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Part Two of: Cthulhu and Crazy People: An Interview With William Browning Spencer Conducted by Lawrence Person |
| Lawrence Person: | In the introduction to The Return of Count Electric, your short story collection, you complained that a lot of mainstream short fiction seems to lack any sort of story. How do you think this sad state of affairs came about? |
| William Browning Spencer: | Well, I think the short story is the victim of creative writing classes in an academic setting. When I was in college, there weren't many creative writing programs. You could major in English literature. Now there are all these writing programs and an academic, critical disparagement of plot. Like plot is the least part of art, the least important thing, you know, it's just kind of a nuisance. You still get this. I went to listen to the Michener fellowship people read, and it was all prose without any substance, without any narrative drive. John Irving said that plot is what makes something more interesting on page 250 than on page 1. And I agree with that. When you're a young writer, you're afraid of not being cool. It's easier to write a story about somebody drifting through the suburbs being miserable, because nobody will say that it's corny or silly or implausible, and they can admire the writing. But it won't be risky, and it won't be interesting, as far as I'm concerned. It will just be safe, because there's nothing you can sneer at. A lot of the stuff I like best does take risks because it is implausible, and you have to go to more trouble to get people to hang in there. A lot of my favorite writers, I think Jim Harrison said this once, they're willing to risk appearing sentimental or stupid. I see a lot of books written by young writers that are kind of technically flashy. They're like those movies you go to where the special effects are really good, and the surface is really glossy, but there's not much going on. |
| LP: | Do you think this is an area where science fiction is ahead of the mainstream? |
| WBS: | I think science fiction has always cared about plot and story. I think it's always been important to the genre. That's probably one of the reasons it still has problems with critics, because they've decided that plots aren't of fundamental importance. A lot of my favorite reading is still story driven stuff. You can forgive a lot in someone who's a dynamic storyteller, really good at making you turn pages. It's clear to me that the reason Stephen King is so popular is that he's a good storyteller. |
| LP: | Certainly his early work, when he was young and hot. Even now, he still has enough of what he had in his youth that even his worst books are interesting on some level. |
| WBS: | Yeah, he does have that storytelling quality, and that's a hard one to get and a hard one to teach. I've had people say in writing classes that they really admire brilliant prose. My attitude is why couldn't you have great storytelling and brilliant prose? I don't see why the one has to exclude the other. I'm glad I wrote that introduction to the Count Electric collection. My publisher asked me to write one because I had been ranting about that subject. And the reason I'm glad I wrote it is that it shaped all the reviews of the book! I guess critics like to have something to talk about, they like a theme too. So they got to say "Well, in a world where there aren't stories, here's stories." It worked out well, actually, because it made them talk in those terms. |
| LP: | Did you try to sell any of your mainstream stories before you published The Return of Count Electric? |
| WBS: | Yeah, and I could not sell anything in that collection. It's funny because that collection came out and it got rave reviews from the critics, but before that I couldn't sell one! What it made me realize is that there aren't many markets for short stories, and more people write short stories. I mean, if you've finished a novel, you've already narrowed down the competition. There are a lot of people in the world with the first three chapters of a novel. To finish a novel, even a terrible novel, requires an immense amount of stamina. There are publications that don't pay a penny with stringent guidelines. "We don't want this and this and this, we want stuff like Stephen King at his very best. Pays in two copies." And they get like 500 stories a month! I always tell people that they might stand a better chance writing novels. And the apprenticeship for writing novels is writing novels. In creative writing classes they teach you that short stories are an apprenticeship for novels, but that's only because it's easier for teachers to deal with short stories. They don't want a bunch of students doing novels. But to learn the things that novels do, which are different from the things short stories do you have to write novels. You need to write a bad novel, then think about it. "Why is this novel not working?" Whenever I taught writing, I used to tell people I'd teach them the secret to writing novels. I said the secret was to take their favorite novel and outline it chapter by chapter. At the end of six weeks of teaching, I'd ask how many people did it, and it was none. None of them did it, because they thought they knew what a novel was. But the truth is, most people do not know what a novel is, because they haven't taken it apart. And the minute you take it apart in a real quantitative way, "OK, this chapter is seven pages long. This thing, which seemed so big to me when I read the novel, is three pages." When you do those sort of things, you learn an immense amount, more than any book on creative writing. |
