Quoth ANONYMOUS: PHENOMENAL WEBSITE. PHENOMENAL. I WORRY SOMETIMES THAT MY PURSUIT OF THE VIOLENT AND NUMINOUS MYSTERIES OF THE SHADOW-SICK HUMAN HEART MAY ALIENATE MAINSTREAM AUDIENCES. HOW DO I WRITE MORE APPROACHABLY WITHOUT FEEDING PABLUM TO THE MASSES? I’LL TAKE MY ANSWER OFF THE AIR.

Thank you for the insightful question. I think that’s something we all worry about, except maybe the people who sell pablum.

You seem to feel strongly about your artistic vision, which I’m guessing is a largely intuitive one with which you improvise to create stories. You see something, it glimmers at you, and you integrate it in your story because you trust your mind’s eye.

To me, that’s probably the purest way to create art, and I admire it deeply.

For a variety of neurotic reasons, however, I’m someone who is driven to entertain people…which makes me either the worst person to answer your question or the best.

I’m nominally a horror writer in that my work tends to include people with fractured perceptions coping with a universe that seems eerily tuned to their exact emotional weaknesses. My work sometimes includes violence, rarely gory or sexual but usually a more internal kind, a personal kind.

For example, a ghost story to me is the gossip of the dead, and the way a spirit haunts a person’s mind is far more interesting to me than the mechanics of how it’s anchored to an old fucked up house.

Most of my stories are experiments, both on the people living inside the story and the ones reading it. I just…like that. The instrument I’m playing with my fiction is the people, not the phenomena or the objects.

You might start somewhere else, perhaps with visual and auditory imagery. You see a curtain of trees or a crumbled factory, and they hint at something deeper than what they are. Some people might want to define and confine that meaning, to explain it, but I suspect you’re more of the “hey, look at this crazy shit” school of artistic expression.

Which I would never talk you out of. In fact, I could use more of that in my own work; I’m tempted too often to explain the mysterious…which ruins it.

To make your work marginally more approachable without sacrificing your vision, I would suggest creating a lens character: someone with whom we travel through these liminal spaces who can perceive (unreliably, of course) the terrible, wondrous things you are showing us.

I’d make this character somewhat more sensitive than an ordinary person so we can see and feel more of what he or she is experiencing, and I’d provide him or her a deep personal history so there are lots of hooks you can use for making the horrors more directly damaging. I’ve written before that weird is normal and normal is cliché, and this person should have plenty of weird.

I think you’ll do okay with that.

One thing you’ll have to keep in mind, especially as a creator more accustomed to manipulating mood and setting than characters, is that your readers are probably going to like this character. We’re going to feel their hurts more because we’re wired that way in our monkey minds.

That means that whatever you do to this character will have a higher impact on an audience. A muted note of horror will sound like a tuba blast when it happens to them, and that’s worth keeping in mind as you control the tone of your story.

That character is the audience’s raw nerve, and whatever you do with that access should probably be more deliberate than your strictly intuitive approach. You may have to consider a second or third idea for their fate instead of leaping on the first. That’s not compromising your vision…it’s just understanding the tool you’re using to express it.  

Now it’s entirely possible that you want to express the nihilistic emptiness of all existence and the hopelessness of love and the futility of evolution. That’s fine; stomp on that raw nerve, put that character’s arm in a blender, throw them through a windshield, kill them off and damn them to hell.

But accept that the work won’t be “approachable” and be cool with that.

What this all means is that characters aren’t just objects in a story like sofas or forests or bloody hatchets…at least not to readers. They suffer, yes. They don’t all get happy endings. Maybe none of them do, if that’s your model of the universe.

But in a work that’s otherwise subtle, you need to remember the power you wield through them.

For me, that risk is worth the huge benefit of audience sympathy. Not all my stories have happy endings, but I try to make them interesting endings: moments of realization or transformation, even if they’re short-lived and wrong.

I don’t think I feed people pablum, but I try not to feed them flaming aircraft fuel, either.

The good news is that we don’t have to choose one or the other.

I hope that helps!