Welcome to nowhere! You'll never forget it

When I was 9 or 10 years old and started reading everything Stephen King had yet written, I realized very quickly how interlinked his stories were. They took place in little towns, fictional or otherwise, around Maine. The towns knew about each other. Their politics, personal and professional, were intermingled. Many characters appeared or were mentioned in more than one book. And crazy, amazing, sometimes terrible things happened in them al the time. All of this meant that Stephen King's world, although seemingly the same as our own, was alive in itself. It was a setting that added loads to the stories he told. If someone were to ask me my favourite fictional town now, I would say "Derry" without hesitation. Though I would never want to go there! It doesn't even exist, and yet I'm glad it doesn't exist a long, long way from where I live.

I don't have to describe how fantasy stories have been using this "living setting" tactic forever. And a lot of good science fiction figured this out with their ships: the Millennium Falcon is a great setting unto itself, as is Serenity, Nostromo, and the Enterprise (pick your model depending on your age.) This isn't the same as having a cool ship. Star Destroyers, Borg cubes and Shadow vessels are all cool ships, but they aren't unforgettable settings like Ten-Forward or Serenity's cargo-hold. The latter add something else to where the characters are. They have history, depth, and they're irreplaceable in some way. You can always replace one X-Wing with another. But when the Falcon is gone, it's just gone.

Even vehicles can be big enough in the audience's mind to be a great setting: the General Lee, a time-travelling DeLorean, and Dean Winchester's Impala. I visited Universal Studies when I was a little girl and have a photograph of myself inside KITT. I remember he even spoke to me. This impressed me a heck of a lot more than the E.T. ride.

Maybe it all seems like common sense, but this value of setting is easily forgotten in the effort to create characters and a story. It's easy to think that just any place will do for the introduction of the hero, the downfall of the villain, whatever. It's the action, the dialogue, the smarmy expression on Dr. No's face that makes the scene. But what about the evil lair? It's good to remember how much more can be added by having events happen somewhere that means something to the reader. And it's great to know that the place you create might live on in someone's mind, with Twin Peaks creepiness, or Middle Earth clarity.

There's a Dictionary of Imaginary Places that I would love to browse. Let me know if you've read it.

The Point is that we're all Wild Things

An article at Guardian.co.uk examines a reaction that says Where the Wild Things Are is too scary for children, could cause nightmares, and should be avoided. This debate is inspired by the new film by Spike Jonze that's due out in December. And it's making me think.


The story is about Max, a little boy, who is sent to his room without dinner for being bad. He imagines a world where he's king of all the monsters, and in his imagination a whole wildnerness grows in his bedroom. But he eventually gets homesick and returns. From the Guardian article:

"This is a classic hero's story in which the protagonist undertakes a journey and returns a wiser person," (Professor Holly) Willett, an expert on children's literature, has argued in the American press. And Sendak's original tale has certainly stood the test of time: it is a reliable classic on the shelves of middle-class toddlers on both sides of the Atlantic and in 1983 composer Oliver Knussen turned it into a one-act opera that has joined the modern repertoire.

The article also mentions other popular scary stories from the Brother Grimm and Roald Dahl. And the general question seems to be not whether the stories are frightening - because they are, we know that - but whether they're harmful to children, or just all right, or even helpful.

Roger McGough, a poet, notes that the story scared his children but they went back to it because, "It is a scariness that you can control and that ends happily." And child psychologist Ruth Coppard says, "There is that pleasurable fear: you are safe but not safe. And that seems to exist in most cultures. It is the reinforcement of the safety." When Max gets home his mother still loves him. Dinner is still hot. What's better than that? Yet still some people are unconvinced.

A friend has a quote by Alfred Hitchcock in her signature line. It says, "Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare." I don't think Hitchcock wrote children's stories, but some things transcend age. Nightmares certainly do.

I usually try to be modest, but I think I'm the perfect person to comment on this phenomenom of safe/not-safe and whether it's useful. I watch horror movies as a pick-me-up. I might put Stephen King's It face-down in a drawer so it doesn't stare at me while I'm sleeping, but I still need a copy in the house. It's one of my favourites. Sometimes I have night terrors that make me wonder, in the darkest hours of night, if I could be connected to some awful other world, glimpsed only in the rapid-heartbreat hyperventilating seconds before I really wake up. And yet I don't want to stop having them altogether, because I think that darkness is actually a part of me. I don't want to be divorced from my own mind, and my own imagination, and even my own worst nightmares.

