Dean Koontz: 120 novels published. 500 million copies sold. | How I Write
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This is the library of Dean Kuntz. We're at his house, and he's written more than 100 books and sold more than 500 million copies of them. And what makes him different is that unlike most mass market writers, he cares so much about the craft. He just loves the English language. We talked about why he stopped outlining his novels, how to create rich metaphors, and how to take characters and make them come to life, and how to do that systematically.

But honestly, this interview is so much deeper than that. And I think you're going to like it. All right. Well, we're here in your insane, insanely magnificent home library. And...

What I want to talk to you about, what I want to start with is why you decided to stop outlining and just get rolling with your writing. Well, I had started at a time when you were encouraged to outline and then the publisher would buy the book based on the outline and pay you half the advance. So you had money to live on what you wrote.

And I did that for a number of years. And at one point, nothing was working to the level I wanted it to. And I began to be dissatisfied with publishers' reactions to the finished book. They would have the outline. If you're in a creative process, you're not going to stick to the outline because ideas are going to come up that are better.

If you stick to the outline, you're going to produce less of a quality book than you would produce if you just let the creativity flow. So I would get excited because the book would get better than the outline. But when I delivered it, the publisher would be disappointed that it wasn't like the outline. And I recognize this is a dead end.

They are now disappointed. Well, we thought we were getting this, but we're getting that. And I would say, yes, you're getting that, but it's better than this. You say you should be happy, but no, they weren't happy. So it was then that I decided, okay, I'm not going to work this anymore. I'm going to, I,

At that point already, characters were beginning to drive the fiction for me. What do you mean by that? That if I've said, if you give the characters free will, as we have free will, which I believe they have, then the characters go places you don't anticipate. I have young writers who'll say to me, how does that work? You're creating these characters. They don't have free will. You're telling them what to do and where to go. Okay.

Yes and no. And if as a writer, you stop telling them what to do and where to go and just lay back, think about the story and all that might be forthcoming and then let them tell you, let them take the flow of it where they may suggest.

And if the characters are actually characters, not just puppets, they do start having their own thoughts that surprise you. So do you feel like sometimes your characters will say things and do things where like, that wasn't me, Dean, that did that. That was actually this character. Yeah. You feel that. And that's when you know it's working. Huh.

And it can be quite exciting and sometimes very strange. You get to a moment where a character, you're typing along and the character, because you're in the character, the character says, and you're typing and you laugh at the line. It's a funny line, but it implies a course of action you didn't see coming.

And then I used to stop and go, no, no, no. That's not what we can do because that's not where I thought this story is going. What I learned over the years was trust the character. If that happens and you go, well, that throws everything off the rails. I don't know where we're going now.

That's better. Let the character have that choice. And now you think where this is going from this point. It's in a way you're talking to your subconscious, I think. I'm not...

So crazy. I am crazy, but I'm not so crazy that I think the Carriers actually are real people. But if you treat them like they are real people and let them breathe and don't always try to preconceive what they will do, they do do things that I would have never contemplated. And always it leads to a better novel. Hmm.

Now, with the way that you write, you kind of go page by page and get this page right and the next page right. You don't just go through the whole book and then begin to revise. And, you know, sometimes if I'm hanging out with friends or whatever, I'll just start telling a story and I'll keep going with the story. And I don't really like where the story's going.

ended up i'm sort of in a pickle does that ever happen to you or do you feel like you move slowly enough that that ends up not being an issue there when i've known other writers who it is very unusual to work the way i love yeah no kidding uh and uh i've had them say but you have no momentum if because i have so such self-doubt i always have i've never gotten rid of them you still have it oh yeah

And so I start the book, the first page, I have to get that page to what I consider perfection. Somebody better than me might not think of it as perfection, but I can't make that page any better. I can't make the language any better. Can't make the imagery any better. I can't do anything to improve it.

Then I move on to the next page. The self-doubt comes back and I go through that page the same way. I move very page by page through the book, 10, 20 drafts per page. Then at the end of a chapter, I go back and read it, print it out and read it because you're seeing a printout what you don't see on a screen anymore.

And I do that a couple of times. But then after that chapter, I rarely go back because of how I once said I moved through a book like a coral reef is built on all the dead bodies of these little creatures. I just pile it up over time and it goes where it goes. It works for me. It's...

It's sometimes you feel like you're on a cliff's edge because is this, I just delivered a book that, uh, my publisher is about to receive it today, but my agents liked it. My wife liked it. So, but it's very unusual. They, um,

The narrator is a man whose IQ is about 75. So I had to create it. And he's very admirable and very enchanting character, or he should be if I do it right. And when writing about him, I had to create a syntax and a grammar for him that are commensurate with his IQ.

But it also had to be something that the reader would flow with, would not be hampered by. And it had to get beyond that. There has to come a point because you want them to absolutely fall in love with his character. And to do that, they not only have to be able to follow his narration without effort, but it has to start to be more enchanting almost than regular English.

And that was something I'd never tried before. It's always fun to try something you've never tried before, but it's also like leaping out of a plane without a parachute. So how'd you go about doing that? How did you go developing that language? Watch movies? You go to some state fair and talk to the stupidest people you can find? Like, what do you do? No, you get into the head of the character. You read, you do your research. Okay. You read about somebody in that position in life.

And it all depends. One of the points of this book is even the lives that seem of no consequence to a lot of people do have consequence to the rest of us. And there is no life without meaning. You can throw your meaning away by your behavior, but simply because you've got an IQ of 75, which once would have been called a moron,

uh, does not mean there isn't effects you will have positively on all the people around you. And that's what this character does throughout the book. He sort of enchants people and changes lives without really quite knowing he's doing it, but just because of who he is and how he sees the world that affects other people. Um,

I will say it was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. I had to keep going through the book and saying, okay, that line, does that go too... Is he too self-aware? Is he too this or that? But it is challenges like that that really makes writing exciting. Otherwise, you're sitting in a room and...

at a keyboard and that's not exciting. So it's what you create that makes you excited. And it has to be something you're afraid you're going to screw up big time. Make this concrete for me. Like, can you walk me through a scene or like a series of dialogues of like what that conversation would look like normally sort of the intuitive way versus now we got a 75 IQ person. And what does that look like? I'd have to go get the manuscript and read it to you. Okay.

Well, this is from page one. I don't know if it's necessarily the best, but I think you'll get the flavor of it. I'll skip the first paragraph. He's talking this whole novel into a machine because he can neither read nor write.

And he says, for a while back in the day, after it happened so terrible like it did, there was things I wished I could sweep out my mind. But mama would call that chicken thinking. When bad things happen, like when folks is mean to you and calling you names that aren't your real name, but just words said to hurt your feelings, then you want to forget. But when you want to forget, you need to think about a chicken and her eggs and don't fall into chicken thinking.

The chicken lays her eggs and means to hatch a chick, but all of a sudden the egg is gone. She don't go looking for the egg. Maybe she wonders what the heck happened to it. Maybe she even seen us take the egg from the coop, but it's easy for her to lay new eggs. So she says to herself, she says, I don't want to know what happened to my little egg because I'll be sad. So I'll just forget about it and lay more.

We keep taking away her eggs and she keeps saying more. She don't never hatch a chick, never has a brood of her own, and never known why. What kind of life is that? If we never known why things happen, we'll never be as happy as we could be. That's what mama says. Mama says finding out why things happen will for sure make you sad sometimes.

But you have to know some sad if you're going to know the why of things. You can't know the why of it all if you don't know being happy. If all you've known is being happy. That sounds hard, but it's just the way the world is. You can't change the world, so get over it. The story I've got to tell into this machine starts out hard and sad, but it won't never stay that way.

