Michael David Wilson 0:19
Welcome to Episode 29 of the this is horror podcast. I'm your host, Michael Wilson, and today we're going to be interviewing Stephen Graham Jones, and we're going to be talking a little bit about his short story 13, which he very kindly narrated for us in Episode 28 so I don't really think that Stephen Graham Jones needs much of an introduction to our regular listeners. He has penned numerous stories, including published by this is horror, the novella The Elvis room, as per Stephen's biography on his website, he is the author of 15 and a half novels, six collections, and more than 200 stories. So with that said, I'm just gonna jump straight into the recording with Steven. Enjoy.

So Stephen to start off with, if you could tell us a little bit about the genesis of 13.

Stephen Graham Jones 1:42
Well, Paula guran, the editor, got hold of me, and she had an anthology coming together about Halloween. She asked if I had anything to contribute. And I said, I bet I could. And then, of course, I put it off and put it off like I always do, and I have a deadline. And then I had two or three weeks to do it. And so I sat down, I thought, Halloween. You know, what can I do about Halloween? Cause I know nothing about the history of it or any of that. So I knew I was going to, like, draw on my own experiences. And so I thought about my most, like, I don't know, my most pungent memory of Halloween, I guess you could say. And that was probably when I was about 12 or 13 myself, and I lived in Staunton, Texas, and I remember running. We'd run around the convent, the convent grounds. The convent was all shut off, but we'd run around the convent grounds. And this one guy, Corey Hopper, he was great or two above me. He was hiding behind a headstone. One was kind of tilted over. And as I was running by, he jumped up and did his arms all big. And he was about six, five at the time, probably, and scared me senseless, you know. And it really stuck with me forever. And so that's really where it comes from, I guess, for me, and also, well, it comes from another town I grew up in Midland, Texas, which is only 20 miles away from Staunton, had used to have a big chief theater it was called, and there was always the legend around town that some kid got castrated there. Maybe it really happened, I don't know, but we all were really spooked by that place growing up, and it's fine. I went back recently. It's torn down now, and it's probably for the best.

Michael David Wilson 3:15
So it sounds like there's quite a lot of almost non fiction and anecdotal experience that has seeped into the story as well.

Stephen Graham Jones 3:25
There is, yeah, really, you know, with, I would say, with all the horror, right? But really, just with everything I write, that's the only like Touchstone I have to reality. I just kind of take my own experiences and, uh, distill them and magnify them and warp them and do stuff with them. So, yeah, there's always some seed of a real event in most of my stuff. And

Michael David Wilson 3:45
I also gaged from this story that there was quite a tribute to the drive in kind of horror theater stories and films as well. Oh,

Stephen Graham Jones 3:57
definitely, yeah, those have had a huge influence on me. Yeah? And

Michael David Wilson 4:01
something I kind of get with a lot of your work is that they have an old school approach, but then you've reinvented them, then you've taken these tropes and made them more for a modern audience. I don't know if that's something you'd agree with or that would resonate with you,

Stephen Graham Jones 4:20
I think I would agree. I think it's really for me, I would just look at it as a scare tactic, because you can kind of lull the reader into a relaxed state if you're giving them a story that they think they know in, like the old prescribed tradition, you know, but then you inject new stuff and, um, yeah, I think that that probably is one of the main ways I try to scare the reader. I never thought about it.

Michael David Wilson 4:45
And in fact, recently I saw in your end of year review, you'd mentioned the film starry eyes as your top film of last year. And I mean, I just watched that the other day. And first of all. What an amazing film. But I mean, secondly, that kind of, if you look at the structure and the story, it had a lot of nods towards just your traditional slasher, but then it had almost put it in a in a much more real context,

Dan Howarth 5:21
sorry, guys, just to represent the listener here as well, having not yet a chance to see it, can I just ask that we stay clear of spoilers please. Is that okay? Yeah, sorry. Sorry. Carry on. Go on.

Michael David Wilson 5:39
Steven. Oh, man, I

Stephen Graham Jones 5:41
totally forgot. I have no idea what I was gonna say.

Michael David Wilson 5:45
Oh God, so I just said that starry eyes has taken the old school slasher kind of story structure and the tropes, but then has has placed that within a much more real context.

Stephen Graham Jones 6:02
Oh, it totally has. But it also, at the same time, allows it to exist at a purely like metaphoric context too, because you can read it as as real or not real, I think. And those stories that you can read like that, they're always the most scary to me, because at the end, I'm not sure whether the bad stuff has really happened or not, you know? And I don't think, I don't think that's any kind of spoiler. I think I'm probably one of the only people who read it read this story like that.

Michael David Wilson 6:28
Yeah. I mean, I Yeah. I think as long as we just make wide, sweeping statements, then there's no kind of like,

Stephen Graham Jones 6:38
it's about a girl, we can say that. Man, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 6:40
no, that Dan's not gonna watch it now.

Starry eyes aside, what have been your kind of favorite standout movies of the past year, either ones that came out in 2014 or movies that you saw for the first time. Then,

Stephen Graham Jones 7:03
you know, I just, I'm just now, like 45 minutes ago, back from Interstellar, and that movie just really blew me away. I liked it a very I liked it a lot. I know it got a lot of kind of wish wash mishmash or wish washy reviews, I guess, um, but, I mean, I was completely on board with it. I mean, it does have some, I mean, without spoiling it, some kind of Terminator problems, I guess. But I don't consider them problems. I consider them strengths. And yeah, it's just a really fun movie. And what else I liked? I really liked coherence, a lot, independent horror movie, much like story eyes, but um, it's such a smart movie in the first place because it limits its cast and it limits its locations, you know, with its very like premise, which is just brilliant and um, so it can get shot, it can get it can get funded, you know, but um, it's just terrifying, terrifying story. And it's a story with, like, no Gore, and it doesn't really have suspense sequences either. It's more like it's terrifying on a like, an ontological level, like it makes you question your own, I don't know existence or being or something. And

Michael David Wilson 8:13
just to very briefly, jump back to 13, yeah. What? Why, out of all your stories, did you choose to open the collection with that specific one?

Stephen Graham Jones 8:27
Oh, that's a good question. Why did I choose to start with 13? It was a complicated process getting this story and what I considered the right sequence, because there's, there's certain stories that can't be by each other, you know? And I knew that 13 having kind of a kid narrator, couldn't be by another kid narrator, so that was the first thing, you know, I guess there's, there's, there's kind of like an old rule that you want to with any collection you're doing. Of course, you only want to include stuff that's your absolute best stuff. But within that, you always want to start strong. You want to have your title story be strong. And you want to have your end story be a good story, which isn't say the rest of your collection is trash or anything, but you want to feel completely confident in those three stories. Because some people will pick up a collection and just know they'll read it like they'll they read first last in title and um, and you have to kind of order things to satisfy that kind of read, or to protect against that kind of read, I guess. And I consider 13 one of the more solid stories in here. I think, I think it's because of what you were saying too, because it is playing with traditional horror tropes, you know. So it's got stuff that any reader picking it up is hopefully going to recognize at some level, and um, but then hopefully it intimates that there's going to be rugs pulled out from under feet and stuff.

Dan Howarth 9:44
I've got to ask Steven your story notes at the end of the book. You know, some of the more intriguing story notes I've read for a little while. I've got to ask you, what is your favorite story in the book?

