Category: Fiction

Okay, I’m listening to a story that H.P. Lovecraft ghostwrote (an appropriate thing for a horror writer) that is called The Mound.

One of the things I like about Lovecraft is the way he uses language. He had a real way with words and a phenomenal number of words in his active vocabulary.

But in this story, he makes a slip.

At one point, the narrator writes:

That evening the Comptons summed up for me all the legends current among the villagers.

Where might this "village" be? The Swiss alps? The island of Borneo? The sleepy hillsides of New England? They certainly have villages in all of those places, but they don’t where Lovecraft’s story is set:

Western Oklahoma.

Nobody in that part of the country talks about towns, however small, as "villages," nor describes their occupants as "villagers." In the dialect common in those parts, the proper, polite term is "town," and the proper way to speak of the inhabitants is "townsfolk." (Less polite terms are also available if you don’t set much stock by the town and its inhabitants.)

I suppose an exception would be made for "Indian villages" in the area, but then the inhabitants wouldn’t be called "villagers" but simply "Indians" (at least in 1928, when the story is set). But that’s not the kind of "village" he’s talking about.

In fairness to Lovecraft, his narrator is from the East and so is apt to describe things as an easterner would, but if he was really having a conversation with a local family about what legends were common among the townsfolk then they would likely have used the word "townsfolk" (or "townspeople" or something of this nature) and it should have ended up in the narrator’s narrative.

In any event, the detail rang false for me.

It’s very hard to imitate the idiom of another region and not get spotted by natives of the area (myself, in this case). I would never be able to fake Lovecraft’s New England setting and idiom.

So, if I ever write horror stories set in the present day, I guess they’ll have to be set in the South or Southwest.

UPDATE: I finished The Mound, and toward the end of the story it is revealed that the narrator is a Virginian. So: Unless they have "villages" in Virginia (and so far as I know, they don’t), what we have here is a flat-out mistake on Lovecraft’s part, letting his native New England idiom intrude onto a story about the South. He ain’t from around these parts, I reckon.

The Year without a Summer caused Mary Shelly and her literary friends to hole up indoors during their Swiss vacation. To pass the time, they took drugs (laudanum) and told stories. Later, they published them. Shelly’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

Frankenstein’s monster wasn’t the only classic horror monster that came into being at that gathering. In fact, a character that, for literary purposes, is Dracula’s father got invented.

The character’s name was Lord Ruthven, and he was modelled off the notorious British aristocrat, Lord Byron. (Remember Byron. Remember Byron.)

An employee of Byron’s, John Polidori, wrote the story titled, The Vampyre and modelled the character after his master, while the two were on a trip in Europe (just like two characters in the story) and were stopped at the Swiss literary gathering by the Year without a Summer. (Strange how it all connects, ain’t it?)

The reason Lord Ruthven can be described as Dracula’s father is that, while there had been vampires before, both in the legends of Europe and other places, they were pictured as brutish, repulsive monsters, not the suave, debonaire romantic types that have dominated vampire fiction since.

So it’s interesting . . . the Year without a Summer ended up getting both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff the jobs that made them famous, 120 years later.

READ ABOUT VAMPIRES.

READ ABOUT THE VAMPYRE.

READ THE VAMPYRE.

The Year without a Summer caused Mary Shelly and her literary friends to hole up indoors during their Swiss vacation. To pass the time, they took drugs (laudanum) and told stories. Later, they published them. Shelly’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

Frankenstein’s monster wasn’t the only classic horror monster that came into being at that gathering. In fact, a character that, for literary purposes, is Dracula’s father got invented.

The character’s name was Lord Ruthven, and he was modelled off the notorious British aristocrat, Lord Byron. (Remember Byron. Remember Byron.)

An employee of Byron’s, John Polidori, wrote the story titled, The Vampyre and modelled the character after his master, while the two were on a trip in Europe (just like two characters in the story) and were stopped at the Swiss literary gathering by the Year without a Summer. (Strange how it all connects, ain’t it?)

