Tag Archives: Fiction

Thought of the Week: The Harshest Critic

The Redemption of Erâth is nearing completion (yes, I know I’m late – I’ve had a busy and difficult week, but the last chapter will be out later this week; you’ve waited this long, you can wait a little longer!), and I’d thought I’d like to share some thoughts on its development. In particular, I thought it might be interesting to discover how it has grown over time, and and how I’ve received, and adapted to, feedback.

They say you are your own harshest critic. They’ve clearly never written for an eight-year-old boy. As you may already know, I began this whole tale as a story for my son, that we might read together as it grew. The inspiration for this came from the serial novels of Charles Dickens, and I loved the idea of keeping him (and myself) waiting eagerly for the next weekend, the next chapter, never knowing what was to come (truthfully; I often had little more idea about the next set of events than he did).

Over time, the tale has grown from the simpler children’s story I had thought it would be, into something much deeper, and much darker. Sometimes I feel almost as if I’m not in control of the tale; that I’m merely the teller of someone else’s story, that I’m merely relating the facts of what happened. I remember trying to explain this to my son one evening; he said, “You mean you stole it?” Ouch.

This is where it gets interesting. I had no idea when I started this that it wouldn’t be my own invention. I thought that I would write, and talk about it with my son, and together we would work out what was going to happen next. Unfortunately, I quickly realized that I couldn’t just make up the next chapter. What, then, was I to do with his feedback, and his thoughts? You see, I needed this to be interesting for him.

When I sat down with him at bedtime, for the first chapter, he asked why I didn’t have our usual book (Harry Potter at the time, I believe it was). I asked if he remembered that I had told him I had wanted to start reading a story to him that I had written. He said, “Awwwww…do we have to?”

Auspicious beginning, no? I asked him to bear with me for the first chapter, and make his mind up from there. So I read, and he listened, and he fidgeted, and I was becoming very nervous; at the end of it I asked what he thought of it. “Um…it was okay,” he said. “A little boring.” I wondered if that was what Tolkien’s children had said when he first read The Hobbit to them.

So I returned to the book, and dejectedly started on the second chapter. The following weekend, I pulled out Harry Potter, sat down and started to read, when he said, “Dad, where’s your iPad?” (I had put the first chapter on the iPad to read to him in bed). So – not a complete failure, then!

Things really picked up with chapter three (A Tale of Blood and Battle), and became our weekly routine from then on.

The thing is, it became important for me to keep the audience happy. From this early experience, blood an battle clearly won out over dialogue and back story. But what was I to do? This tale simply wasn’t going to have a lot of blood and battle, I could already see that early on! So I did what any self-respecting historian would do: I embellished.

It became a weekly judgement of storytelling technique, plot interest and emotional level. Sometimes it got too scary (like when the wolves surround Brandyé in a dream); sometimes too soppy (such as when Brandyé and Sonora start to spend time with each other). And sometimes, it was just plain boring (I could tell when he started pretending to ride his stuffed animals instead of listening to me).

Still…in the long run, I think it has been at least a mild success. He’s never asked me to stop reading (in fact, he’s reminded me the few weekends we were away and unable to read), and he’s even told me he wants me to include some creatures of his own design in the later books (some more embellishing here, I guess). He even started writing his own epic fantasy story about ninjas, which is awfully cute.

The wonderful – and torturous – thing about this weekly feedback has been its dreadful honesty. “What did you think of this week’s chapter?” – “It was really boring; can’t there be more fighting next week?” Sometimes I wondered myself if I was dragging things out too long, and here was the proof: if someone who wanted to know more thought it was boring, what on earth would someone think that had no prior vested interest in the story?

In the end, he’s enjoyed listening, and I’ve enjoyed reading. He does want me to write the sequels, as long as I promise there’ll be more battle. I’m pretty sure there will be (embellished or not). But wow – if you ever want to know the truth about your new novel, read it to a kid. They’ll tell it like it is.

Tales of Despair: Falling Through the Roof

October 2nd, 1988.

An airplane engine falls through the roof of a teenage boy’s home, and should have killed him: should have, had he not been lured out of the house by an enormous rabbit.

Sound familiar? Then you’ve probably seen Donnie Darko. It is a masterpiece of dark cinema, a mind-bending trip into the world of insanity, and it does so in the most realistic of ways: by making the insanity appear sane. For ultimately, this is what we think, isn’t it, those of us whose grip on reality is tenuous? It’s the world that’s gone mad.