Stephen Graham Jones 9:56
Oh, man, let me. Let me open and look directly. So. Wow. It's always being like, asked to pick this puppy to live and the rest of them to die, you know? Oh, wow. Possibly uncle. Maybe I liked uncle a lot, um, and I think the reason I liked uncle is because the end of that when I wrote that story, the whole time I was writing it, I had no idea I was going to get how I was going to get out of this story. I thought this was just going to be an exercise. It was going to be something I wrote for 95% that I couldn't figure out the end. But then when I get to the end of that story, like the character had taken on his own life and he did something which I wasn't expecting to do at all, and it creeped me out. And I love it when a story does it doesn't happen all the time. Sometimes you see the end and you craft your way towards it. Sometimes you just get a glimmer of it, right? When you think the ship is lost, you know? And I think that's what happened to me with uncle.

Michael David Wilson 11:02
And from looking at the story notes, this was also a story that was commissioned for Paula. So it seems like you know when, when Paula puts the deadline on, it brings out the absolute best in you.

Stephen Graham Jones 11:15
Thank you. Yeah, she does. Yeah, her and her and Ellen dett, when they give me story assignments, I always know that I have a chance of producing something good or looking into something, you know.

Michael David Wilson 11:27
And do you think it, is it that they ask for something very specific so then it gives you a focus rather than a general story?

Stephen Graham Jones 11:37
I think that's probably it, yeah, like, um, like, um, let's see. I'm in Ellen dettlers doll collection coming up here shortly. It may even be leaking out now, but, um, she hit me up for a story in that and she also gave me a list of all the things she did not want to see. And that, to me, became an immense challenge. How can I still tell a scary doll story? Because, you know, doll stories have been told over and over and over. How can I tell that story and avoid these, like 18 tropes that I'm supposed to go, supposed to go someplace different, and that idea, or that, that foreknowledge, that I'm going to have to go someplace different is very fertile for me. It gives me no choice but to explore places I wouldn't have otherwise gone. And when I do that, I tend to find workable stuff. You know, can you

Dan Howarth 12:33
give us an insight into what these 18 tropes were? Or,

Stephen Graham Jones 12:37
man, let me think I do not remember, but it was like the first 18 things you think of with a doll story. And, um, she wanted her she wanted the doll collection to be, not the typical doll stories, and, um, and I haven't read the rest of them yet, but I don't think mine is the typical Doll Story. Anyways,

Dan Howarth 12:59
the last one to look out for. Excuse me, that's definitely one to look out for. Yeah, yeah.

Michael David Wilson 13:07
And I think this is definitely what brings out the best within a story. If you take, okay, what do you think of when you think of this particular sub genre, right? Don't include any of that. Now, write your story exactly.

Stephen Graham Jones 13:21
I'm actually this afternoon that's exactly what I'm doing. I got back from Interstellar, and, you know, we had our time zone, like misunderstanding here, and so I thought I had an hour to write. I was gonna work on a story for Paula, actually, a mummy story. And, um, and that's, that's exactly how I'm coming at it, because she did. Paula didn't give me a list of things not to do, but, um, I've read mummy stories, and I know mummy stories tend to develop or shamble around in the same way, which is fun, definitely. But I want to add my own twist to it. You know, around my own twist, not gonna put my stamp on it. It's just, I want to tell a story that people aren't expecting, you know,

Dan Howarth 13:59
based on the the comments that we've had so far, Stephen, we've got no doubt you know that you're going to succeed on that, because Paula is clearly bringing out the best in you. So let us know when that one's due to be released by All right,

Michael David Wilson 14:12
so you said that in uncle, the character kind of took over, and then it it delivered an ending that you didn't expect. So does this mean that you then had to go back and quite meticulously edit everything that had gone beforehand, or did it just seamlessly fit into the story?

Stephen Graham Jones 14:35
It did fit in. I don't know if I'm the one to say seamlessly, but it felt like an organic expression of things that I had only been dimly aware of for the first like 9090, 90, or 95% of the story, you know, it's like, it's like I've been hiding those things in the back of my head so that I wouldn't foreshadow them too heavily, or something, you know, which I think that's what a lot of the writing process is that it's blind, blinding yourself to what you're doing. Not thinking, just kind of going by instinct.

Michael David Wilson 15:02
And one thing we didn't really touch on when we last had you on the podcast was the editing and creative process. And I'm wondering, is there a distinct mode when you're writing? So you're like, right? I'm in creating mode now I'm in editing, or is it something that you flip between as you're going definitely

Stephen Graham Jones 15:27
two modes. For me, I do when I'm writing a piece, as we all do, I'm going back two paragraphs and fixing this, and I think I'm editing, but really I'm still writing. For me, the first draft phase of a thing is a very jittery mindset. For me, I'm a very like jittery, vulnerable. I don't know situation to be in, I guess, but when it comes time for revision, I just put on some easy listening, Adult Contemporary elevator music and cruise I'm not jittery at all. I'm confident, because now I can think I can apply principles I know about fiction, and I can look at the mechanics of the sentences, and I can see how the page lines out, and everything. None of that is really what I can do or what I feel confident doing when I'm writing. When I'm writing, I'm dealing solely with the story elements, and I'm trying to believe in this fictional space so completely that it ceases to become a fictional space. And in order to do that, I have to shut off the critical part of my mind, if that makes any sense.

Michael David Wilson 16:33
And when we had Richard Thomas on, I asked him about what he does for self improvement, and in terms of just honing the writing craft. Because what I've noticed is a lot of people who are already getting well established within writing don't talk so much about what it is they specifically do to get better. So I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about that, whether it's seminars you attend or books that you read, or how well

Stephen Graham Jones 17:06
it's number one and number one and two, it's both of those. One of the MFA programs I teach in, we have a residency twice a year, and we bring in speakers from all over the country and all over the world, writers, directors, producers, poets, everybody. And I go to as many of those seminars and classes as I can, and I listen to how they come at telling stories or revising stories, or working in the industry, just all the many, many things they say. And aside from that, I read interviews of writers I respect and even writers I don't respect, and I listen to their podcasts, and I read their articles, their blog posts, and all with the the aim of stealing tricks. You know, I want to get better. And yes, I do read like I just now finished Steven Pinker's the sense of style, which has for me, I feel like it's changed the way I come at writing prose. I think because I read that book, I order my clauses a little bit differently. Now I understand why clauses come in this order or not that order, and it's helped me immensely. I want to read that book again. I've assigned it for my students this semester, so I read it with them and hopefully understand it even better. And I guess the other way I try to get better as a writer is, well, I mean, I read other other writers. Of course, you can't, you can't not do that. And I'm challenged by them like, you know, I just I read that visible filth that you sent me, and make them balance grades. And um, seriously, that that was so well written that I thought, why don't even try, you know? That was scarier than I can be, you know. So I should just go write romance or horse fiction, something, you know. Um, but I think it's good to be intimidated like that, because it raises the stakes. Because now, next time I sit down and write a horror story, that visible filth is going to be in my head and I'm gonna think, Well, this was scary, but I can do more, you know, or I can push myself harder anyways. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 19:08
I think when you read something that you know, you perceive as being a level above things that you've done before. Yeah, there are, there are essentially going to be two reactions, either it's going to inspire you and it's going to challenge you to better yourself, or you're just going to feel overwhelmed. And obviously it's the the former reaction that we're looking for.