It's grammar that we, as we understand, except the verbs and intenses and the connections are very different. But if they're consistent, then the reader falls into that difference. And I hope we'll see. But I fell in love with the voice. And he's very funny, sometimes aware that he's funny and sometimes not. But the key is you never laugh at the character.

Otherwise, that destroys everything I have to laugh with him, even in the sort of sadness of his condition. The thing that struck me in that is these deeper points of wisdom that are just extremely simple. Do you know about the bell curve IQ meme? You know what that is? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's sort of what it's like, right? There's a deep wisdom on the left side of the bell curve that I think you're getting at there. Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah. In fact, he becomes, in many ways, the wisest person in the novel. Yeah.

When you write something like the intro to The Big Dark Sky, in every life there are strange coincidences, occurrences that we find inexplicable, and even moments that seem supernatural. On this occasion, in the lonely vastness of Montana, the heavens were moonless, the blind face of the night pressed against the windows, the only light in the room issued from a television, and a young girl sat in communion with the dead.

Okay, so when you start a book like that, did you, you wrote that and then you just kind of kept going throughout the whole book? Or do you come back and revisit that?

No, I, well, and there are rare cases where you get into a book and something occurs that will necessitate going back and adjusting certain things. But because of the way I work, rarely do I have to go back. Now, that sounds like it's one draft, but it's not. It's 20, 30 drafts a page because of the way I work. It's the way that's worked best for me. The first time I worked this way,

was a book called Strangers, which was the first hardcover bestseller I ever had. And I began to find there's this thing I sometimes say when writers ask me for advice. One thing I say to them is that because we all do this when we're starting out in a career, we want to scope the industry. We want to know what we're supposed to do.

What is supposed to work, what you're not supposed to do. And that's leads to a problem. And I've said there is no,

an encyclopedia of common wisdom and publishing. All of it is common and none of it is wise. And you have to get aware of that and you have to go your own way and just stick with it because there's so many ways you can be sent wrong because that's the way we always do it. And if I've seen anything in my career, it's,

not mean arguments with publishers, but arguments over you can't do that. And then you say, why not? Nobody has done that. Nobody does that. Or if somebody did that, it didn't work. What's an example of that? I'll go to a novel of mine called Lightning. Strangers was a hardcover bestseller. Not

at the top of the list. But then the next one, Watchers went further up the list. And then I delivered a book of lightning. Now, my publisher had been telling me that I would never be a hardcover bestseller. I would only be a paperback bestseller. I never could get an explanation of why that was the case. Another common wisdom, it started out in paperback. I would stay there nine times out of 10. And, um,

So I delivered Lightning and my publisher just hated it. I mean, she said, we have to put this book on the shelf for seven years. And if your career keeps building as it has been, then we can publish it in seven years and it won't destroy it. But if you publish it now, it'll destroy your career.

And I thought, I just feel the totally opposite. And I had to say, what? What is there about this book that, well, the first argument was it's got too much comic element in it. And it's a suspense, scary sort of story. Yeah.

And that became a long argument for decades, trying to say I can write humor inside what is meant to be a substantial story and it won't bleed away the suspense. But the big thing was your character is a child through the first third of the novel and then comes of age and whatnot. That makes it a young adult novel. And, uh,

She said, and you have an adult audience. They won't buy a novel if they think the character is a child. And I said, what about Oliver Twist? And I just started naming off all the novels where the characters are children.

It didn't matter because the wisdom was that was a career killer. And we argued for six months. And I finally said, look, we're having success. We're moving up. It has to be the next book published or I have to go somewhere else.

and published the book. It went to number three on the bestseller list. It went through 20 printings in hardcover. I think it became number one in paperback. And the very next book after that became my first number one hardcover. So it meant people liked that book. But the wisdom was what you're doing there is going to destroy your career.

So you have to, and you're dealing not with stupid people. You're dealing with people successful in the publishing world. So you have to get

The ability to tell the difference between what is simply something they believe because they've always believed it and something that they write about. And that's the hardest thing for a young writer to find where that line is. So how did you think about developing your voice as a writer over the years? And I mean, obviously you've sold an insane amount of books, something like what, 500 million books more. I mean, it's just, it's ludicrous to think about.

Not from my perspective. It's just absolutely bonkers. But so how did you think about developing a voice and how much of that was like dictated by the market, so to speak, versus some sort of internal locus of taste? It was all internal. I started out as a science fiction writer in paperbacks.

Because that's largely what I read as a teenager and young adult into my early 20s. And I had no great facility for it. One day I realized I'm selling this, but I'm never going to write at the top of this field. I just, it's not who I am. Wow. So I have to move. The first thing I did was write a comic novel.

And it was a book called Hanging On. It was published, very good reviews, but it didn't sell particularly well. And we're talking the 70s, the 80s at this point? Yeah, this was the early 70s. Early 70s. And I said to the publisher, the publisher said, we love the book, but

Why would you expect it to sell very well? And I said, well, you published it. And he said, yeah, we loved it, but we're looking toward your future. Comic novels don't sell. And I thought, well, somebody should have told me that earlier. So then I moved toward suspense. That was moving with the market. But I also was now reading people in that field that I really liked and respected, like Donna Westlake.

who wrote very serious suspense, but also very comic suspense at times. And the whole Elmore Leonard before anyone knew of him, his novels were selling at $4.95 in those days. And he got to be mid to late 50s before he actually became a success. But he was writing wonderful books then. So I was reading John D. MacDonald, my favorite

modern author. And so I started moving that way, but inevitably, because in high school, I was a class clown. I've always been on that side of it. I have a sense of humor. It's why my wife and I've been married all this time. We both have

pretty absurd sense of humor. And it kept leaking into the books. And when I was being told, you can't do that by writing this kind of fiction, the more I'm told I can't do something, the more I want to find a way to do it. Of course. Of course. And so how the voice evolved, it was almost out of rebellion against what I was supposed to be doing. Yeah.

And I was aware of it on both the conscious and more extremely, I think, on a subconscious level, because I would do things that if I'd stopped to think about it, I would have known they're going to say something.

We have a big problem with this. So I wouldn't think about it until the book was half done. And then I'd start thinking about what I was getting into. Tell me about this. You've used the word enchanted a few times. You've used the word mystery. How did you go about developing that? Because even just being with you, you have a great appreciation. You even said the word magic earlier for these parts of the world and reality that are just absolutely real, but we can't reason ourselves into.

You've exactly expressed something that I've been hesitant to talk about. I've had things happen in my life that are so strange that they tell me, and not just to me, I won't say what this was. There were several months in our lives where things were happening to me

that I didn't even tell my wife about. And our marriage has been long and fruitful and wonderful. But I thought she's going to think I'm nuts. And one day she said to me, some things are happening I have to talk to you about. And it was the same things that happened to me.

And someday I'm going to write about this because what it said to me is we do not understand the world. There is something much stranger about it than we normally see and hear. And when all this was happening, it passed and it didn't happen again for a long time. And then it makes you start to think, did I imagine that? No, I know I didn't because...

Fortunately, we both had the same experiences around it. And all my life, I've had that sort of strange thing. I think it might have come from, I haven't given a lot of thought to this, but because I had such a bad childhood, poverty, my dad's alcoholism, his violence, my mother's sickliness, I

It took me until I was, I think, 40-something. I used to say what really shaped me was the poverty and my father's violence. And at one point in my 40s, I had this sort of epiphany. And the real effect of all that was not his violence. It wasn't the poverty. It wasn't the fear of where are we going to have, are we going to have a roof over our head?

It wasn't any of that. It was the fact that being in a small town where everybody knows everybody's business to an extent, everybody knew my dad was the town drunk gambler womanizer. It was the perpetual humiliation that was what really was the most powerful effect on my childhood and growing up.

