Gauthic Times: The Bill Gauthier Newsletter #141, or Telling Your Story

Hello, friends.

This week was another busy one. I miss summer vacation getting to work on my creativity throughout the day every day. That said, I’m fortunate enough to have things to work on after school that meets that creative itch. Honestly, I’m lucky enough to teach in a program where I get to be creative, too. Still, the call remains and so do I.

I’ll be part of a signing next week, which I’ll discuss below.

Welcome to the 141^st installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and being willing to trust your own viewpoint in creativity. If you’re a reader who subscribes via Substack, my website, or Patreon, your encouragement helps motivate me. I’m not breaking any records but I’m thankful to have any audience.

Thank you.

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Most of this week’s writing work was spent polishing The Monster in the Closet, which I finished Thursday night. I’m pretty happy with the book and am looking forward to getting into readers’ hands. Today I worked on the acknowledgements and drew some thumbnails for cover ideas for the publisher. I’ll be emailing the book, the dedication, the acknowledgments, and the thumbnails/ideas this weekend.

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Sometimes I need a reminder for certain things and I’m using this essay as a reminder. Writing is my main way to communicate thoughts, ideas, and emotions so this is a good way to get a message to myself. If you’re interested, you can read, too. (The success of this newsletter is really based on your interest, so thank you). But I’m sending out the reminder to any creative who needs it: Tell your story your way.

I just finished reading through and polishing The Monster in the Closet, my upcoming novel. There’ll probably be a little more of this kind of thing as we get closer to publication and that’s good. I hope further readings will only cement the takeaways I got from reading it this time. The main one is that it’s imperative that I tell a story my way.

Things happen in the novel that are strange. The story goes places I wasn’t expecting when I began writing the book and a few of those places are odd. I don’t know how readers will respond to them. And I remind myself that that’s okay. All I need to do is look at works from those I trust and admire and how they surprise me. How often has Stephen King, Chuck Wendig, or any plethora of writers done something in the course of a story that left me utterly shocked and thinking, Is he really going there?! And the answer is, Yes. Yes he is. The confidence in the story and the characters made the weird turn work.

I need to remind myself of that. The world bends a certain way through my eyes and that way is unique so will make my work unique. It’s something to be happy with and proud of.

My novel Echoes on the Pond does that. It’s a ghost story if we’re going to boil it down to a two-word description. But the ghost of the teenage girl surprised me by wanting to possess the teenage lead character but also kill everyone else. And there’s other things that happen to the main characters, Missy and Cheryl, that are surprising. I didn’t know if they’d work but my instinct was to go there. Readers have responded positively, so it worked.

In The Monster in the Closet, Tim Beaulieu finds that his little girl, Cleo, has an invisible friend who is also the monster from her closet. Cleo’s mother has recently died and Tim suddenly finds himself a single parent with a precocious, sweet kid. She’ll tell him her invisible monster friend, Mr. Brambles, is the reason for one thing or another happening. It doesn’t sit well with Tim and as the story progresses, we discover reasons for this. My pitch for it is Stephen King’s It meets Monsters, Inc. I’m willing to bet that by reading that synopsis you have a certain idea of how the story would go. I know I do.

And you may be right for some it.

But not for all of it.

Things happened in the story during the writing that I didn’t expect. All of them grew in size but always felt right for the book. When friends read it, I expected to hear, “[This thing] doesn’t work.”

That’s not what happened. The surprising turns for me were surprising for them and seemed to energize them and their enjoyment of the story. In other words, seeing the world through my eyes and reporting on it connected with readers.

Creators have their individual viewpoints to bring to their works and they need to be comfortable doing so, but it’s easier said than done. Reminding myself of that is important. Believing in it is even more important.

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Next Saturday, October 4^th, I’ll be heading back to Barnes & Noble in Smithfield, Rhode Island, to hang out with some other local horror authors.

Join John Lynch, Gage Greenwood, Brennan LaFaro, Derek Mola, Barry Lee Dejasu, and myself. I’m looking forward to it.

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That’s this week’s newsletter. Thank you so much for subscribing, reading, and for your support.

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