"Dreadful, dreadful, DREADFUL."

Words of creative encouragement from the Godfather of Goth

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14 Nov 2024 • 6 min read

A good 15-20% of conversation in our house is quotes. Sometimes from Shakespeare – for instance we tend to say goodbye with Puck's line for A Midsummer Night's Dream, "I go, I go, look how I go." Sometimes we get all intellectual and quote timeless cultural classics like Aliens. I once surveyed the mess in our garage, turned to Mari and said, "I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

Shared quotations carry context and emotion, both from the source of the quote and the way you and your community have decided to use them. They also give the everyday a touch of hyperbole that paradoxically makes problems seem smaller. Shareable.

And there's one quote, a very simple quote, from kind of an obscure source, that we use to help each other when we hit creative ruts. What is the quote? Well, spoiler alert: it's in the title. I'll tell you more about after the news.

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The comforting sound of The Unstrung Harp

Everybody in my house is working on one – usually several – creative projects. I live with two artist/writers, and my garage is used as a workshop by a woodworker specializing in exotic wood pens and utensils. The house is filled with projects in the various phases of the creative process.

So at any point, one or more of us can be in the despair phase of a creative process. That phase when we think that we have no new ideas, never had any talent in the first place, and are going to be exposed as the fraud that we are. Everybody hits this phase, however untrue the morbid thoughts. It's a swamp we all have to wade through to create anything. The challenge is not to give up as the mud starts to climb past your thighs.

So when we see a member of the family in this state, we have a specific quote to offer. Words of comfort. We go to whoever is suffering and sympathetically say:

Dreadful, dreadful, DREADFUL.

For us, this is reassurance.

How can this possibly be reassuring?

The quote comes from the very first book by Edward Gorey. He was a artist/writer, famous for his intro animations for PBS Mystery, his Tony-winning costume designs and Tony-nominated set designs for the stage revival of Dracula, and numerous darkly humorous books that, in the words of Wikipedia, presented "vaguely unsettling narrative scenes in Victorian and Edwardian settings."

His first book came out in 1953: The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel. It follows a gentleman novelist, C(lavius) F(rederick) Earbrass, as he slogs through the process of writing a new novel. It is full of "the unspeakable horrors of the literary life," from choosing a title, to figuring out an ending, to dealing with characters that seem to be manifesting physically, like ghosts.

And it is Mr. Earbrass's dark hour of the soul that resonates so:

Mr Earbrass has been rashly skimming through the early chapters, which he has not looked at for months, and now sees it for what it is. Dreadful, dreadful, DREADFUL. He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel.

Mad. Why didn't he become a spy? How does one become one? He will burn the MS. Why is there no fire? Why aren't there the makings of one? How did he get in the unused room on the third floor?

We are all Mr. Earbrass sometimes

The beauty here is not Mr. Earbrass's suffering, however exaggerated and comical. What makes it special is that we have all had that exact same feeling. And here it is, expressed by a fictional Edwardian character created by a young artist in the early 1950's. It has the feel of truth, the heft of history.

The best part? Mr. Earbrass finishes his novel and it is published. Yes, he felt terrible, and yes, he finished it anyway.

So when I come out of my office, and Mari asks how the day went, and I just sigh, she'll lean over and ask, "Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful?"

And those three words remind me that there are always dips in the slow motion rollercoaster of the creative life. It's not that I'm bad at it (or at least not that bad). It's just a phase in the journey to done, and I'm going to have to put on my hip waders and trudge on through.

It's a quick, three word reminder that I'm not alone. Mari's dealt with dreadful, dreadful, dreadful, too. So must have Edward Gorey himself. And certainly so did Mr. Earbrass. So separately, and together, we're all going to get through that dreadful swamp.

Dreadful, dreadful, DREADFUL. As they say in software development, it's not a bug. It's a feature.