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How To Be Successful In Writing Horror With Iain Rob Wright

February 11, 2019 by Joanna Penn 2 Comments

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Writing deep in a genre you love is a great way to make a living with your writing. In today's show, Iain Rob Wright shares his tips on writing horror and also becoming a successful full-time indie author.

How To Be Successful In Writing HorrorIn the intro, I mention the ‘future of digital journalism in question' [The Guardian], even as Spotify buys Gimlet Media and Anchor. Is the future audio-first? [Recode] Google has also announced Live Transcribe, an app that takes real-world speech and turns it into real-time captions using just the phone’s microphone [Google Blog].

Vellum now has Large Print, mass market and international print sizing. Click here for my Vellum tutorial. Plus, my first fiction self-narrated audiobook is out now, A Thousand Fiendish Angels [Audible US | Audible UK | Google Play | Other stores]

kobo writing lifeThis podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

Iain Rob WrightIain Rob Wright is the bestselling British author of over 20 horror novels in a number of subgenres, including the apocalyptic novels The Final Winter and The Gates.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

  • Writing horror that’s based in hope
  • the gates iain rob wrightOn the intersections between thriller, horror, crime and paranormal
  • Tropes in horror and cliches to avoid
  • Success through subverting tropes and doing things first
  • On the wide variety of opportunities available to authors with streaming services
  • On choosing to go deep or wide with an author business
  • Financial security when sticking with one genre
  • Persistence with advertising and seeing returns on investment

You can find Iain Rob Wright at IainRobWright.com and on Twitter @iain_rob_wright

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7 Tips For Writing Horror Stories

November 7, 2018 by Joanna Penn 5 Comments

The word horror encompasses a broad range of reader expectations and experiences – it is far more than just blood and guts.

writing horrorFor example, I love reading horror but I don't watch horror movies. I don't read gore-fest-style horror, but I love supernatural stories. My favorite authors include horror writers like Stephen King and Jonathan Maberry, and some of my own books flirt with horror tropes. I am a devotee of the genre!

In today's article, award-winning horror writer Alan Baxter gives some tips on how to write horror that emotionally connects with readers and stays true to the genre. Alan's latest book, Devouring Dark, is out now. You can also listen to a podcast interview with Alan about how to write short stories.

There’s a stigma to horror that needs to be addressed on a regular basis. In some ways it’s understandable, but it’s up to those of us who write horror to re-educate the reading public.

In the 80s and 90s, there was a horror boom in movies and paperbacks that ended up going in two directions. With books, there were some genuinely powerful horror stories, deep, literary, disturbing, original. There was also some sheer pulp, of course, but that’s normal in any genre.

With movies, there were slashers and gore. Sadly, it’s the movies that have stuck in the popular consciousness, which means that now, when I tell people I’m a horror writer, they immediately think of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Friday the 13th, and any number of other blood-soaked movies where dozens of teenagers die horribly.

There’s a place for those movies (and their book equivalents) of course, but that’s not all horror is, or can be. I don’t write slasher horror, or torture porn, or splatter gore. But I do write horror.

I, like many others, write dark, disturbing, thought-provoking, frightening, unsettling stories and novels that interrogate what it is to be human.

So what are a few necessary considerations to keep in mind when writing good horror? Here are seven tips to get you started.

1. All story is character

Devouring DarkNo matter how cool your ideas for the horror, the monster, the supernatural assault or whatever your story might explore, it will be nothing without the characters to carry it. And in horror, our characters are often more flawed than usual.

Horror explores tragedy and misfortune, so our characters need to reflect that. Often, they’ll be in a horrible situation because of terrible decisions they’ve made, or desperate measures they’ve taken. Sometimes they’ll just be unlucky and stumble into terrible scenarios, but how they respond is important.

Everyone, good guys and bad guys alike, need strong, believable motivations, realistic flaws, genuine emotions. By playing with these we, as authors, can draw out the real meat of the story we’re telling. Character flaws and bad decisions are the bread and butter of horror fiction.

And, as a sub-point of this, setting is key. As far as I’m concerned, the setting is always a character in the stories I write, but I think it’s especially important in horror.

The landscape can change how a person responds to or is affected by the horror. Imagine Alien if they weren’t trapped on a spaceship, or Carrie if they weren’t in a high school with all the social interactions that occur there. Choosing where your story is set and who it’s happening to is essential groundwork.

2. You need more than one idea

A good story is built in layers. You might have an incredible idea for a monster, or a strange occurrence, or a weird infection – whatever the core idea of your story might be – but it doesn’t live in isolation.

Its strength, its horror, is amplified by other factors that exist around it. Your characters are more than simply victims or villains.

  • What’s happening in their lives?
  • Are they going through relationship breakdowns, trouble at work, health issues?
  • Are they living their best life and are therefore completely unprepared for hardship?

The best stories are where something else is happening too, so that means understanding the greater lives of your characters and the world around them, and knowing life doesn’t stop just because something horrible is going down.

Horror is more frightening, after all, when it’s juxtaposed with everyone else’s normal life. A single candle both holds back and exposes the darkness.

dark hallwayA person might be dealing with a malevolent poltergeist at home, but they don’t want to lose their job too, so they have to go to work, right? Think about the greater picture around your story and build in the layers.

Good horror happens in real life, not in isolation.

3. Maintain tension

Once the two things above are in hand, the next most important aspect of horror is the maintenance of tension. Horror is suspense.

In movies and TV, this is most obviously exemplified in the jump scare – the music gets ominous, the character is sneaking through a dark house, or heading into the basement, and you know, you just know, that something is gonna get them, and then BANG! Jump scare. Or whoosh! No scare after all, leaving us feeling deflated and even more nervous next time the tension ratchets up.

Now it’s important that we don’t try to emulate that exactly in our writing, because something which works well in the medium of film often doesn’t translate into prose. But we do need to build tension and play with it in a similar way.

One of the best ways to build tension is through foreshadowing. We hint at things that lodge in our reader’s mind, then we draw those things out. We make the reader concerned about them, and we occasionally twang that thread of tension to put our reader on edge.

We can increase tension with ambiguous characters – who’s really good and who’s bad. Sometimes people can be both. Remember the points above about flawed characters and bad decisions.

foggy forest hooded figureTension can also be consequences, the result of good or bad decisions going in ways the reader doesn’t expect, or can’t anticipate. Or the reader knowing a character has made a bad choice and just waiting for the inevitable fallout as the character goes merrily along, oblivious.

And talking of anticipation, be careful not to give everything away. We have to draw out the revelations. Staring the monster in the face is terror, not horror. Horror is knowing the monster is somewhere out there, in the dark, coming for you…

4. While maintaining tension, leave room to breathe

Some books play well with a constant state of anxiety, but a lot of the time that’ll just wear the reader out and they’ll stop reading for a rest instead. The danger then is that they don’t pick the book up again.

While it’s important to maintain suspense in a horror novel, you also need moments of calm, where the reader gets to take a breath even if the characters don’t. The best thing about this is that when you do ramp up the tension again, the reader has fallen into a false sense of security and gets extra impact from the return of the suspense.

And often the best use of tension is when someone has been kept taut for a long time, then they get a reprieve. There’s no better time than that to drop a bomb and shatter any sense of security.

5. Explore an underlying theme

This is a subtle thing, and you may not even realise what it is that you’re doing until you do it, but in the second draft and rewrites, figure out what your underlying theme is and make sure you’re drawing that up well.

It’s important not to be relentless with it, you don’t want to batter your reader with a message, but with all the crazy shenanigans that might be happening in your book, and the maelstrom of events your characters are going through, your guiding light should be your theme.

In my latest novel, Devouring Dark, I’m playing with themes of death, guilt, and redemption. Everything in the book is tailored around those ideas. Jack Ketchum’s terrible, amazing classic, The Girl Next Door, follows the themes of cruelty and lack of agency. Richard Matheson’s novel, I Am Legend, follows a theme of isolation and being different. (Don’t even talk to me about the awful movie of that with Will Smith!)

Regardless, you see my point. There should be a theme, or a couple of complementary themes, that underline your narrative, the invisible tracks that your horror train rides along.

This will not only keep you focused on the direction of your story, it’ll give greater depth to everything that happens, as it will all be framed by your themes, even if they are only subconsciously recognised by your readers.

In fact, it’s often better if they’re only subconsciously recognised, and only realised later if a person stops to analyse why they were so disturbed by the book.

6. Hit the head and the heart

Horror asks us questions, even if sometimes the question is as simple as, “Why the hell are you going into the dark basement? Run! RUN AWAY!”

So we need to make sure the reader is thinking, not just being fed everything. Show the creeping dread, hint at the unknowable infinity, ask what might lie in that undiscovered country beyond this mortal coil.

We need our reader invested in the characters and events, we need them to try to logically dissect the impossible, the uncanny, the contradictory. And while they’re busy thinking we stab them in the heart (and, for good measure, kick them in the guts.)

The heart and the gut are the emotion factories, the places we process all the hope and hopelessness, the love and anger, the tension and the fear. Engage your reader’s brain with questions, and gut-punch them with answers, or a lack of answers, or just more questions. Make them consider their fear of the darkness, then drag them into it.

7. Write what scares YOU!

I think it’s dangerous ground to try to anticipate what might disturb other people. Some people can pick up and pet a giant hairy spider, after all, whereas I’ll cut you if you try to get one anywhere near me.

toy spidersWe write the stories that only we can write, and we hope there are other people out there like us who will be entertained by them. It’s the same with the scares. We need to address things in our horror that disturb and unsettle us, and there will most definitely be other people out there who are scared of the same things.

One of my biggest fears in life is not being able to protect my son from the rigours of the world, so I know that a lot of my horror writing comes from that. I’m also a control freak, and I struggle when events are out of my control, so a lot of my writing addresses that too.

This kind of writing is cathartic for us, and will be for others like us who feel the same. And it will still appeal to people who don’t share those fears, as they’ll experience the authenticity of them through our characters as we’re writing from a place of understanding. Readers have empathy, and horror takes cruel advantage of that!

