You’d miss them wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you? As a reader you would have to find something else to read, or talk to your partner more, or watch more television, or, sorry to mention this, take more exercise. Sure it might be novel (pun) for a while but just think if it dragged on for over a week, or more. You hadn’t read a short story for a few days, or dipped into a novel since last weekend. Think of the withdrawal symptoms you would experience. The narrative drive on the breakfast cereal packet would begin to take on aspects of supernatural fantasy; the daily newspaper would rustle eerily as you unfolded it on the train.

    Eventually the crisis blew over, as they all do, and books began to fill the shelves again. The main sellers put their stock back up, the small press pulled out their scheduled publications, and the websites got their accepted work online.  Then something began to dawn on them all. Something far more serious than a shortage, a temporary hiatus in book production; there were no more stories coming in; the postman was bringing only bills and the odd postcard. The contributions were lacking.

     Where would we be without the storytellers? Almost from the outset, and certainly once people had learned they could trust us, we were getting on average four stories a day in for Enigmatic Tales. Not a huge amount perhaps, but just think of nearly thirty stories a week, and we published quarterly, so that is more than 350 stories a quarter, and we published maximum 20 each issue.

     The demand to tell a story in Britain is vast. There are all kinds of storytellers out there, some good, a few very good, and some needing some guidance and help as they fashion their craft. We accepted all styles of supernatural fiction from traditional to modern, from ghost, through horror to psychological. Don’t forget we weren’t yet a paying market, and still the writers sent their stories in.

     One of the joys since we announced our suspension, and occasionally before, was to get a letter of thanks from a writer whose story we were the first to publish. To think that you are helping forge a possible career is remarkably rewarding. So where would we have been without all those storytellers? Publishing very little, obviously, but also very much the poorer in terms of enjoyment and creativity.

     So, why do the tellers give us all their stories? Ego sometimes, because they feel what they have to say is important and it needs, it demands, to be shared with an audience. Pride sometimes that they have created something they think is worthwhile and they want to have it admired while they smile uncertainly. Payment, there are paying markets and a career can be made from writing. Before that stage is the making a name for yourself furlongs, where the exposure is the critical thing. If a critique mentions your name favourably the chances may be that the next contribution you send in might get a more appreciable reading from the editor. Often the story just burns to get out and you can no more keep it locked inside than you can prevent a belch at that first meeting with the prospective in-laws.

      Once the muse has taken shape and the story has been written there is no more natural action than to want to get it read by someone. Friends are fine to begin with but are they really about to condemn your creation to the hell of unfavourable criticism when all they really care about are you and your friendship? Unless they are writers as well they can’t be expected to wholly appreciate what it means to write a story, to constrict your thoughts into a plot and a story narrative, and to consign that to the immortality of printed format. So you have to take that tentative step, akin almost to that first faltering step you took as a baby reaching out into pre-toddling stage, of sending your child out into the big bad world of editors and publishers and critics and other writers.

     Other writers, now there is an audience. They of course, know what a story and its structure is all about, after all they have the same desires as you to write and to become famous and rich and handsome and have a sex life. So their comments will be well balanced and constructive won’t they? So they don’t get jealous that you have appeared in XYZ print magazine and they have been rejected more times than they can count. They don’t think everything they write is better than your scribbling. They don’t see you as a rival and we all know there is only so much time the big boys can give to reading work sent in, so if yours gets read theirs won’t. They will be fair and honest and help you develop.

     Of course some, the majority, will, but as are all our opinions, all they can offer is subjective views. The editors of most of the small press operations are pretty even minded. It is in their interests to foster talent because as we found in the shortage in the opening paragraphs, the alternatives are gruesome. Okay, some editors are writers as well, and may be judging your work from a different standpoint than an editor pure and simple. (Can’t think of a pure editor – but plenty of simple ones – boom, boom.) But if you find an editor who offers criticism on your work that actually seems to be helpful and constructive, marry them. To get, especially at an early point in your writing life, someone who is prepared to work with you and develop ideas and styles with you, to explain where a narrative needs more drive, and paragraphs need cutting is invaluable.