And it was kind of an eye-opening moment to realize that because it was constant humiliation. Everybody knew who your father was, what he was like, what he did. Even my aunts would always say to me, you're just like your father. And I knew it was nothing like my father.

And so all of that, I realized, had a profound effect and drove me to live within myself very much because my mother was a wonderful person, but beyond understanding the things that interested me as a growing child and so forth.

And why she put up with the life she had, I'll never know. But as a consequence, I really grew up totally internal. I had a couple of friends, but not many. And both of those friends were a little strange as I was. And there's something about growing up internally and watching the world

Less than you participate in it. That makes you, I think, start to see things and wonder about them that maybe you wouldn't.

Like if I'd been on the football team and had all that, been in the right clicks, I don't think I'd have had the same take on the world. But from a very young age, I began to see things about life that were very weird and didn't make sense to me. And some of it can be the behavior of people, but a lot of it can be those moments in life when things shouldn't go the way they go. And they do. And it's,

to your benefit sometimes, and you stop and think, what was that? Why would that happen to me? It's against the flow of reality. Or you have moments where something bad happens to you that shouldn't happen to you, but it triggers some thought process in you that becomes very valuable. And I just have come to believe that

There is some kind of guiding influence in life if you just be aware of it. I know so many artists, good artists, who would trade their art if they could write novels. And I know a lot of novelists, including me, if they'd have had their choice, would have been visual artists. Because when I was in college, I could paint and sell my paintings. And I thought for a period of time, that's what I wanted to do.

But I didn't go that way. I listened, in other words, to some of that guidance that I think we get, but we generally tend to ignore. Well, it's interesting that you say that because now I'm thinking about the writing that I've read from you and your painting with words. As I was reading, I was like, wow, you're so descriptive and really have a way of

taking a scene and bringing it to life. And what I actually almost, now that I know that about you, see that kind of envy that you have for visual artists. And you're like, dang it, I wasn't given that gift. And now I'm going to put it into my language. I have counseled some friends who sort of their art career never goes where it should because they just don't appreciate it, that they have this gift.

And I've said to a couple of people, but it's the gift you've got. So go for it. Do everything you can think to do with it. And I've said sometimes that talent of any kind is a gift.

It's unearned. You're born with it. Well, it's a gift. A gift is not something that you get. A gift is something that is given to you that you just receive. And I think that comes with the responsibility to use it to the best of your ability and just see what you can do with it. So if that's why I got out of science fiction, I realized...

I don't have what it takes to do this correctly. Right. I can write and sell, but it isn't to the level I'd like to be working at. And it doesn't use the gift to the extent I can. And that becomes a search. How do you use what you've got to the best you can? Well, the other thing is...

You seem to be given not just on the scale of the macro of like, what kind of writing should I do? But also certain ideas seem to just be airdropped to you, like in dreams or whatever. And you're like, whoa, where did that come from?

And then I guess you just become a steward or a custodian of an idea that's been given to you from God or something. Some ideas, you know where they come from. They're still kind of inexplicable. They come from what they do. I've used this as an example before. I was coming home from a studio meeting that had not gone well. They almost never go well. So I was not in a good mood. So like a movie studio? Yeah. Okay.

And I was in my wife's SUV and it was the days of six CDs and she had Simon Garfunkel and Paul Simon. And we both agreed Paul Simon's maybe the greatest living songwriter. And I can listen to him endlessly. So I was...

listening to it coming home in a mood and the song came on I knew perfectly well called Patterns and there was a line in it, my life is made of patterns that can scarcely be controlled. And that line just, it was like an arrow when I had, I was in the car and within 15 minutes I had an idea for a novel called Life Expectancy.

And I think it's one of the best things I've ever done. My editor at that time thought it was the best thing I'd ever done. Sold extremely well. And I love that novel. But I know where it came from. But there are others I have no idea where that idea came from. I've had two that actually came from dreams.

People think you get all of them from dreams. Not the case. But some of them come from... I have a novel coming in the first year called The Friend of the Family. I have no idea where that came from. I was just at the keyboard and I started typing the point of view of this character, not thinking it was a novel. And it became a novel that...

My wife is my first reader always. And she gets at the same time as the agents, but she is quicker. And, uh, all these years of marriage, she reads book. Uh, she comes to me and we talk about it and I value her feedback. And, uh,

This was the first time ever. I know how quickly she reads. She got the book at like six o'clock on a Friday and I knew she couldn't finish. It was almost 400 pages that day. So I figured she'll finish it by noon on Saturday.

So I'm in my office doing things and noon comes and I don't hear from her. One o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock, four o'clock. Now I'm starting to get worried. I think she doesn't want to talk to me about this book. And now I hear pots and pans banging around in the kitchen. It's a Saturday afternoon and I thought, just deal with it. So I went in the kitchen and I said, well, okay.

you're finished. Yes. I said, is it that bad? And she said, no, I just don't know how to talk about it. And I, I mean, we've been married 58 years, 59. And I said, what do you mean you don't know how to talk about it? And she said, I need more time. I'll just say,

I used two boxes of Kleenex. And I went, okay. It's meant to really shake you. And it shook her. And where that came from, I'm not sure. I was working on a book called The Phase. And in my head came a line, my name is Odd Thomas. I lead an unusual life. And I stopped and thought,

What is that? It has nothing to do with what I'm working on. And I started to write down so I wouldn't forget it. And the first and last time ever, I wrote out 30 some pages by hand and it became the first chapter of the novel. And I've never done it before since. And

I put it aside and finished the phase and said to myself, that's going to be crap when I go back to it. I mean, I've never written anything by hand and it flowed. I went back and read it and I thought, this is good. Where did that come from? Why did that name pop into my head? Why did that whole story come to me in almost an instant?

That's the great mystery of this. And it's one of the things that makes it so exciting to do when that happens. It's like it's it is mysterious. Well, what's unique about you is both a great appreciation for.

The mystery of reality, but also like extreme discipline. Like you just sit down and you sit on your booty every single day and from sunrise to sunset and you just write and write and write and write. And usually we see those two things as being completely uncorrelated with each other, but you have them both in spades.

I think the reason I can sit there is because I love it. I love the process. There's writers who like having written, and the whole process is painful, and they get it done. And then there's the interviews, and there's the book signings, and there's all the back and forth with your editor.

I like the writing part. The rest of it is less interest to me. But when I go in there in the morning, it's at my age, I shouldn't still be doing this. I should have been burnt out because you can burn out in this. But so far, the number of ideas just keep coming. I think they're as good of a quality as the ideas I had before.

Facility with character, I think, only improves with time. Tell me about that. A great plot is important, but you can have a mediocre plot. And if the characters are great, the book can be a huge success. I think character is the center of good fiction. If characters work... The character of Bob Thomas was so unusual.

that my publisher at that time hated the book so much that he wouldn't talk to me about it. He would only let me know what he thought through the editor, which was not our relationship. We spoke openly, the publisher and I, about things. He told me, I said, I so love this character, and I think the story is so powerful that

I want to go on with him. I think he's on a journey and I know what the journey is. It's a journey to absolute humility. And I said, I have no idea what that's like. I'm never going to be absolutely humble, but this character is going there. So I, I want to see if I can take him there. And he basically said, I don't want to publish any more books with this character. And I said, well,

I don't want to write only about this character, but I'm going to write more about it. So we reached an agreement that I could write an Odd Thomas novel as long as I wrote another novel between each Odd Thomas novel. And then the book, this was while nobody else had seen the book except my wife, the editor and the publisher.

Then the book came out in an advanced copy and booksellers loved it. We had bigger orders than ever. And then the reviews started coming in, the advanced reviews. And I don't think out of a hundred and some reviews, we had more than one bad one. And the publisher finally came to me and said, I was wrong.

