a charming group of horror fans to discuss stories with. There's a reading club that tackles some really cool stories, like From Hell.

There are over a dozen published authors who participate daily in discussions. There is a system where you can trade feedback on your stories. The community is active and supportive.

Complete strangers, talented authors of really cool stories, gave me eye-opening feedback on my stories and ideas for how to restructure them. I learned to love in-media-res here (and now I even use it in tabletop RPGs).

The community also produces annual horror anthologies that grow out of an extensive community workshopping process.

This year's anthology is Howls from the Wreckage. It's being kickstarted right now, and I was lucky enough to get its editor, Christopher O’Halloran, as well as some other contributors, to answer some questions.

In part one, Christopher answers some questions of mine. In part two, I'll write about the conversations I had with contributors about the annual workshops they host as part of their anthologies.

I badly want to know what it is like to take part.

The subheadings are me; most of the body text is Christopher, except where indicated.

What is the Howl Society?

In March 2020, COVID-19 forced society to adapt to a more insular way of living. To combat that isolation, horror readers formed their own society: HOWLS.

The branding wouldn't come until later, but at its core, the Horror Obsessed Writing and Literature Society is a book club, a supportive resource for writers, and a meeting place for friends.

Who is the Howl Society?

Members of HOWL Society come from all over the world. We represent diverse cultures, gender identities, sexualities, and ways of living that make our weekly book discussions a tremendous—and occasionally contentious—time!

What are these anthologies the Howl Society produces?

Our three anthologies—Howls from Hell, Howls from the Dark Ages, and Howls from the Wreckage—are curated stories from the writers who hang around our community. Every author in the collections is also a friend with a few invited authors in the latter two anthologies who have interacted with HOWLS in some way, whether joining us for a Q+A or helping us in a professional capacity.

What's a high-level overview of how these anthologies come together?

Everything is crowd-sourced and community driven, from the themes to the artwork. While Howls from Hell had responsibilities shared by a collective, Dark Ages and Wreckage have been directed by editors, so they reflect that community passion through the lens of either one or two editors. They choose the theme from a community-proposed list, the stories from the pool of members, and help direct and encourage our incredibly talented artists.

(Me: I got to suggest and vote on some of next year's topics!)

After you pick a theme, I understand you have a workshopping process? I'd like to know a lot more about that

Workshopping is a valuable tool for writers of all levels. It's an intensive opportunity to both give and receive feedback for those who might not regularly get the chance.

During three rounds of feedback, each story is seen a minimum of six times, with the optional third round providing a little extra polish for those who want it. So if you're submitting to a HOWLS anthology and utilizing the workshop, your story is likely to come out closer to how you envisioned it.

Additionally, you'll get the chance to provide feedback on six to nine stories, which will help you hone your own writing and develop your critical eye!

(Me: I spoke to several workshop participants on their Discord. Part two of this article will go into a lot more detail about this workshop.)

As an editor and project leader, what's it like going through this? How do you actually make a book like this happen?

The editing process was a pleasure from the get-go. Even setting the guidelines got me amped up for the stories we'd be receiving. By the time I got the first ones in my inbox, I was ready to rapidly consume them all!

And these writers brought their A-game. It was hard to choose which stories to include because there was so much excellence, but also easy for the same reason. Putting together the ToC was incredibly rewarding, but the following process might have matched that feeling of excitement.

The art for this anthology is seriously next level. From the three cover designs to the marginalia inside, the aesthetic for Wreckage gets me giddy. I wish I could say I had a hand in that, but it was really just artists bringing their magic to me, and me picking my jaw up off the floor.

This is the third time going through this. How did it go in previous years?

The previous years were excellent. Howls from Hell was a scrappy little project with tons of heart behind it. Just a group of writers who decided the rejection game was fun and all, but it would be nice to just put something out there. Luckily, I was able to sneak in my 14k word novelette, Possess and Serve, before we decided on a word count restriction!

Dark Ages was a little different. We had grown exponentially since the days when we could just put out a collection with all interested writers. It was the first year we had to submit, and that made things all the more exciting—and disappointing.

It was hard to celebrate an acceptance when you were surrounded by people who didn’t make it in. Rejection is part of the writing game, and any author serious about submitting will have hundreds of them, but when you’re in a group with dozens of people wanting to make it into the collection, it’s hard not to feel that dejection when the hammer falls. I’m still unsure how to remedy that. Maybe disappointment is necessary.

(Me: the story quality seems to have been quite high. Other publications seem to be snatching up several of these rejected stories, and one looks like they want to adapt one into an interactive story via a new platform

Note: I reviewed many stories from their previous collection, Howls from the Dark Ages. Some of those are here, and others are in subsequent articles)

Any closing thoughts about the Kickstarter?

This is the first year we launched a Kickstarter, and it has been LOUSY with growing pains. The amount of work that goes into it is next level, but we’re so lucky to have the whole team onboard. We’ve got artists designing stickers, multiple editions, the chance to have your name included in the book, and something really unique that I would LOVE to see become standard in the industry.

With our Kickstarter, if you order any physical copy, you’ll also get access to the ebook and the audiobook—free of charge. This is something I feel really passionate about. I do a lot of my reading on the go but I love to have a physical collection, so this is great for readers like me who want to display the beautiful covers while also being able to listen to the excellent voice performances during their commute.

The one thing that threw a wrench into the works of the Kickstarter was the arrival of my second son! It’s tough managing Kickstarter updates and promotion when you’re in the hospital for three days or at home trying to juggle a newborn and a toddler, but I’m so lucky to have an incredible support system in HOWLS and in my lovely wife. Let’s just hope the Wreckage stays on the page and not in my living room!

Closing Thoughts

This is me again.

The Howl Society is a really cool community, and if you check out their kickstarter you'll be happy you did. This is a really cool group of people and I'm looking forward to when this gets released.

There are only four or five days left to back this!

Howls From the Wreckage

As always, if you liked this article, make sure to like and subscribe. And if you’re a SubStack author yourself, there’s nothing I find more flattering and helpful than a recommendation. It really makes a big difference

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What makes a great character?

What makes a great story?

Why do you read?

I asked these questions to several authors and game designers that I’m lucky enough to have met online, and their answers were eye-opening. They gave me permission to reprint their replies below, and I hope you find them as interesting as I did!

Part One is here. (we added an author since last time, hence why this one says Twelve authors)

Barbarian Grunge

Why Do You Read? What Makes a Good Story? Q&A With Eleven Authors (Part One)

What makes a great character? What makes a great story? Why do you read? I asked these questions to several authors and game designers, and their answers were eye-opening. They gave me permission to reprint their replies below, and I hope you find them as interesting as I did…

Read more

3 years ago · 9 likes · 6 comments · Nathan Schuetz

Newton Webb

Horror Author

Newton has worked as a computer programmer and a table top games designer, but now writes horror full time. He has eleven titles on Amazon, including The Horror at Hargrave Hill, The Ballad of Barnacle Bill, the upcoming novel Nestor Lynch, and an upcoming short story collection, Tales of the Macabre. Check out his SubStack too.

Why do people read horror?

We all gravitate to reading horror for different reasons, so I can’t speak for everyone. But for me, it’s the adrenaline rush of fear, the thrill of being scared in a safe, controlled environment, and the opportunity to confront and overcome one’s own fears. I find horror is a form of therapeutic entertainment that allows me to experience intense emotions in a controlled setting. I left a lucrative twenty year long career in IT after my boyfriend committed suicide and I succumbed to crippling anxiety attacks. Reading horror serves to explore and help process the emotional fallout from that, such as anxiety, panic, and fear, in a safe and constructive way.

What makes a good story?