Stephen Graham Jones 19:32
Yeah, it's not bad to be overwhelmed for a week, like when I read. The only two writers I can't read when I'm writing a novel are um Vonnegut and Philip K Dick, because those guys both, they leave me wordless. I see what they've done on the page, and I just think, and I look at my own stuff, and it's so paltry in comparison, and I think, why am I even trying? You know, I love to read dick and Vonnegut, don't get me wrong, but I love to read them when I'm not writing a novel.

Dan Howarth 19:58
What's interesting was it Stephen K. That said you can't expect to bowl somebody over with your writing until it's happened to you. So I guess, you know, the kind of adverse, adverse kind of reaction of, Wow, I can never match that. You know, maybe that's not kind of always the correct way to go. I mean, me and Michael have kind of discussed this at length, and I know that having read the visible Phil for the first time through, we're both like shit. This is a serious piece of writing. Yeah, it's scary once you've kind of digested it, like you say, you know, it does kind of inspire you to get back on and try your best to do what you do yourself, really exactly.

Stephen Graham Jones 20:33
Yeah. I mean, if, like, everybody watches Michael Jordan play basketball on YouTube, and we all know, everybody knows they'll probably never be as good as him, but, um, you got to try. You know, you might get lucky one day. You might have one game where you make a shot that Michael, Michael couldn't have made, you know, or like, like, all bands, all bands starting out in the garage. Um, they probably know that they're finally not going to be Led Zeppelin, but that's no reason not to try to make good music. I think you know,

Dan Howarth 21:05
yeah, exactly. Well, I

Michael David Wilson 21:06
know when Tim Ferriss is talking about business and kind of entrepreneurial aspirations, he says, if you if you set your target ridiculously high, then even if, on some level you fail, it's not really a failure. Yeah,

Stephen Graham Jones 21:25
exactly, exactly. But

Michael David Wilson 21:27
of the tips and the seminars that you attended last year, what would you say were the top three takeaways or tips that you learn

Stephen Graham Jones 21:41
one of them was, I was watching a panel of first time or debut novelists. I was just standing in the back, and I'm and the moderator asked them, at the end of their time period, do you have one piece of advice that you can give? You can impart to everybody and everyone, every all three of them said, Stay off Goodreads. Don't go to Goodreads and read your own reviews. And I never had done that, and I'm and so I left there, and I went immediately to my hotel room, and I looked up, looked myself up on Goodreads, because I thought, well, that's what debut novelists say. I've got, like, 20 novels out. I'll be okay. I've got a thick enough skin. Two hours later, I was wishing I would have heeded their advice, because I think we as writers should stay off good reads, because you need the positive reviews. You think your mom just has another online identity and she's doing it. But the negative reviews, you take the those that go right to your soul. They don't even mess around going through your eyes or anything. They just go right to the heart of you, and you take them as gospel truth, you know? And, um, yeah, it's scary. I think it's not productive anyways, to spend your time haunting Good Reads. Um, let me think, you know, a screenwriting seminar I went to, um, it was about taking notes, I think, and um, or taking notes from producers or from executives and stuff and um, and they said the single best thing you can do when you go into that office or into that meeting room, that conference room, aside from, you know, listening, is proper, proper notebook, up a pad of paper and always be writing. And that makes the people who are giving you notes be they, producers, executives, whoever that tells them that what they're saying has worked, that you're taking it seriously, because a lot of the stuff they say is going to be, you know, probably pretty easily dismissed, because there maybe they missed some part of the story. Or, who knows, for all the reasons that people have bad ideas, that they'll have bad ideas like, but um, if you're writing something down in your notebook, then they it becomes a more productive meeting. I think, um, and I've been in those situations, and so now, when I go back to them, I'm going to be sure to be writing something that they can't see. I may just be drawing Bart Simpson, but I'll be doing something, you know, um, let's see the next most productive one I went to. Let me think, you know, it's probably a dialog workshop I went to. It was given by a playwright, a friend of mine, Mickey Birnbaum, and he had us do an exercise at the end, which I won't like give his exercise away. I don't think it's any big secret, but I think it's something that dramatists do, that fiction writers or I had never encountered these kind of dialog exercises, and it made me kind of think differently about dialog. Everybody always says that dialog is kind of like the distilled essence of your character or something. And I always think, yeah, that's all that sounds good, but what do they really sound like? But that workshop made me realize that you yes it is a distilled essence. And I mean, yes, it is a yes, it has to sound real, but also it needs to be doing something. And I mean, I guess I knew that at some level, but doing those exercises in that class really hammered it home for me. Anyways,

Michael David Wilson 24:59
so when you. Writing dialog yourself. Let's say that in the first draft, you map out quite a full conversation. Then when you go back to it, how do you know what to include and what to take away? Because I guess, with it being the essence of your characters as you put it, it and I mean, we're always told, let's kill our darlings, as it were, but the dialog can really be the core of that. So I guess for a lot of people, it can be a real struggle knowing what has to go definitely,

Stephen Graham Jones 25:37
that is really hard. I mean, you can do the old thing where you cut off the heads and the tails, you cut off the hellos and goodbyes, but that goes kind of without saying in a dialog session on the page and a conversation on the page. But one thing I've had I just read a big like 150 150,000 word novel, and it's very dialog driven, and so I'm peeling back through it right now and doing what you're saying. I'm I'm winnowing the dialog down, and I'm finding that there that I do two types of dialog. I do dialog that is revealing of the character and that moves the plot forward, and I do dialog that I think is hilarious and everybody's gonna love, you know? And what I'm fine, what I'm finding is I have to cut out all the stuff that I think people are gonna love and I think hilarious. I just have to leave stuff that actually serves a story, but learning to make that distinction is quite tricky. Yes. And

Michael David Wilson 26:25
do you think that? Do you think that there's a danger when people try and include accents or, I guess, specific phrases or tics that people have within their dialog? It

Stephen Graham Jones 26:41
can definitely if, it depends if the writer, him or herself, has a good ear or not. People with a good ear, they can get away with it. I don't think I have a very good ear. So I, instead of trying to render someone's diction through phonetics, I'll usually default to syntax to word order a little bit. But really my main thing I'll do is I'll put an umbrella description at top. I'll say this guy talks to the southern accent. I'll say that after some fashion, such that every time we see him, hopefully that umbrella is still over. It says that we remember that he kind of has a draw. He kind of crawls his words out and stuff. But some people can really do it on the page. They can really render a dialect without reducing a whole culture to a stereotype. You know, I'm not. I don't think I'm so good at that, though. So I I don't try because I think I would, well not, not that. I don't try because I think I'll fail. I don't try because I have tried and I've seen what it looks like and it looks like and it looks like crap. I try to do it different ways. You know?

Michael David Wilson 27:46
I guess it can be very difficult to go back and to re edit that kind of stuff anyway, because obviously when you're rereading it, you are putting that accent that you want to be there on the character in your head or out loud. It does make it very tricky to know when you've got it right and when you've absolutely failed and rendered it a cliche definitely.

Stephen Graham Jones 28:15
You know, one of my big problems with talking about that kind of stuff is, when I'm going back and revising a work, I'll get to a paragraph, and I'll realize I, like, get a sense that I need to say tenderly, you know that for that so that's going to do something that's going to polarize or inflect, or do something that I need done right here. And so I'll rewrite like, the first three sentences of that paragraph, such that there's a tenderly in there. And then I'm like, All right, I did that, and then I got to read the second three sentences of the paragraph. And there's tenderly, you know, I already did it the first time through, so they have to go back and undo all my changes that I did to the front part of the paragraph. That's really my biggest slowdown in revising, is that I realized something needs to happen here, and so I make it happen, and then it's already happened, like, 1% further into the story? Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 29:02
and there's a final question on dialog. I mean, I think we all know that. You know generally you want people to say things. You don't want to add all these wild adjectives and verbs describing how they did it. But, I mean, sometimes just a little description can add color. So do you have any rules or tips in terms of knowing when to include a little bit more and when to just keep it as is?