There’s obviously a lot more to writing than just these points – all the usual guidelines for good storytelling apply, and I could easily write another seven tips just for horror – but when it comes to crafting a good horror novel (or short story) the things above should help to point you in the right direction.

What are your favourite horror stories and why? By exploring the horror stories we love, we can further learn how to craft our own. Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

alan baxterAlan Baxter is a multi-award-winning author of horror, dark fantasy, and supernatural thrillers.

If you want an idea of how he’s put the above into action, you can check out his collection, Crow Shine, which contains 19 horror and dark fantasy short stories, or pick up his latest novel, Devouring Dark, an urban horror novel set against a backdrop of crime and corruption in modern-day London. Feel free to hit him up online.

His website is warriorscribe.com and you can find him on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

[Typewriter image courtesy Patrick Fore and Unsplash. Figure in the dark photo courtesy Lionello DelPiccolo and Unsplash. Dark hallway image courtesy Oldskool Photography and Unsplash. Toy spiders image courtesy Raw Pixel and Unsplash. Figure in the fog image courtesy Ramdan Authentic and Unsplash.]

Writing Horror And Making A Living With Your Writing With Michaelbrent Collings

May 25, 2015 by Joanna Penn 13 Comments

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Some of the loveliest authors I know write horror and Michaelbrent Collings is one of them! Today we discuss the boundaries of the horror genre, writing to heal, screenwriting and multiple streams of income. Super fun 🙂

Writing horror with Michael Brent CollingsIn the introduction, I talk about the change to the podcast – it will now go out every Monday so you can expect a regular show! After 6 years of sporadic audio, hopefully this will be a welcome change 🙂 I also talk about the empowerment of the author and the pros and cons of indie, I give an update on my own books and audiobooks and also give a shout out to those who tweeted with what they're doing when they listen to the show.

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets kobo writing lifethrough the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

Kobo’s financial support pays for the hosting and transcription, and if you enjoy the show, you can now support my time on Patreon. Thank you for your support!

michaelbrent collingsMichaelbrent Collings is an award-winning and internationally bestselling horror novelist, a #1 bestseller in the U.S. and also a screenwriter and martial artist.

You can listen above or on iTunes or Stitcher, watch the video or read the notes and links below.

  • How Michaelbrent's upbringing brought horror into his life at an early age, how he started writing stories
  • On the definition of horror and how the edges of the genre pan out. Why people presume things about horror books which are usually wrong. The best horror is more about exploring the outer reaches of what humans can go through – and rise above. There's also an aspect of supernatural that can be taken more seriously than other genres. It's not about chainsaws, nudity and torture porn! The line between Supernatural Thriller and Horror. I mention James Herbert's Sepulchre, a book I keep going back to.
  • On self-censorship, fear of judgment and writing our dark truth. Michaelbrent has 3 rules for writing as relates to readers: Confuse me and lose me. Bore me and die. Leave the world a better place. You can do this with horror. Michaelbrent is a man of faith and brings this into his writing, not in a preachy way but in stories where good vs evil battle each other. We talk about The Stand as an example of this in a fantastic way when good might win one battle but the war goes on.
  • How writing helps with dark moments in our lives. Michaelbrent has written about his depression and talks about how writing helps him to find something to get up for some days. The books have dark moments but there are aspects of hope. I also mention the interview I did with J Thorn about a similar topic.
  • On screenwriting and darker films. I talk about my treatment for Desecration which had feedback around rewriting to make it ‘less disturbing.' Michaelbrent talks about the appetite for horror films because of the cheaper production costs and the potential to make the money back. There is always a market for horror, although the taste shifts.
  • On multiple streams of income. Success will always move away from you, because your goalposts change over time. But if you want to make a living, define it as $X (whatever you like) so you have a concrete goal. Financial success is a result of Products and People. Write lots of stuff and meet lots of people at events. Foster relationships over time and continue to grow your body of work. It takes time. The most successful writers (generally) have a huge body of work written over a long body of time. One book will never be enough. Check out: 10 steps to success on Michaelbrent's website.
  • On marketing – you, the author, are the foremost authority on your book so you have to do the marketing. We talk about being introverts and how to survive at conventions. How to think about the other person first. Tailor your conversation to what THEY want, not all about you. Don't sell to them. Supply what they need. As them what they are looking for. On books: “It's not my baby, it's my product.“

this darkness lightHere's my review of Michaelbrent's This Darkness Light on Goodreads:

This starts off like a fast paced thriller. John wakes up in a hospital with no memory and people are trying to kill him. A nurse, Serafina, helps him and they go on the run from government agents who will stop at nothing to destroy those in the way. Cue high body count and fight scenes … awesome 🙂

But then the dead start to morph into monsters and a thick fog begins to roll over the country, governments go silent as millions die from a horrific disease spread by the carriers … will John and Serafina be able to stop the end from coming? Will Isaiah, the haunted priest who hunts them, reconcile to his own demons?
A super fast-paced book that spirals from thriller into post-apocalyptic horror. Great fun!

Transcript of the interview with Michaelbrent Collings

Joanna: Hi everyone, I'm Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com and today I'm here with Michaelbrent Collings. Hi, Michaelbrent.

Michaelbrent: How are you guys doing?

Joanna: Good. This is going to be a fun show.

Michaelbrent: Oh, I hope so.

Joanna: Oh no, it is absolutely. With just a little introduction to anyone who might not know who you are, Michaelbrent is an award-winning and internationally best selling horror novelist. A number one best seller in the U.S. and also a screenwriter and martial artist. I'm a real fan of your books, as I've just been telling you. So it's awesome to have you on the show.

But, first, tell us a bit more about you and your writing background.

Michaelbrent: Gee, that's an open question. I guess, about me and my writing background is that, like a lot of horror writers probably, I grew up miserable and had to exorcise my demons by killing false people because if you do the real thing, you get put in jail, for some reason. No, not really.

My dad was a creative writing professor and he was the world expert on Stephen King. So if you have a Stephen King book in your school library or your college library, it's probably in large measure because of my dad. He was one of the first people who went out and said, “This creepy guy isn't just a weirdo writing pulp fiction. He's writing literature.” So he wrote all these books about him and published the first full-length scholarly critiques of him. So I went to bed every night with my dad's office in the next room. I had either screaming or typing or both. It was just something I grew up with.

My dad would let me watch all these movies. And if it was a really intense part or sex scene, he'd be like, “Oh, stand behind the TV.” But I just grew up with it.

When I was kid, I was small and I was very intelligent and I was abrasive. Those were a recipe for getting punched a lot. Because of the small thing, I couldn't do anything about it. So I did. I'd write my little stories and I'd be like, “And then the bully died.” I grew up with it in the next room and then it migrated over into therapy. And then eventually I started realizing how powerful a medium horror can be and I started really emphasizing that in my work.

I write other stuff. I write science fiction and I write thrillers and I write all sorts of different things, but I keep coming back to horror. It's both a home base and something I understand, and also just something I find immensely gratifying and something that can be good for the world.

Joanna: I know. That's fascinating and, obviously, you've got a sense of humor as well.

Michaelbrent: You've got to when you look like this, honey.

Joanna: The first question I want to ask is about the horror genre, because I have recently read This Darkness Light. It starts off menacing and I thought, “Oh, why is this in horror? This is a like a mainstream thriller,” but it pretty much spirals into something which has like a supernatural aspect. I think you can get away with a lot of murder in other genres, but I guess my question is:

What defines horror for you and what are the characteristics of the genre? Because certainly your book is not torture porn or anything like that. So explore the edges of the genre for us.

Michaelbrent: Well, the best description and definition of horror on a really precise scale is whatever is on the horror shelf at Barnes and Noble because genre exists as a function of marketing.

In the old days, there was just a novel. It was the new thing that came out and nobody asked, “Oh, did you read the horror book, Frankenstein?” They said, “Have you read this novel, Frankenstein?” Now we have it bifurcated up either in actual shelves or Amazon puts them in its virtual shelves or what have you. And a lot of books that don't deserve to be in one place or the other end up there just because it's a marketing decision.

But I do think when a lot of people think about horror. . .it's funny you mentioned torture porn because people go, “Oh, I don't like horror,” and you say, “What don't you like about it?” And when you really dig down, what they don't like is the poster for Saw because they haven't seen any real horror movies or read any real horror books but they have this kind of image of, “Oh, it's that thing with the monster in the background who's chasing a girl whose bosom is about to pop out.” And then there's blood. That's kind of all they have and if you look at it really carefully, the most gory books I know of aren't horror, they're war novels. And the most sexualized books aren't horror; obviously they're romance and Fifty Shades of Grey and things like that.

So everything that people don't like about horror is found somewhere else, more so. So horror is very much just an image we've created. I think for me when I'm talking about my horror, I'm talking about a story that takes people and it cuts everything away that's extreme. It takes away everything but their sense of self and it does through tragedy.

In a thriller, you're running away from something and there's this sense that you have to stay away, stay ahead of possible tragedy. And I think in horror, you start out with tragedy having already occurred and the threat then becomes loss of self, damnation. The best horror isn't just nubile teens in the forest banging away until somebody cuts their head off. I don't understand that because I've never been a nubile teen in that position. But I am a family man and a lot of my stories revolve around families because I think what would be the worst thing to happen would be to lose them.

Horror, I think what it does is it really incisively takes away everything extraneous about people and then says “Okay, this is your core. You don't have your job. You don't have your money. You don't have even your relationships,” because horror always isolates people. It takes away everything but you and then says, “Now you're going to live or die based on your own merit and perhaps a touch of grace.”

