From Un-Me To Real Me: Writing For My Mother

Part 2

My first novel made it to print shortly before my eighteenth birthday. Being a teenager with a book to his credit makes one really cool really fast. My friends started looking up to me in a different way, even some adults were giving me that silent nod of approval.

The local paper did a write up about me and published an extremely unflattering photo. All my relatives bought copies of the book and...

Well, that was about it.

I was still in high school. I barely knew anything about writing books, let alone marketing one. I tried to get bookstores and libraries to let me come do signings and readings, but most didn't return my calls and the rest didn't really believe that I had actually published a book. One store owner I spoke to on the phone laughed at me. I can't really blame him. I didn't know what I was doing.

It was no big loss actually. The book was awful. My best friend at the time, Mitch, told me that the story was great, but the writing was terrible.

Ahhh, honesty.

So I returned to my first love—art.

My mind was still stuck in the gutter of fantasy.

A demon/orc/monster/thing. I'm not sure
what I was thinking when I drew this. lol!

In my last year of high school I attended some writing workshops, seminars, and retreats, anything that was free that I could get my hands on. I started studying dialogue and watching more movies that were known for their depth and quality of storytelling—The Godfather, Braveheart, The Matrix, Toy Story, Reservoir Dogs... oh, and lots of horror movies.

"Wait. Horror movies with quality storytelling? You're joking, right Craig?"

It may sound strange, but the 80s and early 90s were the golden age of horror films where Hollywood did some if its best storytelling. Evil was evil back then, and horror movies depicted mankind's fight against it in a great number of ways. Sure, Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the Thirteenth get sidelined as being mere slasher flicks, but watch Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and tell me there aren't some amazing universal truths and life parallels in there.

Freddy doesn't think you're ready for prime time.

Freddy, Jason, Michael Meyers. They scared the bejeebers out of me, but they also helped develop my fascination with all things disturbing, which began to play into my style of storytelling.

But that didn't make my mother happy.

I remember trying to write a comic book about a trio of men who are captured, tortured, and then rebuilt into these mutant/cybernetic superheroes. The opening graphics showed them getting diced up by a bunch of robots with saw blades and machine parts.

My mother saw it and freaked out.

At the time, her approval meant a lot to me, so my fantasy writing was very watered down. I was writing what I thought my audience would tolerate—but in my mind my audience was my mother. If she approved of it I could publish it.

Jason Voorhees thinks you should write more horror.

Eventually that same friend who told me that my first novel sucked, Mitch, came to me with an idea for a book of his own. He needed help writing it because English wasn't his strongest subject. We ended up collaborating on three books, two of which were published with slightly greater success than my first minor efforts.

Still, I wasn't pushing the boundaries with my imagination like I wanted to. I wanted my medieval fantasy stuff to be more... mediEVIL. The middle ages were bleak. People were tortured in horrific ways. Children were slaughtered or died of terribly maladies. Women were raped and forced to be slaves. I wanted my stories to reflect that period and incorporate some of the horror elements I was psychologically drawn to, but Mitch wanted to keep our stories watered down. Considering our family-oriented audience at the time, he was probably right, but I was ready to start tackling more mature subject matter.

Because, frankly, horror movies had taught me one very important lesson...

To be continued...