No matter how many academics try to dissect it, and no matter how many greedy hacks try to turn it into a commodity, the process of writing fiction never loses its mystique. It is an enigma, even to those who practise it. Often referred to as ‘dreaming awake’, writing is a weird co-operation between the conscious and subconscious, an act of self-hypnosis.
Perhaps that is why writers are so often the worst judges of their own work. Stephen King believed his novel Christine (1983) was the best thing he had ever written until he let it out into the world and critics panned it almost universally. In this interview prior to its release, he referred to it as “a malevolent Happy Days”, which is a catchy and not inaccurate elevator pitch for the book, but it didn’t account for the saggy and bloated middle section, the rather convoluted relationship between the antagonists, and some inexplicable choices when it came to narrative. King intended it to be a hearty slice of 1950s Americana that skewed off into darker corners, and it was, but a number of things about Christine just didn’t work… and King was oblivious to them.
I can certainly empathise. I have written in another blog about ‘An Odd Man in Opal Creek’, a story I loved to pieces that turned out to be a twice-cooked cliché. The other side of the coin is my story ‘Threshold’, which appeared in a fairly successful small press anthology called Corrupts Absolutely? (2010). I thought it an okay piece with a good concept and reasonably evocative prose, but one ultimately dragged down by a coincidental plot twist. Yet, it remains to this day the most favourably reviewed piece of fiction I have ever written, with two separate critics rating it as the best in the anthology – tall praise indeed when it shared a table of contents with an unforgettable story like Tim Marquitz's ‘Retribution’.
The question is why. Why couldn’t I see the shortcomings of ‘Opal Creek’ and why was I blind to the virtues of ‘Threshold’?
In the case of the former, it was simply that a couple of classics in the speculative fiction genre had escaped my reading net. Since I was unfamiliar with them, I wasn’t to know my story had in effect been written before. (A salutary lesson for wannabe genre writers – read, read and then read some more.)
The latter is not so easy to analyse, but I suspect it has something to do with perspective. Let me explain using a home renovation analogy. If you paint your bedroom, when you’re finished all you can see are the brush marks on the ceiling and that drip you missed above the skirting board. But a friend will come into that same room and see nothing but the beautiful Jellybean feature wall offset against fresh ceiling white. That’s because he wasn’t there during the creative process and doesn’t know about the little failures and frustrations that beleaguered it.
In horror, especially (and while on its surface ‘Threshold’ is a sci-fi anti-hero story, when you peel back the layers it is horror), the overall effect is often more important than concerns like believability or whether a plot twist happens to be a deus ex machina. When I looked at ‘Threshold’, all I saw were the paint runs. Readers, apparently, saw the Jellybean feature wall.
Which is fine and good, but it doesn’t explain how the same mind that created a brilliant novel like The Shining (if you won’t begrudge a return to Mr King for a moment) could come up with something as turgid as Christine (or worse still Doctor Sleep, that tiresome sequel to The Shining).
What we’re talking about, in the end, is an attempt to understand the workings of the human mind, with its trillions of components and countless internal and external influences. Is it any wonder the writing process is unpredictable and refuses to lose its air of magic?
Anyway, I’m delighted to say ‘Threshold’ is about to get a second life. The rights to Corrupts Absolutely? have reverted to the editor, Lincoln Crisler, and he wants to republish it through Tim Marquitz’s start-up venture, Ragnarok Publications. It will have a new cover, a new story from a name writer, and better marketing. If any anthology deserves such treatment it is Corrupts Absolutely?, which has been one of those blessed projects an author prays he will someday be a part of.