Ick!

Something that comes up with regularity in my critique sessions with my occasional, spatially divergent writers’ group is something we call “the ick factor.” It is also – speaking of slush 🙂 – one of the things that often throws me out of a new author’s work. Often permanently.

To begin with let’s establish a ground from which we can discuss this. You see, it is a misconception to say we work with words. We don’t. That’s sort of like saying a painter is someone who covers canvas with other materials. Words are our base material. Like canvas – and paint, for that matter, they can be used for many things that have nothing whatsoever to do with our job.

You use words to ask someone to marry you, you use words to communicate at work, and you use words to order a pizza. None of which is a novel – though they can be part of a novel – or, probably a short story. (Though asking someone to marry you can be a short, sharp shower of… story. See the first proposal in the Pride and Prejudice mini series for instructions on how to make THAT happen.)

No, what we actually use to construct our stories is emotions. You could describe a short work, like a short story, as a tight presentation of strong emotion which will stimulate the reader to think on the subject/situation you chose to illuminate. (This is not a matter of “sending a message” just that short stories are rather pointless if they don’t leave behind a form of intellectual after taste that causes the reader to think or feel something long after.) A novel on the other hand is a sustained emotional roller coaster which amuses or distracts the reader and which might leave behind one or several impressions and thoughts.

Beginner writers, no matter what age, are very much like beginner artists, who never got to dabble with finger paints. At that stage it is easier to work with strong contrasting colors. Even in pastel, one of my most successful projects was working with three colors only: black, white and ox blood red. If you try to use more subtle tones, when just learning, you have a tendency to shade it finer and finer till the whole thing is an indistinct mess. (I’m stuck in this point.) In fact, you could say that past basic competency the painter’s great struggle is learning contrast so the picture emerges from the canvas as what it’s supposed to be, not just “blobs of somewhat related colors.”

It is the same way for writers, really. One of my more common critiques when reading someone’s beginning work is “it’s pleasant enough, but you don’t have a story. You have a series of incidents.” That is because people are trying to write as life happens, and life has no coherent narrative. Narrative is what we impose on it. In the same way if painters try to paint “true to life” and forget that they’re doing three dimensions in a two-dimensional medium, they end up with “muddle.”

But like beginning painters, most beginning writers, consciously or not, reach for the primary colors: anger, fear, grief, joy, laughter and, yes, ick.

Beginners – not all of them, I started with a novel – tend to start with a short story, because they figure it’s easier to sustain the mood through three or four pages than 200 (this is correct. But it’s also far more difficult to make the mood relevant.) And they reach for the big, big emotions, because those are more relatable to for them, and therefore they imagine they can make them more relatable to the reader. I think this is often why new writers have to be “inspired”. I.e., they have to feel that emotion to be able to write. This is not a reliable way to do it, but then they are beginners and sometimes it works.

However, sometimes they don’t have those emotions on hand, but they still want the readers to feel SOMETHING. One emotion some reach for is humor and if they’re of a natural comedic bend, they can pull it off. (Humor is however much harder to sell. First because of fact that not all senses of humor are alike and the gap is harder to bridge than in other emotions. You could say everyone cries the same way but everyone laughs differently. But more importantly, I suspect my friend Kate Paulk is correct and most of the entertainment field has been taken over at the managerial/promotional level by minor demons and, as Umberto Eco taught us, the devil does not laugh.)

The other common emotion that newbies reach for, and which is much more universal than humor is … disgust. We all have basic ick factors: excrement and bodily functions; rotting flesh; gross (I mean that literally) anatomy. To paraphrase Pratchett, we all know there are green wobbly bits in there somewhere and none of us, frankly, wants to think about them too much.

Disgust, if combined with another driver, can be a powerful way to pull a reader into a story. For a combination of “Oh, my G-d, I don’t want to look but I can’t look away” consider my friend Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International. The beginning hit my ick factor so often that I’d have flung it across the room – except that at the same time he was dragging me along way too fast on the pace of the book and the question of whether his character would survive. It’s a beginning like a punch in the gut. You want to step away, but you can’t, and by the time you realize the guy survived you’re bonded to him for good and will stay with him come hell or high water for however many books.

So, it’s not like I don’t understand the temptation. I do. But I almost feel like Larry should have little stickers on the beginning of that book saying something like “this experiment was carried on by an expert. Don’t try this at home.”

The more average use of disgust is to have a oh, hum story where someone is being showered in a long, blunt shower of sh*t – literally. Or a story in which the big point is that ah ah “They’re zombies. They’re rotting. They smell.” Um… mkay. But if you actually succeed in making the reader feel disgust in those circumstances and if the audience you’re writing for is not into – Thanks again, Kate – what Kate Paulk calls “the meaty skull with reptiles” type of art, then… well… you’re going to make the reader ill and the book will get thrown against the wall.

Keeping the reader horrified but reading on involves being at the level of expertise where you at least know a hook when it bites you in the nose. Preferably you’re at the point where you perfectly balance ick and pull, because that’s irresistible. If you must have too much of one, have too much of the hook, because everyone’s ick factor is different and if yours is set high, you’ll lose more than half the readers.

Take the beginning of a novel by a talented but utterly clueless beginner that I read in the last month. We have rather standard fantasy tropes, but murkily discussed in a way that really doesn’t make it very clear what the world is and/or what exactly is happening or why the characters are doing what they are.

There are several mistakes in there already, of course, but the wordage is pleasant enough and you go along on the principle that “this can be edited into sharpness.”

Except that on page three you hit one of those icks, relating to “things that one shouldn’t visualize ANYONE eating.” If you manage to swallow hastily and go past it, three pages later the author starts throwing excrement-related humor all over the page and the book goes against the wall. Hard.

Now, I know the psychological mechanism behind this train wreck. The author knows, at some level that the story doesn’t grab enough. Probably because the author knows that both world and characters are so imprecise and hazy as to be a muddle (or as my painting teach called it “mud”) on the canvas. There’s nothing there to grab the reader. And so instinctively and – trust me – blindly the author reaches for the things that evoke a reaction in the author because… (Duh! #winning!) they can’t fail to do so in the reader.

And the author is absolutely right. It evokes a reaction. You gag, you go “ew” and throw it against the wall.

Now you can’t make a coherent book without the big emotions. Well, at least if you’re not trying for literary post modernist. And no matter what you’re using, some people will be “icked” by it. But don’t rely on the big emotions – PARTICULARLY DISGUST – to carry you through. Think of them as garlic. Some people like a lot of garlic, some people like a little, but if all you can taste in your dish is garlic only a very small percentage of people will read it.

And if the other emotions are garlic, the ick factor is three-alarm pepper. While some people want to have their mouth set on fire and most people can tolerate a pinch of the stuff, your greatest audience will be somewhere between. The more you shovel it in, and the fewer other appeals the story has, the more audience you’ll lose.

The ick factor is not a cure all for insufficient skills in fact it should be locked in your tool box until you are competent with the other tools.