Enter The Seagoon

OK, this may turn out to be one of my more elliptical ramblings. Bear with me, and we’ll see how things come out at the other side…

There seems to be a paradox to the art of writing, and making a work your own. Every author leaves their imprint on a piece of writing, and the great ones do it with a marvellous flair. However, there’s a danger of leaving oneself exposed, or just in leaving one’s naked id hanging out for all to see, as it were. Making a piece your own is an act of craftsmanship, but leaving a part of yourself behind seems sloppy, unhygienic almost.

Am I making sense? I didn’t think so. *sigh*

There are a few authors out there whose voice leaves me breathless. Cormac McCarthy is one; his prose is captivating, and his easy narrative style leads me on like Steinbeck at his best. Take the introduction to No Country For Old Men -

I sent one boy to the gas chamber at Huntsville. One and only one. My arrest and my testimony. I went up there and visited with him two or three times. Three times. The last time was the day of his execution. I didnt have to go but I did. I sure didnt want to. He’d killed a fourteen year old girl and I can tell you right now I never did have no great desire to visit with him let alone go to his execution but I done it.

He lives and breathes in the text, and it’s a wonderful thing. Tolkien and Lewis do it too, albeit in very different ways. Most folk who love reading have at least one author that sweeps them off their feet like this – it’s not that they’re in love with the author (I hope) but there’s something quintessential about their voice.

(Actually, dammit, it is like being in love. The pleasure of familiarity, the joy at being reunited after a prolonged absence… it’s wrong, I know, but I like it!)

There are, of course, many authors with a recognisable voice. If the first category are like lost lovers, then these are the old friends of the literary world. I know the voice of Stephen King, Hunter S. Thompson, the Brontes, WS Burroughs, Kerouac. If I found a long lost romance novel by HST, it might be disconcerting (in fact the idea rather amuses me), but I’d still know the author.

Familiarity can, of course, breed contempt, particularly with the benefit of hindsight.

Take Stephen King, for example. His short story collections fascinated me when I was younger, particularly for the appendices, where he would describe the stories and how they came to be written. These ranged from the prosaic “the baby needed medicine for her ear infection” to the more Byronesque “I was walking down the dry goods aisle at the market and my Muse shat on my head” (paraphrasing is my own, naturally). When he published On Writing, I bought it out of curiosity, and interest in his work – this being many years before I contemplated writing anything myself. What I found was both revelatory and a little off-putting.

The first section, titled “C.V.” is an autobiography captured in a series of vignettes. Almost every scene held something that I recognised, or saw an echo of in one of his works. His life, his family, his absent father and struggling mother, his own struggle with addiction. He wrote about himself over and over, often unwittingly (he wrote The Shining featuring the ex-teacher who battles the bottle and loses without realising his inspiration, apparently). While still grieving over the loss of his mother, he wrote Roadwork, possibly his bleakest piece, about the futility of standing in the way of progress. And in his tumultuous work of the mid 1980’s, his addictions are made incarnate – Annie Wilkes, the deranged nurse who holds her favourite author captive in Misery, or The Tommyknockers, the aliens who possess the inhabitants of a town, giving them energy and inspiration… at the cost of their souls. All the pain, the loss, the self-loathing is there. It gives the stories power, but knowing that it’s there?  Well, it turns my stomach a little now. There was always something I disliked about the energy of those stories. Now that I’ve been alive a bit longer, I have more of an understanding of what he must have gone through, but there’s still something unsavoury about it.

So, whether your favourite author is a “lover” or “just a friend”, there are hazards in knowing them too well. But I hear you ask, what has this got to do with me, or Marilyn Manson for that matter?

Last year, I took a Creative Writing unit at university. For the most part, I loved it and got on with my classmates. We shared opinions, criticised helpfully where we could and learned to appreciate each other’s style. Mostly. Oh yeah, there were some exceptions.

One class, we were shown projected images to use as inspiration. One image, which I haven’t been able to find on the internet, was a Rolling-Stone-esque photo of Marilyn Manson. He was dressed as a crossing guard, surrounded by children in Goth getup, and leering at the camera over his STOP sign. People exclaimed over the picture and got to work. When we were done, however, I was appalled at what people came out with -

“How come you dress like that, you fuckin freak? Don’t you know what you look like? Freak!”

“God, you look disgusting. Take that off now, you hear me? Now!”

Faced with Mr Manson in all his glory, people were reduced to finger-pointing and schoolyard insults – and this was a significant portion of the class too. When people came out of their comfort zone, they forgot all their pretensions and reverted to their baser impulses. Believe me, they weren’t pretty to hear.

(Me? I started a cheery little story about a girl who thinks her crossing guard is a witch, and tries to poison her. What could be wrong with that?)

In conclusion - well, I’m not sure I have one. Is it a blessing or a curse to know an author too well? In these internet-enabled days, I know more about Neil Gaiman than Stephen King simply because Mr Neil keeps his blog up to date, but I don’t need to hear about his terrible addiction to Jaffa cakes to enjoy his work. Should I be conscious of revealing too much of myself? Probably. We’ll see if I manage to create anything of substance, then I’ll get hung up on what I’ve done.