Disclaimer: This is a rant on the subject of writing fiction I originally wrote some years back for a group of friends in the horror community. As such, some of the content may mildly offend some. It goes on a bit, and gets deeper into theoretical concerns than you may care to go. But, if you like this sort of thing -- enjoy.

The ideas expressed herein are heavily influenced by other theoreticians -- most notably Samuel R. Delany. However, much of this is my own, and even what is directly borrowed is mine by process of filtration, fruition, adaptation, and adoption.

1

The single most significant error most criticism makes is to talk about writing, whereas the critic is describing and analyzing the experience, not of writing, but of reading.

These activities are not only very different: they are not even complementary except in a simple and simplistic fashion, generally expressed something like this:

Writing is the act of converting ideas, images, etc., into marks on paper (encoding). Reading is the act of constructing images, ideas, etc., in the mind, based on marks on paper (decoding). If the writer and the reader both do their job well, then the images constructed by the reader will be significantly congruent with those encoded by the writer.

This model is too simplistic to be of more than rhetorical use -- and far too simple to be of use in any rhetoric which attempts to actually explore what writer and reader, separately, do.

2

What a writer does, to simplify greatly, is a process of selection, annotation, and modification, by which he or she clarifies for him- or herself the images she or he has imagined.

I may imagine a scene as thoroughly as you like, but until I actually begin putting words down on paper -- or on a computer screen, clay tablet, whatever -- I am not writing. (Which is not to devalue what goes before the actual process of writing -- but it isn't writing. It's preparing to write.) And, as I begin setting down words, the image becomes clearer, or at least different, in my mind. I select those details that I want the reader to see (possibly those which make some significant impact on my viewpoint character's consciousness), as I move (the character moves) through the scene.

For example: I've got a scene in mind right now where a character I've named Al is walking down a street and is physically assaulted by an owl made of ice. That is about as much of a "plot" as I need to begin with; then I start to write. I'll try looking out at this scene from inside Al's head, just before the attack. What does he see, hear, think, feel, smell, etc.?

Oh. Well, it's a common enough thing to find on a city street (and I guess I've just decided this happens in a city).

None of it would have happened if it hadn't been for the dogshit.

Really? Look at that; I've just painted myself into a corner. The dog crap now has to somehow be the proximate cause of Al's encounter with the ice owl.

He noticed it right before his foot came down--

Too slow. Reverse the order. And let's be more specific -- what does the foot look like?

His left foot, in its brandnew Nike

Still too slow - get some urgency into it.

His brandnew Nike was coming down on it before he saw it.

Better. Still needs work, but save that for a revision. (Oh, and work his name in there! "…before Al saw it.")

He jerked his leg to the left

No, that's not what he does. Look more carefully -- what's that motion?

He swung his leg --

Not the leg; his whole body. And, hey, that's his right foot!

He swung hard to the right, unbalanced, and came up against the corner of the building

Not clear enough, Dan'l. Look closely at that building.

… came up hard against the crumbling tenement

Clichéd, but better. But actually, he doesn't quite fall against it. Quite.

… unbalanced, and put his hand out against the corner of the crumbling tenement to keep from falling.

Okay, he's in position now. Let's bring on the Thing.

Something grabbed his arm

Hmmm. What does it feel like? Make it "something cold." And is that actually a "grab?" Well, it certainly isn't a "seize." "Grab" will do for now.

and jerked him into the alley.

Oh. It's an alley. And, to the side, I note that I must have been unconsciously saving the more violent "jerk" for this. Now, what's the first thing he notices?

He smelled the reek of rotting garbage

Close, but not quite.

An icy reek of rotting garbage stung his nostrils.

Not perfect, but better.

Okay… what have we got?

None of it would have happened if it hadn't been for the dogshit. His brandnew Nike was coming down on it when Al saw it. He swung hard to the right, unbalanced, and put his hand out against the corner of the crumbling tenement to keep from falling.

Something cold grabbed his arm and jerked him into the alley. An icy reek of rotting garbage stung his nostrils.

Well, Clive Barker it ain't, but I hope it's at least readable.

At any rate, what has happened here is that the scene has not merely been a matter of putting down what's in my head. What was in my head changed radically because of the writing.

3

But what happens when the reader reads the scene is very different. I started with a guy walking down the street, and built the rest by looking more closely and selecting. I wrote down far less than I saw (and what I wrote changed what I saw - I can't help reading as I write).

The reader begins (ideally) with no scene in her mind, and builds one from the text, sentence by sentence or even word by word. And it will not be the scene I began with, or even the one I ended with. Hopefully, if I've selected my details well, the scene will be vivid and interesting.

The reader starts with, well, dogshit.

None of it would have happened if it hadn't been for the dogshit.

That's all; just a lump of crap in an otherwise empty universe. Is it floating in space? Is it, perhaps, a huge vat of dogshit? The reader knows that it is significant because it causes something to happen. This is important dogshit.

His brandnew Nike was coming down on it before Al saw it.