I still don't like it, but I'm obviously wrong. And that's the mysterious, wonderful thing about it. That character, I have no idea where he came from, but I ended up writing eight novels about him. Yeah, and when you have a character like Odd Thomas or you're thinking about character in general, what are the elements of character that really matter? What matters about character to me is...

the lead character people say i write really terrifying villains and uh how do you get inside the head of a sociopath well there again i think that was in the strangest way a gift the lat my father uh

Never could hold a job. 44 jobs in 34 years because he would punch out the boss. 44 jobs? In 34 years. My wife and I counted them up once. And he was an excellent salesman, but that wasn't his vision. He was going to become a millionaire overnight. That's why I gambled.

Yeah. And, uh, and came up with inventions that were so strange and over that, but he could, cause he was a good salesman. He could get investors to put up money to make these things. Then they wouldn't sell. And then you would get in trouble with the investors. And it was, uh, we never saw any money, uh, but he was, uh,

And he became destitute the year after we moved to California. And at last, we didn't have him knocking on our door at 2 in the morning drunk. And it was just such a relief to put 3,000 miles between us. And then a friend of his, his only friend, called us up and said, he's terribly ill. He's not got a year to live. He's destitute.

Well, you can't send him money because he takes it to a bar. He buys everybody drinks to play the big man. And then tomorrow he doesn't have anything. So Jura and I talked and it was a real difficult decision. But we said he never supported my mother and me. So now if I let him...

perish on his own it's sort of the same thing he did to us so we have to take him control of him we brought him to california we uh got him an apartment i got him a car i said the first time you're caught driving drunk i take the car away huh you know it was like i became the father in the relationship and it was very strange he used to drink a fifth a day and a six pack of beer

It's a lot. And he smoked three or four packs of cigarettes a day. He lived to be 83. He ate half a pound of bacon for breakfast every night. That's a long life for habits like that. Yeah.

And so we brought him out here and we said, okay, we'll take care of you. He lived 14 years, not one. So it became a much longer ordeal than we ever anticipated. But during that time, he ended up in the psych ward twice. I won't go into all of the details, but then he had to have, the first time he ended up, it was,

people and violence. And the second time was coming after me with a knife in front of a lot of witnesses. Uh, and I had to take a knife away from him and it was a pretty close go. And, uh,

So first time he was diagnosed as borderline schizophrenic, tendency to violence complicated by alcoholism. The second time that he was in the psych ward, the diagnosis was sociopathic. And so I say to people in the strangest way, I know how to write sociopaths because I grew up with them.

And that I wouldn't recommend to anybody. But when you look back on it, you think in a curious way, it's part of the gift. And that's part of when you say an awareness of the mystery of the world and the strangeness of it. That's one of the things I look back on often. What seemed to me as a child,

About the worst thing in my life turned out to give me an insight into a certain kind of psychology It's been very valuable for the books. I write. Yeah growing up in a home like that seems like such a curse Yeah, I had certain fortunate things my best friend his father was the town banker and and they had two cars and they lived in a nice house and I

They would invite me over there often. And I began to see a normal family and how different mine was. And when you grow up in a family that is highly abnormal and you don't have other examples, you come to think every house is this way. So there were things that helped keep me, I think, sane. Well, what I'm hearing you say is that

you grew up in a very unfortunate situation and you had a lot that you needed to make sense of. And you were up close and personal, a very formative time with evil and schizophrenia and violence and anger and alcoholism and all of that. And then also you've had these moments of,

seeing the mysteries and the enchantedness of reality. And I really see how those two things, just your life story combines in, in your work. It makes a lot of sense actually. Yeah. That's, uh, uh, you, you come to a certain point. It takes most of my life to look back and say, all of it was a value. Uh, it all depended on whether you, uh,

But when I finally started, I didn't talk about my childhood or anything until I'd been writing for decades. And then when I talked about it in an interview, I was stunned that I suddenly was getting thousands of letters from people who'd had similar childhoods, some not as bad as mine, some worse than mine.

And the question kept being, how did you get over this? How did you get past it? I'm 50 now and I'm still in therapy and I'm going to say that. And it made me think, how do you get past it? And what I said was, this is not noble, but I think when...

thing that always motivated me was you have to get past it or the bastard one. Yeah. You don't want the person trying to destroy your life to win.

And you have to have that kind of attitude. Yeah, I don't know why this just popped into my mind, but I'm going to say it because it did. I'm thinking of the story of Moses, where Moses is talking to God and he says, God says, I want you to be the leader. And Moses says, I can't do it. I have a speech impediment. Like, I just can't do it. And God says, you can do it. You can do it.

And there's a lot that we see throughout the scriptures around how it's just these ordinary people. But time and again with these great flaws, whether they're speech impediments, Paul being really short and sort of

you know, the thorn in his spine or whatever it is, and you just see it over and over again. I was reading the story of Gideon yesterday, of just these very ordinary people who have a lot of self-doubt, who God raises up to do something kind of miraculous. And it's sort of the

we always think of the story of the David and Goliath, right? Of like the spirit of God, like leading David, like overpower Goliath. But so much of the scriptures, what you're saying is just, just ordinary people left and right who somehow find the courage to do something, to do something meaningful. And a lot of times what actually gives them the power to do what they do is something dark or difficult that happened earlier in their lives. And it's led for me, I,

I've written some book, wrote a series with the character Jane Hawk, who is a rogue FBI agent. She's essentially, the whole agency is against her and she's on the run. But most of the people I write about are not like that. I don't write series characters who are special agents or this or that. My characters are bartenders or fry cooks or... 70 IQ people with a strange amount of wisdom. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's because in life I've sort of seen that's where a lot of good comes from. There's something to be said for suffering as long as it doesn't destroy you. And it builds something else that gives you a certain compassion, I think.

That gives you the courage, as a writer, it gives you courage to say, okay, this guy is going to... That was the thing about Art Thomas that caused some problem in my career. Nobody is going to identify with the guy who's a fry cook as an action hero. Why not?

Yeah, it doesn't sound realistic, but he's not a guy who knows everything about weapons. He's liable to use a mop instead of a gun, but he lives within his own world and makes use of what he can get. So tell me about editing. When you're editing and you're going through all those revisions, what do you feel like you're editing for? What is the kind of North Star that you're driving towards?

Fluidity of prose. Fluidity of prose. Yeah. I want it to be, I want it to, what you said about vividness about, I want to use all the tools in the writer's toolbox. I think American fiction suffered a lot from,

The attempt to imitate Hemingway. Hemingway stripped it all down, but it was still the mystery and the underlying strangeness of the world is there by implication. And all the imitations that came later stripped it down, but didn't have that.

And I think it did damage. When I use so much metaphor simile and that in a novel that when I first started doing it got negative reaction, that's not the way what people want to read. And yet when I get mail, that is one of the things that people react to so strongly is negative.

is the use of the language with all the tools that are there. It's a beautiful language. And it's just fun to bring it along and to keep smoothing it and making it more and more vivid so it flows. And those metaphors and similes don't pop at you like showmanship, that they're there, but they flow into the music of the language. And that's what

I love so much is finding a way to say something that brings it along. You'll sometimes suddenly realize you're writing in a poetic meter for a whole paragraph and you go, oh, I can't do that. And then you stop and think, why can't I do that? It's trying to bring the reader into it so that

There is this idea, I think, sometimes in academia, that the harder it is, the better it is. I don't think that's true. I don't think Dickens isn't hard to read. Dickens is easy to read, but the depth is there. So it's polishing the prose and making sure that...

Anyone can read it and take something from it. But I think that if you were to just cut out what you had said and said, it's polishing the prose and making sure that anybody can understand it, most people would hear that and say, oh, like Hemingway.

And you're actually rejecting that. And so clarify that for me. Yeah, I've written some books that are spare prose, but also have more figures of speech in them. There are as many styles as there are.

