Origins, part trois (Patreon)

While the Ideas Machine is in the shop having its pistons replaced, it’s time for another round of trying to remember what the hell I was trying to do when writing these stories!

The Smoke Child – I forget what the documentary is called, but it’s six straight hours of cast and crew recollections of the making of every one of the Friday the 13th movies. I’m not a fan of that series, but I always have a great time listening to people reminisce about taking part in something that turned out to be something far less than art. It got me thinking about the slasher genre in general, and how it’s so rare in these movies to see less stereotypical kinds of teenagers.

One day soon after watching that doc, I found on YouTube a recording of the author Jon Krakauer’s talk on the Mount Everest disaster of May 1996. It was just him at a microphone with a bunch of slides, and I happened to put it on as I made my biannual half-hearted attempt to clean my apartment, not really giving the talk my full attention. I realized quickly that not seeing every photograph he was clicking through was actually making the tale more interesting, not less. And like the Vietnam vet who tells a horrific true story in the Werner Herzog documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Krakauer speaks about the Everest disaster in a relentlessly calm, matter-of-fact, even friendly tone. The less these narrators try to sell you on the horror, the more ghastly it becomes. And that seemed like it would be a strong formula for a grisly slasher story.

I shot a lot of footage for a video version of The Smoke Child, but I find now that it feels more unique to me without any visuals at all. To me, every click of the slides moving makes the mystery deepen, so maybe that’s how it should stay.

I Was Called Anwen – Recently I had a realization: that when we reach a certain age, we’ve finally become old enough to have actual ghosts in our past—not just memories of faces and places, but ghosts. There are people who feel so very distant to us, part of another life almost, that our long-ago interactions with them are remembered only in soft focus, their voices coming back to us through a reality-distorting gauze. Living or dead, we’ll never see or hear from them again. And whoever they were, they’re probably totally different people now—it’s been that long.

Some of these ghosts we’re okay with, but some haunt us. Wispy, uncomfortable images follow us of, say, the people we suspect we misjudged, or who we decided too quickly were not to be part of our life stories. High school is a time when those snap judgments are often made, brutally and harshly. As much as I feel for Cooper Rabin in this story, I feel for Gordon too, and how in trying to navigate adolescence, he let a little casual cruelty get the best of him, and can’t let it go.

occupiers – I never really stop thinking about writing a long, epic, exhausting war story. I have vivid memories of watching the great ones on the screen, and of first reading one of the best books I’ve ever read, Michael Herr’s Dispatches. Battle scenes don’t have a whole lot of allure to me; what I find more interesting is all the in-between time which soldiers write of frequently—when the paranoia, the loneliness, and the emotional and physical fatigue stretch on for endless days and nights.

Eventually my casual reading about war revealed to me that so much of it is just about getting supplies from place to place, feeding armies, delivering fuel, securing roads so food and ammo can get through, waiting for cruel winters to pass so forces can regroup and advance again. I decided to try to write a story in which the grim, sad, and tedious resting and resupplying time between combat is the source of the fear, and no traditional visible enemy ever really appears.

sugary – There are good donut towns and bad donut towns. Richmond, Virginia is, I would say, a good one. In my first few weeks here, my wanderings brought me to a real gem of a place that ticked off all the boxes I like in a donut shop: 1) well off the beaten path so it requires a real drive, 2) open 24 hours, 3) located in a building that looks, oh, about five hundred years old, 4) has an old horseshoe-style counter, 5) has only middling coffee, 6) has oversized and totally old-school donuts. Last winter was redeemed somewhat by occasional trips on rainy or gray days to this wondrous place, where I tried desperately to eat the lightest thing I could while my eyes coveted the ridiculously large apple turnovers. I can only imagine the nap those suckers would induce.

The Timothy Tape – Cinephiles will know this is just a brief re-skin of Martin Scorsese’s documentary American Boy, about his friend Steven Prince. For the authentic and far more interesting version of the Timothy character, just without the fun spooky trappings, check it out. (I cut one story Timothy tells which brought him very close indeed to Seth Brundle from The Fly.)

prisoner – Way too often, a piece of music will really mess with my alleged “creative process.” As I was writing this story, I foolishly began to look for music to enhance it before I was finished—always a mistake, because hearing the wrong thing at the wrong time can make me suddenly want something totally different for a story. In this case, I came across a lovely string piece whose effect would have been to accentuate the majesty and tragedy of the creature at the end of the tale instead of the horror of just seeing it. I kept listening to that piece and writing to it. That’s the power of music—it had once again totally seduced me. It seemed so important I use that piece that I started to corrupt the story’s simple spooky essence. I staged an intervention with myself at the last minute and I think I was able to bring the core back into simpler focus.