| LP: | Did you read a lot of science fiction when you were growing up? |
| WBS: | Yeah. I remember reading tons of science fiction short stories. One of my favorite writers was William Tenn. Gordon has said that he's acquired two new books by Tenn, and I was so glad to hear that. He was wonderful! Theodore Sturgeon used to say that he'd think of a great story idea, then realize that William Tenn had already done it with three different twists on it! (Laughs) Tenn was brilliant at that. That's probably where a lot of innovative stuff was done in early fantasy and science fiction, in the short story realm. And I read a lot of the classic science fiction stuff, Heinlein. . . |
| LP: | Asimov, Clarke? |
| WBS: | Asimov, I was really impressed with the Foundation trilogy. I remember liking Clarke's Tales from the White Hart. (Pause) Like a lot of people, I went through a period where I just stopped reading science fiction. When you get a whole lot of something, it's hard to sort through what's good and what isn't. It's like, when you hear something is brilliant, and you read three or four books in a row that aren't very good, you just sort of drift off. And some of the criticism leveled against science fiction is valid. Some of it's kind of corny, and some of it doesn't have much in the way of characterization, and some of it is way too idea driven. Different people read for different reasons. Some people are uninterested in the prose or shape of the sentences, and they're interested only in ideas and innovative stuff. I've often thought the hardest writer to be, unless you had a deep scientific background, would be a hard science fiction writer, because your fans would always be writing in to tell you what you did wrong. (Laughs) "I'm sorry, you can not in fact do that, and this is not what's called centrifugal force." And you would be writing books thinking, "Oh, they're really going to nail me on this one!" Instead of thinking of your fans as this warm bunch of fuzzy people out there, you're thinking of them poised to rip you apart if you make some incredible scientific faux paux. |
| LP: | Were you surprised when Gardner Dozois selected "A Child's Christmas in Florida" for Year's Best SF? |
| WBS: | Absolutely! It doesn't have any science fiction or fantasy in it! It's more like a Flannery O'Connor story. I recently read some letters to the editor in Tangent magazine, and they were talking about this. And I have to agree with the people who say "If you have a Year's Best Science Fiction, it should have science fiction in it!" The guy was using the analogy, you go and you buy apples, and the guy throws in a couple of oranges, and when you come back he says "Well, they're fruit. They're kinda like apples. Besides, these oranges are really good!" "But I asked for apples!" I'm really glad Gardner did it, and I appreciate it, but on the other hand, I can understand why some people would object to it. But the defense for doing it, is that in early fantasy and science fiction, that's where stories like that would go. So there's a tradition here. |
| LP: | Much of your fiction is very funny. Do you find it easy to write humor? |
| WBS: | Yeah. My first novel was not very funny. My first novel was my attempt to sell out. Although I like it, just not as much as my recent stuff. |
| LP: | I think parts of Maybe I'll Call Anna are hilarious. |
| WBS: | Parts of it are funny, occasionally it's funny. But I find I really enjoy doing really funny stuff in books. I was talking to Neal about this, since there's a lot of humor in Neal's books. He said part of our humor is that our characters often take themselves dead seriously. They're not trying to be funny people. I found humor came very naturally to me, and the one thing I wanted to do, as an experiment, was to see how much humor I could include without losing dramatic tension. The tone that you set at the very beginning of a book, as you go along in writing a novel, your road gets narrower. I don't know about you, but when I first wanted to write, I wanted to write every novel I ever loved in one novel. "Dostoyevsky, Dickens, I'm going to stick them all in one novel." But you can't do that. The minute you begin to have characters and plot, you've made the decision not to do other kinds of novels. I wanted to see to what extent you could do surrealism, and humor, and still have it be suspenseful and emotionally engaging. And that emotionally engaging part is really important to me, since I bog down if the novel is too intellectually arch and cool. I'll cease being engaged and drift away. So my intention has always been to put all that stuff in, and have it still be entertaining. If you're going to write novels, you might as well entertain yourself. |