      We had stories sent in from retired people who had just completed (too soon some of them) their first writing course and thought we would like to see their hand written account of a coach trip to see a castle that was quite spooky. We had stories, sometimes six at a time, yes six multiple stories, sent in from writers who knew we didn’t publish science fiction, but if we just read their science fiction, we would change our minds. There was the novella, again in a style – high fantasy – that we didn’t publish, but with a letter explaining that the story was written very quickly, so it might contain errors, but not to worry, because the author actually thought they could squeeze a short novel out of it, and anyway it had been sent out to five other magazines simultaneously so they knew one of us would take it.

     Storytellers need to be so much more these days. No longer is it sufficient to be ensconced in an ivory turret committing gems  of wisdom onto parchment with a fine quill pen. There has to be research into markets, reading of newsletters to see who wants what; there has to be an understanding of how to approach an editor, and what the editors name is – Dear Editors is as bad as Sir or Madam. There has to be realism that your story might not blow the socks off from the first person to read it. We all have different tastes. We published stories that other people said were amateur. We liked them so we published them. Sometimes it is the responsibility of an editor/publisher, certainly at our level, to encourage through more than fine words in a rejection letter. If there is latent talent there, why not publish?

     Stories. There are only six basic plots, or is it ten, or one? Anyway it isn’t that many. Therefore if an editor is reading a lot of stories they will soon get to recognise stock characters, ideas, plots, and so forth. Stories need to be told well. We published good stories that were told badly when we received them. With some work done at our suggestion by the author the telling got better. We published some bad ideas that were brilliantly told because the writer had enough style and flair to overcome the familiarity of the plot.

      We rejected quite a few as well. As storytellers ourselves we have had a couple of rejection letters and slips in the past. It hurts, don’t pretend it doesn’t. You don’t send a story in believing it will fail. If you do you may as well give in now and take up stamp collecting. You have to develop a well-tuned sense of the ‘keep it all in proportion’. Stay well balanced, be tough, believe in what you are writing, make sure it is the very best you can do and keep sending it out until there is not a single market left. Then start again; although it might be best to re-evaluate the piece at this stage just in case you finally have to admit to your own conscience that perhaps it may lack a certain something.

      Practice and practice again. You didn’t learn to ride a bike first go and you won’t get writing a story perfect the first time. There is so much to learn. You can read a How To book but better to write, throw away, write, throw away, write…hmmm, maybe. Never throw away completely any idea. Store it in a drawer somewhere so that when you reflect in the years and months ahead, and you recall that wonderful zombie story what you did write, you can call up the evidence for the prosecution and re-write or forget.

      How rich is the creative diversity that makes up the British supernatural fiction scene at present. That’s is not a question, but a statement. Forget the doom-merchants who predict (again) the end of the genre. Someone once said that “horror” is not a genre, so as a style of literature let us be under no false illusions that it is teetering on the edge of some great back abyss.

     Magazines come and go in the small press, but the market is buoyant. Major publishers shun new names but some will filter through. Not always the best, sometimes the well connected, but that is always the case, in all walks of life. The Internet provides a forum for expansion, but so does the development of small presses into hardbacks. Does the small press magazine resemble what it did two, three years ago? Greater professionalism on the back of desktop publishing, coupled with stylish printing has made even amateur magazines have the look and feel of “real” books.

      The biggest asset though is the talent and sheer dedication of the people who work within the genre for little or no monetary reward. They do it for the love of what they do and because they want to make a difference. As we expand this column’s thoughts in the coming months we will be looking at some of the British talent that helps to make the stories come alive through the editing, publishing and certainly the storytelling.

      For now, switch off the engine, preserve the last drops of unleaded, and reach for that final quarterly issue 10 of Enigmatic Tales and think of the talent of the writers, and artists that have made it, and its compatriot publications possible.

Copyright LH Maynard & MPN Sims 2000

Illustrations copyright Iain Maynard.

       *       

History & Traditions (March 2000) from
At The Worlds End (Mark Chadbourn's website)

 One aspect for consideration when reading a supernatural tale is the circumstances under which the story was written. Should we involve ourselves in thoughts of what the writers life might have been like when they were toiling away at the PC, word processor, electric typewriter, manual typewriter, pen and ink, quill, cave wall, tablet of stone…?
Do the life and times of writers present and past affect our enjoyment of a piece of fiction?