Okay, the imaginary dogshit has just acquired a context. For now, it's still the most important thing in the imaginary universe, though the reader may now suspect that its importance lies in what it does to Al. This universe now contains three objects: a dogturd, a man -- or possibly a boy (but not a girl or woman unless the writer is seriously messing with pronouns) -- named Al, and a sneaker, which the reader will (provisionally) assume is on Al's foot.

I'm not going to go through and analyze the whole process of reading this passage. But it's clearly very different from the process of writing it. You get the idea.

4

People talk a great deal about the style of a text, as if style were an objective thing the text "had," some property of the text. In fact, style is the text.

That is: a text consists of significant marks related to each other on paper. "Style" is a way of describing the way those marks on the paper interrelate.

Give me the most exciting text you have ever read, and permission to change one word in each sentence to a "synonym," and I can make that text as dull as dull; give me permission to add a word, and I can make it all but unreadable. What people usually think of as "content" will not have changed.

Why is this possible? Because what people usually think of as "content" does not exist at all except as a product of "style."

Less metaphysically: the images the reader generates in her mind arise as a response to the interrelations of the marks on the paper. Change those interrelations and you change the reader's response.

Obviously, no two readers respond to the same marks on the paper (the same text) in the same way. Each of us has an independent and idiosyncratic set of responses, built up out of our own life-experiences and the sum of all the texts we have read prior to this one. "Good style" often seems to be a matter of creating a set of interrelationships in a text that a variety of readers can respond to -- a robust set of interrelationships. "Bad style," by contrast, often arises from a writer's addressing his own set of responses so perfectly that the text becomes impoverished or opaque to readers who do not share these responses.

And a brilliant writer can address his own responses while teaching them to a reader. This is why James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, who often seem "difficult" on a first encounter, become such a delightful experience on repeated encounters; and it is why writers who attempt to imitate them (usually) fall flat.

5

The received wisdom is that if you know a text's genre, you know something about what the text "contains."

This is nonsense. All a text contains is marks on paper.

Genres are not writerly constructs, but readerly constructs. That is, a genre tells a reader something about a text. To know that a text is "poetry" or "science fiction" or "a mystery" creates a set of expectations in the reader concerning the "content" of the text. More accurately, it gives her a starting set of assumptions for decoding the marks-on-paper into meaning, into pictures, events, etc., in her mind's eye.

Poetry is meant to be read very differently from an essay. Even narrative poetry is (or is meant to be) read very differently from a narrative essay. More technically: the process by which the reader builds up the images, ideas, etc., from a piece of poetry is radically different from that in which she builds up the images, etc., from an essay.

In short, genre is not a kind of text, but a way of reading texts. And the ways in which different types of texts are to be read (the way in which readers build up …) differ a great deal.

Of course, genres are also commercial constructs.

Prior to this century, prose fiction was almost a single genre; the primary difference was between the lengths. A short story was something different from a novel. H.G. Wells's first novels and stories, though original and even shocking, were considered just as fiction, to be read alongside those of near-contemporaries like Henry James. The primary difference based on "content" was between the kind of fiction that emphasized action -- the "penny-dreadfuls" and their ilk -- and the kind that emphasized analysis -- what better critics than I have chosen, for reasons that I understand but don't entirely accept, to dub "bourgeois fiction."

Some bourgeois fiction was concerned primarily with character analysis (psychology). Some of it was concerned with social or economic ("class") analysis. Some writers mixed them in various proportions.

But somewhere around the turn of the century, two things happened.

The first is probably related to the inauguration of modern psychology: analysis was replaced with exposition, leading to what some critics call "the priority of the subject." Joyce is probably the most extreme example of subject-oriented fiction, but Lawrence is more typical. Character analysis was easily converted to this model, but socioeconomic analysis was lost in the shuffle, and in fact came to be classed (by the "literary establishment") with action-oriented fiction.

The other thing that happened at roughly the same time was the mass reading revolution. As larger numbers of people became literate, and had the leisure to read, massive numbers of magazines began printing popular fiction. It may be simply to differentiate themselves in the marketplace, but some of these magazines specialized in particular categories of fiction. Not just "action" stories, but action stories with wartime aviation settings, or Wild West settings, or (whatever). These stories were almost as devoid of character exposition (as opposed to expository lumps about characters) as "literary" fiction was dominated by it.

So genres formed around these magazines, these marketplaces, these (perceived and created) specialty readers. Each genre had its own set of codes -- its own way of interrelating symbols in a text for a reader to use in producing ideas, images, etc.

