Fantasy & Horror Fiction for Adults and Children
Writing Tips
Since it was my mom who first taught me that you could make up stories, put them into envelopes, and send them off in hopes that someone might buy them, I’m going to give her the first word:
“Something whispered in their ears—something spoke from out of time . . . / From the places where they played. . . .”
--Mary Anne Durbin, Old Oak Road (long poem)
I firmly believe that the greatest writing in all of us is rooted in those first dozen years of our lives. No, not that we will necessarily write about our experiences during that time in any direct way—but the colors we saw then, the smells we smelled, the things that scared us, the things we found to love—those will forever be for us the most vivid, the elements about which we will write the most passionately. And what is passionate is convincing.
An illustration from Dragonfly: my Grandma Emma had a bomb shelter in her basement. During the Cold War, President Kennedy advised Americans to build them, little rooms full of bottled water, canned food, and—this was important—a dog-legged approach passage to thwart the nuclear radiation. I remember playing in the bomb shelter as a little kid. It was a mysterious, secret place behind the wall of an already fascinating basement. In another basement—the one beneath my parents’ bookstore—there was a wooden door at one end, a door much bigger and wider than a person would need to walk through. It was not locked; I could turn the cold metal knob whenever I wanted and peek into the pitch-black emptiness behind. But I knew from the size of the door that something big must live back there, back in that cavernous, lightless space where no one ever went. If you’ve read Dragonfly, you can see now where its premise came from.
So look to your past. If it helps (and if it’s not traumatic), revisit the places where you played. Close your eyes and remember. If you don’t have a story, write a description of a place or a memory, even a single sensation. You may be surprised at what comes padding up behind you.
The Question of Why
Why do you write? Why devote so much of your life to the solitude and the sweat? At the best of times, writing fills you with the holy fire of creation; it sweeps you along, your fingers flying over keys, across paper; your spirit leaps from rooftop to rooftop, singing with the knowledge that you are changing the world, giving birth to something truly good. At the worst of times, you pace from your empty page to the window; you lie on the floor; you stare at the ceiling and wonder what you’re going to do with your hopelessly flawed story and why you ever thought you could write. Most times there’s some combination of those extremes—drudgery at the beginning, then an unexpected quickening, then tangles to unravel, problems to solve, more elements dropping smoothly into place, and a steadily growing satisfaction. Always there is a degree of work involved, whether painful or pleasant; and always, there is the isolation, for time spent writing is time when your attention is not on family, friends, outings, or entertainments. To commit yourself to this lifestyle, you need a reason. You need a good one.
All of us have a kind of garden in our minds where those most wonderful experiences have taken root and grown into memories. Rooted and grown, I say, because they are truly organic; they are not the experiences as lived. They are those original seeds enriched by the soil of ourselves, our accumulated years, our journeys. The green and ancient light in this garden shows us what it is about those experiences that have earned their planting there.
In my garden are a host of vivid recollections of books read in childhood and later, each linked to a specific time and place. As a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, I read much of The Lord of the Rings for the first time in the back room of my parents’ bookstore, at an old, battered, graffiti-covered desk. Under my bare feet, the blue-gray floorboards were warm and filthy with the unscrubbed dust of decades. I read Jaws when it was a brand-new book in the Summer of the Shark; I turned those paperback pages on a cozy stairway behind my aunt’s kitchen. I remember reading some of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn in a doctor’s waiting room when I had a tiny burdock bur embedded on the inside of my eyelid, scratching my eye’s surface at each blink. Don’t ask me why I chose to read under such conditions. That enchanting book will for me always be bound up with memories of pain. I read Ayako Miura’s
That’s my Why. These books are all a part of me now. They no longer belong wholly to their authors. I have absorbed them in much the same way that maples on a farm will ingest rusty chains looped around them or old gates leaned against their trunks. I want to send such books out into the world. I want my very best work, infused with my dreams, to go off and live in the gardens of other kids at other desks, on other stairways, in other summers.
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