            Clearly the influences on a writer, the minutia of their life, may have a great bearing on the style of their work. It can be of no little importance to wonder whether a change of life style would have meant a change in artistic direction. Was the writer married or single? Professional or amateur? Sad or happy? City, village; young, old; ill or in good health? Did they have all day to write or were they forced into writing in snatched moments? It is to no special advantage to have to spend all day at work then to come home and immediately place oneself in the frame of mind conducive to good writing. Even worse, horrors of responsibility, if there is a spouse who expects attention, concentration on conversation, help with washing up, children to entertain and put to bed.

There can be little doubt that the influences on the life of a writer such as Poe coloured his writing. No matter how great his natural tendency for the darker side of life, no matter how much a love of the night was born in him, the poverty and grief, which he knew, allowed his gift of eloquent woe to find its voice with deeper depths of agony and genius.

The life pattern of a modern person can be thought in itself to be alien to the emotive force of dark fiction. For the most part living in clean, bright, centrally heated homes, with human companionship so near, even through such devices as the telephone, e-mail, mobiles, pagers, and more. It becomes increasingly difficult to grasp the feeling of living your work that writers of old must have experienced. Perhaps it is over-romantic to imagine the writer of the past huddled over the light of a flickering candle in an otherwise darkened room. Alone with their imagination, with no electronic stimuli, no diversions from the mood of their creation, sheltered from outside influences. By living the horror of the ghost story mood, or the atmosphere of it, could the same be more easily transmitted to the written page? The writer of today must first think themselves into the mood of their fiction by, to a large extent, ignoring the normality of their surroundings, rather than being able to feed from, and upon it, as would be ideal.

Then there is television; the numbing of the senses, the intruding into imagination, the believing in the banal. Where does it provide the creative stimulus for the supernatural tale? It tells when it should cloak, it reveals when it should mask, it explains when it should be enticing. No extension of the creative framework here; rather a bland catch-all formula that drapes a cloud of easy viewing that batters at imagination and its defences until the wall crashes and true creation is lost.

Leaving the sterile atmosphere of modern life to one side, one of the least advantageous influences on today’s writers must be the media of film; cinema and admittedly to a lesser extent with regard to supernatural fiction, the demon television. To say that all the best stories were written before the advent of screen horror would be wholly inaccurate but it cannot be ignored that the ability to see on the screen that which previously could only have been imagined from the written word has an immense affect on the modern reader, and therefore by extension the modern writer.

To take just one example, that of the vampire story, one of the most basic, and finest of horror vehicles. No matter how subtle the writer is, once it becomes obvious we are reading a vampire story then the images conjured are invariably not those intended by the writer but those of Schreck, Lugosi, Lee, or whichever cinematic character the story reminds us of. The force behind the writing is diminished because the vital ingredient of imagination on the part of the reader has been dulled by memories of film, or worse of the circumstances under which we went to see the film. So the writer of a vampire story may today be faced with a reader who does not pale at thoughts of the blood-sucking monster but rather one whose mind is busy recalling the delights of sitting in the back row of the cinema.

The basic and still much respected ingredients of the genre have been over-exposed by the film world so that their power does not work so deeply on today's audiences as they might have done a century ago. It might be offered that horror films have not only had an adverse affect on writing but also on the enjoyment of reading a good horror story. The words more often conjure cinematic images rather than the private images that they would have done previously.

The reader of The Seventeenth Hole At Duncaster today cannot experience the same atmosphere that the first reader knew in the 1920’s. Their lives are vastly different. Their knowledge is different; therefore their senses absorb the words differently and appreciate the meaning and the moods in different ways.

There is sometimes the temptation to consider works of old as being superior in some way, purely because they have the competency of longevity. Even allowing for the sentimental regard with which stories of the past are held today, there is a stylistic difference between them and their modern counterparts, and this cannot be ignored when discussing the influences on writing. While a story may have been effective in 1900 it may not satisfy today, may be inaccessible due to style, rather than content, because its message may already be over-familiar through cinema, television, other works of fiction. What convinced a century ago now appears merely dated and mundane. Creaking doors, and draughty ghosts do not convince us as modern readers. Where our ancestors dreaded their intrusion, we merely wait for the bigger terror, the higher fix of horror.

Each age has had its share of true horrors, the reality of which brings us to book when we worry about the fictional versions. Since the raw carnage of 1914-18 and World War Two we cannot look with the same concerned expression upon fictional fright. Add to that the daily horrors now so freely reported in an increasingly sensationalist media and we have a wall growing ever thicker through which the suspension of disbelief must break. The narrative drive must reach wrap speed these days before it engages a gear high enough for our attention to be provoked. So de-sensitised have we become to stories of children killing each other, to mindless violence, sex, drugs, corruption, infidelity and genocide, that the fictional terrors we create in our imaginations must be more subtle, more inventive than ever to jolt the reader out of their de-humanised veil of disbelief.

