Joyce Carol Oates wrote a great essay entitled “To a Young Writer.” I read it about once a year because no matter how many stories I write I still tend to feel young and the advice still rings true. Oates argues you write your best when you are fearless and “write your heart out” and that there is much wisdom to be gained by becoming obsessed with an author or genre, and conversely just as much if not more to be had by reading outside of your comfort zone.

The essay always gets me thinking about the value of variety to a writer. Not everyone loves variety in their reading life or approach to their craft. I have friends who know in their heart of hearts they are horror writers or fantasy writers of children’s writers, or only read mysteries or science fiction novels. I love their enthusiasm for their form, and have certainly gone through phases of loving certain authors, but it has been a long while since I considered myself “just” a horror writer.

I love variety. In music. In movies. In fiction. Jeanne Cavelos in her article “Innovation in Horror” makes a good argument for innovation being the product of blending a variety of influences in a single form. I won’t make any claim to being an innovative writer, but I certainly enjoy genre smashing when I do it. I’ve had hard boiled stories with gargoyles as protagonists. Fantasy stories with six guns. Horror stories where the monsters are never on stage. I think some of those stories are among my best work.

To keep the “spice of life” on the brain I tried to read widely. Every pro I spoke to while attending Odyssey said that to write your best you have to read outside your genre. Classics. Poetry. Other fields and forms. Each is an example of the form, each is a case study. I spent the first two years after Odyssey reading as many different short story writers as I could. And I’m glad I did. I opened myself up to the talents, voices, and rich worlds of Raymond Carver, Annie Proulx, Robert E. Howard, Shirley Jackson, Robert Aickman, Ernest Hemingway, Lucius Shepard, Jeffrey Ford, Steve and Melanie Tem, Patricia Highsmith, and many others.

That “short story odyssey” is now done, though I still follow the ethos of reading wide and deep. And I think that’s helped me develop my craft. Which reminded me of my approach to music, back in my punk-rock days. I never understood folks who ONLY listened to punk or metal or blues. I loved it all. I liked Johnny Cash as much as Black Sabbath and John Lee Hooker and The Clash. And I loved bands that mixed genres. Like Tom Waits

In Innocent When You Dream, Waits remarks that he was awakened to writing new kinds of music across the spectrum by his wife, who is his writing and producing partner. She came at a hinge point in his career-

“I kind of got stuck. I needed someting to kick me. I needed some kind of car wreck or something. She was the one that started playing bizarre music. She said, ‘You can take this and this and put all this together. There’s a place where all these tings overlap. Field recordings and Caruso and tribal music and Lithuanian language records and Leadbelly. You can put that in a pot. No one’s going to tell you you can’t. You like James Brown and you also like Mabel Mercer. There’s nothing wrong with that’ We’re all that way. We all have disparate influences. And we all know people that don’t know each other! Right? I mean, some people are afraid to have parties and invite them all.”

And Waits does. His albums are romantically sad sonic worlds with punk and calypso sharing a drink in one corner, and jazz and country throwing dice in another, while we won’t say what the blues is getting up to with the tango in the shack.

Now, I don’t know if you can invite all your influences at once in a single story and still have it hold together, but I think inviting a handful to mingle on the page is a good way of turning a love of variety into a good opportunity of great fiction.

I think I’ll spend some time testing this theory. While listening to Tom Waits. For I am a raindog, too.

JSR

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