(via Warren Ellis » Brubaker & Phillips’ FATALE: A Preview)
When I started writing, when I was a teenager, I mostly wrote absurdly hard-boiled stories about detectives standing in the rain at funerals, or drinking coffee in diners and talking to equally bleak waitresses. Nothing of “writing what I knew,” but had I watched Cowboy Bebop through 5 or 6 times, read every issue of Hellblazer and spent a lot of time trying to sound like Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past. I thought there was something about the Noir form that could carry more story than anything else I knew, at that age.
The extent to which I might have been right was obscured by years of Creative Writing seminars, where “writing what you know” is an article of faith. That’s not wrong, just incomplete. It’s true, I was never going to say anything deeply meaningful about being a detective, or even about being as weary as the characters I wrote, but that wasn’t the point. Such as they were, the stories were mostly about impossible love and being overwhelmed by the world. The form is just that, a structure to tell a story with and it worked, such as it did.
The stories weren’t great, they weren’t even good, but I remember how wonderful it felt to write them. That all came back, courtesy of the incomparable Warren Ellis, reading through the first 5 pages of Fatale. Haven’t felt that in years, which means, I think, I’ve got a thing on my hands, here.
