Reflection: Chainsaw in the Night and Other Ramblings
Reflecting on writing unchained and original American folklore ideas
Reflection on journal entries 6/21/23: one-page, reading time organization, and a creative brainstorm
So normally, this reflections post is for paid subscribers only, but I want to do at least one free reflections post a month. So, feel free to read through about my thoughts and feelings around last week’s post.
Chainsaw in the Night is a new story I wrote a few months back. I talked about it a little on my blog, but I’ll get into a bit more detail here since this is the paid side of things, so you should get your money’s worth, or something like that.
Essentially, Chainsaw in the Night is a horror story about a creature stalking the woods around a neighborhood HOA and the two men who both believe the monster is theirs. It’s also about internalized homophobia and self-hate and finding a way to love yourself.
The story features one of my favorite created creatures: a chainsawtaur.
It’s part chainsaw, part bear, part man and stalks the woods around my main character’s home. It’s constant grinding slowly drives him to act and to speak truths he’s been trying to hide all his life.
I don’t want to give too much away, but the story’s pretty horny. I’ll cut down on that in edits because I don’t think I can write “cock” that many times in a story before the editor pulls out the slash. The story was originally another story entirely about a gay man trying to figure out how to breakup with his boyfriend while dealing with a monster wrecking his garden.
It wasn’t as horny and it wasn’t as good. It was a fun story but it didn’t have anything knockout going on with it. There wasn’t a voice or a story really, just some stuff happening to some people.
Which, I know, is a story, but not the stories I want to write.
I want my stories to be a little bit more than pulp. I want them to say something or do something for the reader, whether that is help them see something in a new light or act. But I really loved the monster in the story and thought it needed to be rewritten to bring out the heart of the story.
Whatever that is?
It took a long walk around my neighborhood at dusk to figure out what the story was really about and maybe why it felt so off. In the midst of the evening sprinklers’ chopped chorus, I heard a voice in my head telling me that everything was fine.
There was nothing to worry about. It kept reassuring me in a nervous voice and then it told me:
“The elements of my life that make up Eric Thompson are unequivocally fine. They are the definition of fine, in fact—except, of course, for the matter of the chainsaw.”
It hit like an anvil. I had my character and my crisis. I continued the rest of my walk letting Eric tell me his story and when I got home, I started writing a little bit of it, but I saved the majority of the writing for my morning writing sprints I have with a group of local writers in my gaming community.
Chainsaw in the Night is still being edited, but I allowed myself to take my hand off the wheel enough in that story that it surprised and shock me. I even got teary eyed toward the end. I mentioned it a little in my journal entry but I haven’t always found taking my hands off the wheel to be fruitful.
Dangerous writing is what I’ve heard it called recently. Stephen King talks about it in On Writing. But there’s a method of freewriting a story where the writer just lets the characters go on the page and just follows along to see what antics they get into. In the past, when I have done this technique to help me write a story a day during my August Short Story Challenge, it didn’t end with great results.
That had more to do, in my mind, with my lack of writing and life knowledge. I couldn’t see those interesting crevices in a story because I had no idea how to get there from where I was writing. I saw the shallow things because that was where my skills were. During the small moments when I could step outside of my head and let my characters lead me, it was largely due to inspiration.
As I learned more about myself, the world, and writing, letting my characters explore the story on their own led to interesting discoveries and non-shallow writing. I tend to write dangerously more often now, though I still use a guiding map.
A guiding map similar to the one I created for my reading pursuits.
I want to read all the books. Every one that makes my heart beat just a little faster at least, which is a lot. I’m a bit of a book romantic.
Put me around some books and I’m in love.
This year, I’ve been really good at meeting my reading goals. I even had a month where I did read my dream target of 12 books. It wasn’t an easy feat, but I did so by following my reading schedule that I created. I also want to plug local libraries because I would go broke without them.
I’ve used Libby for all my audio book needs and listening to audio books is a majority of how I am able to keep up with all the books I want to read. I have started looking into how to read faster or more books and audio books is definitely one of the easiest ways to get more books into your life.
There are some other tips I found useful:
Know your intention of why you want to read more
Vary what you read, unless your intention is to read a particular subject or author
Create a reading schedule
Set a specific time for reading
Don’t read more for shallow reasons
Reading is a way for me to learn more and give my writer brain more material to pull from as my characters are wandering around a story.
It also helps me come up with new story ideas when I do my brainstorm exercises. I think a lot of the folklore I created during that exercise in my journal has roots in some book or story I read that my brain has remixed and turned into something horrific or slightly amusing.
Out of the American folklores I created during my exercise, one in particular has stuck with me. Stuck with me enough I think I’ll do a story out of it soon. That’s Bathroom Belle. The beast who licks your butt while you’re on the toilet. It makes me cringe whenever I think about it and I could turn it into some gruesome disturbing horror pulp.
I talked to my partner about it during our date night the other night and they couldn’t stop squirming. It was a visceral reaction. And visceral is what I like. Only problem is, there is no hook or meat to Belle. All I have is a creepy monster and that’s it.
A part of me just wants to write a simple story around Bathroom Belle. You know, a couple’s on a road trip and stops at the wrong roadside toilet. Butt mayhem pursues. And another part of me wants to make it so literary that Belle’s butt licking ties in to some emotional or societal issue.
Which makes me laugh just thinking about.
We’ll see what comes of Belle. I’m already writing a new story now that isn’t about butts and toilets and doesn’t make me cringe. This story is also sort of an American folklore story. It’s about the emotional rage embodiment of women rockers and partners of rock stars who have been jilted or bad mouthed through history taking the form of this sexy vengeful woman who goes around killing all the rock gods and making it look like overdose, suicide, car accidents, etc.
It’s a bloody fun story that I’ve had kicking around in my head since coming home from running errands and listening to Veruca Salt. Like with Chainsaw, a voice came to me from the writer beyond and said:
“I'm so sorry to tell you, but your precious shitty rock gods are all dead—I killed them. And I fucking loved doing it.”