Article written by Bizarchives author C.P. WEBSTER. Buy his book THE HORROR BENEATH.
Trying to be a writer is tough. Make no bones about it. Besides the pragmatic questions of what to write about and whether you are actually any good at it, there are all the other barriers that raise their own challenges. Even if you are half-good or can pen a coherent sentence, you have to find the time and put in the perspiration. Writing is not for sissies. But even when you’ve crafted something you think is decent enough, you must still convince someone else that it’s worth reading.
Submissions require research. What does the editor want? How do you get them interested in your little yarn? How do you sell it to them? Because being a writer is not only about your weird flights of fancy, your own ladlings from the creative stew. No, being inspired, is only the start.
The hardest thing for me was, and is, becoming a salesman. Someone who can convince the “mark” that they want and need whatever creation you have concocted. Sure, these are strange days, and the publishing industry is a sick giant. But with the new vanguard of publishers like Dave Martel’s The Bizarchives, that disease is fast being remedied.
But here I am pontificating. Who am I to give advice? Well, I’m a nobody really. I began writing my own brand of weird fiction back in the 1980s when I was an art student in South Africa. I was determined that I was going to become a writer come hell or high water. Instead, I ended up getting married, having a kid and becoming an art teacher to make ends meet. I had a couple of stories published in a South African sci-fi and horror journal called Probe, but it ended there. In short, I gave up.
For thirty years I made my living teaching photography and photo-history as a university lecturer in fine arts departments in South Africa and the UK. My first research was my own photographic work staged as exhibitions. But academia doesn’t like fine arts professors making exhibitions of their own work. It’s not considered very “academic,” even if it is backed up by conference papers, publications, and catalogues. And I had another handicap. I didn’t sit well in the world of post-modernism. Sure, my work was “weird” enough, but it was the wrong kind of “weird”— not nihilist, too metaphysical, too reverential of the Western canon. Most of all my work was really a visual representation of my literary leanings such as my love of Howard, Lovecraft, et al. Call it Pickman’s curse if you like.
The other academic work I did was curate exhibitions of the work of (often forgotten) German nationalist photographers of the 20s, 30s and 40s whom I had been digging out of various international collections and archives and writing about. I had a great time getting grants to travel to Germany and make catalogues of what still existed and what books they had published in their day and adding their work to my own university’s art collection. They were intriguing to me because they were traditional, clearly very talented but also considered “tainted” because they had been endorsed by the German state (yes, that state).
Now don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed some aspects of that thirty-year career, and I had some moderate successes. I became a recognised specialist in that niche field of the history of nationalist German photography. I got to exhibit my own photographs (the weird stuff) in solo shows in the US, Ireland, South Africa and the UK. I had some fairly prestigious showings in Chicago, London, Baltimore and even New York. But I never made any money out of it, and I never became “known” in the art world. And for that I am, retrospectively, somewhat grateful. The art world is fake and gay to borrow a phrase. And the highlight of my exhibition career was a blizzard in Baltimore on the opening night that kept the punters away in droves. But at least I got to visit Poe’s grave whilst I was there.
So, I have been around the block a couple of times in the art world. But making pictures was ultimately a pressure valve that allowed me to let off creative steam but kept me from doing what I really wanted to do. What I really wanted to do was write.
Then, two years ago, at the grand old age of fifty-five, I took early retirement from teaching to focus on that gnawing thing in my head that was trying to eat its way out. I have begun, once more, to try to become a writer. I live on a meagre income, enough to pay bills and put food on the table. But now I have that most precious of things: time. Time without other demands, without essay marking, academic board meetings, tutorials, workshops, research, endless e-mails...
“When is this guy going to say something useful about writing?” I hear you cry in frustration. Well, if it’s a system you want then I couldn’t point you in a better direction than to Arbogast’s excellent essay Stuck in a Rut? Let Lester Help You Out on The Obelisk. Lester Dent’s system is there, the guide to laying it all out.
When it comes to inspiration or “what do I write” today, that has been fortunately provided by the breaking of the dam wall where a lake of ideas, rising over that thirty-year writing hiatus, has now started pouring forth. But I’m not prolific. I ponder things, write in spurts, edit, write some more. Most of all, I don’t find my stories; they find me. Usually this happens in the early hours of the morning as I wake from some vivid dream, reaching for pen and paper that should be lying next to the bed. More often than not, I’ve forgotten to put them there. Still, it’s one of my standard pieces of advice to anyone considering a creative path. Keep a pen and paper handy.
Writing is like giving birth... and no ladies, I haven’t actually experienced the pain of childbirth. I’m speaking metaphorically here, right? So first you get the germ of the idea, a moment of pleasure, the conception. Then comes the gestation when the idea tumbles around, forming. If things go well there is the fruition and then the pain of getting this idea on paper. It can be swift or lengthy but at last, there it is, a story. Profound, eh?
What I am trying to say is it takes inspiration and perspiration. Then you hold that story in your hands and if you are fortunate, you love it. Yes, I’ve birthed monsters, stillborn tales, and aberrations. I’ve a mental attic full of them. But in writing, as with every other creative endeavour, no pain equals no gain.
What you do during that process of creation is vital. You must have the craft so to speak. Read the works of others widely, read constantly, read what you’ve done aloud. How does it sound? Edit then edit again. Does it move you? Will the reader be able to suspend disbelief? If you are writing weird fiction, then the latter is key. Sure, if you are writing a story about someone who grows geraniums that’s less of an obstacle. But if you are writing about flesh-eating geraniums, that’s more of a challenge. Make it clear, make it sincere, be entertaining. You are the smith that must hammer and forge the raw metal into the sword.
I’m on the road to sixty now. That’s old man territory, and I still don’t really believe in myself. I don’t even know if what I write is any good. I must have a stunted facility in that department, an enlarged case of impostor syndrome. It’s odd, because I’m pretty sharp at spotting talent in others. For my own work, I just have a blind spot. But, for me, that’s neither here nor there. If it’s good, the chances are with the right publisher it will get published. And I’m more than happy to say, one of my yarns, “The Reliquary,” was published in Bizarchives 4, and my novella, The Horror Beneath, has also just been published by The Bizarchives..
Finally, listen to the advice and feedback of others. Take the pain of critique, especially if they are someone whose experience you value. Most of all, don’t do what I did in my twenties. Don’t give up. Write just because you love it. Love the challenge, love the puzzle, the emergence of characters, the twists that you never saw coming, the denouement. And then, when it’s over, well, you did that, you made this story from nothing. That’s a reward. That right there is your own dragon’s hoard and it’s all yours.