Different people look for different things in a story. For example, I was explaining the other day that ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ is a classic horror story with moralistic undertones. I focus on writing creeping horror, which is a subgenre of horror characterised by a slow, gradual build-up of tension and unease, hopefully leading to a terrifying climax. A good creeping horror story keeps the reader on edge throughout the narrative, with subtle hints and clues leading to the inevitable, terrifying conclusion. I try to focus on well-developed characters with their own thoughts and motivations, a believable setting, a subtle moral thread, and a sense of impending doom that is palpable throughout.

Felix McNamara

Author of Literary Horror Stories

Felix McNamara is a writer of essays and fiction. Some of his book-length publications include Any But None and Deep Sea, Other Places.

What makes a great character?

I think flaws and a degree of ugliness are often keys to great characters, so long as we still manage to empathise with them beyond their contradictions and ambiguity. Moral binaries are less useful than 'bad' characters in which we can see 'the good' and vice versa. 

What makes a great story?

Great stories are likely those we return to often or at least more than once. Less-than-great storytelling can feel compulsive while reading or watching but as soon as it ends our desire for it dies. This isn't really answering the question as there's much that can make us want to return to a story, but one key thing might be that it continues to 'speak to us' as if in dialogue, because it makes us active readers as opposed to passive consumers. In this sense, maybe great stories turn reading into an art form.

Why do you read?

I wish I was a better reader than I am to be honest. One simple reason is that it makes you a better writer of course. Another benefit of reading (and of writing) as opposed to primarily visual or auditory mediums is that so much is left to the reader's imagination, which also means that textual storytelling is really only limited to the human imagination, which is a far-less burdensome than limits imposed by technology and economics for example.

Gretel Grimm

Visual Novel Writer and Developer

She coaches me on writing and I generally rely on her constantly for advice. Her unannounced visual novel project is very exciting.

Well, I think it depends on what you're writing?

Because the things that make a good mystery/horror story aren't the same elements that make a cute slice-of-life comedy.

I like Otome because what I'm looming for in a story is character dynamics, I guess if I were to break it down simply

Otome games are all about relating to other people.

In Detroit: Become Human, it's about whether androids can be human, I guess so it's more about “what makes a person a person (or android),” and “what are you willing to fight for?”

But Alan Wake, for example, is more about Alan trying to figure out the strange environment and the mystery.

I like this just fine, but- I prefer stories where the character focus is the driving part of the story.

Both are good. Both make great stories.

Garrett Francis

Author of Em(erald) Dash

Garrett also founded two digital literary journals and wrote one of my favourite short stories on SubStack: Trisomy. I liked it so much I asked to interview him, and he agreed! That interview is coming soon!

It’s often very hard for me to not read like a writer. Most of the time, even if it isn’t my intent, I find myself keying in on technique and how the author is executing everything—how many balls they’re throwing into the air, how/why they’re being thrown, whether or not they’re all getting caught, etc. But I think when I’m able to let go of that and read as, well, just a reader, what’s resonating with me can often be pared down to narration. I hate to sound redundant in that (thinking of the question above), but what keeps me reading is this idea that the narrator—whoever they may be—has something that they need to show me. They’re an authority on this “ride,” and I trust that they’re getting me where I need to go in order to see what it is they have to show me.

In that way, I get to just “buckle up,” to continue exhausting the metaphor. And it’s when those defenses are down, when disbelief is suspended, that the stickiness occurs, where I read something that DOES hang with me for weeks/months. As for what sticks with me, I think oftentimes it’s the choices of a character. But they’re “earned” choices, in that it doesn’t really matter whether or not they’re choices that I agree with, disagree with, or choices that even make total sense. It’s just that I’ve been able to experience those choices alongside someone. To put on a different hat for a while, then when removed look at what has transpired and be like, “Whoa. That was pretty wild.”

V. L. Augustin

Author of Excess Reality

Augustin is writing one short story per day for a hundred days, and the stories are really fun. There is a project page for this here. I find this endlessly motivating, and you should check out her SubStack to see her in action for yourself. She has finished and published more short stories in the last 26 days than I’ve finished in my entire life.

Why people read:

I think there's a huge range of reasons why people seek out stories: comfort, escapism, arousal, novelty, the potential to be challenged, the chance to experience something that is otherwise inaccessible, to see things from another point of view, and so on.

For me, what makes reading different from other mediums (TV, games, podcasts) is that it feels so much more personal. The images and ideas that a book conjures in my mind mingles with who I am as a person and my experiences. I bring myself to the story, as I am not automatically being fed all the sense-data (visuals and audio) you get from other mediums. I also think the ability to get inside a character's head is unparalleled. On TV someone's internal self can be relayed by a narrator (often clunky), or to some extent by their actions when they are alone. In written stories, the internal thoughts of a character feels utterly natural to read, even if their thoughts are utterly unlike my own.

What makes a good story

That's a far more difficult question. Some people like fast-paced thrillers, others like slow, lyrical pieces with focus on characters over plot. I'm all over the place with my taste. It's much easier to say what makes a story bad: wildly inconsistent pacing, deus ex machina, or a plot where the main characters' choices or actions are irrelevant. Even then, plenty of stories are well regarded despite falling under those categories.

What I often treasure is a plot or style that is uniquely suited to the written word. Pale Fire by Nabokov, for example: a 999 line poem by a fictional poet, alongside a foreword and commentary by his colleague. It would be impossible to translate into a film.

Besides that, I would perhaps cheekily suggest that the best stories are the ones the writer truly wants to tell - stories that don't let themselves be confined to what is currently in fashion, or is edited down to be most palatable to a certain demographic.

Christopher O'Halloran

Editor in Chief for The Howl Society

He has also published several short stories, including The Lady of Leer Castle and Jaws, as well as novelettes such as Possess and Serve, and Our Migraine.

A great character is someone who has strong opinions, beliefs, love, and hates. Someone with a concrete goal, flaws that get them into trouble, and talents that do the same 😅

A great story has a bunch of these motherfuckers interacting, inconveniencing, loving, and hating each other.

I discuss his story, The Lady of Leer Castle, here:

Barbarian Grunge

Read 2 Short Stories Per Day -- Batch 2

To do a good job at creating something, you have to be quite knowledgeable about that type of thing — this is true whether we are talking about stories, games, or any other work of art. Thus, as part of a study of short stories, I am reading two of them a day (life willing — see below…

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4 years ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · Nathan Schuetz

Some Thoughts

What do you think of these answers?

The idea that jumped out at me most was how varied the experiences of reading can be. There isn’t a single reason why people read, or a single type of story that is ideal. Peoples tastes, and the types of experiences they seek while reading, vary widely!

Please let me know in the comments if you have your own answers to these questions!

Note

My flu continues. I might miss a week or two of posting soon unless it lets up. But, partially, I’m also busy with worldbuilding for a story series I’d like to start on soon…

And work. Work is about to get crazy.

There’s a dozen reasons to do this, but the benefit of using pre-written modules in particular was to save time with the prep before I started writing. I have a busy summer coming up and wanted to write x words per day without dropping the ball on something else in my life. Pre-written adventure modules seemed like an intersting angle.

When it comes time to write the story however, it turns out that this doesn’t save any time at all.

With one of these modules, you get a situation, a backstory, several maps, descriptions of characters, descriptions of encounters/scenes, ways the events could branch, descriptions of items, descriptions of threats like monsters or traps, and some other details. If this sounds like a ready-made-kit to just jump in and start writing, I would have agreed with you last week. But this week I basically disagree.

First of all, the characters, locations, items, etc., all need to all be fleshed out a little bit. Add 1-2 character flaws, a motivation, a name, etc to anybody who will be speaking or affecting the direction of the story. Including the stereotypical enemies who you want to make into real people. That’s not a big deal, and I was prepared for this (or so I thought).