Stephen Graham Jones 29:37
I would say, I guess my rule of thumb, I never really thought about it, though, is, I'll allow myself one deviation from he said. She said, a page, you know, whether that's going to be a he corrected. She replied. He answered. She muttered, whatever it's going to be. I try to do that maybe once a page, if that usually, I think it probably comes out to like i. Once every three or four pages, but um, I don't. I don't think a lot of people hold it as a really hard and fast rule, you can't do anything. But said, I don't. I don't quite agree with that. Um. I mean, you do want to avoid things like, um, I'll go over there if she whispered softly. You know it's how else can you whisper? But um, so you want to, you don't want to do stupid stuff, but, um, it's not, it's not, it's not. I don't think it's bad to drop an adverb or an adjective around around that kind of stuff at all.

Michael David Wilson 30:28
Yeah, I think it was king who in on writing. He was talking about things, so you use whispered softly. And he said, Well, you'd, you'd use a descriptor if they whispered in a way that you wouldn't expect. So it's more of a screaming whisper or a loud whisper? Yeah,

Stephen Graham Jones 30:48
yeah, exactly, yeah. But I might,

Michael David Wilson 30:51
I said that was going to be the last question on dialog, but now you've, you've brought up another one when you were talking about you have no hard and fast rules, and previously, you'd said that a novel you're working on at the moment is a large percentage of dialog. So I mean, I am wondering if you've set yourself any limits in terms of the percentage of dialog that can be on a page, or the length that a conversation can go on for.

Stephen Graham Jones 31:29
You know, well, I guess to back up a little the my idea or my model, or my challenge for this was I read Jillian Flynn's dark places, which is a pretty, pretty solid novel, but then, when I got to, you know, I finished it, and then I got to thinking about it for a long time, and I realized that novel is just a series of long conversations, really. And there's also a novel by Sandor Mirai called embers, which is just a series of long conversations. And I thought, What a weird form. Why had I never realized that that's the form of probably 40% of the novels out there. It's just a series of long series of long conversations. And the reason I haven't done that is because it's really hard to drive a novel with dialog. I think, especially, I think for me, because I don't come to dialog naturally. I had to when I came to grad school, my professors had to beat it into me that I had to do dialogs. I didn't want to do any dialog at all. I said I was gonna be the one person who never did dialog, but they made me and I my novel demon theory to teach myself dialog. My hard and fast rule was that, for that was that every single line of dialog is going to be quoted. There's going to be no paraphrasing at all. And since then, I've become a lot more comfortable with dialog. But with this novel, I didn't have any rules about how much dialog can be on a page, but it's really, it's really not about, you know, how it looks visually or anything. It's really about the pace at which the story moves. Because if you have two pages of dialog that's going to move really quick. It's really snappy and but I realized that you need, like, expansion and contraction, expansion and contraction, and the dialog is a contraction, and the narration, for me is the expansion. That's where you slow down and you look at the cityscape, and you go through the pasture and you you eat and that kind of stuff. Those are very necessary moments. You have to break the rhythm in a novel. Or you have to establish a rhythm, I guess, like just fast, slow, fast, slow. But for me, it's expansion and contraction, and that's how I think of dialog working in a story.

Michael David Wilson 33:30
So you you spoke about it within a novel. Now, within short fiction, I mean, there are stories that are exclusively dialog. So do you think that is a form that lends itself to a more dialog heavy approach?

Stephen Graham Jones 33:47
That's a good question. Um, you know, I mean, yeah, Terry bissons, they're made out of meat, is the most famous all dialog, one we've got, of course, and it's brilliant and wonderful, and doesn't need anything but dialog, or its only dialog form is kind of where it gets its humor and its power. I do think that when I do short fiction, I have less dialog than I do in a novel. Because when I write short fiction like this mummy story, I'm supposed to write, it's got a cap on it. I'm sure I have to look at the email, but it's probably four or 5000 words, so my suspicion is that most of the conversations in there are going to be kind of like excerpts from bigger conversations, you know. So they'll go on for half a page, and then we'll jump ahead to the story and move ahead. And I mean, hopefully the dialog will be moving the story too. But, um, yeah, I think it's it worked. I think dialog gets different license in the story, in short fiction,

Michael David Wilson 34:43
and What's the longest you've had a first draft of a story that you've then cut down as in, like the kind of percentage that you've had to cut to get the the story within the parameters of that word count,

Stephen Graham Jones 34:56
probably about 1800 or 2000 1000 words, I think you know, which is like 15 pages. It's not easy to do that at all. And forever afterwards, that story, whenever I see it, it always seems like I remember when you were bigger.

Michael David Wilson 35:20
So in terms of daily habits you have and your morning routine, what does that look like? Because I think it's always interesting to see how writers and artists start the day, because it normally sets you up for how you're going to go on

Stephen Graham Jones 35:39
these last I started this big novel I just wrote in late September. I just finished it right after Christmas. And I was doing a lot of traveling, but when I was able to be home, I mean, I rode on the road too, but that's not really scheduled. Writing, when I was able to be home, I found that, you know, I wake up at six or seven, and I would usually find my way to the keyboard, to the computer by eight, and I would push on till about 10, usually. And that's usually about an hour and a half of good writing in 30 minutes of realizing that I'm not doing good writing anymore, you know. And then I bounce to the gym, then I watch something stupid at lunch, and then I come back, and I'll do after lunch. Between lunch and five, I'll usually do two hour and a half riding sessions, and I'll take a break go get the kids from school at three, something like that, you know. And I try to stay away from it at night. I can't always do that, but um, because the problem is, if I start riding at nine, then I think I'm chasing a big fish, and I go until three in the morning, and then I'm screwed for the next day because I didn't get no sleep, you know? But yeah, if I can write four or five hours a day, I can make a lot of good progress. But right now I've got a semester starting up on Tuesday, and I'm already doing a semester with another place right now a quarter, and so my schedule is not going to be as loose as it was these last three or four months. And I'm going to be back to the model of stealing time to write, you know, stealing minutes here and 25 minutes there, and then staying up late to write, and then sometimes waking up at 430 to write, before everybody else is awake, you know. But just however you get it done, I think, is the thing that matters. You know, writers say that your fiction writing is a muscle. You got to keep it in shape, and I do agree with that. But I also think that it's really good to take breaks, like since I finished that novel on december 28 or something like that, I don't think I've written a word of fiction. I've just been I have a futon in my office, and I finally clean that futon off, and I've been laying on that futon for hours and just reading and reading and being happy. Because for me, while I love writing, I think I probably love reading more. So I really appreciate the times between projects when I can just read.

Michael David Wilson 37:57
And you said that if you start writing too late, you can then kind of screw yourself over for the next day. So do you have a very rigid time that you will get up every day regardless of when you went to sleep?

Stephen Graham Jones 38:13
Yeah, I usually get up at six or seven every day. Yeah, I'm just programmed like that, I guess. Well, no, I mean, I have kids in a family and dogs and they make me wake up.

