I’ve written before (here and elsewhere) about the writing workshop I participated in, fifteen-some years ago.
An odd cast of characters, maybe: three writers of poetry and literary fiction then seeking their graduate degrees in English, with an emphasis on creative writing; one writer of comic action stories (think Carl Hiaasen, maybe with a touch of Elmore Leonard); one writer of horror and science fiction…
…and I.
I was the only one who’d published a book to that point, my mystery Crossed Wires. But I didn’t think of myself as a “mystery writer.” (Crossed Wires‘s prose and structure, I think, suggests the crooked posture of a writer in a genre he knows he’s not suited for.)
I didn’t know how to classify myself. My reading tastes were all over the map. I’d read a great deal of science fiction while growing up; liked reading mysteries and thrillers; had been bowled over by the caliber of the romances published by friends*; was moved and challenged by fiction I read in The New Yorker and similar magazines.
Horror? Well, I’d read a lot of horror comics when I was a kid. I didn’t mind “scary movies,” but didn’t get many chances to see them (other than classics from the ’30s). When I got older, I read some King and Koontz, and — on the strength of the paperbacks’ striking covers — I read some of Brian Lumley’s Necroscope series. But for the most part, horror fiction didn’t interest me. Beyond what seemed a core of authors with wider aspirations and deeper, more complex psychologies, y’know, It Was All Just Blood.
But the SF/horror writer in our workshop kept bringing to us his inventive little fantasias of things gone frighteningly wrong. And this got me thinking: I wonder what it’s like to write horror? So I tried it. Once.
My brother the architect once explained to me the key to building things successfully. By building he meant not just framing, erecting walls and roofs and so on, but everything: flooring, painting, pouring foundations, and so on. All of it, he said, had one critical element: edges. How an architect or builder or home handyman handles edges defines his or her success at it. Buildings fall down; patterned wallpaper fails to match up at the seams; bookshelves wobble, and a marble placed on the floor rolls freely from one corner to another.