Second, you try to understand the backstory and the situation and… suddenly you realize that nothing makes any sense. Or rather, it doesn’t make sense in the setting you were imagining these events to be taking place within. Or the style/sub-genre of story at least.

In other words, you might have a vague idea about the setting and sub-genre. Then you go to implant this story into that seting. And you hope that it will mesh nicely. But that story is built upon a different implied world and sub-genre, so it doesn’t mesh. It conflicts and contradicts.

It turns out that almost everything in an RPG, from the adventures to the resolution mechanics, imply a lot about the setting that these stories take place in. For example, having high hit points implies we’re in a world where fights are long, flashy, and dramatic.

So, in order to use these modules, I need to also figure out what this implied setting is, whether I like it, and what genre of adventure it’s going for—is this a Conan-esque swords and sorcery affair, or a high-fantasy epic, or will it be a gritty tale of throat-cutting like Game of Thrones?

Next thing you realize is that the implied setting that contextualizes the adventure is no good. Not because the story wouldn’t be fun, but because it’s just… problematic. Some are sort of like tales of colonialism told from the point of view of the British.

This is fixable! But you have to modify the adventures to do so. And that takes work.

Then, finally, after working all that out, you go back to your characters from earlier and realize that they no longer fit into the world or the sub-genre any more. And you have to rewrite them all over again.

You end up changing so many details that you’ve ended up doing the prep for an entirely custom scenario/story and you didn’t need the original module at all. All you got from it was 1-2 paragraphs of inspirational material that wasn’t really necessary because you have a big list of story ideas already with more usable notes.

So… I will still write some stories based on RPG scenarios. I’m just no longer sure whether they will be pre-made. I would like them to be, but it isn’t necessary for the experiment I have in mind. It might be best to just bite the bullet and make a few of my own from scratch. Unless I find some different modules to try. I have a couple in mind already actually…

I’ve been game-mastering for over twenty years by the way.

I’ll describe the experiment later. It’s a bit weird, but I believe it has at least some literary merit.

What I’ve Been Up To

I haven’t been writing my weekly posts consistently this month. This is very unusual for me, so thanks for bearing with me.

First, the car had issues and we had to go car shopping. That was an adventure and a half. I might write a short story based on how ridiculous that was. A slice-of-life piece of comedy-horror. The sort of story that drains the reader of their sanity points while hopefully also making them laugh.

Then, I started writing a short story based on an RPG module as an experiment. If it turns out, I’m hoping to write a series of articles about this approach, but two things got in the way.

1. I got sick and lost about a week of productivity

2. The RPG modules I was going to use as a basis did not turn out to save the planning time I had hoped. As described above

I’m actually sick as I write this. I had intended to publish something different, but I’m not up for it. I hope this article was interesting at least and didn’t contain too many spelling or grammatical errors!

Do you enjoy this SubStack? If you do, and you’re a writer, I would be eternally grateful for a recommendation. The recommendations I have already are making a huge difference, so if that’s you already, thank you!

What makes a great character?

What makes a great story?

Why do you read?

I asked these questions to several authors and game designers, and their answers were eye-opening. They gave me permission to reprint their replies below, and I hope you find them as interesting as I did!

(I received so many replies that I’ve split this article into two posts. Part Two is already written and is coming in a week or two!)

Sandy Petersen

Creator of The Call of Cthulhu RPG

In addition to Call of Cthulhu, he is known for designing most of the levels in Doom and Doom 2, for his work on Age of Empires, for founding Petersen Games (one of the few profitable board game companies that exist), and for creating a great YouTube channel about elder gods and eldritch terrors.

Because fiction can often illuminate reality more clearly than reality. And it can ask questions more clearly than reality. Here's an example: in the story, THE CALL OF CTHULHU, the protagonist discovers that every single thing that humanity has accomplished is going to be completely destroyed in a few decades at most, along with humanity itself. What is the point of existence? He decided people shouldn't know the truth and hid it.

Here's another example: in the story THE OUTSIDER, Lovecraft presents a hero who desperately wants to fit into the world and society but discovers this is never going to be possible. In his story THE TOMB, he has a hero who doesn't want to fit into the world and society, but can't escape. They're like flip sides of the same hero.

Carson Winter

Author of Soft Targets (Coming March 22, 2023)

Carson has also authored or contributed to books such as Bloodlines and Reunion Special, and has published short stories that include In Haskins, The Mushroom Men, Win Big, Ad Infinitum, and others.

A great character serves the story. So, like with everything in writing, it can be many things. A cardboard cipher, an expressive realist depiction, and a broad archetype all can have stories crafted around them that would be worse without them.

A great story is one where everything in it works in tandem to a singular effect.

J. M. Burnett

Artist and Game Developer, Tuff Mallow Interactive

Take a look at this coming-soon visual novel, The Closet Door. For those who don’t know, indie games take an incredible amount of time, skill, and effort to produce! Furthermore, have a look at this Tumblr.

Because escapism isn't always an unhealthy venture.

Because fiction stimulates the mind and inspires new ideology and ways to interact with the world around us.

Because reading in general is a way to receive communication from one individual to the next, and we are a highly social species.

Because we are able to connect and learn and engage stimulus in a controlled and paced manner that relies solely on the person reading. (Without overstimulation of outside stimuli or extraneous use of bodily functions.)

Because it stimulates a primal need to focus on and consume new material in a harmless way. We relax in a way that allows us to focus on reading when we read something we desire to. (Another reason you should never read msgs/text and drive)

MANY MANY REASONS.

But all under the umbrella of the human experience.

She continued,

I feel the need to say this at this point: reading and writing can be a clinical experience. Or a learning experience. Or an entertaining one. I am not in any way of the school of thought that all three can overlap smoothly. I died trying to get through a Michael Crichton book. That and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Not every literary scientist can write organically, and I do feel that styles of writing can grow dated.

If you plan to write as a philosopher, I think there's so much that can be expounded on. But if you want to be a novelist, the focus should be on Living. Because even in stories about death, they are personified in the experience of life. In communication, we are able to connect via common threads of shared life experience. In world-building, we learn less from history and more from our own stories that paint windows of perspective that the reader can travel through, and in doing so, expound on the way they see their own world.

In reading fiction (and sometimes in other forms of print media), we are actively filling in the blanks with our own understanding. Because of this, the reader is an active part of the words unfolding before them.

Esh

Creative Director, Lead Artist, and Lead Writer at Steamberry Studio

The creative force behind the visual novels Changeling and Gilded Shadows (funded in less than 24 hours on Kickstarter). I highly recommend Gilded Shadows. The game helped introduce me to visual novels, and how the genre is characterized by such great character writing and setting development.

Why do people read? Because they like it. Because a teacher made them. Because they were bored. There are as many reasons for reading as there are people who read.

What is important is knowing what you want to communicate (which doesn't have to be a deep message. It can be a feeling. It can be an experience. It can be a fun, light-hearted story with no deeper meaning than an attempt to be fun or funny).

Getting out and there and living can mean going skydiving or to visit some far off place. Or it can mean going to feed the ducks. Or working a soup kitchen. Or just walking down a sidewalk and appreciating the fall leaves.

It can be going to a dentist and thinking, "Wow, this sure as hell feels like I'm about to be tortured. I should remember this feeling. :ogod: "

You don't have to only experience "interesting" things to be a good writer. A lot of writers are boring hermits, tbh.

It's about the richness of the things you experience.

I live a very boring life tbh, and I feel like I have plenty of experiences to weave into my writing.

