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
book reading writing
It's just the garbage in/garbage out trick. If you're not taking any fiction in, good or bad, then how can you be spitting any back out (good or bad)? I can't even imagine trying to write without reading. Really, I can hardly write a novel at all if I'm not reading just book after book.
writing talking fiction
Writing, of course, it's not all in your head. Not talking about the 'manual' act of typing here either, but that, when your fiction's really working, your whole body's involved, and then some.
writing thinking long
It's important to look ahead, I think, to shape your stuff for - again - effect. Because it's just so easy to write long, flowy sentences, get lost in them. The hard part's making them matter, making yourself make them matter.
morning fall writing
When I am writing a novel, though, then it's usually three or four hours a day. Ideally, right after lunch until three or four, but sometimes picking up again around ten, going until a touch after midnight. I rarely write in the morning, unless I'm on deadline. I do like rewriting in the morning, though. Guess it's the way my brain's put together. Or, the way it's falling apart.
writing years ideas
There's no really other way to learn writing than by writing. So accelerate that as much as you can. The more you write, the better you'll get. What also helps, though, is walking away from broken stuff. Not everything's going to work. Killing two years of your life trying to resuscitate a dying novel, I don't know. Why not just write a different one? You'll have more ideas. You can't help having ideas.
The short story, it's not a step on the way to becoming a novelist.
The slasher film is such a neat, self-contained genre.
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.
default lock people prefer spacecraft time
Every time I lock my people in a spacecraft or land them on an asteroid, the blood wells up again, and I'm writing horror. Horror's my default setting. It's also where I prefer to write.
creature largely longer romantic scary tragic vampires
Vampires have become tragic or romantic figures. Vampire are largely seduction tales. They're no longer the scary creature in the dark.
There's no purer feeling in the world than being scared.