The reason Lord Ruthven can be described as Dracula’s father is that, while there had been vampires before, both in the legends of Europe and other places, they were pictured as brutish, repulsive monsters, not the suave, debonaire romantic types that have dominated vampire fiction since.

So it’s interesting . . . the Year without a Summer ended up getting both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff the jobs that made them famous, 120 years later.

READ ABOUT VAMPIRES.

READ ABOUT THE VAMPYRE.

READ THE VAMPYRE.

GET THE STORY.

GET THE STORY.

I’ve been going back and re-reading some of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories–which I haven’t read in years, so long that I’ve forgotten almost everything about them except the shapes and names of some of the monsters in them.

One of the stories I reread is The Call of Cthulhu, which is a lynchpin of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

For those who may not know (and this is forbidden knowledge, remember), Cthulhu is an evil alien entity who is presently asleep in the sunken city of R’lyeh in the Pacific Ocean and who is destined to wake one day and basically kill everybody. Oh, and an evil cult worships him and is trying to wake him up again.

I was intrigued by the fact that The Call of Cthulhu gives the exact latitude and longitude of R’lyeh:

Latitude: S 47° 9 Min.
Longitude: W 123° 43 Min.

So–in an age of MapQuest–plunked the numbers into MapQuest, which promptly spit back the following map, revealing the exact location of the sunken city of R’lyeh where dead Cthulhu lies dreaming.

UPDATE: Down yonder an alert reader pointed out that the original map showed R’lyeh on the wrong side of the international date line. Turns out I had failed to enter a minus sign for the West longitude. Here’s the correct map:

BEWARE! HIC SUNT DRACONES!!!

I’ve been going back and re-reading some of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories–which I haven’t read in years, so long that I’ve forgotten almost everything about them except the shapes and names of some of the monsters in them.

One of the stories I reread is The Call of Cthulhu, which is a lynchpin of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

For those who may not know (and this is forbidden knowledge, remember), Cthulhu is an evil alien entity who is presently asleep in the sunken city of R’lyeh in the Pacific Ocean and who is destined to wake one day and basically kill everybody. Oh, and an evil cult worships him and is trying to wake him up again.

I was intrigued by the fact that The Call of Cthulhu gives the exact latitude and longitude of R’lyeh:

Latitude: S 47° 9 Min.
Longitude: W 123° 43 Min.

So–in an age of MapQuest–plunked the numbers into MapQuest, which promptly spit back the following map, revealing the exact location of the sunken city of R’lyeh where dead Cthulhu lies dreaming.

UPDATE: Down yonder an alert reader pointed out that the original map showed R’lyeh on the wrong side of the international date line. Turns out I had failed to enter a minus sign for the West longitude. Here’s the correct map:

BEWARE! HIC SUNT DRACONES!!!

Down yonder a reader writes concerning the absence of a much-needed equivalent to Han Solo in the current Star Wars films:

A lot of authors would say that there isn’t one of "those figures"
in the new films because there wasn’t one of "those figures" around
where they were being filmed. They might say their characters are not
placed there by the author like ingredients in a soup, they simply
portray the story as it exists in their head. Luke n’ em’ ran into Han
at the point in time that they did, cause they did. Obi wan and Anakin
didn’t run into one of those, so we didn’t see them do it.

They aren’t made-to-order circumstances, and companies. So, perhaps
they might be reasons that you don’t enjoy them as much, but they would
agrue that you can’t really call them flaws in the story. I am sure
there are some people who were annoyed by Han, and would even argue to
Lucas that he was a distraction. To them he would also reply…" He
annoyed the characters too, but I can’t remove him. How could I? He was
there!"

I appreciate the thought, and writers do sometimes talk about their characters controlling the story.

But . . .

I iz onenna them thar writer fellers.

An’ I don’ buy it.