Ore Arowobusoye

Author of Iron Ore

Ore is a software developer, short story author, and novelist who is currently working on a really stylish novel. It is about a magical world filled with charming (and bizarre) witches that takes place in 1930s or 1940s Britain. It reminds me a little bit of Neil Gaiman crossed with some classical (Russian?) literature, and it makes me think about Harry Potter, but only really because they’re all British. It’s excellent so far.

Why do I read: because I'm able to experience worlds and lives that aren't my own and go on an adventure while I'm sitting in my living room

What makes a great character. Someone who even if you love or hate, you hang on. Their words, their decisions, who they love, who they hate. Their life means something to you and feels real enough to be transfixed by

What makes a great story, Hmm this is a hard one. I guess you never want to put it down. You feel like the characters are your friends or your enemies, and somehow you find yourself up at 3am biting your fingers or laughing or crying.

Andrei Șișman

Author of Practice Space

Fiction author and memoirist from Bucharest, Romania. By trade a lawyer, his literary work has appeared in Every Day Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine, Drunk Monkeys, and other places.

I used to read for escape. As a kid, I hated reading—far too tedious, boring and never relatable for a kid more interested in Street Fighter than Heidi. Then, in high school, I discovered Yasunari Kawabata, and I was blown away. I found myself inescapably absorbed in scenes of Japanese countryside, town houses filled with beautiful women engaged in tea ceremonies, and high-stakes Go matches. I realized fiction could be the perfect escape, a portal to worlds I’d never dreamt I could inhabit. For years I read fiction voraciously. But in recent years, I find myself turning more and more to nonfiction, with a newfound thirst for information. I read and write more nonfiction, and instead of escape, I’m learning to take more notice and appreciate the world I live in. I’m learning to inhabit my world more completely.

Some Thoughts

What do you think of these answers?

One idea jumped out at me the most, but I’ll describe it in Part Two, which is already written and is coming in a week or two.

How would you answer these questions? Let me know in the comments!

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Play It As It Lays, by Joan Didion, is a gut-wrenching story about numbness and despair. In it, an actress wanders from scene to scene, getting no emotional sustenance from any interaction with anybody she meets, while craving some kind of connection or meaning and not finding it, until she becomes miserable, and then proceeds beyond misery, until she stops being aware of her feelings and seems to feel nothing whatsoever.

It is not a happy novel. I would even say that there is a certain type of person who must not read this novel because if they do, it will put dark thoughts in their heads. However, if you are not that sort of person, or wish to disregard this warning, the novel is special. But the payoff, primarily, is an experience of being Maria, and of understanding her a bit, and that isn’t pleasant.

I almost binged it, but then I realized that I would run out of book. So, I ordered another Didion book and once it was in the mail, it felt safe to finish this one.

What Was Most Memorable?

DE-EMPHASIS OF PLOT

The novel has a plot of sorts, but it certainly isn’t plot-driven. You can’t call something plot-driven when you can omit 99% of the book and keep the plot fully intact. Instead of plot, the book is concerned with character, setting, and with using repetition and style to convey directly, almost via pointing, what it is like to be Maria.

DISCONNECTION AND NUMBNESS

"I'm giving this one more chance," Carter said when he saw her sitting by the window. "Tell me what you want."

"Nothing."

"I want to help you. Tell me what you feel."

She looked at the hand he held out to her. "Nothing," she said.

"You say that again and I swear to Christ—"

She shrugged. He left the motel.

After finishing university, while recovering from a concussion, I had convinced myself that I had to work and that it didn’t matter how bad I felt and that nobody would help me. After enough years spent living like this, trying to work despite the pain, nausea, fatigue, and sadness, I stopped being able to notice the emotions I was feeling. I often felt nothing, but I might act out suddenly, and I didn't understand why I was acting out. I wasn’t aware of any emotions. There was no internal dialogue. It was too deeply suppressed.

When Maria, in this story, feels and wants ‘nothing,’ I think that something similar is going on. It isn’t that she feels nothing—it’s that she can’t experience her emotions due to how she learned to cope. That’s why she can feel nothing, while at the same time spending so much time crying and not knowing why.

STYLE

Maria’s numbness isn’t something that you can convey using plot or description. You have to convey it directly, as I said, almost via pointing.

The tone is heavy, blank, numb, repetitive, and unrelenting. Long, wandering paragraphs tell us how endless and horrific it all is, but we are given no time to stop and experience the horror because the narration does not address feelings. Maria’s feelings, in general, are (almost?) never described—the reader is as unaware of them as she is, and this is so strongly adhered to that often Maria is crying, and the reader has no idea until another character in the room comments on it.

To convey how her life feels like a series of disconnected scenes, the book is broken down into many chapters, frequently a single page each.

If this sounds familiar, by the way, it may be because you read my notes about Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero. Joan Didion, and Play It as It Lays in particular, was a major inspiration of his, and Less Than Zero is clearly modelled heavily after this novel. He learned to write by studying this book.

Barbarian Grunge

Notes on Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis

What is this Book? Less than Zero is the first novel by Bret Easton Ellis, published back in 1985 when he was twenty-one years old. It describes a young man from Los Angeles who had been in New Hampshire for college, but who has come home to visit his friends and family for a month at Christmas. His stay is unpleasant; he moves from scene to scene exhibi…

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3 years ago · 4 likes · Nathan Schuetz

A NOTE ON VOICE

Structurally, we begin with some first person accounts that are hard to make sense out of; then we rewind to before those first person accounts and adopt a third-person perspective that closely follows Maria. There is an occasional present tense first person interlude, so we can get into Maria’s head, and these are most common near the end. It has to switch to third person because Maria would not tell this story in this way (as seen in the opening chapter). This way, Didion can be strictly true to her voice.

DRAMATIC TENSION

Foreshadowing: we know from the beginning that Maria is responsible, in some way, for B.Z.’s death at some point in the story. We don’t know why. Is it via carelessness? Was it accidental? A murder? Either way, we know as the book draws to a close that a death is coming. This adds some dread and dramatic tension as we approach the end of the novel. Innocent passages take on new meaning because of this little trick.

Compare this to Knolls The Favorite Sister, where the death plot doesn’t work nearly as well. What is the difference? Play It As It Lays doesn’t try to create the sense we’re reading a thriller or mystery. It doesn’t dramatize it so much. The event at the end makes sense and contributes to the rest of the story. I think death in The Favorite Sister doesn’t contribute as much to the overall effect of the novel, and is maybe at odds with it.

Barbarian Grunge

Dizzying Pressure in Jessica Knoll’s “The Favorite Sister”

The Favorite Sister is about a group of highly successful women who are participating in a reality show that ostensibly celebrates feminism. In truth, this series is a horror-show about pitting women against one another, making them feel insecure about their futures, and actively sabotages them if they ever leave the show. The result is a situation wher…

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3 years ago · 2 likes · Nathan Schuetz

OTHER NOTES

• The ending is absolutely (——), but I can’t talk about it without spoiling it. Same with a few other moments I wish I could discuss…

• In this edition, the book is light, and the margins are huge. This made it really comfortable to read. This is in my notes because I want to remember it if I ever self-publish something. I want my book to be physically pleasant to handle and read.

• Didion and her husband were apparently among the highest-paid screenwriters of their time. I wonder what they wrote.

• The book is probably a condemnation of the culture of the place and time, but I didn’t find this idea stood out. Other commentators do, however. Maybe they are projecting because they live in the area and see her characters as common types. Many people are obsessed with the history of Hollywood, and the narrative of books like these over the years, the way it paints that period in all its decadence and immorality—but also glamour—and I don’t really get it.

• Has anybody read her other novels? Everyone says they don’t live up to this one, and that its her non-fiction I should be looking at. But how can the non-fiction live up to this novel?

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What is Language?

