I’ve made lists of my husband’s favorite things before, for various purposes.  These were in sketchbooks, so I’m gonna try to distill and elaborate on them here, for use with my upcoming zany writing schemes…

LIKES

Movies:  Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead, The Thing, Cure, The Shining, Jacob’s Ladder, Gothic, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tetsuo: Iron Man, Akira, Perfect Blue, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Session Nine, Vampyre, Tale of a Vampire, The Cat, Kairo, Night of the Living Dead, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Little Otik, Crimson Peak, Videodrome, Event Horizon

Some take-aways from that:  character-centric horror, indelible imagery, iconic qualities, if it ain’t literally the end of the world it feels like the end of the world.  dreams.  monsters.  beautiful people.  beautiful people who are monsters.  small central casts.

Stories, Books, and Comic Books:  The Metamorphosis, Fall of the House of Usher, Lost Souls, The Strange Tale of Panorama Island (both versions), My Sweet Audrina, The Necrophiliac, Hellstar Remina, The Laughing Vampire

Some take-aways from that:  gothic drama, cold-hearted beauties, violence, style, ultimate corruption.

Visual Art:  Edward Hopper, Francis Bacon, Hieronymus Bosch, Malcolm Liepke, JC Leyendecker, Stephen Gammell, Suehiro Maruo

Some take-aways from that:  That stuff is pretty varied, but a lot of it ranges from spooky to horrific, from stylish and elegant to exploding with lurid detail.

Games:  Silent Hill (best to worst 3 2 1 4), Sanitarium, The Dark Eye, The Secret World, Rule of Rose, Fallen London, Kult

Some take-aways from that:  good storytelling, it’s all horror games, an emphasis on parallel / hidden worlds.

Music: The Cure, Bauhaus, Tr/st, Drab Majesty, Qual, Joy Division, The Pixies, Fad Gadget, Grauzone, Depeche Mode

Some take-aways from that:  dark romance, frenetic agony, convulsive energy, awkward alienation, depression, laughing at one’s own depression, literary references, intellectualism.

Keep it Short:  Short stories, even so short as to be simple vignettes, like Fuan no Tane.  He always likes this better than long form fiction, which is funny, because he wants more of what he likes, right?  The best compromise if I’m shooting for longer length, I think, is to make sure each part holds up well on its own – has internal interest and its own arc.

Fashion:  Description of what characters are wearing, or other things related to their milieu or subculture – the food they eat, the things they drink, the music they listen to.  I don’t think he always needs this – many of his favorite short stories don’t get much into those details – but he likes it when it shows up.  Describing what characters are wearing, or what they look like at all, can throw a brick on your story’s pace.  I think the writers most concerned about that would be people like myself who are heavily influenced by cinema, but it’s a mistake to forget what medium you’re working in.  Sometimes people wanna know what stuff looks like, sometimes they don’t.  Gotta find your audience and play to it.  In this case, easy, it’s just one guy who I know well.

Looking back at the original notes, he specifically said he likes to see “makeovers.”  That’s tremendously gay.  I’m into it.  Not sure how well suited it will be to gothic genre fiction, if that’s what I make.  What the hell am I going to make?

Colorful Color:  My dude may be goth, but at heart he retains some element of that childhood attraction to green pterodactyls and purple dragons.  New Wave fashion, the makeup on New Romantics, the colors of Lisa Frank art.  Black paired with rainbow.  This is more a thing he is drawn to in visual art, but a reference to nifty colors in a book might go over well.

Simple Language:  I don’t think my dude is as much into this as he was when he made the older of the lists I was reading.  Since then, he has read and enjoyed The Turn of the Screw and Blood Meridian.  Though he did not read the latter in a linear fashion; he hopped around in it, reading parts at random until he was done.  He said it was what he imagined xtians get out of reading the bible – open to a random page for inspiration.  That book was a lot less about the overarching plot than the vignette and the character, I think.

Just the same, I think I know what he was getting at when he added “simple language” to the list.  We’ve both read amateur writing that tried to impress by using strange sentence structure or confusing metaphors.  Best to avoid that kind of shit, I’m sure.

Descriptions:  My husband has mixed opinions on how much description to include or not include in a story.  He has a piece of Stephen King advice memorized that he finds useful – that what’s left to a reader’s imagination is something they can make their own, actually immerse them in the story more effectively than telling them what to see.  His example was having a character step into a bar for a short scene, and only mentioning two details – like the bar being sticky or the bartender having hairy arms.  Something like that, I don’t recall specifics and didn’t feel like looking it up.