And that's the area that I also find very fascinating because you get to talk about grace and about God. If there's a girl possessed by a demon, a guy in a priest's outfit walks in and casts her out by the power of God. Those are things you can't do in any other genre nearly to the same extent. You can't talk about this huge questions even like Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code. He's ruminating around what really happened to Jesus, but it's all played out in a very low key sort of way. The adventure is ridiculous. I liked it, it's fun, but it's ridiculous adventure and then the supernatural aspects are very dug down at the end. Whereas, in horror, you can go like “No man, we're going to ask a question whether this prophetess is a god or the devil and shall either save us or damn us”. It's really cool stuff that you can do.

Joanna: We've been on a bit of a campaign, a few of us, to get the thriller-supernatural added and they now have added it. And when I was reading your book. . .because I write. I always have supernatural elements so I think, will I write supernatural thriller? But when I read your books, I've been reading the James Herbert, some of the James Herbert. I just read Sepulchre again. It's a book I'd keep going back to because I really like it. Again, that supernatural element, I don't think there's much of a line between supernatural-thriller and a horror in a way. You know what I mean?

Michaelbrent: No. Yeah, I agree. Again, a lot of these books, they get put on this shelf because that's where they'll sell. It's like Stephen King writes an awful lot of literary fiction. If you think about the body which was the basis for Stand by Me or even Shawshank Redemption, they're not horror stories, they're very literary. This is what happens in this particular place to normal people sort of stories. But if you stick Stephen King's book over on a literary fiction shelf, it's just going to sit there until somebody grabs it and puts it where it belongs.

Joanna: Yeah, because he's become that brand and I agree with you. A lot of his books are not what one would call horror anymore. That's just where he got stuck, but that's really interesting. And then, it's fascinating about your dad because you've mentioned he was a professor, and this issue people have between literary fiction and genre fiction. Have you ever had. . .Because my mom was also an English teacher and I went to. . .

Michaelbrent: Oh no.

Joanna: I know. And I went to Oxford and I was brought up in a literary household and my family ask why don't I write like Hilary Mantel. So I come up against this all the time.

Have you had to get over any kind of write-something-more-literary type of thing?

Michaelbrent: No. I'm self-published, and I have been very blessed in a lot of ways to be self-published because it means I don't have to listen to somebody telling me what to do. I listen to my fans and they got irritated when I wander from horror for too many books. So, I'll write a horror novel and then a sci-fi, and then a horror and then a YA or whatever. But other than that general like “write scary stuff Michaelbrent,” I don't have people telling me that stuff and if somebody said “Why don't you write more literary fiction?”

I think that I have sentences in my books that are tremendously lyrical. So I think there's definitely times where people want that sense of “Oh, I want something deep and I want something very, very lyrical sounding,” and I think put those things there. My father taught poetry for 40 years. It's in my blood to some extent. But I also, and this is just me, I'm not ripping on anybody else, I don't get entertained and I don't personally enjoy books where people sit around a tea cozy and talk about their adulterous affairs and wax effervescent on the dew on the spider web. It's just okay, well, you banged the wrong people, and you're having tea, and there's a wet spider web. I said the whole book in three sentences.

Just for me personally, I like something that has some movement to it. So my books do have a lot of plot to them. They're very plot driven. But the best stories are always where plot and character intersect on a great level, and you find out about people and you find out what they're doing. And then books are given to us so that we can make sense of some universe, and if you're doing that, there's tremendous artistic value there.

Spenser, the guy who wrote the Spenser books [Robert B. Parker], he can't write a sentence of more than six words, I think. He's just like Hemingway, he's very short. But everything in them is so dense and compacted. Some of the sentences are just beautiful. So I think it's erroneous to say, “Oh, you have to be more literary. Oh, you have to be more plot driven.” I think you just should look a book and say “This is something I like and here's why I'll recommend it,” or “That's not for me and maybe other like it. I try not to be catty about that.”

Joanna: Yeah. No, I get you. People like what they like. But yeah, I certainly couldn't put your book down which, to me, that's important. But I'm also really fascinated with self-censorship. It's something with my book, Desecration, I've talked about for on my show but to write Desecration, I had to overcome some self-censorship issues around what a nice girl should write, and the fear of judgment of how people judge on writing.

Have you come up against this self-censorship or fear of judgment? How do you overcome that?

Michaelbrent: No. I'm a religious person. I'm a believing guy and part of that is that ultimately my status with God is between me and God. And I belong to a religion that I believe teaches true precepts, but even within that kind of rubric, it ultimately comes down to, if God walks into the room, could I stand there and be okay looking at him? So one of the rules, I have three rules that I have for writing which I think you can't break and the first is confuse me and lose me. If you just don't have a sense of what's going on, the audience is going to leave.

The second is bore me and die, because you want interesting stuff and it can be an interesting book about the dew on the spider web. Some people have that capacity.

But the third is leave the world a better place. And I think sometimes you can do that telling scary, awful stories because those are morality tales about what should and should not be. And that's totally legitimate, and that's different from self-censorship. Self-censorship is this extraneous concern about what would others think of me. Whereas, if you go in there with an, “Okay this is my dynamic. I'm going to try and create pieces that once somebody's done with them, their world will have been edified.” And once I say that, well, I'm not self-censoring. What I'm doing is guiding my words properly to that effect which I'm try to achieve. That's a lot more freeing to think of it that way rather than what will my mom think of it.

Joanna: Oh yeah.

Michaelbrent: Because my mommy reads my stuff. She's a mom. There is certainly things where I go, “Mom, you're not going to like this one, just skip it.” There's one book of mine that my wife hasn't read because I said “You're not going to like the subject matter,” and I told her what it was and she said “Never mind.” But I felt good about both of those books. I felt good about writing them because I thought they served a purpose beyond just let's fling words at the internet and see what sticks.

Joanna: I don't have your faith. I have a spirituality, but good versus evil to me, I think, is why I read horror. Because I feel, especially when good wins at the end, which does in your book. Yay, you could feel good, even though there was a lot of casualties along the way. That's what with Stephen King. I feel, The Stand being my favorite book although at the end it kind of puts glimmer of good might not have won.

But that kind of good versus evil, I feel, underlies the horror genre, doesn't it, really?

Michaelbrent: Yeah, it absolutely does, and The Stand's great. And it's great that you noticed that you get the feeling that good might not have won, because. . .and I don't think he's sitting there behind this keyboard going, “Now I shall cut out the throat of their hope.” But he's writing something that people can hold on to which is, you look around your world and you know good people who've been injured unfairly. You know bad people who are getting ahead unfairly. So I think Stephen King, very often, and I do this in some of my books too, you get the feeling the fight is still going on.

Just because they've won this battle doesn't mean we get to sit and rest on our laurels. I think that's really powerful, too, because we live our lives not just in this moment but in the future and an expectation of what's going to come tomorrow. So if we are led to believe everything is great today and it's going to be great from here on out and they live happily ever after, that's a fantastic and fun message to noodle over with your kids, because they need that. But when you grow up, if someone says, “And they you'll live happily ever after,” your reaction is, “I'm going to wake up tomorrow and I'm going to be constipated or I'm going to lose my job or some major or minor mishap is going to befall me, because that's life”.

And so I think when we layer into this melancholy ending where even when good has won, there's still the sense there's evil left. I think that serves a great purpose to say, “Look, the fights are worth fighting even if you can't see the end of the war, these battles are necessary and they're worthy and they're good. So do partake of the opportunity to be a warrior in good versus evil.” Whether you're religious or not, most people have a moral center that says there's good and there's bad. Horror very often says, “And the bad guys won.” But the bad guys won because the good guys stopped being good or because tomorrow there's going to be another battle. And I think that's marvelous.

Joanna: Yeah, no, I love it anyway. But let's move on. Well, you know, staying on the dark side. But I talked to a fellow horror writer, J. Thorn, about how writing some of this stuff, heals us and you talked a bit about bullying, and you've got on your blog about depression.

I wondered how does writing help you through those kind of dark moments? Do you have any tips for people to write through that time?

Michaelbrent: Well, on a very nuts and bolts sort of a level, it gives me something to do. One of the major things about depression is you crawl in your bed and you just don't want to leave. But I always have a story that I'm excited about, and that's something that I can control.

A lot of us really hunger for control in our lives and that's why we acquire money, and that's why we accrue friends and things like that. It's less about their intrinsic value than it is about the idea that now I control this kingdom. And writing is a wonderful thing for that because you can control it. Even if you go and your computer breaks, and then you find out you're out of paper, and all your pens have sprung leaks. You walk outside and you get a stick and you start writing in the dirt.

You can always write. And that's a good thing to have. It's always good to have a project that will lead you to the future because if you're done 100% today and depression hits you, well, why not kill yourself because there's nothing to do tomorrow anyways? So just on a very nuts and bolts sort of base level, it's something to do. It's a good hobby to have.

But beyond that, this actually ties into what we were talking about earlier. I do have a lot of days where I don't see, just because of chemical imbalances, I don't see a purpose and I certainly don't have hope. That's not because I don't want to be hopeful, it's just that's because my brain's broken in that way. And what some of what my writing does for me is it reminds me there are all these characters that I wrote and I wrote them so that they would go through horrific events and then come through it.

And in the middle of their horrors, if they know it's going to be all right in the end, then the horror has no validity. Who cares? If you're standing there being run after by the super human guy with the axe or the machete but you know he's got a bad heart and he's going to die six steps before he gets to you, well then it's not a horror movie, it's just a weird commercial for machetes. But because I've had those horrific elements in my books and those characters who have to keep going not for hope, but for the hope of future hope. That allows me to think about in on an intellectual level.

Look, I don't have hope today. I might not have it tomorrow. But I understand, non-emotively, that if I keep pushing, things should get better. That's a message of lot of my horror which is basically just keep pushing and things will eventually get better.

Joanna: That's great. Somebody else says that you're a screenwriter which I also find I'm fascinated with right now. Amusingly, I've recently written a treatment about my book Desecration.

Michaelbrent: Awesome

Joanna: Yeah, I thought it was awesome. But then I got the feedback that it was too disturbing for TV, and that it would need to be redone, and I'm like, “Well, the book's already written. I'm not going to redo this at this point.”