Our brains are astonishing. They are capable not only of experiencing the world, but of simulating that world. And actually, they don’t just simulate the world we live in. Our brains can simulate just about any world. That’s what imagination is.

While this is already an amazingly powerful capability, language multiplies how powerful it can be. The brain, by itself, can only simulate the worlds it knows or created itself. Our brains, with the help of language, can simulate any world imagined by anybody.

Language is a technology that allows one person to imagine something, to store that experience physically (ie, via ink on paper), and then to get a second person to hallucinate it.

This is a fairly imprecise process with a lot of room for errors of translation, but it’s generally reasonably effective. Plus, even if it isn’t a fully accurate mode of mind-melding, there are a ton of ways to have some fun with how gaps get filled in.

In other words, language was the first virtual reality technology. The words we use to communicate cast a sort of spell over the person who receives the words.

We’ll focus today on things that might accidentally break the spell.

I won’t name names, but all the problems I discuss below are inspired by lines from published books.

Furthermore, just to get the disclaimer out of the way, I am guilty of all of these, and probably committed these mistakes multiple times in this article.

Note: “render,” in this context, means to take information and turn it into a picture or experience.

Unclear or Inconsistent Descriptions

When somebody reads your writing, you are asking them to render your words into a virtual reality inside their heads. This isn’t easy. The words provide instructions, but the reader’s brain still has to do a ton of work. To use a movie analogy, the reader plays the role of director, actor, cameraperson, vfx team, sfx team, lighting, post-processing, and more.

When you give them something to imagine, and they can't imagine it—because it's too vague, or too contradictory—they get blocked. After getting blocked, they will tumble back to the real world, getting bruised on the way.

Eg 1,

He became filled with bottomless feelings.

(story moves on without elaboration)

That seems poetic, but… which feeling are we talking about? A sense of meaning is sure different from having-to-go-to-the-bathroom.

This wouldn’t be such a problem, except that, while we consider this, we are no longer in a far away land where events terrify and touch us; instead, we are on the couch puzzling over some sentences.

Eg 2,

He had to interrogate 6 men off the street to get the information he wanted, and was angry because only one talked to him willingly.

(story moves on without elaboration)

Why did the five “unwilling” men give him information? Did he beat them up? Trick them? Sweet talk them? Or did only one man speak to him, and the sentence was just ambiguous?

Or maybe those five were willing, and helpful, but just a little grumpy?

(Note: there is an intentional way to be vague that is compelling, I will describe it in a future article)

Re-rendering

Pardon me, this paragraph is a painful one:

There was a cat. It was sitting in the shadows. The shadows were cast upon a coffee table. The coffee table was tucked under a staircase in the basement of a warehouse. The cat was bright blue and was a tiger.

Every sentence in that paragraph requires the reader to go backwards and re-imagine or re-interpret the sentences that preceded it. It is terribly difficult for our brains to process.

It is better to describe the big blocks first, the context, and then to add detail in a way that does not mess up what the reader has already tried to “render.” Try not to say something that will be modified by future sentences unless you are going for a deliberate effect.

Eg,

In the basement of a warehouse there were some stairs. Under those stairs, in the shadows, somebody had tucked a coffee table, and a bright blue tiger sat upon that coffee table.

Indirect References / Reckless Use of the Word “It”

Some words indirectly reference other words (typically nouns). For example, They, it, those, one, that, he, etc. When you use these sorts of words, the reader has to work extra hard to figure out what they are referencing. If these connections are clear, they can do so automatically and intuitively; otherwise, they will have to exit the illusion and think about your wording.

Occasionally, a sentence will have up to three different indirect references, and it can be really distracting to have to stop and puzzle out which “it” refers to which noun, and who “he” is in a sentence involving three unnamed people.

Not Believing in a Character

Characters do not have to be realistic, but they do have to be consistent with themselves and their surroundings.

For example, if a story conveys a realistic setting, and then inserts an unrealistic character into it, the reader will be sucked out of the story and back into their chair while they try to understand this paradox.

In other words, the story should avoid asking the reader to fit together contradictory things (unless it is done intentionally for effect).

Eg 3,

The traveller slipped his glock from his belt and stepped slowly into the abandoned warehouse…

That sounds cool. However, in the published story this example is based off, the character just does dramatic things all day, despite the world being a realistic one. The story does not explain why.

If we're honest with ourselves, most people are pretty boring. What would possess a person to investigate every building they found, gun in hand? It's odd. There's nothing wrong with odd, but you have to explain it, or at least acknowledge that it’s odd.

This isn’t that hard to fix: one perfectly good explanation might be, “in this fictional world, people like him DO go around investigating warehouses with pistols on impulse”—easy! You just have to convey this fact as early as you can. You can even “hang a lampshade” on it, ie, deliberately draw attention to the strangeness for effect.

Articles That Are Too Long?

Some people struggle to find time to read and appreciate shorter articles.

Are you one of these? Or do you prefer longer articles? Let me know in the comments.

(Also, it’s my birthday today and I didn’t want to write something longer)

This will be continued in Part Two.

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The Favorite Sister is about a group of highly successful women who are participating in a reality show that ostensibly celebrates feminism. In truth, this series is a horror-show about pitting women against one another, making them feel insecure about their futures, and actively sabotages them if they ever leave the show. The result is a situation where feminist icons are put on unsteady ground, pressured to viciously compete, and then judged for competing as fiercely as they can. This leads to at least one mental breakdown, as well as at least one murder.

The book is marketed as a thriller or maybe as a mystery, but I didn’t find those aspects of the book to be very interesting. What was compelling were the characters and the philosophical points they made about the setting.

What Stood Out?

Setting

The story takes place in the world of famous women whose livelihoods depend on their fame. They pick these women via a simple rule: each has to be independently successful before they join (at first).

To thrive in this world, they have to compete hard. There are only so many spots “at the top,” according to the book, and this competition is no place for wimps. It’s a competition where cut-throats thrive.

Notably, when men enter similar competitions, we tend to celebrate how cut-throat they get. Yet, we don’t celebrate it when women do the same. This is an additional severe stressor for these women, who end up feeling cornered and resentful.

Compounding this, as mentioned above, is a reality show that further pits these women against one another, deliberately making room for fewer of them as a way to create conflict for the cameras.

This sounds like a lousy situation, but nobody can quit because this public hustle, this construction of a transparent personal brand, is a large reason why she is successful in the first place. To step off from the public stage would be a lesser-form of career suicide—especially because the show runners will sabotage their ability to promote themselves if they leave.

Finally, everybody in this world is supposed to be a champion of feminism. This adds pressure for a couple of reasons. First, everyone’s concept of feminism differs greatly from everyone else’s, so they direct a lot of venom and judgment at one another. Second, nobody’s ideal is possible to achieve. At one point a character calls feminism, “just another impossible ideal to live up to” (Paraphrased, my book is in the car).

All together, this creates a stew of blame, shame, panic, and pressure.

What a nightmare.

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Character

These characters are fundamentally reflections of the setting, an approach that reminds me a little of Alan Moore.

Due to the factors mentioned above under Setting, each woman is a mess of ideas and emotions, bounced this way and that depending on how her philosophy interpreted an event, or how somebody reacted to them, or even how successful somebody else is becoming. Her mental, financial, and even physical wellbeing is, after all, directly linked to her standing within the group and her popularity.

This affects some of them more than others, and each responds to this stress in a distinct and imperfect way.

A note: normally, it’s easy to say that a character’s flaws are what makes us love them. But in this story, it feels like you would get attacked for saying so—I think these characters complain repeatedly about this sentiment, saying it’s because men feel threatened by women who aren’t vulnerable; that men get to be well liked without being flawed. But the fact is, we love people who are flawed, and we hate people who aren’t, and it doesn’t matter whether the character is male or female. Perfect people are annoying.