And so I'm just looking for a way that if I write a spare book, it nevertheless flows. And the language kind of sings, if at all possible. Somebody I admire, he wrote two kinds of books.

First in his career, he wrote a very dense, kind of difficult to read, not the prose. The prose was gorgeous. But the mysterious nature of his stories, this is Cormac McCarthy, in the early books like The Orchard Keeper or those, it's like,

whoa, this man's living on a different planet. And yet the prose is so mesmerizing that you're pulled into this, even if it's just saying, what is going on here? Then he moved to things like No Country for Old Men and The Road, which is stripped down and just the opposite of everything in his first career. And yet,

It reads, you know, it's the same writer. And I think that's part of what I'm saying. You can move. It doesn't all have to be dense and rich in its imagery. It can be stripped down and still have the poetry of the English language in it. And that's sort of, I just don't want the language is...

It's a great and beautiful thing. And I don't want to ever, now that I'm older and can understand it better than I did when I started, I always want to do the best possible job with it. When you think about trying to write with that beautiful language and find music that sings, I mean, I would bet that you're going to some sort of well, certain writers, certain styles, certain genres. Yes.

where do you feel like the well is most lush where you can kind of go dig up that water and then kind of pour it into your own, your own work? There are different, I think what you're saying is, uh,

uh all of us are inspired by yeah exactly yeah and and sometimes you read writing that's just like it's like a springtime lush i mean we're here in in newport beach and i was telling you you know we're driving and it's it's late april and the poppies are just so alive and the the the hills are green and like

your mouth almost starts to like salivate as if there's water right in front of you. And I feel that very much when I'm reading certain writers sometimes where I'm just like, oh my goodness, this well is endless. And I'll go to those writers because it makes my own writing so much easier because I just feel this explosion of inspiration, you know? When my wife and I were married, we didn't have a TV for 10 years.

We couldn't afford one when we first married. And then after a number of years, we decided we didn't want one. And we each read about 200 novels a year because that was our evenings. We'd sit down each of us with a book and we'd read. So I've read literally several thousand novels over the years. And I've read so many different people that I,

Each writer I admire has a book or two I most admire. That's in the area of nonfiction and biography. But it's like there's certain writers I admire generally, but when I want to be inspired on my own, I keep going back to the same one or two of their books. The screenwriter William Goldman was a pretty darn good novelist.

But his claim was writing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and all those movies. But his novels were very, very well done. But he had one novel in particular that is absolutely haunts me. The whole impetus of the novel

is to show you the folly of following certain rules about writing. The character in this starts out, he's in college, he's at Oberlin. And he's being acclaimed as a college student, as having writing ability. And his best friend is the son of a publisher. So they become friends and they stay throughout life.

But this character is so brilliant because what Goldman did was have this character become so committed to the idea that you only write about what you know and misunderstands that. I mean, you can learn anything, you know. I don't know about, well, I just had a novel in which a character lives by himself.

a placer mine, which is gemstones that are flowing down out of the mountains, buried in the soil in certain areas. And if you sift the soil, you can find gemstones. So I had to learn about all that. But you can write about it convincingly. But there are people who come out of academia who think it means they have to write only about personal experience when they're writing fiction.

And this character in Goldman's novel does that exactly. And as a consequence, he keeps screwing up his life almost unconsciously so that he has something vivid and exciting to write about. And he ends up putting himself in the most unimaginably worse hellish place at the end of this book.

And it's all for this reason that he's not really quite aware of. It's one of those brilliant things. And I often go back to that book because the character in it is so charming.

You're watching him destroy himself, but you kind of just love him. And how is, how do you do that? What makes you love a character? Cause you were talking about that with 75 IQ guy. Uh, you're talking about that now, like where does that love for character come from? Uh, I think there are various human aspects that if the character has them, uh, makes the character more appealing. Uh,

I said about odd Thomas that he was on a journey to absolutely humility. Uh, and that humility is in this character in this novel, who's got the lower IQ that his mother says to him, you'll be all right. If you do justice, love kindness and walk humbly, do justice, love kindness and walk humbly. Yeah. And, uh, and, and he does, he does those things. And, uh,

Sometimes people will say, "Oh, your lead characters are too good. They have too few flaws." I don't think that's true at all. We're all flawed. They're flawed. Except I don't think you just say about a character, "Okay, he's a drunk," and this or that, and that gives them interesting flaws.

No, that just makes him a drunk or the other. The flaws in a character can be much more subtle than that. And then they're more convincing, I think. Odd Thomas is, in his humility, almost too naive. And it's the novite that gets him into trouble over and over again. They have these problems, but they're more...

on a scale of human problems instead of the problems of drama. I want to talk about suspense and what, what in a book creates suspense. What are the elements of that? Well, uh, you have to, I think we come back again to character. You have to care about the character. You have to care about what might happen to them. Uh, if you're engaged in that level, um,

then I think the suspense works a great deal better than otherwise. And in a sense of not knowing where it's going, what is commonly called twists and turns of the storyline, that matters a lot to people. Once the trick happens, the reader has to look at it and say, I should have seen that coming. Mm-hmm.

As a writer, I don't like the tricks that just are thrown at you out of nowhere because they make for a nice plot development. I'm speaking for myself. That's how I write. But it comes back, I think, again to character. Paying out the history of that character, oftentimes there are things that you're...

hiding that you need to conceal about the character or the character needs to conceal from the reader.

Maybe not consciously. Sometimes characters discover things about themselves in the course of the story. I never give that much thought to suspense. I just get the character into a naughty situation, and I'm pretty sure it's going to keep being naughty. So then what's going on? Do you feel like you...

The phrase I've seen is low boredom tolerance. So does it come from that, that it's just natural for you to be like, okay, I'm bored. This needs to go faster. And also as fast and slow, is that the right dichotomy to think about suspense? Not necessarily. I've written some novels that are, you know, 300,000 words and multiple storylines. And yet they, if I can believe reviewers and readers, they move quickly, you know,

Uh, it's, it's how much event, uh, you're, you're actually asking. It's so strange. I don't think anyone's ever asked me before about how my thoughts on suspense, I guess, because it's such a natural part. I have said that, uh,

I think suspense is a key element of all good fiction, literary fiction as well, because suspense is one of the key elements of our lives. We never know what's going to happen to us between now and tomorrow, between now and an hour from now. And so suspense, that is life. And so a novel without some element of it probably isn't properly portraying what life is like.

So I think of suspense that way more than I think about it as a suspense novel. I don't think about what do I have to do to juice up the suspense for this character. A perfect example of this probably is a novel I wrote called Intensity. And it's a woman who goes to visit a friend on a weekend and a psychopathic killer enters this house in the wine country.

and kills everyone in the house except her because he doesn't know she's there. And then takes the body of her friend, whom she doesn't know is dead, and puts it in his motorhome and drives away. And she thinks the friend is alive. And she leaves the house to get her friend out of the motorhome, discovers the friend is dead, and the killer comes back and gets into the motorhome. And now she's in it, and he doesn't know she's there.

And that's the beginning of the novel. And she has opportunities to get out of that. And the biggest opportunity is, I think it's probably a quarter to a third of the way through the novel. It's been so long that I can't remember. He stops for gas up the coastline. It takes place in California and Oregon.

And he's going up the coastline and somewhere north of Santa Barbara at one of those roadside sort of stops, he pulls in to get gas and he goes into the convenience store associated with it. And when he goes into the convenience store and everything, she gets out of the motorhome, but he comes back

Sooner than she thought. And she's hiding under it now. And he's putting gas in. And she thinks, all I have to do now is get into the convenience store and hide out until he goes away. And she goes into the convenience store to hide. And he comes into the convenience store and kills the clerks. And now she's in the convenience store with him. And he doesn't know she's there either. And here becomes the...