| LP: | Otherwise you're just a monkey picking up a paycheck. |
| WBS: | Well, it used to irritate my now ex-wife, because I would reread old stuff I had written and laugh. And she would say "This is terrible, Bill." And I would say "This is a work of genius." |
| LP: | (laughs) Sort of a fundamental difference there! |
| WBS: | Writing is fun is when you surprise yourself. There's a moment in Zod Wallop which I didn't know about until it happened. That's when Gabrielle gets to her house, and she's thinking about how terrible the traffic was, and what a harrowing day it was, and the morning was exhilarating, because that morning she had killed her psychiatrist. And I didn't know she had killed her psychiatrist until that line came out! To me that's one of the things that makes writing fun, and it turned out it meant a lot to the shape of the book. There are always surprises like that, it's the reason for writing. Another thing in that book is a bad guy who keeps smoking more and more compulsively, and I didn't know why he was doing that, he was just getting nuttier. It turns out that he walks into a hotel smoking two cigarettes at the same time, and the hotel clerk tells him he's not allowed to smoke, and he kills the clerk instantly. And that's when the hotel turns into Castle Grimfast. So it made sense! |
| LP: | Sort of a case where your subconscious knows what you're doing, even if you don't? To step back into the realm of psychoanalysis. |
| WBS: | When you're writing a novel, you don't really know exactly what the themes are, and you learn those as you go along. And those are the parts of a book that make it a better book. Who was it that wrote The Art of Dramatic Writing? Anyway, he said the difference between books you remember and the books you don't is theme, and I really think that's true. If you have theme running through a novel, some attitude about life, it makes it more of a work of art, and you think about it more after you're done. |
| LP: | Makes the resonances deeper? |
| WBS: | Yeah. And sometimes, when you're reading certain books, you'll believe them. You'll think "Yeah, that's the way life is." And then you'll stop reading it and think "No it's not!" Because the author was able to hammer the theme through at the time. So it doesn't matter in the larger world if a book is true or not, just whether it's true in its own book world. |
| LP: | Back to Résumé, With Monsters for a moment. What first gave you the idea of conflating soul destroying jobs with soul-destroying eldritch horrors? |
| WBS: | Well, I had one more book to do for Permanent Press. I had written some chapters of Zod Wallop, and I thought Permanent Press wouldn't know what to do with it. So I said "I want to write a book real fast. What do I know about that I don't have to research?" Bad jobs. I'm an expert! I've had so many bad jobs! And Lovecraft! And as I got into it, I saw that Lovecraft's wonderful sort of paranoia works perfectly in the job world. And some of it was just lucky accident. I had decided to reread Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories as I was doing the book. When I got to the second section, where he goes back into himself, I had just reread "The Shadow Out of Time," where the protagonist goes back millions of years into this alien. So I don't know, if I had read another Lovecraft story at that particular moment, maybe I would have gone in a different direction, since I hadn't plotted it out. |
| LP: | So if you had reread At The Mountains of Madness, he might have suddenly gotten a job offer in Antarctica! |
| WBS: | Exactly! Off to Antarctica! It worked out pretty well. I was able to write that novel quickly, in about three and a half months. |
| LP: | Are you a big Lovecraft fan? |
| WBS: | Yeah! I'm not one of these. . .Lovecraft wrote some of the worst stuff in the world. Probably half of what he wrote was horrible, really bad. All the things that people say are bad in Lovecraft really are, and that's kind of what I liked about doing Résumé With Monsters. It's not exactly a homage. It's about that overblown, frenzied kind of prose, that "ghastly, nameless" stuff. And I like that! I never thought when I wrote that book that it would have a special Lovecraft audience, that in little bookstores it would be in the Lovecraft section. People come up to me and ask "You write any other Lovecraft things? I only buy Lovecraft things." |
| LP: | There are a lot of them out there! |
| WBS: | I know! I'd tell them "I don't write just Lovecraft stuff. I don't think I've ever written anything else Lovecraftian." But then Ellen Datlow pointed out that "The Ocean and All Its Devices" is a Lovecraft story, the one she picked for Year's Best Fantasy & Horror. And I thought about it and it is a Lovecraft story. It was an incredibly innovative thing Lovecraft did, and he did it really well, and some of his shorter stories are works of art. But sometimes he'd run amuck with purple prose. And in his stories, everything always spirals down into madness and despair. Which is why there's a very happy, arbitrary ending to Résumé With Monsters. It's intentionally anti-Lovecraftian. |