So I wondered, from somebody writing what you do, what do you think the market is like for dark material?

Because it seems that to me that there is a lot around that the world is pretty dark. Also, comment on adapting books or should you do that or should you write something new?

Michaelbrent: Well, as far as the market, the market for horror is always there. It's a fantastic market because it's cheap and there's a built-in fan base. You will not see Avengers Sleep Away Camp Seven because they're not going to spend 200 million dollars on a horror movie. But you can get a bunch of. . .All too often it is the scantily clad teens and you throw them in a sleeping bag together.

Joanna: Dark room.

Michaelbrent: Yeah, but it costs 85 cents to make the movie, so it's a no-brainer for a lot of Hollywood executives, they go, “Okay we've got Avengers 4 coming up and that's using up $280 million of our $284. What should we do with the last four? Let's make a horror movie.”

I have friends who are producers that they put together slates of a $100 million and they say “We're going to make 10 or 15 movies with this $100 million.” And the investors love that because it's a safe bet. Even if you make a two million dollar movie that sucks, it doesn't have to have that much traction to make that money back.

So, there's always a market for horror that. . .Within the market there's a lot of shift. Twenty years ago it was all about Scream. Ten years ago, Saw was the big horse on the stage. Now it's very much about the ghosts and the Paranormal Activity sort of handheld stuff. The guy who made the first one, the first Paranormal Activity movie, he really changed the way Hollywood functions on a lot of levels because he went in and he made this for $17,000 and it made a $100 million in the theaters. So people are looking for those inexpensive films to make.

Seriously, if you show up and you're pitching the Avengers versus zombies, you're not going to get very far because they don't want big event horror movies. They want things that can be shot inexpensively with limited locations, and if you make it really full of cool scenery chewing stuff, they like that because they can send it to actors and the actors enjoy it.

One of my books is called Strangers and I wrote a screenplay based off of it. It's about a family that wakes up one morning and they have been sealed into their home. All the windows have sheets, that's sheet metal over them. The doors are all barred and they can't get out. There's a guy in there who wants to have some alone time with them. I give it to the studios, I give it producers and they all love it because it's contained and it's cheap and it's got six people in it. And they each get to have really cool dialogue about how scared they are, and it's something they go nuts over. So I've optioned that thing three or four times now. It's going to sell eventually, it's one of those that's just waiting for the right homes.

So horror's a great thing to write. You do have to be aware of the market. I have three or four of my books and my screenplays are ghost stories. And because of the Paranormal Activity stuff, ghost stories are actually hard to sell right now, because it's so dominated by this one production company and they're putting everything out. If you want to do something, it's got to be really, really different. So you have to be aware of the vicissitudes of the current market. But it's a great market to write for because there's always people there who want horror.

Joanna: Did you start out screenwriting or start out with novels? How did you cross over?

Michaelbrent: I did both at the same time. I've been writing since I was very young and I didn't start writing screenplays. At age four, I started writing my little crayola books. But when I was at high school, a friend brought a copy of the screenplay for Terminator 2 and I read it and I was like, “This is amazing.” It's a totally different way of telling stories. I thought, “I can do this too.” So I've grown up together with my first screenplay I wrote when I was in high school, still. And my first book, I wrote around the same time. And since then, whenever I do a book, I almost always have a screenplay version of it as well. It's just a good way to monetize my work because I can sell two versions of it.

Joanna: That's brilliant and let's come on to that. The “monetize my work.”

You do make a living as a writer, and you have some great stuff on your blog about the numbers and living, writing for living.

Can you maybe talk about your opinions on that? Because so many writers “Oh, I want to make a living writing,” but then they just write one book. So how do you knit it all together?

Michaelbrent: Yeah. Well, I think the two things you need to be successful, and by successful I mean to be making money because success. . .I prefer people not to think about that. Success is the end of rainbow, it's always going to move away from you. No matter how close you get, you're never going to reach success because when you become a best seller, you'll be want to be a number one best seller and then you'll be a number one and then you want to make a movie out of it and then you want to write. . . And it's always one step past you.

So what you do is you create concrete goals. I want to make this much money per year as a writer. I want to, for me, provide for my family as a writer, that's my goal. I'm a huge whore so all I'm interested in is the money. But a lot of writers don't do that. I have a concrete goal.

And then, after that, the way to achieve those goals is almost always a function of two things, product and people. And by that, I mean you write lots and lots and lots and lots of stuff and you meet lots and lots and lots and lots of people. Eventually, one of those people wants your product as a screenplay, or one of those people wants this book as a traditionally published book, or whatever it is.

You really accrete these two things. You have a growing body of work and you have a growing body of people who you know who are in that industry and who are moneymakers who have our gatekeepers. And I use the word accrete purposely because that's a descriptor for coral growth, it's very, very slow. These two things, there's no silver bullet, it's a product of time. You get one person here at a convention. You write a book over six months. You meet another person at a writing symposium.

A lot of the people you meet, they're not going to be useful to you. But then they are one day. One day, the guy you met at the symposium is no longer the person bringing coffee to the producer. He's the producer. And you've kept up with him long enough, and you have a relationship so that he's saying, “Hey send me every single thing you've got.” And that's a relationship I have with a lot of producers. I've finish a script and I send it out in a bulk mail, “Here you go. It's up for grabs, knock yourselves out.” But that took ten years to get those contacts. And really, there's nothing special about it. You scour the internet and you cold call people.

Mostly, you meet people at symposia and Comic Cons and things like that because it's face-to-face that's going to have the most effect. Then you write and write and write.

Forbes did a really interesting survey of the most successful writers monetarily in history. There were no common grounds between them. Except, with the exception of a few outliers, they all had a huge body of work written over a long period of time.

I wrote a book called Run and it did really well. It was a number one best seller in Amazon. It made me think I knew what I was doing which was a huge disservice to me because the next book didn't make any money and the next book didn't make any money. And then ten books later, I was making some money and 15 books later, I was making decent money. Now I'm 30 books in and I'm a writer. I get to just sit around with my pants off all day and type if I feel like it.

Joanna: I'd say, you type quite a lot actually.

Michaelbrent: I do, I do type a lot but that's the thing, is people. . .Here's another thing I'd like to say is if you go to the doctor and he's about to poke a finger in some hole that you don't like fingers being poked in and you say, “So where'd you go to school?”. He goes, “I didn't really go to school per se but I went to a doctor once and he was terrible, so I figure I can do better than him.” And then you're going to be gone and there's going to be a little smoke outline of you in the doctor's office. And you're out of there because you don't want to be poked by that guy.

But that's the way a lot of writers pursue their writing career. They say, “Well, I read a book once and it sucked, so I thought I'd bark up my own little set of word craft and some magical publisher's going to come along and scoop it up and gold will rain upon me.”

And in reality, if you want to be successful, you treat it like medical school. You write after work for eight hours a day. I was a lawyer for about ten years before I became a full time writer. I would get up at six. I'd go to work until six or seven, I'd come home, I'd play with my kids, I'd play with my wife. At ten or eleven, she'd go to bed and I would write until 2:00 a.m. I did that every day for ten years. Most people are like, “I'm going to be a writer.” “Well how are you going to do that?” “I'll write a book during summer and then never think of it again.”

Joanna: Then make a million.

Michaelbrent: Yeah. It happens occasionally but even to the people that it happens to, they run into problems because they've got all this money and then eventually the money dries up, which it has to. And this person doesn't know how to replicate that success, because what they did was they succeeded by accident. You want to not only succeed, you want to know how you did it so that you can replicate that success. Again, this first book I wrote, it did really well and had no fricking clue why no one was buying the other ones.

Joanna: Yeah, and that's so common. We see that especially. . .I feel sorry for debut novelists who get the first book that they cared about and the second book nobody cares.

Michaelbrent: Yeah.

Joanna: I'm an introvert and I really struggle at events but Twitter's my secret weapon, as in I stalk people and generally make friends first, and then when I talk to them it's much easier because they actually know I exist.

But I wondered if you had any tips for the meeting people stuff, naturally in a good way?

Michaelbrent: Well, okay there's a couple things. Number one is if you're a writer and if you've written a book, recognize the fact that you are the world's foremost fricking expert on that book. So a lot of writers that I meet, they come up to me and they're very pensive and they're very worried and it looks like they're worried I'm going to punch them just for existing.

The reality is you are a world expert in this thing, and you are competent to talk about it. If you have that in your mindset, it's a lot easier to move forward because what we're afraid of. . .I'm an introvert too, obviously. I've got this depression and stuff. When I go to conventions, I come home and I sit in a dark room for a full day and I shake, because it scares me.

But you go up with this sense of, “I know what I'm talking about,” and that's very helpful.

The other thing to remember is try and picture the other person like someone you're meeting at a dinner party and you pull out your wallet and you show them all the pictures of your children. And this is a small slice of hell for that other person because they don't give a crap about your kids. They don't know about it. I don't care that Johnny lost his tooth. I could care less. Now, if he lost his face, I'd be interested because that's an interesting story.

The mistake a lot of novelist do, that they make when they go to these convention, they approach to me and say, “I wanted talk to you about my novel.” “Good, start.” “Chapter one, page one, we open in a very dark place, not as dark as your room but a little lighter than outside, but it's kind of creepy.” And sixty minutes later, this person that you're talking to just wants to kill themselves, because you're showing your baby pictures without any context.

If you walk over to my table, I've got twenty books and I can tell you the basic idea of all of them in under two minutes total. Then that allows the other person to be invested. He can ask you. Before we were talking on air, you asked, “What should I read next?” and I didn't say, “Read this because it's so awesome”. I said, “Well, do you want to read about monsters, serial killers, ghost, or demons?” Then you get to answer, and now you're leading the conversation and I'm not selling you anything. I'm just supplying your need. That's a much better situation to be in.