This has to do with suspense and character also. I won't go into her background, but she had a very difficult childhood and a very inconstant mother who had a very bad taste in men. And this girl has this chant when she's in trouble. She's had it since childhood. Her name is China Shepard.

China's shepherd untouched and alive. She says it's like a mantra that when she's in trouble because of one of the men her mother is currently with, and she always gets herself through without being touched or harmed. And she uses that mantra. Without this, well, she's in the store

He kills the people, but in the conversation with them beforehand, he reveals that he's going home where he has a young girl that he keeps in the basement. He taunts these people before he kills them and tells them, and she realizes she can leave here or she can get back into that and go save that girl.

Now, would she do that or would she not? If the characters developed properly, I think she would.

That's where the story comes from. I have to tell you, when I wrote that, I didn't know it was going to happen. I knew she was going to get out of that motor home. She's going to go in there. But I didn't realize he was going to kill the clerks. And then I realized he was going to kill the clerks. He was going to reveal. He kidnapped the girl and he kept her in the basement of his home that he was returning to. And she has a moral choice. And that makes the entire novel.

So the image that just popped in my head is you're kind of like the bulldozer of writers. You just go really slowly and you kind of just... And then the novel just kind of reveals itself at every point. Yes. And...

I guess what's going on is day by day in your head is you're just kind of crawling through this novel. I think a lot of it's subconscious too, because you get surprised by the developments yourself. I have said to people who, other writers I know who say, but how do you keep momentum? You're going so slow. Yeah. And I say in the strangest way, it builds it in your head.

You're denying yourself the easy answer to things. By going slowly, you're giving the best way I can say is there comes a point where you realize sometimes it's you think, okay, I see where this is going to go to a certain extent. This character is going to have to end up here. And that is going to cause a narrative problem.

what do I do to get that character out of that moment? And it looks like you're tying a knot that can't be undone. But because you're moving very slowly, you have a lot of time to think, just what you just said. And what over the years I've learned as you get to that moment, you not only have figured out how to solve it, you've got two or three or four options.

And it makes the story richer, I think. And just what you said, you're always moving forward and you've got time on a conscious and a subconscious level to think, how do I get the most out of this situation I can? Instead of just, how do I get the quickest thing out of it I can? So tell me about this.

This is one of your four rules of writing. I'd love to go through them. And you say, never go inside more than one character's mind in a scene. Each scene is from a singular viewpoint, and therefore a metaphor or simile should be in the voice of the narrator of the scene. Yes. I think it's one of the worst things that's happened to fiction, that that doesn't get taught. And when you...

Reading a book where in one scene you're going into different characters' thoughts and heads. Right then, it's not a novel anymore. It's the author talking to you. You've sacrificed the illusion of reality because you're showing your hand. Now, I just have written a book.

in which I break the fourth wall repeatedly. But that is with intention and through the humorous effect of it. And as a consequence, I find that I've said that to a number of writers who don't want to do it. And I've said it to some younger writers who it's like a light going off. And they realize that forces you

into an intimacy with each character that you otherwise lose. If you can go into every character's heads in every scene, you're not actually doing that. You're being a puppet master. But if you force yourself to live within that character in that character scene, you get more intimately involved.

involved with that character. You're not just manipulating anymore. You're living within the character. I think it's a very important rule. And if I had a literature writing class, that would be the first thing I'd try to teach. How about this one? Metaphors aren't meant to dazzle readers, but to seduce them into a more intimate relationship with the story. Yeah.

things come to you and you go, wow, that is cool. That is a cool metaphor. And then you look at it after a while and you say, yeah, that's really cool, but it pops us too far out. You have to get to that point where you recognize it's within the perspective of the character you're writing to have thought or said that.

And anything that's hard is also interesting. It makes the job more interesting. Writing becomes a more interesting task if you set up these parameters that you have to obey. Seriously, no dazzling. Oh, you can dazzle, but it has to be interesting.

felt within that character who's narrating the scene. We say that this means that every figure of speech should be consistent with the mood of the scene that it appears in. Yeah. And that becomes difficult if you're trying to sustain suspense and humor at the same time. But you can figure that out also. But if you're writing a very tense scene, then the metaphor should have tension in it in some manner or form.

How about this? Metaphors and similes describe a scene more colorfully than a chain of adjectives, and they reinforce the mood. Yeah. What does that mean? Instead of just saying the scene is bathed in moonlight, uh,

That sets the mood, but you can also suggest in a metaphor of the face of the moon wrapped in clouds that began to unravel like the wrappings on a mummy or something of that matter. And that's not a good one, but that's what I meant.

describing it more metaphorically than just blunt adjectives uh you start bringing it it's what poetry does it uses words uh one of the things it does it uses words to say more than the word itself says that to create moods and and states of mind and that's what is the value of metaphor and simile

Yeah. How is faith kind of been incorporated into your work over time? Because one of the things that were that just kept on popping up was just love. And there's like the Christian love, the love of the Holy Spirit. And that has seemed to become more and more prevalent. But then also it's in the word faith itself. There's faith, right? There's where logic and reason can take you. And then there's where the structure of reality is. And there's a gap between those two things.

And I think you're saying, of course, that's how reality works to think that we can understand reality is just foolish beyond belief. Is that right? Yeah. It's I read a great deal of science. I always have. Yeah.

If I go over into science books, there'll be all kinds of books about quantum mechanics because I find it fascinating. But when you look at quantum mechanics or molecular biology, you're discovering a world that can't see a world that responds easily to reason alone. There's other depths to it. And I...

I'm friends with a number of scientists, very good ones. And they will tell you that if scientists in these fields, in quantum mechanics, in molecular biology, are together and know each other as friends, they will tell you that it is a creative world. But they will not say it publicly because careers are on the line.

And that I find fascinating. And some will come forward. There's Stephen Meyer, who's written a couple of books.

that his publisher actually came to me and asked me to give a blurb. All the other blurbs are by the scientists. And then here's his blurb. And I said, you, you don't want, that'll just cut into the value of all the other things on there. And they said, no, we think you understand what he's saying here. And it's, it's,

Pretty difficult stuff, but he's making the argument that science showing us, if we only are willing to look at it, that the world is more complex than just numbers and formulas, that there's something going on at greater depth.

And he makes a fabulous case for it. Well, if you go to Darwin, Darwin thought the human cell was what he called a blob of carbonized albumin. He didn't know there are thousands of parts in every human cell. There are chains of proteins that go on and on and on.

And that cell doesn't function without all of that. So in other words, how did the cell evolve into that great complexity if it doesn't function with that complexity?

irreducible complexity you can't reduce it and still function in other words it can't function here and gained these other attributes it always had these attributes that throws a big monkey wrench into everything we think we know it's i just had

When people say, how can you be so positive? How can you actually about life when you came from where you came from and how can you be so certain it has meaning and that we have free will and it's a creative world? And I say, you know what?

If I came from where I came from and I have gone through everything I've gone through and all of this has happened to me, I'd be an idiot to think that there wasn't something going on here because I didn't on my own make this happen. There were so many moments in life that things happened and clicked.

That if it had gone the other way, and when you start to be aware of that, and you're willing to say, I'm part of something that I don't understand, and it's mysterious, and it's wonderful, and I just have to do the best I can. But if I do the best I can, things will happen that you have to seize the moment. It's opportunity that's given to you.

And it is given to you. And it's not because of who your parents were, in all cases, certainly not mine. And I can't imagine a world that I would take just that reason alone can answer everything for it. Because, well, we know it can't. So.

Square this for me. On one hand, you love writing. You love to sit down at the computer every day and just work and work. And on the other hand, you have this self-doubt. And how do those two things come together? How do you reconcile the two? I don't know. I think it comes partly the doubt. Is there...

the sense that I need to overcome the doubt that it's been put in my way for a reason. If you have no self-doubt, then you might not have any self-judgment.

