A Writer's Life

My writing career began when I was a teenager. In high school I wrote satirical stories that made people laugh, and it occurred to me, “Wow, I must know how to write.” Of course, my goal was to become a serious, “literary” writer. I wanted to be thought of as an artist, an innovator, an explorer in uncharted realms of language. From the very beginning I saw writing as a means of developing myself as a person, of gaining a knowledge of the world. As graduation neared, I decided that the best way to approach my literary goals was to major in journalism in college. Journalism, I reasoned, would teach me the craft of writing, and afford me a living. I would work for a big city newspaper to pay my dues and eventually hunker down in some secluded mountain cabin to write the Great American Novel.

When I got to college, however, I learned an important —albeit brutal — lesson: I didn’t know how to write. At least, that’s what my professors told me. And they were probably correct. The most painful episode came in my freshman year when I was called in to see the dean of the journalism department. His message to me was blunt and devastating: based on my grades, I was being kicked out of the school of journalism. “This journalism department,” the dean explained coolly, “has no room for mediocrity.”

I took my share of creative writing classes in college. I wrote lots of stories, but none of them were very good, let alone publishable. It’s not that I didn’t try, but it seemed that each story presented me with a unique set of challenges beyond my skills. At their best, the stories were open-ended experiments that never quite fell to earth. I left college a lot wiser, but no less determined to live the writer’s life, to become a “literary” writer.

I moved to San Francisco in the summer of 1980. I got a job at a tourist magazine, not, as you might have expected, as a writer, but as a bookkeeper. My ambition of becoming a journalist was not entirely defeated, and I thought maybe I could somehow develop into a writer if I worked at a magazine around other writers. Unfortunately, I ended up hanging out with bookkeepers. They were very nice people, but they didn’t know jack about writing. Later, I worked at a public relations agency. Still later, as a cab driver. Along the way I got a freelance job at a film and video newspaper, and produced some decent articles, so I did manage to lift the journalism bugaboo somewhat.

Throughout the 80’s I continued to write fiction — but in fits and starts. I wrote experimental stuff, influenced by some of my literary heroes, people like Faulkner, Kafka, and Robbe-Grillet. I wrote stories with atmosphere but without plot, with odd time signatures, sudden changes of scene, and multiple points of view. Stories that never quite fell to earth.

By the end of the decade, I had been at the writing game for about 15 years and I still hadn’t been published. I had submitted my short fiction to magazines but without success. I had started novels and couldn’t complete them. By 1989, I simply gave up, concluding in dismay that I was not capable of writing decent fiction. All the stories I had ever written seemed false and superficial to me, pseudo-literary exercises meant only to impress. Where was the heart and soul in my work? I couldn’t find it. I began to dabble at screenwriting. If I couldn’t write fiction, I reasoned, perhaps I could write films. There was money in screenwriting, after all. I had some connections in Hollywood through my father, so it seemed quite plausible at the time that I could move to L. A. and develop a career in movies. Since fiction was impossible, it seemed to be my only chance of making it as a writer.

During the year or so that I was developing scripts and imagining a possible life in Hollywood, I began to read, purely for enjoyment, the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. I can’t recall a time when reading fiction was more fun or exhilarating. I had always enjoyed horror fiction — like great comedy, horror had a penchant for violating good taste and political correctness that made me cheer. But Lovecraft revealed another of the genre’s qualities: the hint of cosmic menace lurking just beneath the surface of everyday experience. It was this inference of chaos at the heart of things that opened up something in my own imagination. Horror was not something that I, as a former aspirant to “literary” fiction, could take seriously as art (that would be too threatening to my ego), but it was a great deal of fun. So I read Lovecraft avidly and told no one.

During the summer of 1989, in the middle of writing my latest screenplay, I became stuck. The words just wouldn’t come. Then it dawned on me that screenwriting wasn’t “deep” enough for me to sustain a long-term interest. I had hit a brick wall, and abandoned my script in creative confusion. With screenwriting now gone, and fiction impossible, it seemed that I had outgrown all my old expectations, that my days as a writer were over.

Sometime after this, later that same summer, completely directionless and without a voice, I had a funny idea. I decided to write a parody of Lovecraft’s fiction. Something merely to amuse myself. Not "serious" literature, of course, just a clever pastiche for laughs. I even had a title: “The Pizza on Yuggoth.” I had a few ideas in my head and needed to do some research to make the story believable. I wanted to set the piece in a small California town like Petaluma, so off to Petaluma I went in search of atmosphere. For two weeks I was completely immersed in this “farce”. By the time I had finished the story, though, nothing about pizza and little of Lovecraft’s mythical planet Yuggoth remained. The story, in fact, wasn’t too funny at all. It was dark, searingly painful, and most definitely not a farce.

I knew that something profound had changed in me. I knew that I would never be the same person again, that in writing this tale I had crossed a fateful threshold from which there was no possible return. After all the years of amorphous and half-baked work, I had suddenly attained a mastery of my subject. This feeling of personal epiphany was quite palpable at the time, as indeed it is to this day. For the first time since I began to write, I had discovered an authentic voice for all the pain and terror in my life. It was as if horror fiction had cracked open the block of ice containing my heart and had handed it to me, pulsing, on a platter of gold. I also knew for a certainty that I had finally written a publishable story. The next year, the story in question, “The Horror at Santa Alma,” appeared in a small press magazine. So, inexplicably and completely out of the blue, I found myself a writer of nightmares — and I haven’t looked back until now.

Over the next eight years I wrote dozens of stories — works of weird horror, soft science fiction, macabre surrealism. Some of it was good work, some not so good. The good work tended to get published. Although I was never published a great deal, it happened frequently enough in ratio to my small output to give me the confidence to keep at it. I would have written more stories, no doubt, if I hadn’t turned to novel writing, which I’ve pursued almost exclusively from the mid ‘90s to the present.

Over the years I would think now and then about the best way to arrange my tales should I ever wish to collect them. Now that such a collection is completed, it’s clear to me that my stories of the ‘90s fall into three categories. In the first category are those stories that ponder the nature of reality — these are tales populated by demons and aliens, and feature speculations about life in other dimensions. More than this, they are stories about the fear of glimpsing the deeper reality behind the surface of things — the terror that comes when the veil is momentarily lifted to reveal a vaster truth. In the second category are tales which more or less fall under the rubric of Sexual Horror. They investigate in painful detail deformed ways of loving and longing, sexual obsession, childhood trauma, the unexamined rage lurking within our hearts. A final class of tales could be titled Assorted Grotesques. These pieces don’t have a common theme, but in both style and subject they tend to be more surreal than the pure horror tales of the first two groups. All the stories save one contain some element of the supernatural or fantastic.

Writing is a grueling, heart-rending process, and it’s lonely work to boot. I dare not imagine the experiences I might have had, the money I might have made, or the lovers I might have kept, if it weren’t for my obsession with storytelling. The most challenging thing, of course, is that you have to spend thousands of hours in a room (or, if you’re wise, in the park) working purely on faith that your writing has meaning — not just to you, but to others. Writers write, ultimately, not for the money, not even for themselves entirely, but to be read by other people. In the end, you do your work as honestly as you can, you send it out, and you let go of the outcome. I think of my tales as little bridges between the dark side of my heart and the world. If I’m lucky, a few intrepid souls will cross some of those bridges that I’ve laid down. If they do, I promise to meet them halfway.

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