So rather than go, “Here's my baby pictures,” just vomit stuff on them. Say, “What are you looking for?” and they tell you, and then you say, “Here's what I got that fits that.” If you don't have something that fits that, you go, “Well, coincidentally, I'm writing something right now that fits that.” And you have to do that.

I've been in pitch sessions where they went for a movies so I was trying to sell a movie and the producer goes, “That's not what we're looking for” and I say “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to waste your time. What are you looking for?” and they go, “We're looking for a movie about lesbian dogs from space” and I'm like, “I'm just writing one of those.” Even if they don't end up buying the idea, you've made that contact who thinks you are awesome, because you have this joint affection for lesbian dogs from space and that becomes a friend. In ten years, he'll want something that you're actually writing.

Joanna: So I guess the trick there is to always focus on the other person and not yourself and I agree with you, so many people. . .I get pitched all the time by people wanting to come on the podcast, or for me to endorse stuff, whatever. They just don't even consider who I am. I get pitched for credit cards and stuff like that and I'm like, “What's that got to do anything?”

Michaelbrent: You have to ask yourself. . .This is a service industry and I mean that in two senses. One, it's like a restaurant, you're giving them what they want to eat.

Two, I really believe writers are serving humanity. We are writing, hopefully, good things that edify on some level, that uplift on some level, that help people. And so, if someone comes to you and says, “I need help,” and you say, “I can help you,” you're best friends now. It's just the nature of civilization. If somebody comes up to you and says, “I need help,” and you go “Let me tell you something I want to tell you first and then we'll talk about your needs.” That's not a friendship and that's not something that's going to work well for you. Also, if there's an old lady on the side of the road with her tire flat and you jack up the car and fix the tire, never see that old lady again but you go home and you're like, “Honey, I was the bomb today” and you feel good about yourself. And it's exactly the same when you're pitching your materials.

If you take the time to find out what they want first and then address that desire rather than going in and saying, “Well, I've got my favorite book and I'm going to pitch it and they're going to love it or else.” Well, there is no other else. You've got to be able to ask what they want and do that.

Joanna: It does get much easier the more books you have because you care. You don't care as much about each individual project when you have so many. It's like that children metaphor, I just laugh about that now. You've got some real children but also books. Once you get over six, ten books, you don't call books your children.

Michaelbrent: No.

Joanna: That's ridiculous.

Michaelbrent: That's very true. That's silly. The faster you get over that, the better.

One of my screenplays came out, or the movie was finished and I watched and it was not a good experience because they had changed some things and it just wasn't my screenplay anymore. I walk out and people go, “Wasn't that devastating for you?” I said “You know, it kind of sucked because my name was on this movie that I didn't think was very good, but my first thought wasn't they killed my babies.” When I walked out and the producers were all lined up because it was a screening and they said, “What did you think?” My first thought wasn't, “You murdered my baby,” my first thought was, “Their check cleared and it was big. How can I be happy about this?”

Joanna: “I loved it. Let's do it again, number two.”

Michaelbrent: Without lying, how can I approach this? Because it's not my baby, it's my product. And that's another thing that's helpful if you go in there thinking, “I'm a business.”

Instead of putting greeting cards on the table or hamburgers in wrapping, I put books out. They mean exactly as much as those hamburgers and those greeting cards. They bring people pleasure. They help them get through the day. Hopefully, they make them a little healthier on some level, but it's just a hamburger, man, and I can't get that freaked out about it. Because when people get freaked out about it, “This is the most important work in English literature!” It's going to go down hill from there.

Joanna: Where can people find you and your books online?

Michaelbrent: Well, my name's Michaelbrent and that's my first name. So if you type in Michaelbrent, all one word, you're going to get my Amazon page and my website. My website's michaelbrentcollings.com but I'm really easy to find, just type Michaelbrent. Although, there is an underwear model whose name is Michael Brent. So if you type it in and you get this devastating dude with no clothes, that's not me. But michaelbrentcollings.com or just type Michaelbrent onto your Amazon browser or Barnes and Noble or wherever.

Joanna: Fantastic. Thanks so much for your time. That was brilliant.

Michaelbrent: Thank you.

 

Risk-Taking, Author Collaboration And Marketing Ideas With J Thorn

September 9, 2014 by Joanna Penn 3 Comments

risk taking with j. thorn

It's great to learn from successful indies who can share their insights into lessons learned on the journey. Today I have a laughter-filled chat with horror writer, J Thorn.

J Thorn is a bestselling horror writer,  consistently one of the Top 100 Most Popular Authors in Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy, with his bestselling books selling over 100,000 copies. J is also a podcaster, entrepreneur and speaker. His latest book is the Black Fang Betrayal.

You can watch the video below or here on YouTube. You can listen below or on Soundcloud. Or there are show notes below the multimedia.

J and I have a complete laugh and discuss:

  • On genre and categorization. Why we need to put things in boxes, but how J writes stories, regardless of how they are categorized. You don't have to write in a hot genre in order to sell, just write what you love, and readers will find you. If it has a demon in it, is it horror? It's up to the author to claim the tag.
  • On being entrepreneurial. Taking risks, trying things out and then moving on if it doesn't work. Iterations and pivoting apply to authors as well. For example, J started PremiumBoxsets.com to market multi-author box-sets but it didn't work out, as box-sets have started to be less successful. You have to leave the ego behind and just take risks. Try things out, go play and just get on with it. None of us know what we're doing – we're just trying it.
  • Lessons learned from going indie: You have to make risks and you will fail most of the time. You also have to GIVE, authentically, without black fang betrayalexpecting a return. It's not a barter. [I also believe that social karma and generosity are at the heart of the internet eco-system.]
  • The Black Fang Betrayal – a collaboration with 10 authors on one single story. It's not a box-set, it's one story managed and published by J. The writing part is the easy part. The management piece was positive, but a challenge!
  • On being control freaks and loving the freedom of being indie.
  • On branding and website. Rewriting bios and product descriptions. The pain of getting to a consistent brand. J's brand is authentic as it's who he is. As a heavy metal and horror fan since a teenager is natural. It's taken a long time to be proud of who he is, but J talks about how all of our journeys are about reaching this point.
  • On email marketing. Having 2 lists – one for general signups and a special ‘street team' kind of list. J refers to Dan Blank, who I interviewed on email marketing here.
  • On the Horror Writer's Podcast and reaching people through multimedia – although we always need to consider the reader's perspective. We talk about book trailers and whether they are worth doing. I mention they are good value for translation. You can find my Youtube channel here. Here's the interview with Martin Lastrapes about writing horror, vampires and cults.
  • On joining Associations as self-published authors. Why we think it's a good idea. I'm a member of International Thriller Writers and J is a member of Horror Writers Association.

You can find J at JThorn.net and his latest book is the Black Fang Betrayal.

Writing Metaphor, Memorable Characters And Horror With Chuck Wendig

November 7, 2012 by Joanna Penn 11 Comments

OLD POST ALERT! This is an older post and although you might find some useful tips, any technical or publishing information is likely to be out of date. Please click on Start Here on the menu bar above to find links to my most useful articles, videos and podcast. Thanks and happy writing! – Joanna Penn

https://media.blubrry.com/thecreativepenn/p/s3.amazonaws.com/CreativePennPodcasts/Podcast_ChuckWendig.mp3

Podcast: Download (Duration: 35:13 — 20.6MB)

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Metaphor with Chuck WendigI believe it's important for us as writers to find successful authors to model, for inspiration on the journey but also to learn from.

Chuck Wendig is one of the authors I respect and aspire to model. He is an incredibly hard-working writer with prolific creative output, and some incredible writing. I love his latest novels, Blackbirds and Mockingbird and his blog, TerribleMinds.com is a must-read (although it does have a language warning on it and the profane humor is not for everyone). Chuck is also an award-winning screen-writer and game designer, as well as having non-fiction books available on writing.

Today's podcast is clean (despite Chuck's reputation!), and you can watch the video interview on YouTube here.
chuck wendig

  • How Chuck got started with writing 18 years ago (when he was 18) with his first published short story. He wrote 5-6 horrible novels including the first iteration of Blackbirds. He worked in the gaming industry and then moved into screenwriting, winning a contest and learning how to adapt Blackbirds to the screen in order to fix it and then turn it into a proper novel.
  • From there, Blackbirds got published, Chuck had an Emmy nomination, his screenwriting thing took off, so did the novels and the blog. Now the novels are the main income stream which has developed in the last year. He has 5 novels, a stack of books on writing and 7 books due in the next 2 years. It's a busy time!

On writing horror and dark & twisty things

  • On writing horror and also being psychologically healthy. I keep coming back to this subject as my own writing is getting darker. Writers address things that everyone is scared of, and everyone is scared of something. Figure out what your characters are afraid of and then confront them with that. As readers, we associate with the protagonist, so we're asking the audience to confront their fears.
  • On self-censoring and being afraid of what people might say, of how they might judge. Chuck has some YA books coming out and there is a discussion of using a pseudonym. Write what you want and beta readers, editors etc will help you with what might be just over the edge of acceptable.

Tips for creating memorable characters

  • The character has to be active and interesting. Don't have passive characters and don't use the ‘everyman' vibe which is mostly boring.
  • The character has to have a ‘save the cat' moment – we have to see their motivations and their ethos, wants, desires in action that drives us to know their story.
  • In Blackbirds & Mockingbird, Miriam Black can see people's deaths, when and how, when she touches their skin. She thinks she can't change this fate so she lives off other people's deaths, until she meets someone who makes her question whether she can change things.
  • On gender and writing violent, dark characters. Miriam Black is a hard-core character, kick-ass and pretty nasty. Chuck gets two main complaints – his use of profanity, and the other thing is that he is a man writing a dark female character. Yes, she has a masculine side but she is just a hard woman. [Personally, I love the character and the fact she is a woman.]