Michael David Wilson 38:22
Yeah? No, I guess if your children want feeding, you can't really say no, yeah, but something else that you mentioned was going to the gym. And I mean, a lot of people talk about the importance of having a fitness routine. So I wondered, first of all, what is your fitness routine? And I mean, how much do you attribute doing that to kind of your success and just setting yourself up for creating?

Stephen Graham Jones 39:01
Yeah, you know, I was listening to a producer talk recently at a seminar, and somebody was asking her about working with a director who is really hard to work with, or an actor who's really an ego trip, or a production that seemed to be flawed from the beginning. And she said she and people she knows will get on board projects like that, but they're really insistent that when they do that, they set aside, like, an hour and a half each day to go to the gym or do yoga or play basketball or whatever, because I think, and it's that's the way it works with me. I need to be doing something that is not with my mind, you know. And working going to the gym is not using my brain at all, you know. And I just been programmed like that. I grew up with a mom who wouldn't watch TV unless she was like, doing. Sit ups and stuff and um, and so I remember in high school, every time I hear that song, every time I hear Zeppelin's cashmere come on the radio, my stomach muscles tighten up because they used to be my my stomach crunch song in high school, you know. And it goes for like, nine minutes, and it was way too long, I think. But um. And so then I came out of high school to college, and I remember in college, undergrad, I was working out three times a day, you know. And in grad school, dialed that back to about one time a day, and that's what I've been doing ever since. But I'm at the gym come snow or whatever, an hour every day, you know, like even the on the January 1 year, my gym was closed, which I thought was not cool. So I did a trial membership at another gym. It was a huge headache, but just so I could work out on one on that one day, you know, use one day of my trial membership. Yeah, cuz I get if I can't work out, I go, I get jittery and crazy. I'm used to what I did. I had a basketball goal in my driveway, and I wrote a lot of my novels. I would write for an hour or two and go outside and shoot, about shoot baskets, and come inside and write and go back out and shoot. That was my rhythm. But um, lately, I've had so many knee and ankle surgeries and shoulder mess ups and back injuries that, um, basketball requires a lot more recuperation than it used to. So now just go to the gym and

Michael David Wilson 41:17
do you find that when you're there, you are multitasking in the sense that you're either listening to some music or doing something else. At that point,

Stephen Graham Jones 41:27
I usually I'm either listening to an audio novel or reading a book, yes, or sometimes I listen to music too, but I always have a notebook and a pen with me, because I get, like blindsided, blindsided by ideas that I have to do in this thing I'm writing, you know, actually, these little, these little waterproof, um, contractors notebooks that I get at the hardware store, and they're perfect. They're really rugged and tough, so they can bounce all around the gym.

Michael David Wilson 41:54
Is it more a weight lifting or a cardio routine that you're

Stephen Graham Jones 41:58
mostly, mostly cardio I do. I mean, I do, I do weights, but I'm not too serious about it. You know, I don't really want to be on muscly or nothing. I just love to get on a bike or an elliptical or a stair stepper or whatever the gym I has, and just kind of try to turn my brain off for 45 minutes or an hour. Yeah.

Michael David Wilson 42:17
I mean, there might be some people listening who are wondering what this has to do with the writing. But for, I mean, for for me, having read a lot of studies into these areas, while some people might think, Well, okay, if I spend an hour a day at the gym, that's an hour less writing. But it seems to be because it gets that blood flowing and it, it really is a stimulus that releases these endorphins, that you'll actually find that what you're doing post work out makes you more productive. Yeah, the

Dan Howarth 42:50
amount, the amount of writers who have said in kind of interviews, you know, oh, I had a breakthrough on this plot when I was, you know, halfway up a hill on a walk near my house, and had to run home and, you know, make the notes that I thought of while I was out. You know, exercise really does seem to be a benefit to the the writing muscle, as it were, it

Stephen Graham Jones 43:09
totally, yeah, totally, 100% believe that, you know, um, I remember, you know, I was laid up one summer and I couldn't really do basketball. So I did hacky sack, which was just as good as basketball. And that, like, used to, I thought basketball was a magic key to unlocking the fiction part of my brain or something, but I realized it's not basketball. It's just something that's not fiction, you know, it's just doing something and doing something with my body. You know, it's not just like going and driving or something, not that driving is necessarily easy, but I'm just doing something that just requires, like, involuntary stuff in my brain. You know, it does allow the fiction, the stories, to cook. I think

Michael David Wilson 43:49
now in terms of looking at this year, 2015 Have you got anything coming out this year? Because I remember you saying that? I think it was your agent had said to not put anything out this year. But I don't know if I think that is just the novel form, or if we'll be seeing short stories from you and and also what the strategy and approach is behind that

Stephen Graham Jones 44:19
there. Yeah, there. I'll definitely have short stories out. I don't have any novels out for the first time in a lot of years now, because my agent says that I was having too many novels, and I probably agree with her, you know, but there are two books coming out with my name on them. Anyways, one is the faster, redder road selected fiction or stories of Stephen Graham Jones, a guy named Theo van OST is doing it through New Mexico press. And then that's in April, I think, and then in this, in the fall, there's a critical companion to the fictions of Stephen Graham Jones, which I'm doing a big. Interview for that. But of course, I don't have any hand in the critical stuff. So I mean, I'll still be on somebody's radar somewhere anyways, and there's, there's more stuff, but I can't talk about it yet. I'm under various gag orders. Man, yeah.

Michael David Wilson 45:19
So I was wondering if, in terms of the strategic approach, it's more or less just rein in the amount that you're putting out, so that then you become even more established, so that each time you put more stuff out, you get a better deal Correct.

Stephen Graham Jones 45:39
That's exactly the strategy that she's pushing. She says that I need to make my books an event rather than something that people assume, you know,

Dan Howarth 45:51
DM Steven, does it you know, kind of with, you know, a best of and a critical study of your work. Does it feel like people are kind of, I don't know, like you hear this a lot from kind of sportsmen, maybe, you know, when they win, kind of like the NBA, or, you know, the Champions League and football, or soccer, as we call it, you know, does that make you feel that you've kind of achieved all that you want to now, people are kind of writing these kind of books about you or, you know, putting kind of, you know, accolades that you'd associate with kind of, I don't know, maybe the end of a career or something like that. Do you feel like any kind of, I don't know, emotions about those books that are coming out, you

Stephen Graham Jones 46:32
know, I told one of my editors, Don or Don Doria at Sam hain, I was sitting at a table with him in Portland. I think it was, but um. And I said, Does this mean I'm dead? They're doing a selected works. And he, he said, he said, no, no. He said, Selected Works are good. Collected Works are bad. You know, they're collecting all your stuff. That means you're dead. But, um, but, um, yeah. I mean, hopefully the Selected Works would just be, like, Volume One or something, you know, that'd be ideal as for, yes, it does to me. It does mean, or it does to me, indicate that I'm reaching the people that I'm trying to reach, in some sense, you know. But there's always another horizon, too, you've got to always keep, I think you never can. Like, well, you can be satisfied, but just never rest, I guess is the way I feel about it. You know, so many writers I've seen who won a prize or get a movie made from their stuff, or have really good sales, or get on some list, they're like, All right, that's great, and you don't see anything from them for six or eight years. And that's not the model I want to follow. You know, I want to always be doing like, a one two punch over and over. You know, if I make it on some list or win some prize or do whatever, I want that to be the thing that happens for that six months. But then the next six months, there's gonna be something else happening. You know,

