Stephen Graham Jones
Stephen Graham Jones
Stephen Graham Jones is a Blackfeet Native American author of experimental fiction, horror fiction, crime fiction, and science fiction. He shares a fan base with fellow authors Will Christopher Baer and Craig Clevenger known as "The Velvet"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
CountryUnited States of America
covering five full hundred novels obviously pages people six three weaving written
I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.
change ingrained psyche
The whole 'starting with stories, ending with novels' thing, it's probably too ingrained in the industry and the psyche to change it.
almost humor
The way humor's usually used in horror, it's as a pressure-release valve; without it, the drama would escalate out of all control almost immediately.
broke haunted people
People shouldn't go broke making a haunted house. Or, we should pay for our enjoyment, definitely.
absolutely rational seem stories stupid thrown time
Stories need stupid decisions that, at the time, seem absolutely rational and necessary. Without stupid decisions, the world isn't thrown out of balance, and so there's no need for a 'rest of the story' to balance it back.
The slasher film is such a neat, self-contained genre.
The short story, it's not a step on the way to becoming a novelist.
christmas counting people until
Some people are born for Halloween, and some are just counting the days until Christmas.
actual human solve
Most zombie stories, the problems they solve are not the actual zombies. The problems they solve are the human interactions.
audience comparison difficult easy endings fiction jaded laugh people sad
Making people laugh is so much more difficult than making them sad. Too much fiction defaults to the somber, the tragic. This is because sad endings are easy in comparison - happy endings aren't at all simple to earn, especially when writing to an audience jaded by them.
book car lots louis mostly talking uncle westerns
My uncle Randall always had a book in his hand. He read in the car, he read at restaurants, he read when you were talking to him. He read lots of different things, but mostly it was Louis L'Amour's westerns and contemporary thrillers.
again anybody duck exposition forget stories time trying
Neal Stephenson handles exposition better than anybody else. I keep trying to learn his tricks, but every time I duck into his pages, I get lost in the stories all over again and forget that I'm a writer.
ellen mind opened running saved wonderful
When Ellen Datlow was running the fiction at 'Omni' in the late '80s and into the '90s, I had a subscription. It was one of two subscriptions I'd saved for, the other being 'Spider-Man.' And they each opened my mind and my heart in wonderful ways.
comedy erase five hard hit last life might minutes moment romantic watch
We watch a romantic comedy because we want to cry, say, or an action movie so we can participate in heroics. Horror's different. It can hit you with a moment of revulsion so hard you might want to erase the last five minutes of your life, please.