Writing Spirits
It's scary what can lead to great writing.
We make our own monsters,
then fear them for what they show us
about ourselves.
—Mike Carey and Peter Gross
Fun factlet: Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelly) wrote the classic masterpiece Frankenstein as a lark after Lord Byron challenged his pals to a contest while they were vacationing in Switzerland.
The part I find most reassuring? They came up with the game while suffering through a dark time—figuratively and literally:
Weather conditions were abnormally unpleasant at the time due to the lingering effects of the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora the previous year, forcing the group to largely remain indoors. Amid the dark and frigid evenings of that “Year Without a Summer,” the weary vacationers read and debated literary works late into the night, most notably horror stories and macabre poems that seemed appropriate given the gloomy weather outside.
Byron suggested his friends could one-up the stories they were sharing, and after an initial stretch suffering writer’s block, Mary Godwin had a vision (because of course she did; it was the Gothic era) and then wrote what we know today as one of the greatest horror-slash-morality tales of her time (and ours).
May your Halloween be horrifying in only the best of ways and your November be safe and well.
Lagniappe: Mary Godwin Shelly has something in common with the author of the world’s first novel: they were both women. Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji more than 1,000 years ago. In fact, women wrote almost all early Japanese literature because—misogyny! According to History.com, “Aristocratic men eschewed their native tongue in favor of Chinese during the Heian period (794–1185), leaving women who were denied a formal education to rely on Japanese for personal and creative expression. The hiragana script, one of the language’s three syllabaries, was even referred to as onna-de, or ‘women’s hand.’ ”