Whether I’m doing fiction or non-fiction, I am fully in control of what I’m writing. Sure, sometimes one gets to a point in the writing where it just seems to "flow," without deliberate effort, but this happens (when it happens) after one starts the writing, not when one is pre-planning and deciding what elements need to go into the mix.

It isn’t the case that a writer sees the whole story in his head and has to write it down. Stories almost invariably come into one’s mind a piece at a time (in fact, agonizingly slowly), and one can and must control the mix of elements needed to make the story effective for the audience.

In fact, the ability to do this is an essential part of making the transition from an amateur writer to a professional writer. Amateurs are too wrapped up in their ideas to be willing to sacrifice them for the sake of the overall work, and their work suffers as a result. They also often feel so passionate about their material that they can’t see what’s working and what’s not from a reader’s point of view.

To get to the point of writing on a professional level (I don’t mean publishing a few stories or articles here and there; I mean being able to place pieces consisently and frequently such that you can make a living at this) you have to get a feel for the reader’s point of view (which is not the same as your own) and you have to be willing to control and shape the piece to what will work for the reader rather than simply wallowing in your own "artistic expression." Too many writers have gotten stuck at the "I am an artiste!" level and never gotten to the point of doing work that is actually . . . well . . . good.

It is true that writers sometimes talk about things "writing themselves," which just means that they had a very easy time writing a piece. They also sometimes speak of characters demanding to do or say things in a story, but what this means is that they have lived with a character for so long in their head that they have a very clear idea about what the character would do or say in a particular situation–or what would be really good for the character to do or say.

For example, in the fourth season of Babylon 5, Joe Straczynski had an episode ("The Long Night") in which the mad emperor Cartagia needed to be offed for the good of Centauri Prime. He originally planned to have Londo Mollari do it, which was the expected, predictable thing. Then when he came to write the scene he realized that it would be much better for Londo’s timid, bumbling assistant Vir to accidentally kill Cartagia.

So that’s what he wrote.

He later said that the character Vir stepped up and demanded to do this, but that is just a metaphor for having a sudden flash of inspiration about what would be the best use of character based on his long familiarity with the characters of Londo and Vir (who he had been writing for at least four to six years by this point).

This is a wholly different subject than should there be a Londo or a Vir in the story. How would dropping characters like these into the mix affect the show? How would it add to or take away from the mood and the dramatic possibilities of the story? Those are very different questions than what the characters do once you add them to the mix and write them for so long that you have an instinctive feel for what they would do.

So writers do–particularly with things like television shows and motion pictures–focus consciously on the mix of characters and how they combine to create an overall emotional experience for the audience.

The "My characters made me do it!" defense may work on the level of particular scenes written with long-established characters (including scenes that have plot points in them), but it doesn’t go to the question of whether a writer lets a particular character into the story.

This would seem to be the case particularly for George Lucas, who makes movies like children working with PlayDough. He starts shaping a movie in a kind of loose way, then tweaks and pokes and prods it, adding material, snipping material, even coming up with new material in the editing process. An examination of the prehistory of his shooting scripts reveals that he dramatically changed both the characters and the story as he went along. He did not have the overall story worked out in his head from the beginning, and he is quite capable of making major changes if he thinks they are needed.

The difficulty is that he seemingly hasn’t realized the mood problem created by the absence of a Han Solo equivalent.

Down yonder a reader writes concerning the absence of a much-needed equivalent to Han Solo in the current Star Wars films:

A lot of authors would say that there isn’t one of "those figures"

in the new films because there wasn’t one of "those figures" around

where they were being filmed. They might say their characters are not

placed there by the author like ingredients in a soup, they simply

portray the story as it exists in their head. Luke n’ em’ ran into Han

at the point in time that they did, cause they did. Obi wan and Anakin

didn’t run into one of those, so we didn’t see them do it.

