Like pretty much everyone who writes for pleasure, I have been writing stories since a very young age. At primary school I would generally eschew any kind of learning activity that didn’t involve the opportunity to write something. Once, my parents were called into a meeting with the headteacher, during which she expressed concern that I was a disturbed child writing disturbing stories, and quizzed my parents on my (delightfully normal) home life.
As I recall, these disturbing stories involved ghosts and witches and a tent with a trap door that led more ghosts and witches. So, more Halloween-spooky than a lens upon my troubled inner life. I was discussing this ill-fated meeting with my mother a few weeks ago, and I glibly suggested that I dedicate my first published work of fiction to her. I then giggled to myself imagining delivering a few manuscripts of stories I have written in my adult years to her. ‘I wonder what she would say if she knew that my creative writing dissertation included a story about a group of teenagers killing themselves.’
My mother took her eyes off the road for a moment to glance over at me. ‘You wrote a story about teenagers killing themselves?’ Okay, maybe that is a bit disturbing. ‘Yeah, on their A-Level results night’, I added, as though this offered some kind of explanation. Coming back round to the original issue of the conversation, my mother wondered aloud if I only ever wrote scary stories to shock and annoy my teacher. The words left unspoken are: and maybe you’re still doing that now?
I suppose this brief description of one of the short stories that made up my creative writing portfolio does sound like something written purely to shock. The actual story is slightly more nuanced, has a somewhat logical plot, and doesn’t just read like a gothic teenager’s diary entry. I’m not going to post it on here just yet, so you’ll have to take my word for it.
It’s worth mentioning that attempting to shock some of my university creative writing tutors with my writing would have been pretty tricky: one of them criticised me for not describing sex in suitably graphic detail, in a scene which took place in a post-apocalyptic brothel. He gave me the advice that I should read some erotica and stop being quite so British about it all.
Looking back over my writing repertoire, with particular attention paid to the stories I wrote while I was studying, it does occur to me that not much of it features a happy family’s day out to the beach. Between a man keeping his dead wife in the house and a young boy kidnapped by a religious fanatic, there aren’t many feel-good stories. One time someone I recognised from seminars ambled over to me in a club’s toilets and told me how good he thought my writing was. I opened my mouth to drunkenly thank him, and he swiftly followed up it up by telling me that he also found me scary. So ‘writes well, is scary’ might just sum me up.
I never write with the sole purpose of trying to shock anyone. My preferred form of writing is the short story. I’m of the opinion that a good short story has to have something out of the ordinary, something a bit surreal or, yes, shocking, in order to hold your attention. Tales of the everyday can work brilliantly in a novel, when you have time to get invested in the story and get to know the characters. So, when you’re writing a story that takes place within a limited amount of words it almost seems necessary to shock the reader. Not so much that they are horrified, but enough so that they pay attention.
I suppose a little part of me does think what’s the point if nobody’s even a little bit shocked? I want a reader to feel something, and if that feeling grows from an initial ‘oh my god’ then I’m fine with that.
A Blanket of Noise 