Writing metaphor and description

  • I think Chuck's writing is literary, in terms of the language being beautiful, evocative and original. As an example on his blog, check out The Battlesong of the Storyteller.
  • A metaphor is combining two unrelated things that draw the reader in visually, emotionally and psychologically. Metaphors are fingerprints that tell you more about the writer than anything. It's a peek into the author's weird brain. Chuck mentions Joe Lansdale as an example of a writer who does this very well. Chuck tells a story about when he was younger and didn't realize his eyesight was so bad. He stalked what he thought was a wounded bird, but it was a rock. It's about seeing things differently.
  • Here's 25 things you should know about metaphor – from Chuck's blog [language warning]

How to turn a terrible novel into something amazing

  • Learning how to outline transformed Chuck's novel-writing life. It helped him change Blackbirds into a novel with a coherent plot and the book has gone on to enjoy great success.
  • Writing a screenplay helped him learn about language. The description bars need to be evocative without being pages long. The dialogue needs to crackle. It needs to include interesting visuals and hooks. Applying that back into the novel is what gives it the edge.

The hybrid author. Combining traditional with indie publishing.

  • Diversity is the best way to survive, so spreading your creative projects is advisable so you aren't dependent on one thing. Trad and indie publishing can also support each other and opportunities arise because of the different routes. Chuck's Kickstarter success for some indie books have led to a deal with Amazon for YA books. On the other hand, Blackbirds & Mockingbird as traditionally published books have brought some amazing opportunities in terms of reach, reviews, possible TV/film deals based on them getting copies of the book, foreign rights, graphic opportunities. The two sides work together. They don't need to compete.

On blogging and twitter

  • Chuck talks about how he thinks the blog possibly helps his fiction but he has no proof of this. Publishers are certainly happy about the ‘platform' or audience numbers. He can track people's links to his buy buttons on the right hand side and people do click through. But blogging is an up and down thing, but overall an up because Chuck is still blogging.
  • On productivity. Chuck gets up around 6am and writes until he is done – 2000-3000 words per day, although sometimes significantly more than that. Then he does admin, emails, marketing stuff. But he writes fiction every day as this is his business and income model.
  • Around a year ago, a whole load of things happened at once for Chuck, as if critical mass had tipped and lots of people discovered him. He says that Twitter is underestimated by many authors. It is a phenomenal way to connect with people. See Chuck's interview with Margaret Atwood. Writing helps you reach an audience with ripples, but twitter helps you throw out more pebbles (which make more ripples!)
  • There is no single way for the writer's path. So take pieces of information from everyone but remember none of it is gospel.

mockingbirdI'm not usually a horror reader, but I devoured Blackbirds and Mockingbird, and I totally recommend them both, as well as Chuck's books on writing. Warning: adult language and content.

Here's my review for Mockingbird (5 stars on Amazon.co.uk)

“Chuck Wendig can seriously write a great metaphor – his language is stunning and original and I'm always re-reading lines to try and fathom the layers. This is definitely horror with a suitably violent and nasty serial killer hunting young girls, mutilating and murdering them. Miriam Black, with her visions of how people die, tries to change the fates of the girls she meets by hunting down the killers. But is her gift, or curse, beginning to twist her mind into madness? It's hard to tell as Miriam is one crazy chick, but a brilliant character. There's kick-ass action scenes as well as psychological weirdness. Highly recommended, but don't read last thing at night … “

Transcript of Interview with Chuck Wendig

Joanna: Hi, everyone. I'm Joanna Penn from TheCreativePenn.com, and today, I'm really excited because I'm here with Chuck Wendig, who many of you know. Hi, Chuck.

Chuck: Hi. How are you?

Joanna: I'm good. For those people who haven't met Chuck before, Chuck is a novelist, a screenwriter, a game designer. He's also the author of Blackbirds, Mockingbird and Double Dead, as well of a host of e-books on writing, and he has a brilliant blog on TerribleMinds.com. So Chuck, I've been following you, I guess, probably about a year now, I think.

Chuck: Well, thank you.

Joanna: Yeah, about a year. It seems like you've done so much.

Can you give us a brief overview of your creative journey?

Chuck: Brief? That's a hard one. I had my first short story published when I was 18, so that was 18 years ago, which is totally terrifying to me right now. I think I just had heart palpitation; 18 years. I had that published and I always thought I'd be a novelist, and it turns out that I wrote horrible novels. There were five or six very bad novels including one called Blackbirds that was unfinished and terrible at that time. Building up to that point, I worked in the game industry also, to sort of whet my writing stone a little bit.

From there, I went to a screenwriting thing. I won a screenwriting contest competition which was a cheat for me. Then I was trying to learn how to adapt my own horrible piece of crap novel, Blackbirds, to the screen to fix it, and then transition it back to a novel. That worked. I won the contest. I got the mentorship. I did learn how to turn Blackbirds into a proper novel, and part of the secret there was outlining. Apparently, I need to outline, if I'm going to actually write books. From there, I got Blackbirds published, and Double Dead was in the process.

Then I had this blog and writing books, and I work in Transmedia. There was an Emmy nomination at one point, which is very exciting for a project called Collapsus. The screenwriting thing took off. I went to the Sundance Screenwriter's Lab with my writing partner Lance Weiler.

I've been doing a lot, really. In fact, now that I'm saying it all out, I might need a nap.

Joanna: What are you now then? What comes first?

When people say, “What are you,” what do you say? Is it author? Is it screenwriter?

Chuck: I just go with writer, or the occasionally cheeky penmonkey. It's just because I write so much. I mean if I have to put something front and center, novels are where it's at, just because they're paying the bills right now more than anything else. For a while, it was freelance game and work that was paying the bills.

Somewhere in the last year, I developed for myself a career in novel writing. I have four books out now, I guess — Blackbirds, Mockingbird, Double Dead, Dinocalypse Now. Then actually Bait Dog, which is a sub-published thing. I have another seven books I do in the next two years, so I'm on fire. I mean literally, I'm actually on fire in a good way.

Joanna: I can see that. We're going to come back to your productivity in a minute. But first, I want to talk about Blackbirds and Mockingbird because I'm not a horror reader, but I downloaded a sample. I love your style of writing. Anyone should have a look at your blog, at least. When I read Blackbirds, I was captivated by Miriam Black. You wrote this awesome woman. She's nasty and kick-ass. There's so much there.

First of all, where does this dark and twisty stuff come from, do you think? What draws you to the horror style?

Chuck: I don't know, but I've always been that way. I've always been kind of a weird kid. When I was kid, one of the first things I drew was this, and I don't know why. I don't even know, first of all, who let me watch Aliens, the movie Aliens, as a young child. But they did. I was horrified, but at the same time, completely compelled by the horror.

I actually wanted to be a cartoonist very early on. One of the first comic book/cartoons I drew was this weird, buddy-up adventure with Pac-Man and the Xenomorphs from Aliens. It's like the worst and stupidest mash up in the history of mash ups. It was dark and strange. I don't mean like really grim, but just odd.

I was always attracted to that stuff and I read a lot of horror as a kid. I tend to lean toward darker stuff. I like lighter stuff, too. I think there's value to that type of thing. Some of it just comes from the fact that in terms of narrative conflict really comes best when it's maybe from a darker place.

Joanna: Particularly, Mockingbird goes much darker, I think.

Chuck: In some ways, yeah, it really does. Mockingbird is probably a little more horror than Blackbirds is. Blackbirds has a crime-y-er feel but with a serial killer vibe. Mockingbird definitely gets that Silence of the Lamb-y tweak to it. I was actually re-reading Blackbirds as I was writing Mockingbird. I was really disturbed by myself. I was like, “What is wrong with me? I should actually probably see help, some serious, serious help.”

Joanna: There's so many things I want to ask you, but I want to deal with that right now. My husband is one of my first readers. He said he was reading one of my latest drafts, and I've got some ritual, sex, murder, ancient Egyptian tomb. He's like, “Where did this come from?” I'm like, “Well, I don't really know, but is it all right?”

Can you help us, those of us who are quite nice people like you and I, but have these dark things? Is it okay? Are we psychologically okay?

Chuck: I think it has to be because first of all, people read this stuff and other people write stuff. In fact actually, some of the indie author communities, some of the nicest people have been the horror authors, which is either A, because they're purging it. It's like an infection. They purge all that stuff, and now they're just all lightened up like unicorns. Or it's a ruse and they're planning on killing us, and it's getting us a lot. It's just that stuff's fake. They're like sociopaths. I'm hoping it's the former because I feel like I'm not a sociopath, but time will tell.

Joanna: Is it that as writers we can address things that everybody's scared of in that way?

Chuck: I think every novel and every story is, in its core, a horror story. Not in the squeaky, gore soaked, viscera laden sense, but in the fact that we're all scared of something. One of those key things they tell you about characters is to figure out what they're afraid of, and then often make them confront their fears. Then by proxy because the character, the protagonist is something we are meant to associate with in a deeper way and by proxy, we're really asking the audience to confront fears, which is ultimately, the goal of horror. But then it becomes the goal of all storytelling.

Joanna: Absolutely. Miriam Black, I find, is incredibly memorable.

I know you have a post on creating memorable characters, but I wondered if you would just give us some of your two top tips for how do we make such a memorable and original character.

Chuck: Two top tips for memorable and original characters. One, this sounds stupid, but they have to be interesting. They have to be active and interesting. They have to do stuff. You often find a trend sometimes where characters are very passive. I did this very early on, try to capture an everyman vibe because we're told that the everyman vibe, everyone can relate to. But ultimately, the everyman vibe just isn't that interesting. You can make it interesting, but you have to be very good to be able to turn that lead into gold. When you look at a character like House from the TV show House, he's an erasable, horrible person and yet, there's something in there that makes it a compelling character.

There's a tip. Actually, I cite this tip. This is not my tip. This is a tip from a book called Save the Cat, which is very early on, the character needs to have a Save the Cat moment, so we could get behind them. I don't necessarily think it needs to be a Save the Cat moment in that we're getting behind them as a good person, but I think we do need to see some of their own ethos and wants and desires and fears in action, in a cool way, that really drives us to another story.