The commercial categories that the magazines used to differentiate themselves became genres: both in the commercial sense, as publishing categories, and in the specific literary sense I'm proposing here, sets of readerly expectations and ways of reading. In some genres, the set of readerly expectations (from the writer's point of view: the set of tools available for creating meaning in this genre) became sufficiently rich (complex, robust) that it became possible to create new kinds of meaning. Mysteries, romances, and other categories each developed their own set of readerly expectations, and along with them standards of excellence. (Not the same thing; a writer who successfully meets the generic expectations but does little more can be very popular with readers who, at the same time, say "of course, he's not actually very good…")

6

Case in point: science fiction. SF is (properly) read in a way radically different from the way literary fiction is (properly) read. In reading a SF text, for example, the reader literally creates a mental construct (a "world") from the writer-selected details. A reader who has never learned how to read SF has not a clue as to how to make meaning from a sentence like:

The door deliquesced.

At most, she finds herself faced with a literal, and probably disquieting, image of a door melting into a liquid. An SF reader, on the other hand, finds in this sentence a great deal of implied data -- depending on the context in which the sentence was located; if in a scene of violence, for example, it implies a weapon capable of deliquescing a door.

As it happens, in the actual text from which the sentence is taken, the context implies that this is normal for a door. Thus, the reader experienced with SF judges that, in this world, there are technologies capable of producing doors which normally open by deliquescing (and, presumably, resolidify when it is time for them to close -- as, in fact, occurs a few sentences later).

It also causes the experienced SF reader to ponder on what kind of a culture wants deliquescing doors; on what advantages and disadvantages they offer with respect to the kind of doors we are familiar with; and, possibly, on how our society might evolve into that society. (More accurately, gives the experienced and willing and active SF reader the opportunity and motivation to ponder on these things; the text itself is passive.)

What makes an SF text SF, then, is precisely the ways in which a reader, responding to the text, creates in her mind a world different from the actual world. Because of this, SF can be a useful tool for critiquing the actual world.

Interestingly, just as it is possible for a reader of literary fiction to misread SF, it is equally possible for an SF reader to misread "literature." There is a fairly well-known (if anecdotal) case of a literature professor taking a year to familiarize himself with SF as a genre. When he returned to his normal field of study, he found, as he began rereading PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, that he was constructing in his mind the "kind of world" in which that story might take place.

(Whether this is actually a misreading or a valid, though peculiar, alternate reading, is an open question, and even more so for, e.g., Dickens; the milieu in which his fiction takes place is very much an artificial construct. Is it valuable to read Dickens as SF?)

7

About horror, then.

First, is horror actually a genre?

That is, are there specific readerly responses learned by experienced horror readers, which give her an advantage in responding intelligently and richly to a horror text?

One possible answer is to say that the answer is yes -- but that the genre is still young. Most of the generic codes of horror are still fairly crude.

That is not a judgmental term, by the way; to analogize again for just a moment to SF, early SF was almost always set on far planets and in distant futures. The generic codes which made it possible to create mental worlds different from the actual were still crude, in the very literal sense of the word. It was not until the codes had been established and honed somewhat that it became possible regularly to create worlds that differed more subtly from our own (that is, worlds of the very immediate future, or allohistoric worlds where the difference is not very dramatic).

At the same time, the refinement of these codes also made it possible for the radically-different discursive worlds to be more radically different from the actual than had been the case with early SF. The "Lensmen" universe of E.E. Smith seems very conservative in its social speculation today; it was radical in its time. A writer in the 1940s could not have written of a world as radically alteric as, say, Gene Wolfe's Urth (of the New Sun books); not because of censorship, but because the verbal technology to create such a world literally did not exist. Similarly, the five-minutes-from-now of books like Neuromancer would have been difficult to write (though some did attempt near-future) because the verbal technology wasn't sharp enough to slice that close to the "real" world and still be recognizably different from it.

If we are to view horror as a genre, I think that's its state today. There have been "scary stories," recognizable as such, since forever. There have been little communities of "horror writers" [e.g., the Lovecraft circle], for quite some while also. But only in the last couple of decades has there been an active and continuous community of writers and readers specializing in a particular genre of horror fiction.

8

But on more mature thought, I don't think horror is a genre at all, and (more to the point) can't be. Which isn't to say that there is no genre called "horror," because a quick glance at your local B.Waldencrown will make it abundantly clear that there is.

If there is one characteristic of real horror, it is this: Horror is shocking; and shock works only if something is unexpected. If it fails to surprise in some way, it may be terrifying, it may be scary, it may be gross, but it isn't shocking -- and it isn't horror. But if a genre is defined by its expectations, then the moment something becomes a genre, it becomes something that isn't horror.

Which is why, again and again, the best new horror seems to come at a strange angle, utterly unlike what the commercial entity called "horror fiction" happens to be doing at the time -- and often by writers not perceived as "horror writers." The Silence of the Lambs, to pick one example, was so effective precisely because people thought of it as a mystery or suspense novel (movie). Hannibal Lecter, and to a lesser extent Jamie Gumb, tossed aside the expectations for a character in that type of story, and so shocked -- and so became genuine horror.

In the meanwhile, the "horror section" of the bookshops and libraries become glutted with "horror" that titillates, irritates, frightens, grosses out, terrifies, thrills, amuses… in short, does everything but horrify. Some of them are even very good books.

But they do not shock, they do not horrify, and so they are not horror.