That is sound advice, but by contrast, sometimes an author wants to cast a spell, pull us more fully into their own world, and my dude has enjoyed that kind of writing a lot as well.  Since he has this flexibility, I think it might behoove me to use another metric for deciding how much and how little description to include.  Here’s a good one:  The more description you include, the more time slows down; the less, the faster it goes by.  I’ll just use description to control pace, or cover important details…

I say that, but I’ll probably just fall back on my evil ways and describe stuff however I please.  It’s a real hard habit to change – maybe those kind of changes are best left to subsequent drafts.  Looking back at the original notes, one says, “vivid description but not too dry.”  I think I tend to hit this mark with no effort.

Writing Actions:  A caution against excessive blocking.  Most of us are thinking visually, or acting out what a character does in our heads, so we feel the need to say “he put his hand on his chin” forty-seven times in a book, when one would probably suffice.  How often does it really matter if something happened on the right or left side?

Environmental Activism:  Not actual environmentalist themes, which would be an intrusion of depressing realities best left to other authors.  When my husband is looking at the work of amateur writers, the number one thing he harps on is that they do not establish what the hell is happening – the first element being where it’s happening.  They’re too eager to get into dialogue between their fun funboys, but are they in a rundown apartment or the Gobi Desert?  That shit kinda matters.

Establishing shots are a thing in cinema; descriptions of where your story opens have been de rigueur for hundreds of years for a reason.  In fair Verona where we lay our scene…  I don’t think I’m going to have a problem with this.  I don’t think like those kids.  RIP to them, but I’m different.

Identifiable, Well-Conceived Characters:  Stephen King does well enough at this most of the time, but his failures are notable.  As a boomer, he can maybe detect the subtle differences between white people with strained marriages and kids they don’t pay adequate attention to, better than we can.

Lovable Characters:  I don’t think he’s as much about this now as he used to be, but he’s still 100% not into unlikable characters, which is something a surprising amount of writers and readers are fond of.  I know he hates anything that feels twee or like it’s for babies, so even the beloved Dale Cooper is pushing it a little, sometimes.  People having likable flaws is good.

Romance Beginning or Being Renewed:  A lot of drama is wrung out of relationships going bad; he is not interested in that.  I’ll avoid it.  He does like to see a romance begin, or be reaffirmed in the course of a story.  Less depressing.

Humor:  My husband doesn’t like a lot of humor writing, but the humor in the writing he likes?  He likes it a lot.  He also tends to include elements of humor in most of his stories, at least a tiny dash here or there.  The kind of humor I’d be reaching for: Kiyoshi Kurosawa (wry, dark, feminist, humanist), David Lynch (people acting like wacky monsters, other people having gentle quirkiness, awkward situations as long as they aren’t too humiliating, parody like Invitation to Love or What did Jack Do?), parody of the banal things of life such as brand names and TV shows, breaks in tension at dramatically appropriate moments, etc.

Horror:  Typically of the surreal, science-fiction, or fantastical origin – a menace you would not encounter in real life.  Feeling disempowered in real life, he cannot relate to the power fantasies of being able to action hero your way out of danger.  He likes the Raid movies some, but not as much as me.  Horror as a genre is incredibly diverse.  On one end, there are action horror stories, where the characters survive and / or defeat the evil because they are so cool.  Not his jam.  Another expression is lurid interest in physical and psychological trauma, as one sees in “torture porn,” or edgelord films like Last House on the Left.  Also not his main interest, though occasionally there’d be some appeal in some amount of that.  Lastly, you have the disempowered character being confronted with a source of mortal fear, and doing their best to escape or survive.  That’s the stuff.  Another use of horror as a theme rather than a genre is to express a powerful feeling, as the surreal elements of a David Lynch film.

Survival Horror:  Of his favorite things, not a lot in this category.  Significantly Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo and the Silent Hill games.  What does he like about it?  I’m guessing it isn’t the “chance to return to zero, and make your way by wits and steel” like the main run of zombie genre fans, or the desire for a faceless mob you can mow down without compunction either.  Maybe there’s some allure in not having as many people around, since he has the shyness.  There’s another way that could interact with social anxiety – the circumstance gives an obvious way to bond with strangers, to overcome shyness.  If you’re a survivor, you have something in common.  But I think, broadly, this is just an extension of what he likes about horror.  It is believable and relatable to be in a circumstance you must react to, exciting when it’s a scary circumstance that is not one you would actually experience in real life.