Joanna: That's really good. Miriam is really interesting.

For people who don't know, she touches people and she can see their death, right?

Chuck: Right. Yeah, she can see how they're going to die, but when and how, not where. That complicates her life a little bit and it makes her feel really twisted because it happens early on. It happens as a teenager that she develops this. She runs away, and she's on the road for a couple of years before the book begins. She believes she can't change it. That's sort of the crux of Blackbirds is that she thinks fate has pretty much screwed her. It screwed the pooch, totally. She thinks she can't change it, so that leads her to live a life as a vulture. She picks the bones of the dead, so to speak. Takes their wallets, keys, watches, calculator watches, shiny awesome calculator watches, whatever she can do.

She meets a person who she responds to. He's a character named Louis, who is possibly the only nice character in the whole book. I mean, like genuinely a nice guy, only nice person in the book. Everyone else is awful, by some degree. She learns that he's going to die and then the question becomes, “Is she somehow complicit in his death, and then is there a way to change it?” So once again, she takes on the battle of fate versus freewill.

Joanna: It's excellent. You're a man, right? I get this.

Chuck: I am not told that. I'm told to accept it, every once in a while.

Joanna: I think I get these comments just because I'm a girl, but I get people who say, “You're a woman. How can you write these types of violent things?”

You're a man, you've written a female protagonist, who is really, really violent. Do you ever get any comments on the gender stuff?

Chuck: That's probably one of the biggest complaints I have. Any time I see a bad review, I can usually be sure that the bad review's going to talk about one of two things. One, that I have a foul, foul mouth. The book is sodden with vulgarity. Again, I rewrite it again. I'm like, “My editor didn't take any of these out.”

The second thing is about that I'm a man writing a female character and that it feels like she's a dude. I'll admit to that. There's a male component to her. She's a very tough survivalist type character. That being said, I don't think that she is an unreal female protagonist. I've known people like Miriam. I have met Miriam in some guise among multiple people. She's a character drawn from real humans, real female humans.

So I don't think it's impossible with someone like that is a girl or a woman, but it was tricky, as far as criticism, to how do you respond to that. Every once in a while, you get the criticism or I get the criticism, that men should not write women at all. It's an impossible criticism because am I supposed to just write books about white, middle class dudes?

Joanna: Yeah, that's ridiculous. I really like the fact that Miriam is a woman because I'm totally with you. I think women are as dark and twisty or possibly more dark and twisty than men.

Chuck: Sure. Yeah. Right? That's the hope. I don't really ascribe to the theory that women are one thing.

Joanna: Yeah, I know. Nobody's one thing.

Chuck: Miriam, she has been on the road for six years. I just heard one review that's, “How does she know how to fight?” I'm like, “First of all, do I need a whole book to put it out how she learned to fight? Is that a thing?” She's been on the road for six years and it's not like she's some Kung-Fu master. She's a dirty, sand in eyes, stab you with a bottle type of fighter. There's no finesse.

Joanna: I want to get deeper into the bravery side then, because I do find myself self-censoring things. Like you, I have a bit of an internet presence now. I'm out there and people know who I am, so I'm starting to write things under another name that people don't know because I'm afraid. I'm actually afraid, so I'm wanting to bring that to you.

For people who are afraid of sharing honestly, what do you say to them?

Chuck: Sharing honestly, in terms of…

Joanna: Really what's in your head.

Chuck: Not fiction. You're talking about real life stuff.

Joanna: No, no. I mean fiction. Writing fiction that's scary and wrong in some way, and that people will attack you for.

Chuck: I can't say it's only the bad idea. I do have a series of young adult novels coming out with Amazon Children's Publishing, and there is the occasional discussion of whether or not I'll go with a pseudonym. It will be a known pseudonym, not hide it. People know what the books are, that I'm the guy behind them, but just to not confuse teenagers who become the one book and they are like, “Well, Blackbirds is probably also young adults.” Totally not young adults.

Of course, on the other side, I read stuff like that when I was a teenager and I turned out just fine. So I don't know. You do it and then if it's too dark, someone will tell you that. There's beta readers, there's editors, there's agents. Someone's going to step in and say, “Well, maybe this is a little too edgy.” There were one or two things in Blackbirds. They were very small things, but they were just a hair over the edge that we pulled back on.

Joanna: Really? I'm amazed.

Chuck: Yeah, believe it or not. There was an ending to Mockingbird that I pulled back on. I won't share that because it's a grim secret, but it was a dark, dark ending. It's a dark ending.

Joanna: It's good to hear that, actually. Let's get back into your writing style.

Although you're in the horror genre, I think that your writing could be classed as literary. What do you think about that?

Chuck: I have a literary background. I studied English. I adore certain literary voices. I'm not opposed of that distinction. I don't mind being in a genre sense with a literary vibe to it. I think language is really cool. I like to play with language and get into the nitty-gritty of the narrative theme and mood, and all those little flibbertigibbets. So sure, I'll take it.

It was Stephen Blackmoore, fellow author, great author. He has a book called Dead Things coming up, which is great. He said something like some of the work in Blackbirds and Mockingbird sounds like poetry. I was like, “That's interesting.” I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I'll take it.

Joanna: I find your writing…it's beautiful. You had a post today on your blog, The Battle Song of the Storyteller.

Chuck: I do that once a year during November, some kind of crazy, insane, call to action. Those posts are where I uncork the bottle and I let whatever pours out. I just write insane stuff on those posts.

Joanna: It's a great post, and it's full of examples of your descriptive writing and your metaphor.

I wanted to ask you about that because you come up with some things that are really tangential. Do you have a process for that? How do you think you come up with that stuff?

Chuck: I don't know. Metaphor's weird. Metaphor is you're purposefully trying to combine two things that don't belong together. You can't combine two things that look alike. It doesn't make any sense. You can't say, “The deer looked like a moose.” It's stupid. It's meaningless. It has to be something. The way it moved has to be unusual and has to draw the reader in, in an interesting way, visually and emotionally and almost psychologically to a point. What you're doing is as an author, you're imprinting. I think metaphors are like fingerprints. They tell you more about how the author's mind works than a lot of things that are contained…character and everything does, plot everything in the story. The general construction of a sentence does not tell you necessarily how a writer's mind works, but metaphor is like a little peek, a pinhole for the door into the author's weird, weird brain.

There are some authors who do that very well. Joe Lansdale, his sentences are great and bizarre metaphor. They work. I don't mean bizarre in a non-functional way. If they're too bizarre, they fall off the cliff and die in the ocean somewhere, so they really have to be right and weird at the same time. I don't know how I think it up. It's just part of me just thinking visually, just taking a walk and taking photos and just seeing what things look like in an unexpected way.

There was a very brief story. When I was a kid, I did not wear glasses, and I did not know that my eyes were complete turds in my face, just useless pieces of crap stuck in my head. I was outside one day and I saw a bird, a pheasant. I was like, “It's not moving, so it's clearly wounded.” I'm like, “I'm going to go,” and I sneak up on this bird. I'm going to see what it is and I'll grab it. I don't know why I was going to grab the bird…what I was going to do with it. Choke it. I have no idea what my goal was. So as I crept up on the bird and I literally got within two feet and I realize, it's really just a rock because I had bad vision, horrible vision. But that was telling for me also in a metaphorical sense in that the rock looked like a bird, and it was just…you don't usually think rocks and birds are associated together, but there was a telling moment in that little broken eyed boy.

Joanna: I like that. That is kind of seeing things differently.

Chuck: Yeah. Maybe what I'm trying to tell people is mess up your eyes. You take off your glasses.

Joanna: I wear contact lenses. I'm completely blind. Well, not completely.

You said that you take photos and things. Do you carry a notebook and write stuff down as you see good metaphors in display?

Chuck: I don't, generally. I have my phone on me most of the time, as a modern techno whore. I can't leave my phone anywhere, so I will, if I need to take an audio note that sounds cool. But generally speaking, when I see something in the moment, it's rare that that's the type of thing that's ever going to come back. Like, “I need to talk about this tree.” No one else is going to get it. But what it does do…if we're to assume that this thing, this creative thing that we do is a muscle in some way, that I think exercising that muscle with metaphors, that is itself a metaphor, is useful and will continue to help you do it as you go.

Joanna: In the beginning, you said that Blackbirds has been around for ages. It was terrible and you re-wrote it. You did a script and then it's back to a novel.

Is some of this language stuff the reason it's become better or is it a completely different story? How did you take it from crap to being so brilliant?

Chuck: There were two things. First of all was learning to outline. I am a pantser by heart and a plotter by necessity. I would love to just be able to like, “I'm just going to write.” That was always my dream and I was always like, “You can't oppress me with your outlines.” When the mentor, the screenwriting mentor, Stephen Susco, who wrote both The Grudge films and Jack Ketchum's Red adaptation. He said, “You have to outline.” I said, “No, I don't do it. I'm sorry. Maybe you come from the screenwriting world, but I come from novel land, where we all do our happy artistic muse dance.” I'm like, “I'll do a ritual in the woods and it'll all just come to me.” He's like, “No, you're going to outline.” So I outlined grudgingly and painfully with gnawing my nails to the quick. It turns out that totally worked because what I didn't have with the story was a plot that made sense that can hang anything on. I was able to outline it and turn it into a screenplay.

The screenplay taught me a lot about language. I'm not talking about a shooting script, but like a spec script. It's a script that's still meant to be read. Even though it's a blueprint, the script as itself, kind of a bare bones outline that's meant to be translated to another form. It still has to be a compelling read. The dialogue starts to crackle. Those description bars need to be evocative without being pages long. You can't sit there and take a half page to describe something. You just can't because each page is a minute of screen time, so the more you do that, the more you lose.

He taught me well. You really need to be sharp and short with your language, but also still throwing interesting visuals and interesting little hooks that compel the eye and compel the mind. So I translated that back to the novel writing process and said, “I'm going to take that ethos with language and make it a short, sharp, shock of language, but still little visual jazz hands, if possible.”