Dan Howarth 48:01
yeah, of course. I mean, it must be difficult, you know, obviously being as prolific as you are, like shifting goal posts, and, you know, I know you kind of can't talk too much about the projects that you've got coming up, but you know what, what are you aiming for? Kind of next, you know, I know we talked about the possible rom com Last time you were on the show. And you know what, kind of aims are we looking at, you know, for this year? Is that still kind of, you know, I think the white elephant, you know, the white whale that you haven't got, the white

Stephen Graham Jones 48:32
elephant. If I have a white whale, it's probably that I want to write. I would love to write a novel like Dan Simmons Hyperion. I would love to write a big, huge science fiction novel. Um, it's not, it's not necessarily about page about, you know, page number. It's about the, I don't know, the depth of the imagination, I guess, the how well somebody has imagined this space. Um, that's always been my goal. Since I was a little kid. I wanted to be a science fiction writer, and I never have felt like I'm good enough to do it yet. And I think I've probably set the bar too high by reading Vonnegut and Dick, you know, I guess. But I still hope to do that. If there, if I do have a white whale, that's probably it, you know, just to write good, compelling science fiction, and there's good stuff happening. I mean, it's not just all Vonnegut and Dick. There's John Scalzi, there's, um, I won't say that guy's name? He did, ready? Player one, which is pretty brilliant. You know, there's so much good stuff happening, but, yeah, it is weird for me. I mean, it's, it's what's weird for me right now, in this year, in 2015 is that I've got, I think, four completed novels in the drawer. No, five. Now, with this one I just wrote, um, it'll hopefully be completed. I mean, it's completed, but hopefully it'll be polished and publishable before too long here. So I guess I got five books in the drawer, and so that feels really weird to me, because I'm used to having publishers call me and say I need a book, and I'll say I don't have one. Can you wait a few weeks? You know? But, um, so. Yeah, it's, I wonder if these books will ever get published. I think they're some of my best stuff. But, um, for a while there I was just writing so so much, you know, that it was more than, like the shelf could hold or something, you know, yeah, no,

Dan Howarth 50:16
just, just though that was an interesting thing. You know, somebody who's achieved so much, just to see what kind of keeps you ticking over. But it's kind of, you know, reassuring, almost, to see that, you know, you've had so many books out and yet still, you know, there are goals that you're chasing. It's, you know, that's kind of a little bit inspiring in itself. Yeah,

Stephen Graham Jones 50:34
definitely, what I really want is just to connect with readers, and sometimes, sometimes it's one reader, and sometimes it's 5000 readers, you know, um, but one of my favorite, like, letters I ever got from a reader was, um, for bleeding to me. I guess somebody wrote me and it got to me somehow. I forget how this was, before social media, before I was on it, anyways, and, um, and he said that a story of mine bleeding to me, the title story from the bleeding to me. Collection, he said, um, he had lost his brother when he was in high school, and he said he's been dealing with it for years and years. And this story, bleeding to me, really resonated with him and helped him a whole lot. And, um, that's, that's the kind of experiences or that I as a writer would like more of, I guess, you know, and I'm, I guess, the more sales you get, the higher the chance that that's gonna happen, you know. But I mean, it's not all about cash and royalty checks or film option money and all that stuff. I mean, yeah, it is about that, but it's really just about connecting with people that's, that's the magic of fiction for me, is that my book can go to a Spaceport in 400 years and possibly reach a culture that I never imagined, and that's just purely magic to me, that connecting with somebody that I've never guessed existed.

Michael David Wilson 51:57
Now I don't know if this is going to go into territory that you can't actually talk about on their podcast, yeah, but I wondered what, what it was that had inspired the agent change.

Stephen Graham Jones 52:10
Ah, you know, I'd been with my agent for 14 years. We'd been together since we were both just babies on the publishing scene, you know. And, um, I just thought it was time to mix it up. You know, that's pretty much basically it. I was, I wasn't really dissatisfied or anything, and she hadn't done anything wrong. My previous agent, I just thought, um, at a certain point in your career, you want to try things from a different angle, you know, and that's what I'm doing. Well,

Michael David Wilson 52:41
it sounds like you're taking, yeah, a completely different approach now. So it if, if nothing else, then it's an experiment, and you've got to do that to see what the the result is, yeah, exactly.

Stephen Graham Jones 52:55
You don't want to die with questions, you know, with unanswered questions. You want to have asked everything you can ask, I think. And

Michael David Wilson 53:01
I think in terms of your art, you're doing exactly that. I mean, particularly with the experimentation in terms of other genres. So you did say, just backtracking to your conversation with Dan about putting out a science fiction novel that being a big target for you. Now, we spoke about tropes to avoid. So do you now have a list of things that you definitely don't want to do within that science fiction?

Stephen Graham Jones 53:36
Yeah, that's a good point. I guess I don't want to have a explosion that makes noise in space, you know, I just, I mean, I realize science fiction, and you do get a sense of what the audience prefers and tolerates poorly, I guess, you know, really, one kind of insight into that is, if you go to the websites of All the the science fiction magazines, both big and small, and read through their submission guidelines, some of them have a comprehensive list of tropes that are played out in science fiction, and you can use those either as idea starters or you can use those as fences, either way, I think. But it's really good to know the field anyways, I see a lot of writers come into something, and you can tell that they don't read horror, but they're writing horror. They thought they had a scary idea, but they don't realize that Poe did that story 80% similar, 140 years ago. You know?

Michael David Wilson 54:34
Yeah, I think when you start writing in a genre that you're not as familiar with depending on the competency of the writer, it can either be an absolute car crash or or it can actually bring something quite fresh to the table. Yeah. So with the latter example, I'm actually thinking the other. A I guess it was last year now, when we watched the bay, yeah, and that was, who was that? Directed by Barry Levinson, directed it, and he hadn't really strayed into this kind of found footage horror cinema before. And for me, I thought that worked absolutely perfectly. And it did. It did give us something that we hadn't really seen before in in a genre that's becoming increasingly oversaturated.

Stephen Graham Jones 55:34
I agree, yeah, the bay kind of creeped me out, definitely. And I think you're right, that that was the benefit or the result of somebody coming to who doesn't usually play in that area, you know, because he was able to set the story up for like, 80% of the story where we thought it was going to go one predictable way. But then when the little bug things, whatever they are, come around, you're like, you throw your hands up and run away. But you're right about, you know, I teach undergraduates as well as graduate students, and lots of the undergraduates, my fiction workshop might very well be the first encounter with the mechanics and the craft of fiction that they've had. So that, what that means for me is that the initial stories they turn in, um, they'll be raw in the sense that they're maybe not mechanically correct and all that, but that's all you can deal with that. But every once in a while, one of them will do something that is so what we would consider out of bounds for fiction writing, but they don't know it's out of bounds, because they don't know where the fences are. And it's really cool when they when they do that kind of stuff, they're like, No, I didn't know. You couldn't Fast Forward 80 years inside of a single sentence and then come back. Sentence and then come back, you know. But um, they or do it, or do my story all on passive voice, or whatever it is. And um, I try to cultivate that all I can, because I think fiction needs that new DNA to remain vital, you know.

