Day: June 1, 2010

I began reading genre fiction simply to entertain myself. Then, I read it to learn and hone my skills as a fiction writer. You may think that if I’m always on the lookout for new ideas while reading, that it would be impossible for these novels to provide escape. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Good stories give you words, but make you forget the words. All good stories do.

I’ve always enjoyed a good ghost story, whether it be found in a book or via some other medium. I would get terribly sad whenever I missed the Halloween episode of the now defunct Magandang Gabi Bayan (which my siblings and I watched in bed with a blanket around our shoulders – at least the first few iterations of the special, when they were still scary). I also enjoyed reading about different kinds of mental illness, and given my particular affinities, how could I not fall in love with the horror genre, which offered all these and more? I got it into my head that I wanted to write a horror novel, and so I treated every short story and book I read as research, and, more importantly, as a challenge.

Read more here.

In Bob Neihart’s 2007 interview with Stephen King’s son and best-selling horror writer, Joe Hill, Ben Neihart said, “Hill writes in two traditions that he would argue are artificially walled off from each other: genre fiction, with its emphasis on breakneck, often outrageous, plot and metaphor; and literary realism, which values detailed characterization, psychological depth and subtle epiphanies.”

What an excellent description! And what a description that completely escaped me as a child, a young reader who wasn’t aware of these traditions at all, who knew only to categorize stories as either “good” or “boring”. Back then, all I wanted was to get from Point A to Point B–and to get to Point B fast. Who cares about lovely turns of phrases and language and words, who cares about character development? I only cared about one thing: what’s the plot? Is someone going to end up dead? Is there a lot of gore? Is there a twist? Is there a monster in it? During those early years of my life as a reader, nobody told me what to read. Nobody served as a guide, so I read whatever I found amusing, and I read blindly. Reading then was like walking around a dark house during a thunderstorm, and I believed, in my heart of hearts, that I’d be more excited if I reached out a hand and touched a large, slimy creature, than if I came upon a room within which a young woman sat in silence and mourned the sudden end of her youth. (Unless the sudden end of her youth turned her into a large, slimy creature. Then that would be seriously awesome.)

And so I gravitated toward the plot-driven stories, which turned out to belong to the genre fiction tradition.

Read more here.

Part 2 to follow.