If you have no self-doubt, then perhaps I would see every word I wrote as golden, and that would be a mistake. Yeah, that would not be good. That wouldn't be good. So the self-doubt is a tool just like metaphors are a tool. And you shouldn't be afraid of self-doubt. Some people get eaten up by it. And I often have said all writer's block is self-doubt.

You may have other things you think are the cause of it, but it always comes down to when you sit down and you can't get those words to come. It's because something inside is saying you can't do this. What is the doubt that you feel? Is it I'm not good enough? Is it that people won't like this? Is it internal, external? I think now there's a question that I've never been asked also. This is interesting.

And it just made me think. The self-doubt is I can't do this as well as I want to, and I'm going to make a fool of myself. And I don't want to make a fool of myself. And that's hard, too, because I frequently choose things

a book or a subject or a way of telling it that everybody in my professional life tells me I'm going to make a fool of them. So I guess I choose them because there's that risk. But yeah, I think it really comes to personal. And it may go back to what I said about

but having lived and grown up childhood adolescent in the constant path of humiliation. And I don't want to humiliate myself. A lot of people do that for me. So I think that's probably where it comes from. It's you just don't want to be a fool if you can avoid it. I just want to go through a few writers that I know you really like and just get a quick take on...

how they've influenced you, what you took from them. And let's start with John D. MacDonald. He was the first writer who ever showed me that character can be as interesting as plot. He was a suspense writer, but he also, he wrote a series with a character named Travis McGee. They're good books, but his best books were not in the series.

He wrote a whole body of work about running a motel, about being a real estate agent. And it's a suspense story that's involved in that. But his books are maybe the best record ever of fiction has given us of the 1950s and 60s of common America.

And I just loved, he would be taking along a book, you're just compelled to get page to page. And he would stop and tell you about this character. And he would go on for five pages. And when I first was reading him and he did this,

I would be like, just get on with the story. I don't need to know all this about the character. And you get to the end of the four or five pages and you get back into the story and you go, wait a minute, I want to know more about this character. So he made that as much gripping and interesting and appealing as the actual plot. And there was a great deal to learn from that. But yeah,

He was very, as a writer, he had tremendous charm. And he was a cynic, but it didn't put a bigger edge to his work as it does with some. You don't usually hear the words charm and cynic. Yeah, it's an interesting, well, look at Mark Twain. There was a certain charm and cynicism mixed there too. All right, T.S. Eliot.

The use of language is just mind-blowing. Mind-blowing. Mind-blowing. I've actually traveled here with one book, and it's the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot. You can read the same piece a hundred times, and there's something new the language gives you the hundredth and first time you've read it. And I don't know of any other writer that managed. He buries so much information

within the surface prose that it's almost impossible to describe. But I remember when I first found him and read the four quartets and you read and read and read and it's just mesmerizing. You know, I think it's T.S. Eliot who wrote it, but it reminds me of you. He has a line I really like here or there does not matter. We must be still and still moving.

And the reason that reminds me of you is there's a... I don't know if you've always been like this, but you seem remarkably at peace in terms of just your disposition of just spending time with you, but then also incredibly prolific. We must be still and still moving. I always think about that. It's...

I think I've learned more from Elliot than I realize because I think you absorb stuff that comes into you and changes you. I think the thing that I most love about his is the surrendering to the way of the world. This is the world. It is a created world. We do not control the world. We make our way. We follow it.

fail. Uh, but we go on and going on is the purpose. And you just accept there's a certain acceptance in him of, of, of all that's problematic in life. That is, I think way beyond Buddhism. Uh, and, uh, and it's very appealing once you start feeling it, uh, it, it,

I've never been, I was just sort of in an interview I had with Linda, laughed when they asked, how often do you get angry and what makes you angry? And you actually laughed. Because we couldn't think of any time I've ever been angry. Really? I just don't get angry. And it's...

It used to bother my wife because she would say, they're ripping you off. Yes, I know, but we'll get past this. I get disturbed by people's bad behavior, but I can't say why I don't get angry. But I also think that's in Elliot. There's no point.

We live in the still point of the turning world. Yeah. And it's all there is. So. Here or there, it does not matter. It must be still and still moving. Yeah. How about Ray Bradbury? Oh, I read much when I was young, younger. There is that Bradbury just wants you to be as delighted with everything as he is.

You know, he's such an ebullient writer. Well, unless you read Fahrenheit 451, which is a dark, dark piece. But my favorite thing of his is Something Looking This Way Comes, which is just a wonderful, wonderful book about...

fathers and sons and the right kind of father-sons relationships and things. And yeah, he, from Bradbury, probably have started to have, as a reader, less fear about

colorful language i don't mean foul language i mean just letting letting the language get however flowery you want it to as long as you feel in control of it what do you mean by feel in control of it spell that out well you're just not ending up uh i was in a book or blurb recently and uh

I started to read it and there was absolutely no control of metaphors. The more elaborate and fantastic they could get, the better. Well, that isn't a good metaphor. And Bradbury would push all of that kind of writing as far as he can and sometimes tremble on the edge of it, but he never loses control of it. So there was a lesson to run out and to get...

there is, I actually read once he said that he never wrote anything except in a state of joy. And I believe that's probably true. Um, he wrote mostly short stories, uh, which takes away the angst. Am I going to live long enough to finish this 400 page thing? Uh, which is always in your mind, even when you're young. Uh, and, uh,

he wrote many short stories just going outside and sitting on the patio on a lawn chair and spending a few hours. And he had a story. And that was because of the joy with which he approached writing. You know, he had a sign over his desk that said, don't think. And there's this great interview where he says, you must always surprise yourself at the page. And when you think, you start to lie to yourself. But you must always surprise yourself at the page. And I think that

There's similarities between the two of you there where he saw writing as almost like an act of surrender to your self-conscious and you were the leash and it was the dog. I do say often I have to entertain myself when I'm working. Yeah, exactly. If I'm not entertaining myself, then...

And it's more than entertaining. I have to move myself to if it's a book meant to take you somewhere emotionally, that also is an intellectual side to it. Then I have to feel that when I'm writing it. And I can easily move myself to tears when writing or laugh out loud. And that's when I know it's working.

That's when I'm sure. Sorry. If I get choked up, then okay, this is, this has got it without really twisting the heartstring. Yeah. I was writing something a few weeks ago and I was bawling. I was bawling. And it was, uh, I sent it to a friend and he said, uh, he said that moved me to tears and I hadn't, uh, I was actually crying so much that I, uh, I had to speak it out. I just couldn't type. And,

it was a strange feeling because I'd always kind of thought of emotions as, I don't know, sometimes I've resisted emotions and it was kind of a challenge to myself to just like feel this one. And the act of writing kind of turned up the volume on them. And it was, it was, I was very sad in this particular point, but it was strangely delightful to feel the emotion of sadness to the absolute extreme. And I think, you know, if you watch a musician, they're,

Making music to do that. And I think that we can do that as writers of how do I feel this emotion as intensely as possible? And there's something strangely very nice about it. Yeah. Well, you listen to certain things of Mozart and you're absolutely sure he was crying as he wrote it. Let's do one more Dickens. I didn't read Dickens in high school or college. No.

I was always, I'm not going to read what they want me to read. I'll fake it and I'll read what I want to read because I always had my own desire. The rebellion strikes again. Yes. I also read you didn't like research at all when you were a kid. You hated that. No, I love it. But yeah, I could fake book reports and things, so I would do that. But then I was...

I don't know what it was, late 20s, early 30s. I'd have to go back and look. But I said, well, I ought to read this Dickens guy. And I chose Tale of Two Cities. And I just became utterly captivated with it. And when I got into the latter part, I couldn't stop. I had to read it. I was reading the end of the book. It was like three o'clock in the morning.