| LP: | Speaking of which, the protagonist eventually ends up hooking up with a female fan of his work. Do you have any fascinating groupie tales to share with the sensation hungry Nova Express reading public? |
| WBS: | I wish I did. |
| LP: | Don't we all! (General laughter.) |
| WBS: | I think you're much better off being a rock star than a writer. I'm not sure if writing groupies exist. Fans of writers tend to be people who say things like "I have a book here. Can you recommend me to your agent?" |
| LP: | Is it true that you think Robert Waller is the worst writer in America? |
| WBS: | I do. People always try to come up with worse writers, but I think the kind of overblown sentimentality that is Robert James Waller can't be beat. Every now and then I get into arguments with Neal about whether Silas Marner or The Scarlet Letter has discouraged more people from reading. |
| LP: | I'd have to go with The Scarlet Letter, since they didn't make us read Silas Marner in my high school. |
| WBS: | I think that if you consider the bulk of his work, Nathaniel Hawthorne was probably the dullest writer to ever write. |
| LP: | Well, "Young Goodman Brown" has a couple of OK parts, though I'm not a Hawthorne fan. |
| WBS: | Yeah, but you pay for it by having to write little papers about the symbolism. Very dull. Massively dull. Silas Marner is pretty bad too. Many people have been made to read that, I don't know how you dodged it. |
| LP: | It may be a generational thing. |
| WBS: | Maybe. Maybe somebody figured it out! "This makes people catatonic, so maybe we should stop." One of the great ones we got was To Kill a Mockingbird. You can get people to read that all the time. It's a good story. |
| LP: | Oh, it's a great book! But we didn't get to read that, or Catch 22. Of course they couldn't teach Catch 22, since the people in it actually have sex. But Silas Marner was off the list by then. |
| WBS: | You were very lucky. |
| LP: | Yeah. Didn't get any Jane Austen, didn't get any Proust. . . |
| WBS: | Jane Austen is wonderful! Jane Austen is, to me, the best writer of sentences! She wrote great sentences that were so smart, so wonderful! I read Proust in the stockade, where you have time to read things like that. |
| LP: | The stockade? |
| WBS: | Yeah, I was in the stockade for about five months. |
| LP: | So, that's where- |
| WBS: | Yeah, Maybe I'll Call Anna! I didn't have to do research. Someone wrote me and said "I don't think that stuff about the stockade is right." Sadly, it is. |
| LP: | So, care to share your exciting U.S. Army story? |
| WBS: | Well, I was drafted. This was back in the age when they drafted you. And like the hero in Maybe I'll Call Anna, I refused to obey orders. I had authority problems then and I still do. All my heroes have authority problems. Writers have authority problems! |
| LP: | Or else they'd be working productive day jobs. |
| WBS: | Yeah, I think so. So now I fight publishers, which isn't as dramatic. They don't return phone calls. The stockade was pretty much the way it was in Maybe I'll Call Anna. But while in there, in this little tiny library, they had the complete Remembrance of Things Past. So I read the whole thing! And it's something that I don't know if you can read on the outside. I think everyone who's read those books has been locked in the stockade with lots of time. Proust makes Henry James look succinct. |
| LP: | (Dissolves into gales of incredulous laughter) |
| WBS: | He makes Henry James seem like a man who just blasts right to the point! Like James M. Cain! So if you read Proust all day long, just sitting around in the stockade, you'd begin to feel feverish. And when you thought about anything, you'd think about it in these finely delineated ways. Your thought process would be full of elliptical phrasing. But that's where most people read Proust, in jail. Invalids and the incarcerated. |
| LP: | Speaking of James, that reminds me of a piece of spam that Dwight sent me that goes "The proceeding passage shows us why of all the James studies, The Homespun Humor of Henry James has yet to appear." |
| WBS: | (laughs) Homespun humor! My favorite quote about him is "Henry James chewed more than he bit off." |
| LP: | I think he must have been getting a subsidy from the Society for the Preservation of Infinitely Dependent Clauses. |
| WBS: | Yes! And his people were always so finely tuned and so sensitive! |
| LP: | I read Turn of the Screw, and it was like pulling teeth. |
| WBS: | And that's one of his best. |
| LP: | Well, enough of Henry James. What sort of work environment do you write in? |
| WBS: | I lie around in bed and write on this old, $300 Radio Shack WP-2 word processor. It runs for about two weeks on a couple of penlight batteries. It's great except it only holds five or ten pages, and then you have to zoom those into your desktop computer. But it's real light, weighs about as much as a book. And my friends all laugh at it because it has a little screen that only holds four lines, but you can scroll up and down. I like it because it's lightweight, it doesn't feel like you're really working. And I get to lie in bed and write. I find I actually get more done when I'm sick, because when I'm well I can go out and do something. So if I get the flu or something I'm really productive. |