Ambiguous or Inhuman Enemies:  This can be true in both survival horrors like Kairo and Silent Hill, and in works that include surreal horror like Twin Peaks and Lost Highway.  I haven’t seen all of the new / final season of Twin Peaks yet, but I somehow doubt that within it Lynch and Frost spelled out exactly wtf Bob and the doppelgangers were.  One has to wonder to what extent even the writers themselves left things intentionally undefined.  Spirits?  Aliens?  Alien spirits?  What does it mean to be a “magician” in that world?

While as a writer I tend to spell this shit out pretty specifically, I think I can manage the restraint to make an ambiguity work.  On the other hand, people did express some confusion about Josefina and Blasfemia, so I should tread carefully.

Suspense:  I don’t tend to instinctually think like this, as a writer – gotta force it.  Remember when I said I was going to aim to write a Dan Brown-style thriller?  I very thoroughly planned and outlined it, but didn’t get very far into writing.  Nonetheless, I can’t wait to get back to that project, because the preparation did help a lot.  The writing was very fun.  But making it suspenseful?  For this I had to make a conscious effort in my outline to include all the tips and tricks famous people like Brown and (much more importantly) Hitchcock have given on the subject.  It’s a cool way to make a story compelling.  Even cheap tricks can work well; they exist for a reason.  But I may have to take a very different approach if I want to land on David Lynch instead of John Grisham, you know what I mean?

Mystery:  Silent Hill, Mulholland Drive, Cure, these works all had a significant sense of mystery to them.  Not a whodunit among them, but still, you are led to wonder a lot, which is compelling to a guy like him.  I’m a basic bitch for stories spoonfeeding me.  Perhaps I’m a touch incurious – too assured that I understand everything I need to understand in life, and that anything outside of that domain can stay mysterious if it so desires.  But I think this’ll be a lot easier than suspense to work into any given story idea.  All I gotta do is come up with a bunch of stuff that is never shown on the page – only alluded to – and thereby invite speculation.

Should be important stuff, something you might actually care to know.  I’ve seen amateurs put a mysterious but uninteresting character in front of you, and in asking for feedback say “what do you want to know about this guy?”  Gotta make sure the answer, in my case, isn’t “not much.”

DISLIKES

Story Too Long:  He much prefers short stories to novels.  Contradiction:  He writes novels.  What’s up with that, man?  He also wants to see a lot more of the things he likes – like Silent Hill games, which turned to shit before their time.  You can’t get more of what you love without said thing going long, one way or another.  For my part, I’ll probably keep what I write on the short side for a novel, with room for a sequel.

Description Too Dry:  Too much description, or description that creates a dull, uninteresting tone.  I’m a lazy writer.  Won’t catch me penning anything like the first chapter of Mysteries of Udolfo, so I think this is not a problem.

Unnecessary Information / Overlong Exposition:  When we develop a sci-fi or fantasy setting, or an elaborate web of conspiracy or intergenerational intrigue, we tend to want to lay out all of our work on the page.  Big mistake, for any audience except the ultragork, and my dude has a low tolerance for it.  I don’t expect this’ll be a problem for me.  On the other hand, maybe J & B would’ve made more sense if I spent more than the odd short paragraph on explanation…  Contradiction:  None; he’s pretty consistent about this.

Too Much Relationship Drama:  He probably has Post-raised-by-women-who-watch-Dynasty Stress Disorder.  A lot of stories get their mileage out of ups and downs in a relationship.  Oh no, is he cheating?  Is she jealous?  Is he planning to leave her?  Will absence make these hearts grow cold?  Contradiction:  He’s OK with including one of these things, but generally is true to this principle.  It just doesn’t interest him – or me.

Too Much Conversation:  When word count is tilted toward dialogue, this is a pet peeve for him.  Especially if the dialogue is redundant or adds nothing but mild character development to the story.  Contradiction:  None; even in real life he’s pretty stoic.  Maybe he doesn’t like chatty characters because he doesn’t relate.

Graphic Sex:  A lot of people agree with this, just find it tasteless to see a lot of dirty words in print, feels better when something is left to the imagination.  Contradiction:  How much sexual content is in David Lynch films?  In books he loves?  I suppose that can hinge on how one defines “graphic.”

