Why I Write

Notes on ambition, aesthetics,

and a bit of oaf history.

When I was four years old my mother came to me with a book. She opened it up and showed me a picture. At its edges were dim brown shadows and cobwebs and in the center was a pile of gold and jewels that seemed to cast its own light. Coiled on this pile was something that looked like a lizard with wings. I could tell by the scale that it was huge and it had a sly, suspicious, cruel expression on its face that frightened me. In the front right corner was the shadow of a little man crouched over and stepping forward.

My family, parents and brother and brand new sister, lived in San Pablo. Everything out on the street was a little dusty, a little ugly. A little boring. The book was a hole in my world and when I looked at it I saw wonders.

“Do you want to know what’s happening in the picture?” my mom said. I nodded. Mom turned to the front of the book and started reading. I was hooked.

From then on my parents read out loud. At first to me, and then to my brother and sister as well. I remember everything. It was as though I lived in the stories that were read to me. There was a coin that would grant you half a wish and a man who ran safaris where you could shoot a dinosaur. I hid in an apple barrel with pirates all around me, I helped fight for Martian independence. I learned to read in the first grade and before the end of the school year I was allowed to check out books from the adult section of the library.

I read about sharks and Komodo dragons and the dreaded Candiru fish. I discovered reprints of old pulp fiction discovered that reading to myself was an even more vivid experience than being read to. I burrowed to the lost world at the center of the earth, then found myself reborn millions of years in the future, long after man’s extinction. When I was crucified and a vulture came to eat my eyes I bit its head off and drank its blood to keep myself alive long enough to revenge myself on those who had persecuted me. I was taught to dab blue chalk dots on the backs of bees and to follow those dots until I found honey.

I’m a compulsively creative person. I make music and pictures, I’m the kind of cook that friends and family casually refer to as the best in the world (there are untold millions of us…), I’ve even dabbled in sculpture and film when I was a kid.
And whenever I’ve seen or heard or tasted anything that I’ve loved or admired I’ve wished that I’d created it myself.

A big part of my envy is that I want is to be better than I am. I want to be one of the people with the magic. Someone who gets attention because they deserve it. Quentin Crisp once said that artists of any kind are nothing but a bunch of hooligans who are unable to live within their budget of attention. Guilty!

And I must also confess to a certain sort of mild sadism. Almost everything I do involves elements of humor and horror. While these are sometimes referred to as genres, it just ain’t so. Humor and horror are emotional reactions, not collections of tropes.

One of my favorite anecdotes involves the great folklorist and pulp writer Manly Wade Wellman. He’d been invited to the first World Fantasy convention, to sit on a panel with a number of other horror writers. He was one of the majority of people who find public speaking intimidating so beforehand he’d stiffened his courage to the sticking point with the help of a little bourbon. Maybe more than a little…

Anyway, there came the time when the moderator of the panel asked the writers a question that is frequently asked of those who work in that field. Why write horror? There’s an implication there. When you write horror you’re writing about ugly things. Nasty things. What kind of person are you anyway? What kind of person gets down and wallows in the muck at the bottom of the human experience and roots around for the very worst things they can find? Mr. Wellman, why do you write horror?
Mr. Wellman leaned forward in his chair and stabbed his finger at the moderator and said, “Because I want to make your eyes bug out!”

That’s it. That’s it exactly. And humor isn’t any different. What does a comedian say when they come off stage and they really feel good about their performance? “I killed out there!”

The point of humor and horror is to create something that either uses or evades our critical thought processes to zip right past the cortex and hit the parts of the brain where our reflexes live. The most purely pleasurable moments in the writing process come when I’m consciously guiding the reader through an experience, when I know that I can make them hear what I have to say and feel what I feel as I put the words on the page.

When someone tells me that they laughed out loud or cringed at something I wrote that is satisfaction. When a friend told me that she tried to stop reading one of my stories and found herself unable to put it down, that it gave her nightmares, I felt bad for having distressed someone I care for. Still, it was all I could do not to pump my fist in the air. Triumph!

Why do I want to make my audience physically react to my work? Because I’m a tyrant at heart. My sense of right and wrong keeps me from pursuing power-based relationships in real life but if someone’s foolish enough to read something I wrote, then they have given me consent to do anything to them that I want.

Anything.

Right and wrong are important to me. Of course it’s ridiculous to expect things to fall neatly into one category or another, but I don’t think of them as categories. Rather, they represent poles to navigate by. Try and move towards one and away from the other. The construction of a system of morality is a central and ongoing issue in my life. (Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am vast, I contain multitudes…) I want to be able to transmit some of the moral lessons that I’ve learned back out into the world.