Joanna: The other thing that I find really interesting about you is you are an example of the hybrid author, who is combining traditional publishing with indie publishing.

Do you think that's the best way that people can do it? What do you reckon about this whole indie trad thing?

Chuck: The reason that I think it's the best way is because I do it. Now, that's horrible logic. Do whatever I do. No, don't.

The reason I think it's a good idea is because diversity is a really powerful thing. I mean nature diversity, that's the thing. It's how species survive. If you have a lawn that's all one grass seed, and that grass gets hit by a drought that affects it or some sort of pest or parasite, then your lawn is all dead. People look at our lawn. We live in the woods and people look at our lawn. They're like, “It's green. It's so lush and beautiful.” But if you get close, it's actually all weeds. Our lawn is just a weed bed, but it's kept short and mowed short. In the worst droughts, it's emerald green. Part of that is because diversity allows it to survive, so if one weed dies, there's still a whole filthy nest of other weeds waiting to take over the territory.

What you get with traditional and “indie publishing” is you get these two sides of things that if one should fail, the other is there to support you. They also feed off each other. There were points at which some people were questioning maybe if I shouldn't do the one thing and shouldn't do the indie side or should focus on the other side, but the opportunities that have been afforded by both could not exist, unless I did both.

Having my young adult novel get published with Amazon and with what was a deal that was frankly very good for me was in part was lent off the fact that I had two kickstarters that I was part of. One was my young adult series, Atlanta Burns, Bait Dog. The other one was a middle grade-y young adult, at least in terms of tone and subject matter, pulp novel called Dinocalypse Now for the Spirit of the Century role playing game. Both these things lent themselves up to it.

Yet on the other hand, the experiences that I've had with Blackbirds and Mockingbird, I could've never had had I self-published them. I'm not only talking about just sales numbers. People will talk about it as pure sales numbers. That's what we often get with the indie community. It runs like, “You do so much sales and you control the thing, you get 70%. That's the best thing ever.” It is, at a very basic math level, but what it doesn't tell you is that there's things that you don't get with self-publishing. You don't get great reviews. You don't get your book in unexpected hands.

I got to pitch to incredibly awesome people at film companies out in LA because they've got a copy of Blackbirds. It just happened. They just got it. I had another company, a comics company, talk to me. Just things like Blackbirds falls into people's hands. I've had foreign rights sold in multiple places. All these things build on top of each other, and yet Blackbirds also gets attention from the indie side. What they do is they work together. There's no competition. I don't know why people feel the need that these two things need to compete. They can work very well together, and perhaps, probably it should.

Joanna: I'm with you. That's my aim, too. On that, I saw Mockingbird, I think, reviewed in The Guardian in Britain. That's one of the most highbrow papers in the country. Maybe it was Blackbirds.

Chuck: I think Blackbirds was. Maybe it was. I think it was. Yeah.

Joanna: When I saw it, I was like, “Wow. That's amazing.”

They only review about five books a week, and you made it. I was like, “There's no way that would happen with an indie book.”

Chuck: Yeah. No, indie books are held at arms' length. Sadly so because I think there's a really awesome number of incredible indie books out there that would just never get the attention they deserve. That's the other myth, too. There's a lot of the indie proselytes will tell you that, “You just write the greatest book you write, and it's the greatest cover.” Because it's indie, it's just going to float to the top and cream floats. But it doesn't, though. In fact, a lot of the really bad stuff floats and a lot of the really great stuff sinks. True in traditional publishing as well, so I don't mean it. It's not indie's fault. Indie is not a solution in and of itself.

Joanna: No, I agree. Just in terms of other things, you blog a lot as well. You blog almost every day.

Chuck: Yeah, Monday through Friday.

Joanna: Yeah, so you blog a lot and a lot of people would say, “Stop blogging. Keep writing.” I heard of you through blogging, and I'm sure a lot of people have.

How is your blog fitted in with your fiction? Because you seem to do both.

Chuck: I have no proof that it helps. I think it helps. I have met a number of people who have found me obviously, via the blog, and have a very big audience, both on Twitter and the blog. At this point, over the last year that for some reason, people feel the need to actually listen to the crap that I say online. What's wrong with you people?

I think it helps. I feel like my sales are strong. Both in terms of publishers and editors and stuff, I think they're pleased that I have the platform, which I don't consider a platform so much, as just an audience. I think an audience is really what you're looking for. I think it works, but I also don't have any numbers. I can't say, “I get this X number of people on my blog and this percentage of them has bought my book.” I had no idea, but I do see every day that I have my links on the side. My Blackbirds, Mockingbird, and all my writing book links on the side. They do see that people are clicking out to these fairly frequently. Fingers crossed, it has some effect.

Joanna: You enjoy it, right?

Chuck: The blogging? On and off. Every once in a while, it's a little frustrating, not because of anything anyone does, just because it is time consuming. I had to take time on the weekends to do it because my writing schedule for the week doesn't really afford that. There are sometimes I'm like, “Maybe I should stop doing this.” Then I find some reason that I want to blog again, and then I love it again.

Joanna: You mentioned your writing schedule there. You seem to be incredibly prolific.

I love the way you talk about working pods. Can you tell us a bit about that? What are any tips for productivity? What does your week look like?

Chuck: I tend to wake up usually around 6 in the morning and I will write until I am done, which generally means 2000 to 3000 words a day. Every once in a while, I'll do significantly more than that, but I don't force myself to do that. There's no gun to my head, which will be really weird if I held gun to my own head. I write that and hit that mark, and then I cool down and whatever happens in the middle of the day, lunch and whatever. Pornography? I don't know. Whatever happens in the middle of your day.

Then from there, I tend to do editing in the afternoon, or other administrative stuff like answer whatever e-mails have piled up over my head, which are usually in the hundreds and often not useful. E-mail feels like drowning. I'm just telling you that right now. There needs to be a more efficient e-mail. I don't mean like e-mail needs to go away and there needs to be something more effective in its place.

Joanna: Like Twitter.

Chuck: Like Twitter. If we could all just tweet at each other, it'll be so much more effective. Force me to conform to 140 characters, that'd be great.

Joanna: So you basically do write everyday on fiction.

Chuck: Yeah, especially because right now that's what I have to do. I say that in a good way like it's great that I have to do that. I literally have seven novels on track. I have to write. People are making me write, which is great. Because it means I'm going to be fed. My family will be clothed, and we'll have mortgage payments paid, roof over our head for the next two years.

Joanna: That's brilliant. I just have one more question, and I don't know whether you can answer it. You've mentioned several times that about a year ago, something happened. Things took off. Your blog took off. The books took off.

Do you know what happened? Was it critical mass? What do you think was the crux of things?

Chuck: I feel like it was critical mass. I had just a bunch of stuff happen — Double Dead and Blackbirds. I had already come off to Sundance Screenwriting Lab. It was just like the blog was starting to really do very well in terms of people reading it and communicating it to each other, and then Twitter.

Twitter is a big thing that happened. I think some authors underestimate Twitter, some don't. Obviously, many don't. But Twitter is phenomenal. I am talking to people I should never be allowed to talk to, but on Twitter, I can. The fact that I was able to interview Margaret Atwood at Terrible Minds is absurd.

Joanna: Awesome.

Chuck: I even told her, “This can only hurt you and help me. It will not increase your profile, in any way, shape or form. You're already good to go. You do not need to do this.” She was still very kind enough to do it. She retweets the blog every once in a while. I meet these great authors. They are just funny, phenomenal people, proving that writers are actually fairly nice, generally speaking. Sometimes, they're total dick bags. But generally speaking, they're very nice.

Twitter has been a huge thing. I always say, “Sometimes, writing is like feeling you're in the middle of a lake and your audience is on the shore. You're just trying to reach them with ripples.” Twitter is a great way to throw as many pebbles as you can. It doesn't even take a big audience in Twitter to reach a big audience, because there's always someone out there that has that. Twitter's definitely a very big thing. Not Facebook, not Google Plus. I think now, it's a boneyard. Google Plus is a boneyard. I think they're burying digital corpses in Google, sadly.

Joanna: We should remind everyone, that at the beginning, you said it's been 18 years.

Chuck: This is not a fast process. No. This is like a one foot in front of the other, very long process. I don't think it will always take everyone 18 years. Every writer is a totally different animal. Getting into the heart of the publishing mountain is every writer digs his own tunnel and detonates it behind them. I can't tell you how many different stories you hear as to how people do that. My experiences getting an agent, my experiences getting published are going to be wildly different from how everyone else does it or did it.

That's where writing advice and talking about the blog and all that stuff is useful, in the sense that it's interesting and you may find things that are valuable to you. Certainly, any pieces of information you glean from these places, you should use and feel great about. But ultimately, none of it is gospel, and there's nothing that you should read that says, “This is my new bible and I'm going to follow it, pound for pound, line for line.” Because it probably won't work. Got to find a way.

Joanna: Fantastic. Where can people find you and your books online?

Chuck: The best place to start is at my other website, which is www.TerribleMinds.com. Then on Twitter, which is first name, last name. ChuckWendig. C-H-U-C-K W-E-N-D-I-G. Not Wending, because people misspell it that way, or Winding…I tend to be Wendigo, if you feel like I should be a native American spirit who will eat your frozen heart.

My books are available obviously, at Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and hopefully, your favorite indie book seller and library and Walmart and Target and airport. Not really. They're not available in those places.

Joanna: Brilliant. Thanks ever so much for your time, Chuck. That was great.

Chuck: Thanks very much for having me.

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Most of the information on this site is free for you to read, watch or listen to, but The Creative Penn is also a business and my livelihood. So please expect hyperlinks to be affiliate links in many cases, when I receive a small percentage of sales if you wish to purchase. I only recommend tools, books and services that I either use or people I know personally. Integrity and authenticity continue to be of the highest importance to me. Read the privacy policy here. Read the Cookie policy here. I hope you find the site useful! Thanks - Joanna

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