Music remains such an inspiration. The process of conceiving many a story has begun with me hearing something and thinking, “I have no plot yet, I just know I want to make people feel like this song makes me feel.”

A Convergence in Wintertime – I was about to foist yet another woods story on you fine folk, but I stopped myself in the planning stage. “KEEP OUT OF THE WOODS FOR A LITTLE WHILE, FOR GOD’S SAKE!” I yelled at myself. Then I remembered the dunes, the dunes at the beach. Ever been out among them when it’s cold and getting dark? I threw out the story I’d been working on and started all over (silently resenting the fact that I can’t just set everything deep in the woods).

This story will go on record for me as the biggest, longest self-inflicted hatchet job I’ve ever struggled through. So many plot changes, so many holes opened and closed, so many aborted plot strands and altered directions… I was scratching my head for so long, trying to figure out where this thing was actually supposed to go. If you’ve ever tried to get an angry cat into a pet carrier for a trip to the vet, you can understand what it was like to try to make this story work. I only got content with things when, in draft #9 or so, the guy in the shack slowly became a secondary character to the teenaged boy, Anson, and Eva, the penitent.

attraction – I know I have to stop watching The Flight Channel. I know it. It’s this series of videos on YouTube (YouTube again, I know!) where a real air crash is clinically dissected in 10 minutes or so. This is a common enough concept on the web, but these videos in particular have a terrible narrative power, much of it due to the simple technique of printing the story paragraph by paragraph on the screen in dry block capitals, without narration. Hoooooo boy. It’s actually given me an appreciation of all the engineering genius and astounding safety precautions going on up there in the air, but it has also of course ruined my mind in some ways. I hate flying anyway—I didn’t need these vids in my life on top of it! Anyway, it was only a matter of time before the stories transit and attraction came about.

compulsion – We all have people in our lives like the narrator’s grandmother: people who, if the masses were to get a hold of their story, would be quickly condemned and dismissed as Irredeemable Bad Folk, yet whose life narratives are maybe more complicated than that. We know them for something a little more, see something inside them that others haven’t bothered to look for. It puts us in a tight spot: Do we have the guts to speak up for these people just a little, or do we fold in silence because we’re scared the masses will judge us by association?

surveillance – I’m sometimes reminded that people often go on podcasting binges and listen to the same voice for hours, even days at a time. Keeping that in mind, I’ll juggle styles just a little bit so my first-person droning doesn’t become totally monotonous to someone listening to the stories back-to-back-to-back as they drive a U-Haul across Arizona. If there’s room in the Knifepoint Horror mix for a dash of old-fashioned creepypasta, this I think would be that story: lighter than most, wackier than most, wrapped up in a little narrative bow like an episode of Tales from the Darkside. Something to have fun with before being dragged down by the heavier business in surrounding episodes.

Let me add a note here that while all the great actors who jump in to do parts for these stories are given fairly rigid dialogue to perform, their performances, and their delivery of very specific lines, change the final products in surprising ways. The subtle touches and bits of flair that the actors serve up in particular moments—and not necessarily the ones I had envisioned—will set off light bulbs in my head and edits are then made, in the timing and arrangement of the surrounding text and music, to put more of the scene’s focus on that nifty bit of acting. Happens all the time. I’ve even been moved to suddenly cut entire scenes and rewrite others because I just loved what the actors did so much (or was even thrown for a loop by the direction they went) that something new seemed to be called for. I may write the words, but these performers are always spurring changes by hitting unexpected notes in unexpected spots and putting shading on characters that was never there on the page. I love happy accidents like that. It’s always exciting when I get someone’s completed audio files in my email and there’s that moment of “What’s this performance going to sound like, and what’s it going to do to this story?” Again and again, it’s like unwrapping a present I know is going to surprise me.

drop-ins – For the video version of this story, I was alone in a park getting the shot where the main character looks back to notice that he’s being followed. The last thing I wanted in the world was to see, under a little pavilion, some guy sitting at a picnic table and smoking in the dark, all alone. Watching me, maybe. It was about eleven at night. I had a choice: Get back in the car and get the hell out of there before he pulled out a butcher knife, or try to get the shot. I figured, “OK, there’s a police station just down the block, so he’s gotta be harmless, right?”

He then made some of kind of… vocalization.

It was like: “Ha HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA… haaaaaaaaa.”

And then… silence.

Needless to say, I did not get the shot that night. For all I know, he’s inside my trunk right now.

That’s all for now, folks. I think for the next story, we’ll take a weird tour through the world of rock music and meet a particularly disturbed practitioner of the craft. Good old-fashioned solo first-person narration for this one. (No cowbell, unfortunately.)