Michael David Wilson 56:58
And we know that experimentation is so important. So I suppose if you don't actually know what the rules are, then there are no boundaries. And so I guess I could see how that could bring out some really interesting stuff. I mean, I'm sure it also brings out some pretty terrible writing. But occasionally, you'll see something really creative and, wow,

Stephen Graham Jones 57:28
yeah, and I'll ask them oftentimes at the end of the semester, I'll say, Listen, I know you're going to go, you know, back home and run, run your family's business. I know you're going to go to Tibet for the next 10 years, or whatever they're going to do. I'll say, but this trick you did in the story right here, if you're not going to use it, can I use it? And they always say, Yes, you know, but I tell them that I'll always give them acknowledgement for it, you know, I won't pretend like I came up with it.

Michael David Wilson 57:53
And do you find a lot of people who pass through your creative writing courses do then go on to to continue with that. I mean, so I did an undergraduate creative writing course, and whilst there are a percentage of us that I see that are still out there writing or within the publishing business, unfortunately, you will see people who will pass through it and then maybe find the well, invariably find the money isn't quite there. And whilst they would like to be writing short stories or longer pieces within their spare time, the jobs they invariably get don't actually allow for that amount of time. I

Stephen Graham Jones 58:40
see that happen a lot, yeah, and it's, I don't think it's necessarily bad either, because really, what's happened is now this person who is now in marketing, or who's now selling cars or whatever, I think they're still using their fiction skills, you know, they're telling a story about this used Subaru, or they're using audience manipulation in the advertising field and all that. And I think that the skills you learn by crafting stories are applicable in so many parts of life, you know. So, yes, these people aren't showing up in anthologies or on the shelf, on the fiction shelf, anyways, but, um, I think they're still a lot of them are still writers inside, you know,

Michael David Wilson 59:20
I think with with writing, it's the one crash that you can really come to later in life, or that with age you get better, because, as you say, it's storytelling. So I mean, to really succeed at that you need to have these life experiences to draw from. So you know, if you've just gone through high school and then college and university, and then you decide you're going to lock yourself up in your room and write, yeah, there's and I. Argument that you don't have that much to draw from. So it might be better going out there and getting these experiences and then coming back to the writing table. Exactly,

Stephen Graham Jones 1:00:10
yeah, they say go up and get your heart broken, all that kind of stuff, you know? And I do think that that is so, so important. It gives you, like, a, I don't know, a context or something. It kind of you learn about what really matters. I guess you know because you're right coming out of high school, you think a certain set of things matter, but as you you know, 12 years later, you realize that none of that matters, you know, um, which isn't to say you can't get beautiful novels that deal with the high school issues. You definitely can, but, um, but yeah, I think that experience is definitely what makes, makes, gives writers their feel Anyways, um, but then you got people like Emily Dickinson just sitting up in their attic room writing poems, a lot of dashes in them, you know. So I don't know it works for some people, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 1:00:58
and you can learn so much about the author through reading their fiction. I remember when Graham Joyce was talking at a this is horror event. He was saying that the things that seem more unbelievable or more like absolute fabrication within a lot of his stories are the bits that are real taken from life. Yeah,

Stephen Graham Jones 1:01:23
definitely, definitely. What I found is going around doing readings and stuff. Sometimes I'll be reading a piece and I'll have like, two or three lines in it that I think are funny, and the audience tends not to laugh at those moments. They laugh at these other moments that I never anticipated. And, um, it's, it's weird to me that I can so poorly anticipate an audience's reaction sometimes, but um, what I do then is, I don't delete those parts that they laugh at. You know? I try to sensitize myself to that kind of, I don't know, play or construction or whatever. Since that, I can repeat it hopefully.

Michael David Wilson 1:02:00
So do you find, with some of your readings, you'll bring in a piece that isn't quite finished, and then you've got the reading environment as a testing ground.

Stephen Graham Jones 1:02:11
Some, when I have a longer reading, like 45 minutes, I usually try to bring in a brand new piece and try it out on the crowd to see if they tolerate it, you know, I guess. But sometimes I'll do readings like in a bookstore, you know, 25 minutes, 30 minutes. And usually in a bookstore, I'm trying to sell a certain book, and so I need to push that book. And so I'll usually not try new stuff. It just depends on the audience, I guess.

Michael David Wilson 1:02:38
And have you ever had a kind of Chuck polonik moment where you've had a real visceral reaction from the crowd. I guess it applies more to the horrors now,

Stephen Graham Jones 1:02:50
yeah, I've never, I've never had anybody, um, pass out like they do for guts, you know. But I always think with guts, they're not passing out because of the corn, that's when everybody's supposed to pass out, or the peanuts, that's what makes people pass out. But I always think they pass out because in the first line of that story, this story lasts about as long as you can hold your breath. And I always think people start holding their breath then, and they pass out like two pages later from deprivation. But probably the best response I've had like that in that family would be I was reading down in at the Texas State cemetery last October, maybe two Octobers ago, and it was a reading. I want to say it was at 10 o'clock, or maybe midnight, really pretty late. I was one of four, maybe five readers, um, let's see Lindsay Hunter, Amelia Gray, um, and um, it was a really cool setting. We read right after RL Stein, I guess he had a big event, and then we went on. But um, I read a What did I read? I read the first section of this story. I have notes from the apocalypse, which actually shows up as the age of hasty retreats. In my book zombies, sharks with metal teeth. And it's a short little piece. I can read it in five, maybe six minutes. But, um, I read it, and I looked up to the crowd. It was a pretty big crowd, and, you know, at nighttime cemetery, and they were just shocked at that story, or they had this look like, um, we were expecting to laugh, you know. And it's not, it's not a story about laughing, you know, in them. And then I had, after the reading, I was kind of circulating among the people who had been there, and I had two or three people tell me that I made them or somebody standing beside them and cry, and it's just a, it's just a, I mean, it's a little zombie story, you know, but it's neat to give, to deliver to an audience something that's not quite what they're expecting, and just to set them back on their heels, and I think I got lucky that time when I did it

Michael David Wilson 1:04:45
in this returning to the writing process, we've spoke a little bit about what to do, particularly with regards to dialog. But what are perhaps the to. Three things you would say people should not do when writing,

Stephen Graham Jones 1:05:05
okay, one thing is, now there's two. I can think of two things actually. They're really specific things. Never describe your character by having that character look in the mirror, I think that comes off pretty terrible. And, you know, it's like, and especially if it's a first person narrator, I looked at the mirror, at my evenly spaced eyebrows, and my my white teeth, and my gran was a little off, and all that kind of stuff. You know, it comes off quite corny. I think another rule that seems to work all the time is never start a piece of fiction with somebody waking up. The only exception to that is if they wake up as a cockroach. I guess then it can work nearly every time that fails. And I think my third one would probably be more broad, and it's not mine at all. I think it's really Elmore Leonard's, he says to start. Or I think he and Vonnegut both say this actually, to start. They say, start the story as near to the end as possible. And that's something I've had to learn through the years. I used to think you started at the beginning, but now I know that what you do is you have a big, huge, epic story in mind, and then you tell the last 15% of it. You know, that's the interesting part.

Michael David Wilson 1:06:23
And do you think with the waking up, that would also be a kind of wider role that we can apply to chapters or segments of stories, you know, unless they're being woken up in such a dramatic way?

Stephen Graham Jones 1:06:38
Yeah, no, I think probably so. In detective novels would get a little bit of a pass on that, because those guys are either getting knocked out at the end of chapters or passing out drunk, you know, so doing some form of waking up at the first of some chapters.

