The Old Normal & Weird Fiction

Given that the first issue of Dimension Bucket Magazine is finally available in print I thought I would use this chance to both advertise for it and to make a little post based on the story I wrote for inclusion in its pages.

No, this isn't going to be a review post. That would be awkward. I'm not comfortable reviewing things my work appears in for many reasons, but I can tell you that the magazine features many different authors that are quite good at what they do and stories you won't read coming from the cobweb-caked shelves of Oldpub stores. You can even find the issue digitally here.

I'm going to be talking about the weird and the normal.

My story in the issue is called Endless Nights in Villain City and is ostensibly about a selfish loner who embraces his inner magic to become, as Boomer parents like to say, true to himself and his inner light. In other words, it stars a villain. The story is incredibly violent, vicious, and dark, but I thought it was quite Superversive in the end. I thought the ending quite uplifting. However, two different Superversive writers told me it in fact was not Superversive in the slightest, so who am I to say? You can be the judge of that and let me know. I'd be glad to hear.

But the story highlights the difference between good and evil with the latter not being shown as ideal. Apparently this is weird and not the norm. Well, it is to me.

The more I've been writing over the years the more I am aware of how weird fiction can be. I've been writing in a PulpRev mindset since 2017 and as I write I'm starting to understand what I write might not be as straightforward as how others see it. What I think is normal is actually quite strange. For one I was told by someones that the first short story I sold, Someone is Aiming for You, was too scary. I didn't catch that when writing it. For another example, what I thought was the most direct story I ever wrote, Lucky Spider's Last Stand, was described as such:

"It's the tale of a gangster who was his boss' right hand. The boss is dead, there's a legit, no-shit superhero who is immune to bullets called "A Crusader" (nice touch btw), and Lucky Spider has to fight this superhero with a healing factor in a god damned sword fight."

Special thanks to Jim Fear for the kind review.

The more I write the more bizarre it appears to get. I recently realized that I don't write superheroes, but pulp heroes. One would have to be familiar with their differences (law vs. justice, the permanent against the temporal, etc.) to understand the schism, but there is absolutely a gap. Each story I have written in my "magic superhero" series has not been like those in the comic books I grew up on and has shifted into something far different. What was originally a battle of the supernatural between two opposing forces (powers and magic) somehow became a playground for nutty ideas about God, justice, alienation, and death. I'm not sure where it's going to eventually end up, but I think after the next story I'm working on I will move them to novels instead. There is more to tell than what I can scratch out with a handful of short stories.

But it also kicks off a big difference between what I think works between the pulp hero and the post-pulp hero, and that is in explaining too much. The #1 writing problem I've picked up today for anyone who writes and action adventure story is their constant need to explain everything in overbearing detail. Others have picked up on this, too.

I suppose my take on this is strange because of how I write characters. When I write a story it is as if a window to another world is forming in my head and each draft and editing pass goes towards cleaning the glass so that it can be fully grasped. This means the characters are already formed with everything else which means they already have a history coming into what I am writing. They are prepackaged with one when they come into existence. I know it, and so do they.

But the reader doesn't need to know that. Origin stories have quick become a plague on modern writing. The worst ones damage the imagination, even the better ones strip away mystique.

As far as the reader knows the characters lived normal lives in the world in question up to the point the story started. Just as all weird tales, it is normal until it isn't anymore. This adds weight to the weirdness surrounding the plot and action and allows the audience to ease into it at the same time as the characters do. The audience are normal people and that is how they relate to the hero. If the reader is learning about whatever the trouble is with the main character then there is a better chance for a connection. This should be the goal of all stories.

In a book the main character should have no intense, tragic background before the story starts. No heavy traumas the audience doesn't know about, no excuses for why they are doing what they are doing, and no complex relationship with the antagonist that the audience isn't informed of until the author deems it right. I say this because the place you start your story from should be the place where the audience can be connected to it. The writer's job is to let the reader in, not to lead them around by a leash and tell them where they are allowed to put their investment. The main character should not be the one throwing curve-balls at the audience, they should always be on the same side in whatever craziness occurs.

You might be wondering about other things. Literary works are all about trauma drama, so it works there. But we aren't talking about those.

Stories like Trigun or Cowboy Bebop feature a back story for the main character, seemingly breaking the rule. But it must be taken to account how it does so. When that background is in focus, they are not the focal point character in the story. In Trigun when Vash's history is brought up we see it from another character's perspective every single time, and when it is focused on Vash it is never about that side of it. In Cowboy Bebop it is the same whenever one of the main characters has their past focused on. The perspective shifts to the most normal character in the situation. This is much easier to do with visual art forms than written ones.

In short stories and novels the writer has to use a different tool-set.

In Grey Cat Blues, Two Tone is the main character. He is a reformed punk though the audience is never told the exact reason why as it is not relevant to the story being told. However, at the point the story starts he is the anchor for the readers and learns the craziness occurring with them. On page one he is the normal the readers need for the weird that is about to happen and they need to connect with him. To do this he cannot be a broken character or else it dilutes this connection, and being that he is the only viewpoint character he needs to retain his normality in the weirdness.

That is the key to true weird fiction. The normal and moral is the starting point and the weirdness that closes in from the outside is the true antagonist. If the norm is as stained as the weird then there is no power in victory over it. The entire battle between them blurs into grey paste.

In Lucky Spider's Last Stand, my protagonist is a villain and the weirdness comes in to give him a moral battle with the one before him. To keep it focused I could not give any excuses for him being a villain to soften his character. He had to confront his own choices in a way the audience could get right off the bat. It is the same with Endless Nights in Villain City. The weirdness is what allows the villain protagonist to be who he wants to be and its the hero antagonist that has to face the weirdness caused by his choices. I suppose you can consider these stories subversive, but all they do is show typical hero stories from another angle. At no point is evil glorified or good seen as wrong.

What I'm getting at is that something in a story has to be nailed down in normality, and the most obvious thing is the protagonist, the good guy. This is what a "relatable" character should be. This is the key to weird fiction and what makes it so digestible no matter how disturbing or out there the story might get. The good guy needs to represent normality. Otherwise you just have a bunch of events randomly happening to people in a world you don't care about. If you end up there, what is the point of it? Why even bother?

That's a long way to say that one of the things I have gotten more appreciation for since I started down this pulp revolution path is what weird really is. Since I began reading authors I had never heard of and stories long since buried by gatekeepers that had no right to gatekeep I began to see why things were changed. And it isn't just the old works. The stories I reviewed in my previous post all reclaimed the old normal just as well as the pulps did. They were stories focused on the border between the normal and the abnormal with the former being seen as the way it should be--the natural state of things. Good is good and evil is evil and both should be pointed out for what they are for both the characters and the audience.

The weird is a tool to highlight the normal, whether by cautionary tale, heroic adventure, or straight up romance. This is something the dinosaurs of the Oldpub have forgotten with their mandatory genre segregation and 400 page cookie-cutter formulas. Truth is weird, it's not as stale as the creative class with their sensitivity readers and dry workshops have made it today.

I plan on writing more stories to highlight this bizarre reality, and I hope to read more stories from others doing the same. I hope you will join me.

The revolution is still on. No sleep until victory!