If this stuff is inside you anyway, you have to turn and fight it. No one ever defeats the monster by running away. The monster always follows. Children know this perhaps better than adults. They understand the inevitable. It's why they sacrifice one leg to the monster under the bed, while the rest of them suffocates under the blankets. It's why no matter how many reassurances a parent gives, there are no illusions about the monster in the closet. It's still there, waiting.

Children will be scared. We can protect them by not throwing things at them they don't yet understand and certainly don't have to experience: gory crime fiction? Not so much. Budgeting for alimony, random violence, witnessing abuse. These things will sadly come up eventually. Later. But the fear and hope that children already have, for the monsters in the closet, anger at their parents, at their siblings, a sense of adventure and rebellion, testing their own power, rage, loneliness, homesickness - it's already inside of them. We're too late anyway. Let them explore.

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Updated to add: Last night on an episode of The Simpsons a faux-version of Where the Wild Things Are was used to illustrate the fears Lisa repressed because she wasn't allowed to "just be a kid." I have no idea when the episode first aired but it's pretty interesting. (In the end she finds the monsters cute as well as scary. Huh.)

Fourth Fiction

Fourth Fiction is "a blog-based literary reality show." It involves a group of anonymous writers who each submit a short piece of fiction based on that round's challenge, and then the readers vote for their least favourite. The writer with the most votes leaves the island. Er, the blog.


It started months ago, and now they're down to six contestants. At the moment the debate is whether it will soon be an all-girl show, as there's just one male writer left. (I figure if it was really anonymous we wouldn't know if they were male or female, but so it goes.)

The variety of fiction produced by the contestants has been impressive. From rhyming poetry, to pure sci fi, to near-satirical erotica, there's something for everyone. Or something for no one, if you're that picky. Each writer's style comes across so clearly in their work that deciding on a favourite and least favourite is usually pretty easy. As far as the readers/viewers are concerned, that's a good thing. It means it's actually entertaining.

But like all reality shows, the drama was inevitable. Starting with conversations on the Twitter feed, the contestants showed they could be just as bitchy and weird as anyone on Big Brother, and readers had picked out favourites before a single writing exercise was produced. Now the drama continues in comments on each exercise, with some readers choosing to be clever and cruel rather than constructive, and writers replying in kind. One losing contestant launched a bitter backlash against the entire competition (and everyone involved) until he was nearly banned from participating.

It's a fascinating experiment. I don't enjoy the drama. There's a lot of snark and not much grace. And although some of the contestants are very talented, others are painful to read. Worse, some of the worst are hailed by other readers as the best of the lot. I've been voting for the same person for weeks and I can't make a dent in their fans.

Yet I can't deny that as a whole it is entertaining. Some of the fiction produced is well worth reading and makes me want to keep track of the writer, see what else they produce. The host manages the chaos, and the voting process is fun. So it works. Kind of. And it's worth observing, from a curious, "Is this going to happen again?" kind of way. I mean, if Temptation Island can go three seasons, this should arguably go at least six.

Here's to manageable goals

I'm starting to jog some mornings. 3 times a week, maybe only 2 times a week when it becomes too wet and cold and awful. It doesn't take long but I feel good afterwards.

Someone actually called me out for not running long enough. "Only twenty minutes? I thought you were trying to get fit." Yeah, yeah. I suppose if I ran for an hour a day, or two or three hours a day, I'd be fit in no time. But am I going to keep that up?

And here I've proven one of my pet theories: that a writer can turn anything at all into an analogy for writing.

If you give yourself an unmanageable goal, no matter how great it would be to accomplish that goal, you probably won't. So what's the point? Manageable goals get accomplished, they build momentum, and they keep you moving forward. They let me keep running every week instead of giving up in an exhausted heap after one day. And they let me keep writing every day instead of sitting, frozen, in front of my computer, wondering how I can possibly write 80,000 words of great fiction all at once.