Michael David Wilson 1:06:53
I mean, do you think perhaps in in a scenario where they are knocked out or or pass out, would you necessarily, in terms of just getting really into the the story, want to resume when they wake up again next, or would you maybe want to to start further along the process? It's

Stephen Graham Jones 1:07:12
that's, it's really tricky. Depends on what you've been doing in the novel before that. Because if it's a novel where you've been kind of changing scenes and going from the protagonist to the subplot, characters to the wider context. If you've got like different people, you can focus on, then, yes, the detector gets knocked out, then you can focus on what's going on in Washington, DC right now, or what's going on back at the house and all that kind of stuff. And then you come back to the detective, and he's getting interrogated, tied up to a chair, and he's already awake, of course. But if you've got a novel where it's single focus, where you're only looking at the detective, then it almost requires you to show his or her waking up after whatever fashion. You know it's it's hard to do it in a in a way that hasn't been done before, but, um, it does seem to be necessary to do it. And I think the the workaround to that is have your detective not get gotten, not get knocked out more than once in a book. Then it doesn't become a pattern, you know, because too many, too many detective novels depend on that for a cliffhanger, you know, walking in the room, and then something flew toward my head, and then I fell down, you know, they get knocked out. And then that, that's the cliffhanger for like 30, like every third chapter or something, you know. And then it does become kind of a joke of how this detective is going to wake up and in what circumstances. I just

Michael David Wilson 1:08:36
think we need the detectives to train a little bit harder, maybe take on some martial arts, and then they won't so frequently. So, I mean, I think already, we've had so many great kind of tips and takeaways that people listening to the podcast will get an awful lot of value out of but one, one other thing that I guess people struggle with is so once they've made the time to write, or once they've managed the schedule so that they can conceivably fit it in, it's staying productive. So do you have any productivity tips, or perhaps even apps or things that you use to ensure that you are on target and focused.

Stephen Graham Jones 1:09:27
You know, I've heard about those apps, yeah, um, I never have used one yet, but I hear people use them say they're actually pretty cool. Um, I was reading some novelists tips on his blog recently, and one of his big, big tips was, don't bother with a word count and, um, and what I thought immediately was, screw you, so I turned my word count on so that it was on the whole time I was writing, you know, and, um, it didn't seem to make any difference, I mean, but I think that's because I'm no longer nervous that I'm not going to hit the requisite amount of pages, you know. I know that really, the really the task is going to be. Trying to reel this in under three or 400 pages, that's going to be the real task, you know. But let me think what not to do, what not to do, you know? I think it would just be, don't allow yourself the easy way out. Well, I mean, first, always write yourself into a corner, but then never allow yourself the easy way out. I think you become such a better writer when you make your character get out in an honest way, rather than delivering them a parachute of knives or something, you know. So make yourself right. I think, I

Michael David Wilson 1:10:35
think that is probably what happened with Breaking Bad that made it such compelling television, because you look at so many other series and it's predictable, you know how the character is going to get out of that situation, but with Walter White, you never really knew what he was going to do. And I don't really think, having watched all of it that there was really a single moment where he took the easy way out. And I know that that's a huge claim to make, but I stand by it. No,

Stephen Graham Jones 1:11:13
I think you're right. And I think most of the ways out he found were usually complicated by some sort of moral dilemma too, you know, so that it became much more engaging for us to participate in.

Michael David Wilson 1:11:24
And that was the thing as well. I mean, there were so many different layers to things. And you could read, you could read it on a very much surface level, but there are a lot of other things going on throughout, definitely. Yeah. Um, so just very quickly, then what, what targets and resolutions do you have for the forthcoming year? You know,

Stephen Graham Jones 1:11:49
somebody asked me that the other day, and I realized that I should have had a resolution to make resolutions. I don't know. I can't. I mean, I guess ride my bike more, but I already ride my bike pretty much, maybe you ride it more in the snow. It's been snowy these last three weeks here, and I haven't ridden my bike. Maybe I should become more of a snow rider to maintain my vehicles better, because usually I just let them go to junk and then I trade them in and get a new one and let it go to junk in two, three years. But I just got my jeep back from the shop today, and I'm trying to make a conscious effort to make a vehicle last this time, instead of just using them up. What else I want to read outside my comfort zone more? I love horror, but I can't only read horror. I need to read other genres. You know? I need to I need to figure out what makes like romance tick. I need to figure out, what's the draw for literary fiction. I need to figure out science fiction. I don't know if you ever figure it out. I need to figure out. I need to figure it out enough to do it better anyways.

Michael David Wilson 1:12:51
And finally, who are some of the new writers, or at least new writers to you from 2014 that we should look out for in 2015

Stephen Graham Jones 1:13:03
man used to Adam says are was always my my answer for what new riders are you excited about? But Adam's got so many boats now. He's probably an old timer. Best New rider I discovered this year. Very clearly. I think his water for drowning really impressed me. I've got his new book on my Kindle right now. I'm excited still enough time to read it, but he has, he has a he has a nice way of getting across the page and just a nice way of delivering the whole story package. I think sometimes everything just comes together, right? And it seems that with his stuff, what I've read of it, it comes together, right, more often than not.

Michael David Wilson 1:13:47
Now, I know I said that the last question was the final question, but just one more question before we go. What books do you recommend that our listeners seek out who are looking to learn more about the craft of writing.

Stephen Graham Jones 1:14:04
You know, I think the the books on writing, on craft, that I've got the most from man, I would say Richard Hugo's, the triggering town, has been kind of like my Bible ever since man, probably 9694 something like that. I bought that book so many times, and I've given it away so many times. He's a poet, writing on poetry, but it all applies to fiction. Man. He has so much good advice. I can't even think where to start. Thin little book. You know, if it goes 8090, pages, I'd be surprised. But Richard Hugo the triggering town, and, of course, Stephen King on writing very, very helpful. Um, you know, I just read Steven Pinker's the sense of style, and that completely changed the way I mess around with sentences and think about how paragraphs and just prose works. It was really, I don't know, I feel like I'm a different writer since reading that book. And I'm gonna, I'm about to read again, too, just to become an even. Different writer. And, I mean, I guess that's three, I'm not you know, Rick de Maraniss has a book, was it the art of writing fiction? The art of fiction, writing the craft of fiction. I got a Rick de maranis Anyways, is the writer. I'm sure it's a findable book. That book I've read that a couple times. Steven Bauer has a book on writing, B, A, U, E, R, it's pretty solid. Janet burrow is any addition of her writing fiction textbook is immensely valuable, always helpful, the way she just has everything categorized, like, if you're having a problem with point of view, or I don't know how to include exposition or anything, it's just a go to text. It's a resource. Yeah, and, I mean, of course, the big place that you get all your writing help is from reading other novels, from reading other fiction, you know, reading it as a writer, and losing yourself as a reader, of course,

Michael David Wilson 1:15:51
all right. Well, thank you so much for taking some time out to talk with us today. As I say, I think it's been a really great podcast, and we've got a lot of good stuff that our listeners can take away from it. Well,

Stephen Graham Jones 1:16:07
thank you. It's been really great talking to you. You know, thanks

Dan Howarth 1:16:09
for your time. I really appreciate it, and I think this can be a great episode of the podcast. So all the best, and I'm sure we'll, we'll be in touch with you again soon. Great. So great. Thank you.

Michael David Wilson 1:16:20
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