A Writer''s Tale

  I’m somebody, alias Alice.

  Though Dolores Claiborne helped me justify writing a book in the words of its female protagonist, Holden Caulfield was a more important inspiration for Alice. Holden and Huck, my own Trevor Bentley, and Mattie Ross from True Grit. Alice is sort of a descendant of them all.

  But they are all “good” people.

  I have my doubts about Alice.

  With After Midnight, I went out on a limb by writing the book from Alice’s viewpoint, then went out even farther by allowing her to do bad things.

  Several times during the course of the book, she behaves in ways that are more suitable for a villain than for a protagonist.

  I did go a bit too far. To make the novel more suitable (and apparently to prevent a rejection by the book club), I was asked to tone down certain scenes in which Alice strayed too far beyond the realms of decency. I was happy to cut back. I knew that I’d pushed it, and the minor cuts didn’t damage my portrait of Alice.

  The book club, possibly worried about Alice’s unsavory nature, accepted After Midnight but limited their initial order to 9,000 copies. As of this writing, it’s too early to know whether they’ll require additional copies.

  Before I’d quite finished writing After Midnight, I learned that the book club no longer planned to do a double-book of Bite and my next novel. Instead, they would combine Bite with my short fiction collection, Fiends.

  If I’d known that would happen, I wouldn’t have abandoned The Midnight Tour to write After Midnight. And quite possibly, After Midnight would have never been written at all.

  Funny how things work out.

  I finished After Midnight on January 2, 1997. With a little extra time on my hands, I spent almost three weeks writing a screenplay based on the novel.

  And then it was time to try, once more, for a return trip to Malcasa Point.

  THE MIDNIGHT TOUR & A WRITER’S TALE

  As mentioned earlier, I wrote the first 180 pages of The Midnight Tour between June 9 and September 4, 1996, immediately after Bite and before After Midnight. Done with After Midnight on January 2, 1997, I returned to my third Beast House book on February 18, 1997.

  After working on it for a couple of weeks, I left it again, this time to write a short story, “The Job,” for a Peter Raining anthology. Simultaneously, I spent time trying to develop another new novel, Madland.

  I returned to The Midnight Tour on March 15. A week later, however, I was approached by Peter Enfantino and John Scoleri about helping them prepare a book about me. I continued writing The Midnight Tour but also spent time, starting on April 25, preparing material for the book that would become A Writer’s Tale.

  From that time onward, I’ve been working regularly on both books. Today is December 12, and they are almost finished. I need to complete A Writer’s Tale within the next three days, and I plan to send off The Midnight Tour next week.

  Both books took on lives of their own and nearly grew out of control.

  Initially, I was to contribute some material to the book for John and Peter (and Bob Morrish, who came aboard the project somewhat later). As I worked on it, however, one thing led to another. I soon got in touch with John and Peter and said, “I’ve got this idea.

  What if I write the whole thing? It won’t just be a ‘Laymon companion’ for my fans, it’ll also be a book full of advice and information for aspiring writers. I’ll tell them things they’ll never hear in creative writing classes… or anywhere else. The nitty-gritty stuff most writers only find out the hard way.”

  Peter and John were enthusiastic about the idea.

  And one thing has continued leading to another to the point where I am now writing this piece three days before my deadline.

  If not for the deadline, I could keep on writing A Writer’s Tale. Like the novel ideas I’m always seeking, it has an “infinitely expandable” plot.

  But this piece will be it. For now. We want to have the book ready by late October, in time for the World Fantasy Convention.

  Time to stop writing it, and put the final touches on The Midnight Tour.

  Like A Writer’s Tale, The Midnight Tour grew well beyond my original intentions.

  From the start, I wanted it to be a big book with lots of scope. After developing the plot, I knew there was enough material to take me well beyond my usual 600 pages of manuscript.

  I expected it to run no longer than 700-750 pages.

  But one thing led to another…

  As I’ve stressed in the course of A Writer’s Tale, every story seems to have its own internal, hidden structure. The writer’s job is to discover it, reveal it and follow it.

  Once I’d made my early decisions about the basic plotlines for The Midnight Tour, I had little choice but to let the stories develop along their natural paths.

  I found myself surprised, however, by the length of the paths.

  I kept following them, having plenty of adventures along the way, moving ever closer to my destination the midnight tour itself. But the tour, like a mountain seen in the distance, was farther away than I ever expected.

  And I had a deadline to meet.

  The contractual deadline is December 31, 1997. But it isn’t exactly the real deadline.

  Because of the approaching holidays and family commitments, I need to finish The Midnight Tour and send it to England no later than December 23.

  As early as October, I knew that I had a long distance to travel in a fairly short amount of time.

  Sure, there were short-cuts I could’ve taken to get there quicker.

