I’ve been tagged on this blog hop by the wonderful Priya Sharma, and meant to do this a week and a half ago. I did, at least, manage to get to the story she asked for a bit faster.
I’m capable of going on for about three solid weeks on how Priya’s stories of beautiful horror, broken romance and twisted myth are amazing, but if you’ve read this blog for any length of time you’ll have heard me say all that before. So for now, I’ll just point out that you can read some of her stuff on her website, and it’s a far better use of your time than any wittering from me.
Though there was a reason beyond my being rubbish why this post took a bit longer than planned.
I’ve had a really hard time trying to think of things I don’t write about. One of the side effects of committing to do stories pretty frequently, even little flash ones, is that you cover a ton of ground. I thought: poetry. I don’t write poetry much. Then I sat down for that day’s story and came out with John Frum ‘Merica.
But there are some things that even over the course of 240-ish stories, I haven’t touched.
1. Melodrama
My natural place on the story-writer’s spectrum is between speculative and magic-realist. When I’m writing fiction, I don’t like to keep to the confines of reality. It feels like that’s not what fiction’s for.
So things like melodrama are basically beyond me.
I tried, once. I set out to write a story of a doomed relationship in the similarly decaying streets of Venice. By the end, the city was sinking, there was a procession of dancing ghosts in St. Mark’s Square and one of the characters might have been around in the 1700s.
I decided after that it probably wasn’t my thing.
2. Mystery
Any piece of longer writing, for me, comes with two caveats. Firstly, when I start writing I need to have a plan about where the story is going, from beginning to end; and secondly, there is no chance said plan will survive until the middle of the first draft. Mysteries, with their need for some fairly intricate plotting, don’t play well with that process. I remember hearing an interview with a crime writer – I forget her name, unfortunately – who said she often didn’t work out who the criminal was until she was 80% of the way through the book, and SERIOUSLY HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE? My brain just rebels at the thought.
3. Magic-medievalism
I don’t have anything against high fantasy. I’ve read quite a few sword-and-sorcery books, and told well these stories can be quite a lot of fun. But even in the well-told ones, I read about the war between the elves and the humans that’s raged for 2000 years and think seriously, in all that time, no-one’s come up with the cannon? Or slightly more inventive siege tactics?
The whole genre seems to rely on societies that have an absolute refusal to progress. And I don’t mind reading about it for some cheerful Orc-decapitating escapism. But writing it I find kinda dull.
And yes, some of the delay with this blog post was due to coming up with a term for sword and sorcery that began with an M.
So what do I write about? As you can imagine, I had rather more to choose from here, but I’ve tried to nail down some of the broader tendencies.
1. Fairytales and mythology
If you’ve read my stories for any length of time, you’ve probably grasped that I love this stuff. I’ve got something of a fascination with the past, and these stories feel like the closest link we’ve got to the people who told them.
The flash, in particular, has them crop up over and over: Snow White, Cinderella, Cassandra (twice), and of course the Magpie stories, which started as a conscious attempt to write myths of my own.
2. Tiny bits of weird
So very many of my stories, both the flash and the longer stuff, come from taking the world as it is now, changing a couple of little things and then carrying events to their logical conclusion. It’s often in the implications that you can find ways to put a new twist on an old idea, and where a lot of the human drama can fall.
This one’s a bit of a cop out, since you can say that about entire genres, but since it’s where so many of my ideas begin, it should be in this list.
3. Boundaries
There’s something about the edges of things. It seems to be where stories are found. This could be the line between a good place and a bad one, one year and the next, different seasons, or life and death. Boundaries mean something is changing, and when something is changing, there’s something worth writing about.
So who’s next?
I have been extremely lazy about my tagging, but one person has graciously agreed to pick up the baton:
Dave Higgins – Dave has been featured in the Fauxpocalypse anthology (which I reviewed here a while ago), and his short story collection An Unquiet Calm is next on my reading list.
If you want to have a go yourself, consider this an open invitation. Let me know when you’ve posted, and I’ll add you to the list of bloggers here.
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