Posted in: Short 'n Curlies by Si Spurrier | Tagged: short and curlies, si spurrier

Short 'n Curlies #20 by Si Spurrier

The Keyboard Is My FuckMonkey:

I spent much of the last week writing an in-depth cityguide to a town that doesn't exist. That's a lot harder than it sounds.

For a start, this splat of DeScript has to be brutally practical. No trace of last-minute whimsy here: no sudden decisions to make the air in this Madeup Metropolis bright purple, or the streets cobbled with the undigested remains of a Hogmanay feast, or the citizens as phallus-eyed snailkin with hovering jet-shells. I may indeed be swollen with all the self-importance of a worldmaking deity (bwah-ha-ha), but I've also been unfairly neutered before I've even got going.

This guide, you see, is a companion piece to a spiky comicbook gorgoegasm I've been writing for months, which is already in the process of being drawn. To start tweaking background ephemera now might very well pitch my poor, long-suffering artist into the pits of creative buggerment, or worse, (and more likely) might make me look unforgivably stupid when a) the editor refuses to allow any last-minute art changes, b) the conflicting infosources go live, and c) legions of eagle-eyed readers reveal that — secretly — they're far less interested in sky-rippingly awesome stories of solid platinum YES than they are in catching-out plebskulled writers for petty and unimportant data infractions. Tell me I'm wrong.

So: no spontaneous invention. Equally, the bloody thing's got to be Actually Vaguely Readable, on the grounds that the poor undernourished text has no solid basis in reality itself, so a tenuous ability to Gratify is pretty much all it can offer. It has to Entertain but contains no story. It has to Educate but contains no permissible fakt. It has to Inform, but you couldn't find a single nugget of Genuine Real Information in it with a sniffer-dog fed on pulped encyclopaedias and a set of dousing-rods made of Wikipedia's brittle, twiggy soul.

Hard.

It's for a project which — to idiomrape slightly — needs to Hit The Ground Rutting. I'm pretty sure the story stands upright all by itself, and given time the dripfeed of information would flesh out this bizarre fuckbag of a city all on its own. Alas, thanks to the way we're releasing this puppy into the wild, it's in the interests of the project to provide as much fruity background as possible up front. It's not enough to merely splash the reader with the shimmering pheromone gold of Episode One — no, for maximum COMEBACKSOON credit we also need to dunk the fuckers' heads in the bucket, hold them under 'til they drown, pump their saturated corpses with the tasty crystal Crack of a Fully Formed World, then revive them via genital defribulation and a free blowjob. This is Marketing 101: make notes.

CHOKE ON OUR FICTIONSPUNK, JUNKIE, THEN COME BACK FOR MORE.

Not much of a battlecry, but it's a Work In Progress.

So, all this background-oriented, universe-expanding melch is what RPG types call "The Fluff": a phrase which keeps getting confuddled in my mind with that old pre-Viagran mainstay of the porn trade: the Fluffer. Cue a whole host of confused daydreams involving Space Marine moneyshots, scale-model Zulu warriors cracking wise about Wood, and Vampire Contessas in riotous orifice-plugging FangBangs.

(Actually, that's about as awesome as an analogy can get, because whilst the Background Fluff is indeed at least as addictive as the Main Show — be it story, game or history — it's sadly nowhere near as addictive as Cruel And Unusual Pornography. Which just goes to show: there's always something you'd rather be writing.)

Anyway. This Cityguide thing is a massive departure for me. It's not a question of mere language — no thin veneer of fun descriptions and ragged-yet-inventive cussnukes — which, in case you never Got It, is where I'm at my most comfortable. Nor is this gig a matter of plot; on the thorny subject of which I've expounded on this hallowed columnturf before. Once you've got a Writing System in place for that, structural whatnot isn't an issue.

No, this thing is pure Infrastructure. It's pure Constrictive Colour: the sort of stuff which can all too quickly come right back and bite you on the arse. Just when the story demands a thrilling hi-octane chase through a vast magma-spewing foundry packed with gibbering insect fetishists and many-tentacled tongueworms, you glance back at your superdetailed geographical guide and realise — whoops… Your characters are stuck in a cul-de-sac and surrounded by car-lots. (Not, for the record, that this particular fictional city contains any of those things — foundries, fetishists, freakworms or fuel-driven vehicles — but you get the idea). With too much background detail, writing yourself into a corner is a constant danger.

Along the same lines, I've always been a bit wary of novels which have maps prefixing Chapter One. Until now I'd sort of assumed it was some Darwinian Instinct — hotwired into my literary ballbag — responding unhappily to the very notion of Yet More Fucking Orcs And Elves. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't have more to do with some freaky, subconscious sympathy-pang for the writer. "How the hell, chummy, are you going to surprise and astonish us… and more importantly keep yourself interested… when you've only got this one, uninspiring little drawing to muck about in?"

Which is stupid, really, because a lot of the best stories in the world are set very firmly in a fully-realised world with more Fluff than anyone could ever hope to digest (ie: the one you're sitting in right now), and that hasn't adversely screwed up too many decent writers for want of Weird Shit. We live, after all, in Weird Times.

The key, I think, is to check and doublecheck that the universe you've built is capable of existing without you. Like a mewling, newly-born puppy: you don't drop it into a deathpit with the snarling Rottweiler of Audience Disbelief until you've trained it to stand up, fitted vibro-caps on its spiky little teeth and implanted a power-drill in its tail. And — importantly — tested they all work. For this, sadly, you need a lot of puppies.

And you have to be rigorous. Have you given your madcap little world — your bubbling, festering urban nightmare — all the Bits it needs? Have you provided all the resources, supplies, neighbourhoods, civic buildings and General Cultural Wankery you'd expect to suffuse the life of every one of its peculiar citizens? Have you spattered it with enough randomness and pointless whimsy that it won't ever become constrictive? And, most importantly, have you given it all an atmosphere of functional vagueness or wackiness — a bit of sly literary WiggleRoom — to explain-away all the odd necessities that crop-up later on down the line; either because the story demands them, or because some no-life facetious little Norman compiles a list of Implausibles and posts it online?

ORRRR — the death knell — have you created something either a) so fiddly and self-referential, b) so violently inventive that it has no touchpoint in reality at all, or c) so utterly exotic and obtuse that the only way it works is for you to be standing beside it: endlessly fielding tricky questions and inventing increasingly wild explanations for How That Bit Works? Are you, in other words, a jittery parent — leaning over your poncey gingerhaired spawn during a playground smackdown, constantly playing Defender, Explainer, Provider of One-Liners, and Justifier Of All Things Crap.

There is no moral to this story. Add it to the list of Things I Never Thought I'd Worry About While Writing, and stand back to see how the fucker fares on its own. You, my people, will be the first to be invited to Find The Cracks.

This Week I Have Been Mostly Hating:

…people who fail to acknowledge that my Halloween Pumpkin was The Best Halloween Pumpkin, and all other Halloween Pumpkins are pitiful fat-headed orange-skinned Retards by comparison. HATE THEM WITH PIE AND SOUP.

Find Me @:

Twitter: @SiSpurrier

WWWebbage: www.simonspurrier.blogspot.com

Send wurdz, thoughts, stories, Hatings, and insane post-work RAGES to the Only Checked Occasionally And I Might Not Bother Replying At All Ha Ha Ha email address:

Contact@Chop-This-Bit-Outsimonspurrier.co.uk

Or the It Might Not Get To Me At All But If It Does I Promise To Recycle It snailmail address:

C/O William Christensen,

Avatar Press
515 N. Century Blvd.
Rantoul, IL 61866
(Disclaimer: Secretly, I'm nice.)

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