My brother is so hard to scare.
Really, he is. No horror movies scare him, no ghost stories chill his blood, no
paranormal show makes him want to sit in a whitewashed room lit by a hundred
LED bulbs and wait until morning. I can’t say I’m not the same way. I’ve read
so many haunted house and ghost stories that I’m surprised I’m still a sane
person. (In the broadest sense of the term.) Rarely do I find myself trembling
beneath my skin and wishing I had not picked up a book filled with ghost
stories. When I was in grade school, I devoured books like Scary Stories and its sequels. You know what I’m talking about, the
Alvin Schwarz books designed to strike fear into the average middle-schooler’s
heart and leave them quivering underneath their bedcovers, a flashlight in
hand, the light on, and their eyes either jammed shut or wide open. Those
stories never really scared me. Frankly, nothing really scares me. Startles,
yes; the easiest way to startle me is to stand somewhere I won’t expect to see
you and stare at me, waiting for me to discover you. And when I do:
Yeah, I can’t say I’m proud of that.
Really, though, reading something
“scary” has an effect on me equivalent to a really annoying person trying to
tell me a story that will “freak me out.” The type that kind of sits forward
in the dark and likes to exaggerate the essentially scary parts and only succeeds
at dropping a cheese bomb. Been there, done that, over it. Let’s get into the
really freaky stuff. Stuff that will make my un-freak-out-able brother want to
sleep in that whitewashed room. Stuff I can’t ignore as it floats around my
head and asks to be written. Stuff like…
Charles Dickens.
DON’T LAUGH AT ME.
No, seriously. Have you ever read
his ghost stories? “The Haunted House” is a little slower and doesn’t make much
sense sometimes, but that’s really the only one I’ve read that hasn’t freaked
me out (too much). Just try reading “The Signalman” or “The Murder Trial” or
“The Chimes” at night by yourself, tell me your organs won’t clench inward.
Yeesh.
(By the way, “The Murder Trial” has
to be my favorite one. “The Signalman” runs a close second, though.)
When you stop and think about it,
today’s “horror,” today’s “ghost stories,” today’s stuff like that...well,
I think it tries too hard. Let me use the movie Mama as an example. (And if you won’t let me use it, too bad; I’m
going to anyway.)
The storyline of Mama is the classic “ghost story” that
we all know being told at campfires growing up. Person in some distant time had
something tragic happen, something went wrong and the person died with
unfinished business, this unfinished business leads the person’s ghost to
attach itself to someone/something/somewhere, and some unsuspecting skeptic
intrudes and eventually has to come to terms with the ghost’s existence and
quest so they can help the spirit find rest. Sometimes new elements are
introduced to make it “zazzy.”
Well, the zazz has run dry. I
venture to say it ran dry quite a while ago.
Charles Dickens doesn’t follow these
rules. His stories are freaky because you don’t know what to expect. The cliché
got ground up by a carriage wheel in some London gutter after Dickens threw it
from his window and watched it fall, laughing the whole while. He decided to
take every ghost story and make it something people wouldn’t expect. Even “The
Haunted House” had moments when I wanted to close my Kindle’s case and lay back
in broad daylight until I had the nerve to move and not see something in every
shadow, mirror, window, etc.; and THAT, my friends, is where I’m heading:
prodigiousness. Unexpectedness. Unforeseeable turns of event.
In other words, throw open the
windows of your mind, and toss out the cliché.
Let me give you an example: A story
like “The Signalman” written by someone on today’s ghost story market would
have the signalman be the person that gets killed by a ghost and have the ghost
come after the guy who was keeping the signalman company. But in Charles
Dickens’ story, the “ghosts” that the signalman was seeing were actually
foreshadowing events of his own oncoming death, witnessed by someone who
couldn’t see or hear any of what the signalman saw or heard, and not due to
ignorance or disbelief like in today’s market. The narrator—our “someone”—simply
happened to stumble into something that he had no real place in, and when he
befriended the signalman he knew of the stuff despite the fact that he couldn’t
see or hear it. (Which, by the way, is partly why I had a hard time swallowing
when reading this one.) All these rules that Charles Dickens defied—unknowingly
or not—has set a standard that I hope to follow in my own writing, no matter if
I do happen to pen a ghost story or anything else.
Hence my title of “Repudiator.”
Like Charles Dickens, I throw open
the windows of my mind and let fall every cliché we as a culture and a people
have been suckered into believing as “good storytelling,” or “originality,” or
anything else stupid and mundane and Mainstream-Instant-Oatmeal (MIO) and *gag* accepted.
I mean, why are they accepted??? WHY?
Why must every guy be beautiful and
buff and brooding-but-secretly-deep, and the women
weak-but-strong-in-other-ways mice and also beautiful and annoying and whiny
and—OH, I CAN’T TAKE IT.
Anyway.
(breathe)
Where was I going with this? Oh,
right; ghost stories and Charles Dickens.
 |
| Yeah. Like this. |
Recently my mind has established
that it will not write novels for the moment
<------
But it will manage to write short stories, which happen to be my Achilles’
heel of the Writingverse. No, let me rephrase that. Short stories happen to be
my only Achilles’ heel in ALL of the
Writingverse—that, by the way, is not bragging. I’m not that great at songwriting
(I can’t explain that), literature and life-based fiction is completely beyond
my comprehension of how to accomplish (I blame the bolt of Wonder I was hit
with), articles are just now starting to form themselves for me (which is
weird, seeing as I was opposed to writing journalism in any way for a long
time), and I suck toaster at exegesis (I refuse to conform). Also, I fail
miserably at limericks. The man from Peru shoulders no responsibility here.
And despite all my misgivings and
fear about short stories, they have a tendency of late to fill my head rather
prolifically. Charles Dickens serves as a major inspiration to the ghost story that
so desperately panders for my attention.
So, despite all this talk of ghost
stories, I mostly scare myself. All in the name of research, of course. At the
most inconvenient time to be freaked out (alone, downstairs, in the dark), I
think about something cliché from a horror story and automatically make it
original. Translation: I take something predictable and scare the living
nutcakes out of myself making it “original.” (Yeah, thanks, originality.
Sometimes you suck.)
All in the name of research, of course.
And then, when my spine couldn’t possibly be tingling any more than it
already is, I put the What Ifs into my head. Like, “What if a bony hand reached
out from this corner and grabbed me? No, that’s cliché. Make the fingers long
and thin, with no fingernails, like nasty spider legs, and gross gray. NO. PURE
WHITE. And it doesn’t grab me and drag me somewhere, no. The skin is so cold I
jump ten feet because the hand also went THROUGH MY ARM.”
Or the lovely window mind-games:
“What if I looked out of the window and saw something that screamed at me? No,
too cliché. I wouldn’t see anything at first. What would happen is (a) the
grass by the trees would rustle, something would appear and disappear like an
animal, then reappear closer in shadows, then closer, then closer, and all I
would see as the motion-detecting light turned on would be two white eye
reflections at the edge of the shadow, where something should be able to be
seen. And then, a scream…BEHIND ME.”
And it’s all in the name of
RESEARCH.
My mind’s windows are open, but
sometimes I’d like to close them. Gently, mind you. Any shattered panes would
let in something…unwarranted. Like Mainstream-Instant-Oatmeal. However, if
Charles Dickens taught me anything, it’s that the original, despite what anyone
says or how weird it may seem to the drivel-eaters—the originality in our
stories happens to be that story’s truth. And the only thing we could ever hope
to convey as writers is the truth in the stories that reveal themselves to us.
And if that truth happens to scare
us white as ghosts…
Well, so be it. Who am I to discourage
creativity at its most visceral?