The Murder

There is a murder advertised on the back-cover of the book. After reading the book, I’m not certain how I feel about its inclusion in the story. The story would have been fine without it—better, I feel.

Its presence reminds me of the difference between Martha Macy May Marlene and The Nest, both by Sean Durkin. In Martha Macy May Marlene, Durkin sets up a compelling and hauntingly horrific situation, and he is free to explore it in whatever way he likes. He chooses to escalate the situation, however, and this added drama, rather than adding to the story, just threatened suspension of disbelief and weakened the other elements of the story. By comparison, in The Nest, Durkin was confident enough to skip the high-grade drama and this let the more mundane points of the story really shine, and his movie is far stronger because of it. The Nest is a lovely movie by the way.

I wish the murder in this novel had been left out.

Style

The language and the characters/philosophy are in sync.

Each character sees the world through the lens of their personal philosophy. This philosophy colours everything in their world: it determines what they describe, how they describe it, whether they describe it, what aspects to describe, and how long to spend on it. On top of this, each character has a distinct voice and feels like a unique person. This leads to a very personalized perspective on the events of a given chapter.

Then, the next chapter might present the same situation from somebody else’s highly subjective perspective.

Stylistically, this allows Knoll to throw the idea of objectivity out the window, and lets the reader start to understand just how dizzying it is to try to make sense out of these complex social situations and expectations.

This sense of dizzying, ominous pressure is probably the key sentiment the story wants to convey, and the style was critical for this.

Other Notes

• I watched Luckiest Girl Alive and was blown away, which was based on Knoll’s novel (Knoll also wrote the screenplay for the movie). After I looked her up, I found and read this book.

• Does anybody have any other philosophy-intensive recommendations for future reads? This reminded me a little of Dostoyevsky, which was nice

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Discovery of Witches is a TV series based on some novels about witches, vampires, and demons coming into conflict with one another in the 21st century. The action centres around the relationship between a witch and a vampire, and the story is told mostly from the witch’s perspective.

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What I found interesting about the show was how bluntly it used a few storytelling tools, and how, even though I felt like I was being hit over the head by them in the least subtle ways possible, they still worked on me.

I found season one rather engaging. Rotten Tomatoes gives season one of the show 94% or something, it’s one of the highest rated tv shows I’ve stumbled on.

What was going on?

(Note: this analysis based on season one.)

Conflict and Dramatic Tension

First, the story sets up some characters and factions with distinct goals that they care about very much. The goals of these characters and factions conflict with one another, both in an inner-conflict way, and an external-conflict way. This creates the promise of actual conflict, and creates a ton of difficult decisions for characters to make. These (potential) conflicts are shown to the audience constantly and bluntly.

In parallel, the story works hard to make you care about the characters.

The result is dramatic tension, where a character wants X, but it’s impossible because of Y, unless maybe they do Z, but do they really want that?

There’s one more ingredient that really makes it work: the characters are not hell-bent on fighting each other. They mostly would prefer not to fight. But they care so much about their goals, or are so worried about bad things happening, that they might step on a few toes anyway. The characters might not be aware of how inevitable the conflicts may be, but the audience is—after all, they are in the middle of a work of dramatic fiction. The audience knows that life is about to get very complicated for everybody. This helps tremendously with suspension of disbelief when it comes to plot events: the reader knows things will get hairy, but the characters refuse to believe it, which leads the reader to want to yell at the characters DON’T YOU SEE WHAT IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN? DON’T YOU KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON?

The show utterly lacks subtlety in how it does this, but still, these technique work wonders.

Interestingly, the character motives are often simple or even stereotypical, but each is plot-relevant and shows why each is involved in the story. These external conflicts drive the story forward in a character-driven way that reminds me of a Stephen King novel (and I suspect the story was written by a “pantser,” but maybe not).

By the way, these motives are frequently blatantly paired up with some sort of opposite characteristic or motive to create internal conflict. These are stereotypical too. Yet, no matter how obvious or bluntly this technique is wielded, it works.

All this builds up to critical moments used to emphasize the dramatic inner tension even further by following some character as they make a difficult decision: I want to do this, but that is in the way, and I don’t want this other thing to happen, but I also care about that, and I don’t know what to do…

Those moments are the key to the experience.

Again, there is no subtlety to this, but it comes together extremely well.

Suspension of Disbelief / Magical Realism

The story handles suspension of disbelief the same way most modern fiction does: it takes the weirdness for granted and makes the setting into a fantasy setting from page 1. By this I mean, you’re not in our world—you are in a world of magic and wonder. There is no in-world reason to disbelieve in what is going on because what is going on is, fundamentally, normal. The story still makes use of heavy dramatic irony to sell other things, but not to convey that The Weird is real.

I think I’ve heard this described as magical realism in the past.

Contrast this with grounded supernatural horror stories: these stories are one part horror, one part magic, and that feeling that something magical is happening comes from the contrast between the mundane and a sliver of The Weird. By convention, The Weird is the source of horror, but it doesn’t have to be—and maybe it shouldn’t be as often…

Here’s a tangent: in the past, fear of the unknown was recognized and celebrated in horror. Today, fear of the unknown is seen as a problem that leads to a mess of societal horrors. So, we see a trend towards The Other being something that is actually friendly, once you get to know it, and The Bad Thing isn’t one of the strange creatures, but rather our society. To see an example of this dynamic, see: Discovery of Witches (but also, Twilight, and a dozen fantasy settings off the top of my head).

Other Notes

• The show flows forward pretty smoothly, which implies a suitable approach to pacing and rhythm. This isn’t easy to achieve, but I suspect the story uses the standard method of spreading new information out and giving characters (and the audience) a chance to process it before adding more to the mix.

• Later in the season, the dramatic tension I describe above disappears, and the story suffers for a few episodes. Everyone’s situation was simplified, and instead of having tough choices to make, they each simply became set on their course—and that was boring. I assume the author restores this tension in season two. The lack of believable inner conflict really hurts.

• Have you seen the show or read the books? Do you have anything you would like to add? Let me know in the comments!

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A few months ago, I decided to study the works of contemporary “literary” authors who had serialized some of their fiction.

This led me to Bret Easton Ellis, who had just serialized his newest novel (his first in 13 years) in podcast form, allegedly unedited and with chapters published as he wrote them.

This could not have been a more perfect case study.

I think.

This is assuming that he did publish chapters as he wrote them. As I’ll discuss later, Ellis inserted himself into this story, intentionally blurring the lines between the real world (and the real Ellis) and the fiction (including, to an unknown proportion, the fictional Ellis). When we say he published it as he wrote it, we are basing that on what he said in the podcast episode introductions when he aired the story. Those segments were partially reality, and partially fiction, and he deliberately made it as unclear as possible which was which.

What Stood Out?

Inserting Himself Into His Work

In the style of Lunar Park, Ellis insists that this novel is actually a work of non-fiction. As he frames it, this novel was constructed from diary entries written back when he was in high school. These entries detailed a phase in his life that was so traumatizing for him that he’d been unable to speak of it for decades. With anybody.

Until now. He’s says he feels now that he has to tell this story. Being compelled to tell a story about what was happening in his life is how all his novels were written, and each corresponds to a different time in his life. Only this time, he has to go slowly. The serialized format was a way to let the retelling affect him less severely, so he could pace himself; some episodes were longer or shorter based on how difficult the subject matter was for him.

At least, this is what he claims. This is, after all, a work of fiction, and not only is the Ellis from the past, the high school student, fictional, but so is the Ellis from the present, the narrator. Except not entirely. Both the Ellis in the book and the real Ellis are in this story, and it’s not clear where the fiction ends and reality begins. The high school Ellis and the narrator both at least closely resembles the historical ones.