I was in bed, dirt of sound asleep, and she woke up and I'm just in tears. And the end of that novel, it's, you know, it just is maybe the biggest, most emotional ending to a novel I can ever think of. Whereas this attorney who is a drunk and has messed up his life, but is in love with this woman who's in love with another man.

And he goes to the guillotine under the identity of that man. So he's sacrificing himself for the woman he loves, that she can be with the man she loves. And then he gives compassion to a woman. I'm just getting verklempt. If you haven't read that book, you have to read it.

get the thing and poof he he had now I don't like all Dickens some goes a little too he's making up of names and stuff can sometimes get a little difficult but but because they're so over the top strange and but

Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Tale of Two Cities. He wasn't afraid of emotion. He wasn't, you know, what has happened in a lot of literature courses is sentiment is

is is confused with sentimentality sentiment is confused with sentimentality sentimentality you want to avoid genuine sentiment you want to have as much of in a book as you can get spell that out for me what do you mean sentimentality is uh um well the character let's just say

It has to do in the way you're writing. It also can be in the events itself. You have a character dying of cancer, say, and at the same time as she's dying of cancer, she discovers the child she has may be dying as well. Okay, we've gone from something to appeal to our genuine human feeling to something going so far over the top that

that even though it can happen in life, you have to be awfully careful about doing it.

Sentimentality is also in how you write about it. If you go so far as to push and push and push to get that emotional reaction, you shouldn't have to actually. It comes back to that point about it being easy. Yeah. If you don't have to push for the reaction, it simply comes from the condition of the character and where they are in their life.

And it's such that you can identify it as a human being without a lot of flowery language. And it moves you. That is sentiment. But I have seen where almost an attempt to drive sentiment out of fiction, just let's do it straight and cold. And this is life and it's the way it is.

I'm sorry, but that doesn't move people and it doesn't inspire people to deal with the problems of their own lives. Sentiment connects us. It's the source of sympathy and pity. We can recognize in the feelings and hopes and dreams of other people ourselves. And if that is stripped out with fiction, you're somebody as proud as I like, but I find completely accepting one more person.

with so emotionless that I can admire the cold clarity of it. And that's Joan Didion. Very cold, very clear, but I don't really want to read it because the closest she comes to real sentiment is in the book about losing her husband. And even that, you can see we don't want to go too far here. I don't want to talk too much about

She will just say she was devastated, but we need more than that. We need to venture into sentiment a little. Just don't go over the top. This is my most self-indulgent question. Sorry, listeners. But how do you feel that surrounding yourself with these Japanese influences, these Art Deco influences, how is that shaping your creative work?

Well, for those who just didn't walk through the house. Okay, let me get the pitch. This house is awesome. This house is awesome. I walked in and I just lit up. I mean, I feel... Maybe I should share some photos on the screen here, but it's just...

It's this like mix of like classical Japanese with Art Deco paintings and doors and curved lines, sort of like the streamlined modern. And then right here in front of me of this collection of Art Deco radios. It's like there's there's there's nothing of the plainness that you see here.

in so much of contemporary life? Oh, I think that plainness in contemporary life is destroying souls. Yeah. I've thought about this because I grew up in poverty, but that doesn't mean you can't have beauty around you. But there was no sense of it in the families I grew up with. Everything was kind of ugly. And I gravitated it toward...

things with some beauty to them. I'm doing notes now for a book that might be about why I write, how I write. I'm not trading in your character. Oh, I feel very threatened right now. But I started with just notes to myself about the families, my father's family, which was dysfunctional in the extreme. He had two brothers that committed suicide.

He always talked about suicide, but always that he would kill all of us at the same time. Oh, my goodness. And all of his family was dysfunctional into a second generation. And when you would go there, there was nothing of beauty in the house or anything.

or in the lives you were there with. He had a brother who died of burst appendix because their mother decided she was a Christian scientist. And a week after she decided that, he got appendicitis and she wouldn't allow him to have any treatment. He died. Two months later, she gave up Christian science.

That was sort of that whole family. And my mother told me never go near them. If anything happens to me, do not get involved with that family. And so as I grew up, there was, I think, a kind of yearning to be around peaceful things, beautiful things. And beautiful things aren't like Japanese art, some Chinese art.

you go through the day and just seeing it there, just walking past it calms you, I think. It does me. And so I like to have things around me that give me a sense of continuity of life, of reason and meaning. And that's all in Japanese and Chinese art of the best kind.

If that's there, I'm much calmer. I hate that this is going to be the final question, but I just have to talk to you for the next 12 hours, and I have to just respect your time. So you say that metaphysics is the ink in my pen. Whatever's going on here, it is the central issue of our existence, and it seems to me that it begs to be the central issue of a writer's career. Wow, I said that. I guess. Yeah.

I must add a little wine. I guess. What are you talking about there? I have said, if what you're going to write is, and it's your conviction, that life has no meaning or purpose, that we're all just animals who can't think too much, you have one book. Once you've said it, what do you have to say?

There's nowhere else to go. You can keep writing the same story about the meaninglessness of all things, but what a dead end that is. I have found that the more I'm aware that there is deep mystery in life and things happen that you would...

Somebody may say, oh, it's coincidence or it's, or go so far as to say it's synchronicity, which just is a way to cover up the fact that it's all too coincidental to be coincidence. So they have to have some better word for it. When you, when you open your mind and eyes to that, it's kind of that life becomes much more interesting. It becomes fascinating. And that's where,

you have something to write about. Every life then becomes, every life of every character becomes a great adventure towards something meaningful. And it isn't just somebody who is thrown into all kinds of violence and everything and either triumphs or doesn't. They're going somewhere.

And that's what makes that book different from the others. How did they get there? What did they learn along the way? It's not that the work becomes didactic. It doesn't. It just starts preaching to you or anything. It just opens you to all the different ways lives are lived and all the mystery that evolves out of every single life if you're able to.

look at it and think about it. And so, yeah, that's always there when I'm writing because I'm always thinking about it. It's so many very strange things have happened in my life. I was standing right next to somebody who was shot and killed and the person who shot them turned the gun on me and I was looking right down the barrel of the gun.

uh and they didn't pull the trigger they just walked away uh and i ended up having to talk to police and that kind of thing so you always wonder what was there you know if you would kill one person and there's the witness and you don't take the second shot it makes you start to think it wouldn't it trying to think of

I don't want to go into some of the really strange things because people say, boy, it's weird. But if you open your eyes to things, you see coincidences in life and you say, that's a lot more than a coincidence. And when you open it to it, the strangest thing is it seems like it happens more to you, that the more you're aware of it, the more it happens.

uh, and it's, it's, as a writer, that's inevitably fascinating, and, uh, sometimes can carry you, uh, out there to someplace where some readers just can't go. I wrote a book called Breathless, and some people love that book, and some people say, well, this is a little too hot there for me. Well, that's, that's okay, too, uh, but, uh,

I always want to reach an audience because that's why you're here. And that's why they allow you to keep publishing. If you don't reach an audience, you don't get to publish. But just conveying your sense of the mystery of life, I think is useful because we're living in a world where

As we get old, we always think it was better then. But there's things that you can look at that didn't exist then that I don't think do us a lot of good. Social media is a beneficial thing, but it's an enormously destructive thing also. And I look at the coming of AI and what that's going to be. What is it going to do to people's self-esteem? Because a lot of jobs are going to get lost.

And a lot of things are going to change. And it's worrisome. I won't be here to see the worst of it if it goes really downhill. But you're concerned about the fate of the race. How will the human race go on? Thanks for doing this. Well, you do an interesting interview.

It's a little different. That was fun. Thank you. Thank you.