Dark Dreamers on Writing by Stanley Wiater

Author:Stanley Wiater [Wiater, Stanley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: interviews, horror authors
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2018-05-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9: Shocking Advice

I think all of us start in darkness.

I try to encourage young writers to face up to their hostilities and murderousness. A lot of us were raised incorrectly, and we’re supposed to be ashamed of our feelings, and ashamed of our destructive-ness. We should be, if we take a direct object and go out and destroy it. Because we don’t want that for ourselves we have to find ways of doing these things indirectly. And so I try to say, “Look: pin the shadows to the wall first! Get rid of the dinosaurs and tyrannosaur—and all those other monsters and ghosts and skeletons in your subconscious. Open Pandora’s Box! Let out the horrors!”

Those are the first truths you know. Ray Bradbury

There really must be a love of just working the language. A delight in making sentences. There’s a wonderful character in this Philip Roth novel that I enjoyed very much, The Ghost Writer, who’s an old writer. He says, “I get up in the morning and I write a sentence. And then I turn the sentence around.” You really have to like doing that! That’s essential—that’s the nuts and bolts. You really have to get a deep joy out of writing itself. And out of other people’s writing, too. Peter Straub

Even Shakespeare would not have written a play unless it was exciting and full of surprises. So don’t think that the commercial and intellectual are at odds with one another. They’re not. You can write a great novel and have it be really suspenseful and have a lot of spectacle to it. Yet it can still have all the philosophy and deep meaning that your soul needs to make your writing worthwhile. Anne Rice

Writing is a job. It is plain hard work. Anyone who’s gone to college and written term papers knows what I mean. Just think of doing it every day, five days a week. Or three days one week and four another—whatever schedule suits you. Just as long as you do have a schedule, and even if you have a job on the side—which most people must have when they’re beginning to write seriously. I run every morning before I go to work. I hate running. But I do it because it’s beneficial, and I know other good things are going to come because of it. When you start out cold, saying to yourself “I can’t do this today,” the first couple of laps are murder. Then you get yourself into a groove, and find that the experience becomes pretty mechanical, if not enjoyable. It’s that way when you sit down to write something as long and difficult as a novel. Doesn’t matter whether you can do it better in the morning or better at night; you have to establish a regular time to write. It may be a paragraph or a page, who knows? But if you stay with it, the pages pile up, and you’ll write a book. John Farris

I was in a Waldenbooks store the other day, and I ran into an acquaintance of mine who used to be a doctor.

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