He has done this before: in Lunar Park, he is the main character, except in that story it is easier to tell the fact from the fiction. For example, in Lunar Park he talks a lot about his wife and son, who are central characters in the story, and the whole story can perhaps be seen as a fictionalization of some events that led him to grow closer, but also impossibly distant, from his son—yet, in real life, Ellis is gay, unmarried, and has no children.

To be honest, it’s a little jarring when you go into a story like this not knowing what is going on. I felt the same way about Fargo, with its “based on a true story” message at the beginning of the entirely fictional movie. If you accept that these stories are, in a sense, a game, it’s fun; otherwise, it feels like you’ve been lied to.

So: what is a lie, and what is the truth?

For example, The Shards, Imperial Bedrooms, and Less Than Zero, all take place in the same area of L.A., and Ellis quotes the names of streets, stores, malls, and more from that area. He names the same schools in all these books. He presumably grew up around there and is writing about a place he’s quite familiar with. So, a lot of it, at least, is not fiction. But are the broad strokes true, with the details being made up? Or are the details true, but the broad strokes are the lies?

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Notes on Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis

What is this Book? Less than Zero is the first novel by Bret Easton Ellis, published back in 1985 when he was twenty-one years old. It describes a young man from Los Angeles who had been in New Hampshire for college, but who has come home to visit his friends and family for a month at Christmas. His stay is unpleasant; he moves from scene to scene exhibi…

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3 years ago · 3 likes · Nathan Schuetz

There’s a consistency to these lies, too. Bret in The Shards might very well be Clay from Less Than Zero, if we accept that Clay is a stand in for Ellis and that much of the story is, at least partially, a roman à clef.

Eg, Blake’s dad is clearly Terry from The Shards: a gay movie producer with a wife and a taste for boys, and the father of a love interest (blaire = Debby?). Both clay and Ellis in The Shards have a family member (aunt?) with a place in Palm Springs that he can stay freely. Clay’s parents are split up; Bret’s parents are about to split up in The Shards.

Then again, The Shards is fiction, and all of this might be deliberate misdirection.

It is a fun game, like I said, if you’re in on it. This game only deepens when we look at the alleged writing process.

The Alleged Writing Process

In the novel, Ellis-in-the-past is a high school student who wants to become a writer, and Ellis-in-the-present can explain how much of a sensation he would become. And all those details can be confirmed on Wikipedia in our reality, since Ellis did go on to be a famous author.

He spends a great deal of time in the book talking about his writing process. He describes it like so: writers are exaggerators. All great novels are basically just collections of interesting true events experienced by interesting people (or those who have met interesting people), except where the writer exaggerated and masked everything, to a massive or minor degree.

He says in The Shards (and certain interviews) that Less Than Zero was based on his diaries, just heavily exaggerated and fictionalized. That Rules of Attraction came from his time at college, and that American Psycho came from his time in New York among the charming folk of Wall Street when he was feeling trapped in his life filled to the brim with shallow appearances, leaving him filled with rage and despair.

In every case, he spent years writing his novels, not because he wanted to write a novel, but because he was simply unable to not-write that novel. He would resist it and resist it until, finally, he wrote a page here or there of outlining, and eventually these built themselves into entire stories. In Lunar Park, he portrays this almost as a sort of possession, but in The Shards he portrays it more as a psychological imperative.

There are interviews around that confirm some of this.

This is reinforced in Lunar Park when he claims that parties are part of his work—that his debauchery and lifestyle is the fuel that feeds his literary career. Unless he was lying ^^

I believe that Imperial Bedrooms was highly autobiographical as well, reflecting the filming of The Informers.

Anyway, the novel feels so raw and honest that it’s embarrassing to read sometimes—except, at the same time, we know it’s fiction, so it isn’t as embarrassing as it could be. But this is powerful and important and very intriguing.

So, we get two takeaways from this discussion.

First, it is fun to speculate whether this is his writing process, or whether he lied for the sake of the story, possibly to reinforce suspension of disbelief and to muddy the line between reality and fiction.

Second, I wonder what would happen if I wrote a story using this approach.

Unreliable Narrator

The narrator is unreliable on many levels, but we do not know to what extent. Not only is reality and fiction being muddied, but the narrator might also be lying to us about what happened in the story.

What effect does this have? Well, it makes the book a bit of a game. You wonder a lot how to interpret what you’re reading. There is a lot of play around figuring out how the author, the fictional author, and the reader interact. It makes the story stick with you.

Serialized Format

Simple: it worked.

I especially like how the serialized format allowed him to put introductions before many of the episodes. This level of meta-commentary added a lot to the storytelling, especially because this meta-commentary was at least somewhat a part of the fiction itself.

I wonder how the physical book will differ.

Coming of Age

This is a coming of age story, which means the story revolves around pivotal, formative moments in somebody’s life, which happen to occur quite frequently during adolescence and early adulthood. There is something magical about these times in people’s lives. They are, as I said, formative, and they feel special and important and full of meaning.

The first time you realized something. The first time you did something. The first time you accepted or rejected something. The first time you felt something. When you first met somebody or said goodbye to them. When you first accepted something about yourself.

Other Notes

• This novel has a plot, and a good one. Contrast this with his earlier works, which don’t really have any narrative to speak of

• This book is extremely raunchy, and contains some extreme, vivid violence

• Suspension of disbelief via dramatic irony: he talks constantly, from the present, about the events of that summer and the violence and the killings, but the characters in the past don’t know about any of that. This adds some dramatic tension while at the same time making the events of the story more believable. It isn’t executed perfectly, but it’s good.

• My notes say (this is not a quote from the book): He often likes to exaggerate; his friends complain about it; he takes a seed of truth that made something sort of interesting to begin with, then embellishes it until it is something entirely different — yet it still contains that seed of something real and interesting.

• a complaint: Normally, preorders are appealing because it guarantees you that you’ll have a copy of your book as close to release day as possible. Waterstones has innovated on this concept and introduced a new kind of preorder that still hasn’t shipped weeks after the book’s release date. So, as I said, this is based on the serialized podcast.

• An aside: while researching this, I learned something curious: F Scott Fitzgerald put true events into his fiction to such an extent that he even quoted his wife’s journal almost verbatim in his novels, which creeped her out; as well as personal info about the people he knew, which they were not pleased about. And, incidentally, The Great Gatsby is one of Ellis’s favourite novels of all time. An influence?

More articles about Bret Easton Ellis and his work:

What is this Book?

Less than Zero is the first novel by Bret Easton Ellis, published back in 1985 when he was twenty-one years old. It describes a young man from Los Angeles who had been in New Hampshire for college, but who has come home to visit his friends and family for a month at Christmas. His stay is unpleasant; he moves from scene to scene exhibiting a sort of numb shell shock for about two hundred pages, and then he goes back to New York.

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The story is about the horror of growing up in Ellis’ Los Angeles, or perhaps about the horrifying toll of late twentieth-century life on young people across America; or possibly about a sense of disgust about certain types of people and behaviour; or maybe it’s just about expressing a certain voice as clearly as possible. Depending on the interview, Ellis will say something different—my favourite is the last.

The book is notable for being called representative of “the youth of today” back when it was written. It sold very well, and Ellis became famous after writing it. This and his next three novels were all made into Hollywood movies.

Those books came from a place of anger and frustration. I was disgusted with society and I was going to share my disgust. —Bret Easton Ellis

What Did I Learn?

Firstly, the book has no plot, and this is a characteristic of many of the stories that are my favourites.