They aren’t made-to-order circumstances, and companies. So, perhaps

they might be reasons that you don’t enjoy them as much, but they would

agrue that you can’t really call them flaws in the story. I am sure

there are some people who were annoyed by Han, and would even argue to

Lucas that he was a distraction. To them he would also reply…" He

annoyed the characters too, but I can’t remove him. How could I? He was

there!"

I appreciate the thought, and writers do sometimes talk about their characters controlling the story.

But . . .

I iz onenna them thar writer fellers.

An’ I don’ buy it.

Whether I’m doing fiction or non-fiction, I am fully in control of what I’m writing. Sure, sometimes one gets to a point in the writing where it just seems to "flow," without deliberate effort, but this happens (when it happens) after one starts the writing, not when one is pre-planning and deciding what elements need to go into the mix.

It isn’t the case that a writer sees the whole story in his head and has to write it down. Stories almost invariably come into one’s mind a piece at a time (in fact, agonizingly slowly), and one can and must control the mix of elements needed to make the story effective for the audience.

In fact, the ability to do this is an essential part of making the transition from an amateur writer to a professional writer. Amateurs are too wrapped up in their ideas to be willing to sacrifice them for the sake of the overall work, and their work suffers as a result. They also often feel so passionate about their material that they can’t see what’s working and what’s not from a reader’s point of view.

To get to the point of writing on a professional level (I don’t mean publishing a few stories or articles here and there; I mean being able to place pieces consisently and frequently such that you can make a living at this) you have to get a feel for the reader’s point of view (which is not the same as your own) and you have to be willing to control and shape the piece to what will work for the reader rather than simply wallowing in your own "artistic expression." Too many writers have gotten stuck at the "I am an artiste!" level and never gotten to the point of doing work that is actually . . . well . . . good.

It is true that writers sometimes talk about things "writing themselves," which just means that they had a very easy time writing a piece. They also sometimes speak of characters demanding to do or say things in a story, but what this means is that they have lived with a character for so long in their head that they have a very clear idea about what the character would do or say in a particular situation–or what would be really good for the character to do or say.

For example, in the fourth season of Babylon 5, Joe Straczynski had an episode ("The Long Night") in which the mad emperor Cartagia needed to be offed for the good of Centauri Prime. He originally planned to have Londo Mollari do it, which was the expected, predictable thing. Then when he came to write the scene he realized that it would be much better for Londo’s timid, bumbling assistant Vir to accidentally kill Cartagia.

So that’s what he wrote.

He later said that the character Vir stepped up and demanded to do this, but that is just a metaphor for having a sudden flash of inspiration about what would be the best use of character based on his long familiarity with the characters of Londo and Vir (who he had been writing for at least four to six years by this point).

This is a wholly different subject than should there be a Londo or a Vir in the story. How would dropping characters like these into the mix affect the show? How would it add to or take away from the mood and the dramatic possibilities of the story? Those are very different questions than what the characters do once you add them to the mix and write them for so long that you have an instinctive feel for what they would do.

So writers do–particularly with things like television shows and motion pictures–focus consciously on the mix of characters and how they combine to create an overall emotional experience for the audience.

The "My characters made me do it!" defense may work on the level of particular scenes written with long-established characters (including scenes that have plot points in them), but it doesn’t go to the question of whether a writer lets a particular character into the story.

This would seem to be the case particularly for George Lucas, who makes movies like children working with PlayDough. He starts shaping a movie in a kind of loose way, then tweaks and pokes and prods it, adding material, snipping material, even coming up with new material in the editing process. An examination of the prehistory of his shooting scripts reveals that he dramatically changed both the characters and the story as he went along. He did not have the overall story worked out in his head from the beginning, and he is quite capable of making major changes if he thinks they are needed.

The difficulty is that he seemingly hasn’t realized the mood problem created by the absence of a Han Solo equivalent.

Added a list of fiction titles down yonder in the lower righthand margin. I don’t have time to read fiction very often (usually when on vacation or travelling), so whe I do I try to read the good stuff. These are some of my favorite reads.