Judgments / Shaming:  Too easy to relate to a character who is on the spot, beloathed.  As a child he used to identify with the villains in superhero stories, like Wesley Willis assuming Batman would kick his ass.  Contradictions:  If he hates an antagonist enough, they might get some amount of this.  But even then, not for long.  He once wrote a rush limbaugh -inspired character that was mocked by a demon for like two seconds before being sent to hell.  Don’t dwell on it.

Embarrassment Comedy:  You ever notice how much comedy – especially sitcoms and Farrelly brothers movies – revolves around humiliation?  You ever been humiliated?  How you responded to that experience may be the deciding factor in whether or not this humor works for you.  Personally, I fucken despise it.  Nuke it from orbit.  My dude has expressed as much to me, and I can’t see myself writing a scenario like this, even by accident.  Incidentally, the fetish some people have for humiliation is also beyond my comprehension, except insofar as I understand any intense experience could be sexualized.  Not my cup o’ tea.  More broadly, my husband doesn’t like reading about people being embarrassed, on the spot, upset, but… Contradiction:  The sad ending of Mulholland Drive hinges in part on the social horror of humiliation.  At least we’re not expected to laugh at it.

Realistic Characters as Impediment to Story:  It might be realistic for characters to have a slow time adjusting to a fantastic circumstance, but if they’re still getting used to the idea of zombies existing when the credits are about to roll, that shit is annoying.  Real life people tend to not have bold personality traits that line up with tropes, just being a muddle of contradictions and mild feelings about things.  Archetypes and tropes exist because they help storytelling, and shouldn’t be shunned to make your guys more boring.  Contradiction:  My husband, as a writer, does tend toward understated characters that don’t hew closely to existing archetypes, and can have complex motivation.  A sort of realism can work, if it doesn’t impede the story.  I don’t think I’ll have a hard time writing characters for him, in this way at least.

Inscrutable Characters:  Not everybody has to wear their heart on their sleeve or be obvious from go, but if you haven’t made at least a false sense of the character within a few chapters of their introduction, they’re kind of a non-entity, not interesting.  The Man of Mystery can’t be too mysterious.  Contradiction:  He’s down with the antagonist from Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, who seems to have amnesia throughout the picture, and has indecipherable motives.  What’s up with that, man?

References to Attractiveness:  Nobody is universally attractive.  Even if they look remarkable, different people will be struck by that differently.  I’ve only seen people with noteworthy eye color less than ten times out of thousands of people I’ve seen, and I wasn’t “arrested by their limpid pools,” hollering after them or trying to get those digits.  Some readers want a fantasy of everybody being horny for the character they identify with, but it reads like the insecurity of the author to me.  Not compelling, unrealistic in a bad way – a way that limits the narrative.  Contradictions:  My man likes the early works of Billy Martin, which have the sexy-to-everyone specialest boys in them.  I do think we’re mostly simpatico on this one and I’m not likely to transgress, but could I dip into it just a bit, for cheesy charm?

Self-Important and Self-Pitying Characters:  When the author identifies too much with the character, there’s a tendency to treat them even more preciously than we treat ourselves in real life.  At least, I’m hoping that’s the reason characters are sometimes written like this, because if they are reflecting their authors accurately, those authors are not appealing people.  It comes off like more insecurities.  Sometimes it will be a character clinging too tenaciously to the comforts of their cute little status quo.  Sometimes they’ll overreact to perceived slights and disrespect.  Sometimes they will just seem absolutely uninterested in other characters in the story.  Sometimes they’ll react to any suffering imposed by the narrative with too much sniveling and whining.  Not every character has to be stoic manjobs, but this stuff sucks.  Especially when the Universe of the story agrees with their point of view – everybody around them is unreasonable, every inconvenience they experience truly is a cosmic injustice, etc.  Contradictions:  My dude likes gothic writing, which does have a lot of self-pity on display.  But, y’know, when you’re being poisoned by your grandma and your uncle is driving you insane with snakes in the parlor so he can steal your inheritance, self-pity might be in order.  He’s clarified this for me more recently – impotent rage is the least appealing expression to him, reminiscent of incels.

Characters too Edgy:  Stories that expect you to identify with a rapist – why are there so damn many of these?  Ditto other stripes of creep.  This is easy enough to avoid.  Contradiction:  My husband likes some stories with grody MCs, altho the out for that is when the author is not asking the reader to agree with them, like EA Poe with his various murderer-narrators.