| LP: | What sort of music do you listen to? |
| WBS: | Almost entirely female vocalists, like Natalie Merchant, people like that. My ex-wife said if The Chipmunks had been female, I'd have all their albums. It's probably true. I listen to a lot of simpleminded pop music, probably have the same tapes 13-year-olds have, like REM, U2, things like that. |
| LP: | No, that's the music of my generation. It's already passe. Now it's Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, and they may be passé by now. Do you listen to any modern female vocalists like Tori Amos? |
| WBS: | Yeah, I've got all her CDs. |
| LP: | How about Alanis Morrisette? Dead Can Dance? |
| WBS: | No. Shawn Colvin! She now lives in town. I even have a fan among singers, but she's somebody nobody's heard of anymore, that's Janis Ian. She's read all my books. She started her career at 17 with a song called "Society's Child," and then did a song called "Seventeen" they still play on the radio. Then she did a bunch of wonderful albums that were incredibly gloomy, and got more gloomy with each album. They were wonderful, but I don't think anyone bought them but me. Then she disappeared for about ten years, but for the last two or three years she's been back. |
| LP: | How did she start reading your work? |
| WBS: | Actually, I tracked her, and sent her a copy of my book. |
| LP: | So you stalked her! |
| WBS: | Yeah, I stalked her. But she responded, and now she's read all my stuff! |
| LP: | So where do you see your fiction going over the next decade or so? Still in SF, or Horror? Mystery? Mainstream? |
| WBS: | I don't know. I don't think in terms of genre. . .Is Tolstoy better than Edgar Rice Burroughs? Well, somedays yes, and somedays no. Some days Edgar Rice Burroughs is better. So I don't really have this hierarchy of what's good. Different kinds of writers are good for different reasons. So when science fiction and fantasy writers are talking about mainstream audiences, they're not being snooty, which is sometimes the perception, they just want as big an audience as possible. They envy Kurt Vonnegut, since he left SF when it was a ghetto and made a ton of money back when most SF writers weren't. So I guess I'd like to be writing odd books, and in that sense probably continue to be compared to Jonathan Carroll (laughs). But having a mainstream audience who are willing to tolerate very strange stuff. It's true that fantasy and science fiction people were the first to notice my stuff. I think because they were more comfortable with weird stuff. I think the first critical acclaim that really helped was when Roger Zelazny read the Count Electric collection and really liked it a lot, said wonderful things about it and blurbed the book. |
| LP: | How did that happen? |
| WBS: | My friend Lyn Banks was at a writer's conference with Roger Zelazny. She didn't even know who he was, they were just hanging out, she's not a science fiction fan, but she liked him a lot. She said "I've got this friend, and I want you to read this" and gave him a galley. He really liked it, called me up, and sent this glowing blurb to Permanent Press, and they said "Well, we don't know, we're not going to put it on. Who's Roger Zelazny? We've never heard of him." And I said, "He's famous!" And then they went to the Frankfurt Book Festival, came back and said "Everyone seems to know who Roger Zelazny is. He's famous in Bulgaria!" And I said "I told you! I told you!" So they finally put it on. |
| LP: | Very little of your work could be labeled as "hard" science fiction, but "Downloading Midnight" could easily be labeled cyberpunk. What made you write that? |
| WBS: | The criticism that could be hurled against that story is that it uses standard, sort of generic cyberpunk stuff, post William Gibson. And of course, Gibson himself didn't know the science, but everyone was just using these kind of tropes. And it's true, that's what I was doing in that story. But the idea that prompted that story was someone talking about how they're using 12-year-old kids in fashion model photography because their skin is perfect. So I thought, what if in a holographic future children were used for their innocence, and that was the starting point. The criticism that can be leveled at that story is that it could have been written by someone without any knowledge of science fiction, and it was just using the cyberpunk flourishes, and I knew that. It's more of a Raymond Chandlerish story, actually, one world-weary guy, with some sense of values in a world that doesn't have them. |
| LP: | Of course, Chandler himself was a big source for the tone of cyberpunk. |
| WBS: | Yeah. In David Hartwell's Year's Best SF, he talks about how this is my first venture into this type of fiction. It's probably my last! (laughs) |