The rabbit plagues Donnie; the rabbit tells Donnie the world is going to end in twenty eight days, six hours, forty-two minutes and twelve seconds. And oh, Jake Gyllenhaal does such a good job of believing it, never doubting it, and descending into the madness that comes with the freedom of knowing it’s all going to end. Yet all the while, we remain rooted firmly in the real world. School goes on; work goes on; life goes on. The rabbit is an illusion; the rabbit is real.

Certainly, the world doesn’t seem like it’s going to end. Nor does it for any of us, of course. Almost certainly, when the end does come, it will be abrupt, it will be instant, and we won’t know any different. But Donnie…oh, Donnie knows.

And it is despair that comes with this. The knowledge that any thing, any action, is meaningless. He burns down the principal’s house, and it is meaningless. A vile secret is unearthed because of it, and it, too is meaningless. He falls in love…and it is meaningless.

The story behind this film unravels the very nature of what is real and what isn’t, and in a very Descartian way dissects the meaning of armageddon. For if we end, the world ends, and there is no way of knowing otherwise. It is an end of life, an end of existence, and most importantly, and end of self.

And in the face of this ending, the destruction of self, Donnie is given a choice, and the choice is this: to let the world end…or to let the world end.

Few people will be given the chance to learn of their death before it comes. Fewer still will make the choice to roll over in bed, and let the engine fall through the roof.

Tales of Despair: Wyndham’s Apocalypse

Does anyone remember John Wyndham? His post-war novels set the stage for science-fiction to come, and despite H.G. Wells‘ prescient War of the Worlds,  he is known to this day as the godfather of the disaster novel.

The influence of his seven stories of terror and disaster have been felt across time and medium, being seen in future novels and films for decades after his lifetime. In particular, his first three novels, The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes and The Chrysalids set the stage for apocalypse and disaster, and the strength of human survival in the wake of mass disaster.

Imagine the terror of waking, blind in a hospital, to nothing. No sound, no smell, no sight. Wandering through the streets of London, and discovering that every other person in the great city is equally blind. Some run in fear; some capture the few sighted in violence. Many are dead. All civilization is crumbling around you.

Then, quietly and in the distance, the whisper of monsters approaches. Towering, flesh-eating monsters that ought never to have been released. That ought not to exist. That ought not to be able to move, for they are plants. Yet move they do, and their advantage is great, for among the blind, they sense the movement of the frightened, and strike them down. Poison, stings, death and rotting flesh. Tearing humans limb from limb.

The 2002 film 28 Days Later… pays homage to this brilliantly, with Jim awaking in a hospital to the sound of silence. Stunning scenes of entirely empty London streets reflect the confusion and fright of Bill Masen, suddenly thrust into a twisted reality from which there is no waking, no escape. The fight for dominance among the few survivors parallels the dictatorial colonies of Wyndham’s post-apocalytic vision.

Paramount to these tales is the gut-wrenching realization that there is no return to normality. The world as we know it is gone, and the primal laws of evolution rise: the survival of the fittest. The weak die; the world diminishes. Hope is forsaken, and the sole thought is to make it to the next dawn.

When I first read these stories as a child, I was terrified; I saw tendrils of barbs and poison pushing gently at my window in my nightmares, insidious and threatening. I saw movement in the bushes walking home from school, and ran past the rhododendrons in fright. I haven’t read the novel again since.

However, the most heartbreaking tale of strife remains, to me, The Chrysalids. Here, the apocalypse is long-gone, and the survivors have settled into a rural, medieval society, where preservation of the normal is the law of the bible, and the deviants are hunted down and destroyed. Deviants, however, are abundant. Some are hideously deformed; some are barely noticeable. A single extra toe is cause for banishment and death. And in this setting, a new strain of human comes into being: ones who can sense the thoughts of others. The horror of being driven out by one’s own parents dominates the mood of the story, and I cried bitter tears when David, Rosalind, Petra and the others – mere children, naive and alone in the world – are gradually discovered and hunted in violence by their own families.

Wyndham had his finger firmly on the pulse of despair and hopelessness, inspired perhaps by his horrific experiences in the war, including the storming of the Normandy beaches. Such visions are indelible, and it is possible that these novels were his catharsis; the only way he knew of exorcising these demons.

His terror, his fright and his visions of destruction have inspired generations of creative artists; the world is fortunate to have had such a bleak storyteller.