I didn’t realize this—neither that Bret’s stories usually have no plot, nor, that I seem to favour stories without plots—until I began trying to outline the plot of several stories back when I read The Informers, and I became confused about what would go into the bullet points. What does it mean for something to count as plot? Almost the entirety of each story falls into what I usually categorize as (valuable, excellent) “flavour.” I recall having the same difficulty when outlining J. D. Salinger’s work. In each case, the stories are basically just collections of events or conversations that happen to occur between some beginning and end. Eg, a night of drinking for Salinger’s “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut.” Yet, these were some of the best stories I read over the last year.

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The Informers, by Bret Easton Ellis

Introduction I read a lot of Bret Easton Ellis (most famous for American Psycho) years ago, when life was different and when it felt like I needed something from the world and I couldn’t get it, and maybe for that reason, his stories spoke to me. Since they are almost entirely about people who are surrounded by uncaring friends and family, with hollow ca…

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3 years ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Nathan Schuetz

After puzzling over this, I tracked down various interviews with Bret Easton Ellis where he said that three or four of his most famous novels deliberately have no narrative at all because he considered narartive to be artificial at the time when he wrote those stories (an attitude he’s changed his mind about—see the quote below).

For years, I have had a lack of interest in plot and felt guilty about this. After this analysis, I feel a little less guilty. To me, if a story sticks with me, it’s because of the characters, setting, theme, ideas, style—the plot is usually not the thing that makes something live in my head for years at a time. Often, it is almost a distraction from the aspects of the story I really enjoy.

A relevant quote from an interview:

My aesthetic when I was a young writer, when I was in my 20s, was that narrative was phoney; it was artificial; story was artificial; plot was artificial; it was all fake. And what you really had to do was be very true to a narrator's voice, be very true to the milieu you are dissecting, and don't add a plot in because it… seems bookish.

I've gotten older, and as I've gotten older, I've realized in a lot of ways that lives have narratives. You don't really see it in your 20s, you really haven't experienced enough to see that you make choices in your life, and one choice leads to another… —Bret Easton Ellis

My second takeaway was a reinforcement that style can be central to the meaning of a written work, and can create meaning in ways the content does not.

I noticed how important style was for this novel because, first, I have spent the last six months studying style in stories (eg, Rhythm); second, Bret said so. Specifically, Bret said that Joan Didion was influential.

I came across Joan Didion in a high school writing class that was taught by my mentor, my English teacher Mr. Robbins. Slouching Towards Bethlehem was a revelation. What is so apparent when you’re reading those essays is that it really was in the style that the meaning of everything was located. It wasn’t just the reportage; it was the actual style. And I had been working on a novel, and I realized, This is how I want to sound. I can’t copy her stuff—she’s too good a writer—but I did with Didion what she did with Hemingway: I sat and typed up paragraph after paragraph of her work in order to figure out how she did it. A writer only needs one or two influences, and I had mine. —Bret Easton Ellis

This quote is from here.

Barbarian Grunge

Rhythm in Pulpy Fiction, with Two Examples

Looking to improve your writing? This is the first of a series of posts on rhythm in fiction. I hope you enjoy, and remember to subscribe for future posts! You may have heard of Alan Moore, the grey-bearded anarchist who’s also a magician? The guy who’s best known for writing comics? You may have heard of a few of his stories: Watchmen, From Hell (the co…

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4 years ago · 2 likes · Nathan Schuetz

(Note: Didion’s work is exceptional. She is sometimes called “the foremost prose stylist of a generation.” I will post an analysis of “Play It As It Lays” sometime soon.)

Years ago when I first read this book, while I may not have consciously thought about the style very often, I clearly subconsciously mimicked it for years afterwards. I didn’t know I was doing it.

What is the Style of the Book?

Long, wandering sentences in first person, present-tense, strung together by commas and the word “and” or “or,” which he uses to describe the shallow details of situations in a list-like manner, by listing the drugs on the counter and the types of trees in the pots and the colour of people’s hair (blonde) and how tanned they are and what brands of clothing they wear and whether they are wearing wayfarers or not at that moment—often they are for some reason, maybe because they want that extra wall between themselves and others—but the main idea is that this is all a bit much and it all means nothing and this shallow landslide is unrelenting. Which means that when Clay, the main character, decides to cry in the bathroom and take a cold shower right before a section ends, we understand what he is going through just a little.

There are no chapter numbers, but there are many short chapters, frequently only a single page. This creates a decent rhythm and pulls you forward continuously because there are no natural stopping points and none of them conclude by making any definitive statements that feel like satisfying answers to the questions the novel poses. See Didion’s “Play It As It Lays” for a very similar approach, except with chapter numbers. This reinforces the theme by being disorganized: neither the book’s events, nor its organization, are tidy. They are merely linear.

From the beginning, there is a consistent sense of “anxiety attack,” but this is never described directly with a name; he just acts them out constantly without giving them labels because it’s too normal to be given a name. The reason for Clay’s quiet desperation is never explicitly stated, but we learn by direct experience about the numbing emptiness and monstrous horror of his environment.

Finally, Characters are regularly identified by something superficial about them: the girl with the cappuccino, the girl with the wayfarers, the boy with the tan (although everyone has a tan but Clay to start with). This is again a stylistic choice that adds meaning to the content that isn’t present in the content itself. Ie, the first-person narrator is not aware of any depth or meaning in his surroundings.

The third takeaway is a matter of curiosity related to his writing process. I’ll talk about in my future discussion of The Shards.

Some Other Notes

• Early in the book, the characters feel like they have heart—especially compared to the characters in some of Ellis’s other novels. This becomes less true later on, except for Julian.

• Despite Clay being the hero of our tale, he is a rude cocaine fiend, and we will see a darker and less sympathetic side of him more and more: he is a participant, to some extent, in the world he hates, not merely an outsider who accidentally stumbled into the scene.

• Somewhere around page 100 it started to feel like a dark comedy, and American Psycho definitely was a dark comedy. A dog eating and re-eating a cigarette. Ridiculous valley girls. Clay being comically stressed out while never refusing to hang out with these people. Ridiculous rivalries. Clay in the cold shower after dinner with his mom, his friends saying it looks like he’s on acid after and he explains: I had dinner with my mom. It’s absurdist. I didn’t care for this section, but it only lasted about 30 pages. He is better at this in his later novels.

• In one scene, a character is in the hospital for anorexia and you feel for her. You assume she’s a victim and you want her to get out of this world. Next thing you know, she’s hurting herself in a less forgivable way. Your sympathy fades. Ellis does this a lot: he tempts you into sympathizing with monstrous characters, and asks whether you still love his loveable characters after he reveals how monstrous they are.

• This book was heavily outlined before it was written. How? It reads like a random collection of scenes, a mosaic, a montage that couldn’t be planned. How do you outline in a way where you end up with “and this scene, they drink and do coke again, and talk about Japan”? I really wish I could see that outline.

Finally, a quote from Lunar Park about Less Than Zero. Like everything in Lunar Park, it cannot be trusted to be true in the slightest—hence, why it’s at the bottom here, and only just for fun:

When I was a student at Camden College in New Hampshire I took a novel-writing tutorial and produced during the winter of 1983 a manuscript that eventually became Less Than Zero. It detailed a wealthy, alienated, sexually ambiguous young man's Christmas break from an eastern college in Los Angeles-more specifically Beverly Hills-and all the parties he wandered through and all the drugs he consumed and all the girls and boys he had sex with and all the friends he passively watched drift into addiction, prostitution and vast apathy; days were spent speeding toward the beach club with beautiful blondes in gleaming convertibles while high on Nembutal; nights were lost in VIP rooms at trendy clubs and snorting cocaine at the window tables of Spago. It was an indictment not only of a way of life I was familiar with but also-I thought rather grandly-of the Reagan eighties and, more indirectly, of Western civilization in the present moment.

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