There are of course two ways to look at criticism. Many people would argue that art must live by today's standards, so that a film made fifty years ago must stand up to the techniques of today before it can be considered valid. This seems too easy an option. It places no importance upon circumstance, and indeed it seems to ignore the influences, surrounding the making of the film, or the writing of the story if considering fiction. This is not to suggest that excuses should be made for the writer if the story was written under difficult circumstances, If a wife has just left a husband should we excuse a poor story written as a result? Hardly. But if a work of art was considered valid when it was first created then it cannot be accurate if thirty years later it is deemed poor if it does not affect a modern audience in the same way. Is the modern audience a keener critic because a few years have passed? We may have become familiar with the style or the theme, but that is not the fault or responsibility of the writer. The art has not changed, merely the opinions and sophistication of the audience. Their views and tastes have changed but the words written remain exactly the same. It can surely only be accurate to take historical perspective into account when reading an old story. If a story fails to ignite us today we must look for a better reason than merely to suggest it has lost its spark along the way.

Would it be wholly valid to explore the avenue of thought that an influence on writing today is the greater availability of fiction to the mass market? After all it is within everyone's grasp today to buy a book at any one of numerous bookshops, or to borrow it from the Public Library. This availability was not always the case. A second rate work of fiction today may well reach a far wider audience than a better book years ago simply because the distribution channels are so much more diverse these days. The Internet has increased this phenomenon even more with its ability to access fiction on the web sites as an addition to the printed page. Another medium available now but not previously is the talking tape where stories and novels can be abridged and spoken without the need even for the effort of lifting a book in leisure. Allowing for his distaste for the general public, and that it was not his intention to write for critical acclaim, it is interesting to ponder how the writing of H P Lovecraft might have altered if fed to a wider audience, and the difference it might have made if subject to a publishers deadlines.

Trends can sometimes be seen in current fiction that suggest a deliberate attempt to fool the voracious appetite of the reading public, sated as they are by these diverse images. Stories whose every intention is vagueness; over-explored themes deserted for stories of minimum plotline but maximum exploration of the mind of modern man. Then there are the stories of excess gore and sexual athletics. The intention of many modern stories seems to be to place Man as the monster, his way of life as the creator, and his mind as the catalyst that sparks the horror. To do this exclusively suggests that the writers believe the terrors of old are ineffective in today's society and that new and less traditional horrors are required. New approaches are always welcome but we should not ignore the classical in the pursuit of the wholly different just for its own sake. The meaning behind the words should not always be so obscure as to leave the vagueness so clearly worked for as to give any feeling, emotion of atmosphere, no chance of survival as the puzzle develops.

Stories that are obvious are never satisfactory be they one day or one hundred years old. The converse is equally true in that stories that baffle to deceive are simply infuriating. From what viewpoint should a work of fiction be judged? Some good stories are poorly told, others well written but clichéd in plot. In all probability the only true way to judge a story is objectively and yet that disavows the emotional pull that should exist if a work of fiction is to engage our full attention. It is possibly because many critics take the subjective path that arguments as to merit develop. The only true way is to read with a subjective eye whilst the objective mind can sort the poor craft from the well-meaning ideas. Merits to one are defects to another.

In terms of fiction the influences upon a writer are many and varied. This was always true and is more so today. The electronic stimuli, the modern stresses and pressures, the familiarity the reader has with themes and ideas, all conspire now to make the storywriter perform to their best if they are to emulate the writers of old. Because a story is decades old does not mean it should not be read and enjoyed today; though it should be treated with respect of age and not expected to perform as though a teenager in the prime of youth – make allowances for style, pace and even content - please.

A writer draws on many influences in the pursuance of their craft; their life style, their past, their aims when writing, their known audience, their publisher’s wishes. Our modern emphasis on bodily comforts seem to spare the writer of horror the chance to experience the terrors at first hand, and yet each day carries with it some new nightmare from which to draw ideas. Dark fiction remains now as then, a valid release valve from the horrors of the real world, and a reminder that despite modern sophistication of living we should never get too complacent.

 ENDS