Gross-outs:  We personally know a talented new writer who loves to write about sloppy piles of guts and excrement.  My dude has a reasonable amount of respect for her, but is decidedly not on the same page for that stuff.  Contradiction:  The part in Ranpo’s Panorama Island which luridly describes the double’s sorta-fresh corpse gets a thumbs up, as does the writing of Gabrielle Wittkop, such as The Necrophiliac.  Hm.  I suppose, for horror, a good metric would be how it compares to Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive (originally Brain Dead).  That is clearly grody as hell for the sake of being grody, which is a no-go.  One of our writer friend’s short stories was very much like Dead Alive, or Reanimator.

Scary Animals:  It amuses me that this was on one of the lists because he has done extensive work on at least three novels with prominent use of animals for scares.  He has complex feelings on beasties.  I do hope he gets them ready for self-publishing; they are compelling.

Children and Babies:  Something about stories involving children or babies is extremely uninteresting to my dude, which makes sense for a non-breeder, but there’s more to it than that.  He also doesn’t like most literature written for children, no matter how much it works for the masses.  That’s part of why he never had to feel the disappointment of queen terf’s heel turn the way many people close to his age do.  Even if the characters are over eighteen, if they’re “coming of age” or “figuring themselves out,” it feels like kid stuff to him.  Contradiction:  I think he’s cool with scary kids, like Damian Omen and Sadako The Ring.

Boring Settings:  He just finds certain milieus uninteresting and boring – deserts, prisons, courtrooms, corporate / professional settings, extravagance and wealth.  Contradiction:  He has a line from The Trial tattooed on his body, the joaker.  Plus gothic stories are usually set in an environment of extravagance and wealth, if a decaying one.

Overly Detailed Settings:  Can’t have so much detail that it’s hard to remember or understand.  Contemporary setting is by far the best, if sci-fi or fantasy keep jargon constrained, minimize learning required.  For my part on this project, I’m definitely using a contemporary setting.

Crime Stories:  Again, a setting or milieu he finds uninteresting.  For me, it depends on the execution and the focus.  If the characters are all competent and cool criminals executing a hojillion dollar heist, less interesting than grotty fuckups getting into trouble.  But the grotty fuckups can easily become too unlikable.  For me Pulp Fiction really pushed the limit.  I generally can’t get behind those assholes, but the actors helped a lot.  Professional charisma havers.  You do not get this benefit in print!  Of topic.  Lessee… Contradictions:  He liked The Raid movies.  Twin Peaks is a murder mystery -esqe thing.  More than one Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie has police procedural elements.

Cars / Vehicles:  Like a boring setting to him, but also connects to a general lack of interest in action.  No Fast No Furious.

Action:  He doesn’t like action adventures – he does not like scenarios that show a character’s power, because it is unrelatable to somebody with chronic feelings of disempowerment, even as wish fulfillment.  Contradiction:  He is OK with action scenarios that are more about just barely surviving, horror content or scenarios that feel like horror content.  The Raid movies are relentless action, but horrifying.  He especially liked a scene of the dude from Matheson’s I Am Legend arriving late at his fortified home, which was swarming with vampires.

Too Many Enemies:  Not sure what he meant by this one.  May have just been an extension of how he doesn’t like longer form or overly complicated stories.

Heavy Topics:  Environmentalism, war, global strife, politics, homophobia, transphobia, racism, ignorance – even in antagonists.  It’s too real; my husband goes to literature to see problems that are not affecting him IRL.  Contradiction:  I think he can tolerate traces of this, but he’s pretty consistent about it.  The villain should be scheming to steal your kidneys for Satan, not hurting you because you are gay.

From Recent Discussion With Him:  Best stories are simple at their core, which is why he favors short form.  If I do something long, the length must not come from complexity within the story, or too many side plots and characters.  Asked which David Lynch movie involved the least time-wasting foolery, he said Blue Velvet.  I bet he’d say that of Eraserhead as well, if he had thought of it.  Asked for an example of something more like novel length that didn’t waste too much time, The Haunting of Hill House was mentioned, and Frankenstein.  He emphasized that fairy tales are a good model for elemental storytelling.

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This is more notes to myself and I have no special idea on what people should comment, if anybody feels like commenting, but as you please…

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