And it’s not just morality. I want to be able to communicate the value of everything that’s important to me. And why is this? On some level, it’s related to a sense of duty and responsibility. My life has been immeasurably enriched by the works of artists who have used their craft to speak about what was important to them. To go back to the beginning of this essay, that first book that my parents read to me was The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkein.

As a more critical reader, I find it to be a dismissible work. But why would I want to dismiss a work that so profoundly enriched my life? Tolkein’s love of the comforts of home life and the beauties of nature came through strongly enough to affect my own attitudes towards those things even today. I was a city kid but when I was taken out into the natural world it had a quality of magic to it, a sacred, numinous quality that still helps to sustain me. And at the other end of the spectrum things as simple as a good meal and a warm bed partake, again, of the sacred.

It’s easy enough to defend the nice and the pleasant but all art has a fundamentally positive value, even art that seems negative or ugly. Harlan Ellison has written many times on the subject of death. If you read much of his work you will be told time and time again that everyone we love will die and every death will hurt. When my brother died many of the people around me were damaged in a way that I had trouble understanding at first. Then I came to realize while I had to come to terms with the loss of my closest friend, they had to come to terms with death itself. Art, particularly Ellison’s, had prepared me for that moment. I did not have to rebuild my view of the world in order to accomodate sorrow.

Art has given me strength and comfort and refuge. It has challenged me and angered me and changed the way that I looked at myself and at the world around me. It has shown me the crystalline beauty of purely rational thought and the deeply knotted torment of madness and it has allowed me to accept and value these things in myself.

Now that I’ve touched on some of the more important motives for creativity I can try and answer the question of why I write. For most of my adult life illustration and visual art has been my central passion. I play music regularly and have recorded an album. All my life I’ve vaguely felt as though I was a writer but up until quite recently I spent less time and effort on writing than on any other form I’ve been seriously involved in. Why have I decided after all this time that writing is my real passion?

I realized that if I wanted to achieve a professional level of skill in any field I was going to have to pick one and put most of my effort into it. And a few years ago I found myself experiencing a brief period of success as a writer. It wasn’t intentional; I just fell into it. One night I was at my sister’s house for Sunday dinner. My brother-in-law was making on-line animated cartoons. At that point in time web animation was a big deal and so was my brother-in-law – he was mentioned in People, had been interviewed by Forbes and so on. I wasn’t that crazy about what he was doing. When I was looking at his bookshelf I found something called The Sleaze Merchants which was about exploitation filmmaking.

“Dude,” I said, “Why don’t you do something cool like this instead of that idiotic celebrity crap?”

“Pitch it,” he said. “Write up a proposal for a show and pitch it.”

I did and it sold. The process of developing the show was a real apprenticeship for me. Up until then the only story I’d written that felt like a story was a pastiche of the Three Little Pigs done as a hardboiled crime/horror story. I had to learn how to make a story, a complete beginning-middle-and-end story, and I had to be able to do it in three and a half pages of script.

By the time I’d learned how to write a script the company was starting to feel the signs of the impending Internet collapse. They stopped producing new shows. But the editor I worked with on my show brought me in to work on another show. I wound up doing a lot of work on shows that were in trouble – the creative staff got fired, the show really sucks and the sponsor is starting to make noises, that kind of thing. I thought of myself as the go-to guy; maybe I was just easy to work with.

So when I sat down to decide what my creative focus was going to be I said to myself, “Well, I did make some money writing. It could happen again. I like money.”

That’s just part of it. While the acts of drawing and playing music are more fun than writing, more open to casual execution and experimentation, they don’t convey as much as I’d like.

It’s funny – the form with the driest, most limited sensory input (black shapes against white, the touch and smell of paper, the rustle of a turned page) provides the most vivid immersive experience available in the arts, the richest in meaning and possibility.

There is something about the rigor of writing that pleases me. Sobriety, silence, and solitude are all necessary for me to write well. When I think of what I can do and what I would do the gap between them is filled the gratification that comes from hard work and study. And there is a very special pleasure in getting things right, in finding the proper word, evading a cliché, coining a phrase that speaks from my experience of life. I like labor and the demanding nature of writing pleases me.

But in some ways the most important factor is that fiction holds more potential for me than any other form with which I’ve worked. My music and pictures are amusing, clever – and distinctly limited. Writing gives me the opportunity to truly communicate, to let people understand what life feels like to me. It allows me to give myself to the world as directly and completely as possible

I’m coming to believe that is a worthy gift.