  But I wanted this to be my biggest book yet. It was to be the ultimate Beast House story. I wanted to pull out all the stops, “ring all the bells,” take it all to the limits.

  If you’ve learned anything from reading A Writer’s Tale, you’ve learned that the larger the novel (within limits), the more seriously it will likely be taken by agents, publishers, book club buyers and readers.

  The Cellar had been a quickie little genre piece. The Beast House had been more fully developed, more mainstream. With The Midnight Tour, I wanted epic proportions. I didn’t want people to read it and think, “Not bad for a sequel.” I wanted them to think, “Holy shit!”

  But I never expected to go 900 pages with it!

  As I kept writing the deadline drawing closer and the midnight tour still looming in the distance I knew I was cutting things close. If I didn’t watch out, I’d run out of time before reaching the end of the book.

  Starting in October, I knuckled down. Instead of my usual 30 pages per week, I averaged about 40. Finally, the first week in December, I wrote a total of 56. That brought me to December 6, the day on which I finished the climax of The Midnight Tour.

  As of today, I am attempting to finish A Writer’s Tale. I am also proof-reading my manuscript of The Midnight Tour, making a ton of corrections. And I have not yet finished writing the wind-up” what we used to call “the denouement” of The Midnight Tour.

  Even though I’m anxious (more anxious than eager) to get done with this and move on I have a very busy week ahead I feel compelled to follow my own advice.

  Advice I am about to impart to you.

  Never rush the ending.

  John Kinney, my editor long ago at Warner Books, once told me that writers are like baseball pitchers a lot of them seem to “lose it” in the final innings. He thought it would be a neat idea to have “relief writers” who could come in and save the endings.

  Though I don’t like his idea about relief writers, I do think that John made a very good point about book endings.

  During the final chapters, writers often mess up.

  This may happen for several reasons.

  1. The writer may simply have grown tired of his story. He’s been dealing too long with the same old characters, the same old plot, and he wants to get it over with so he can move on to fresh material.

  2. The opposite. He is so caught up in his material, so excited, that he’s racing through it
. He’s plunging forward as fast as he can, skimping on details, writing the first thing that pops into his mind because he just can’t wait to find out what’ll happen next. (I plead guilty.)

  3. A deadline is approaching, so he cuts corners in order to reach the finish as fast as possible.

  4. He doesn’t know how it should end.

  5. A combination of the above.

  Rather than dealing will these problems individually, I’ll cut corners and discuss endings in general.

  As I’ve mentioned earlier and you’ve certainly noticed by now I’m a master of stating the obvious.

  In this case, the obvious is: You don’t want to blow your ending.

  And there is a real danger of doing so.

  You’ve been working on a novel for many months maybe over a year. At last, the end is in sight. Like a long-distance runner (no longer a baseball pitcher), you’re worn out but you want to put on the big push for the finish line. You want to churn up the ground in a final, gut-busting sprint.

  My advice is this: Don’t.

  You’re not a long-distance runner. You’re not a baseball pitcher. You’re a writer.

  Resist the temptation to make a mad dash for the end of your book.

  Slow down!

  You’ve spent a long, long time developing your characters and plot. What for? For this!

  Every word, from the first, has been a footstep on the path toward the climax of your story.

  You haven’t been writing to get the story over with you’ve been writing to reach the big climax in which all the ingredients come together and explode.

  The climax, not “THE END,” is your real destination.

  You do not want to “short-change” it in a rush to finish the job.

  You want it to be great and memorable.

  So take your time with it. Relax.

  Play with it.

  To a large extent, a reader’s most lasting impression of a book with be based on his reaction to its climax.

  So give it your best shot.

  As a final word about endings, I have always been dubious about “explanations.”

  Explaining everything is fine and dandy and perhaps necessary if you’re writing a mystery. After all, a mystery story is supposed to involve the solving of a puzzle.

  But I don’t believe that writers of mainstream fiction or horror novels are required to give reasonable explanations for everything that happened.

  Certainly, we do not want to leave our readers befuddled and confused. We don’t want them to think we’ve created such a wild muddle that it defies explanation. We want to clear things up.

  To some extent.

  But we are under no obligation to explain everything.

  And shouldn’t, in my opinion.

  On television, in films and often in fiction, audiences are bombarded by stories that end only after every issue has been neatly tied up and explained. No loose ends are allowed.

  Which seems amazingly artificial.

  For one thing, the “explanations” (particularly in horror stories) are often incredibly trite or stupid or unbelievable or otherwise lame.

  For another, there are mysteries at the heart of every real event. Beneath the surface, there are strange and murky currents.

  We may think, for instance, that we know why someone ‘was murdered or why a car crashed or why we exist.

  In the final analysis, however, what do we really know?

  Not much.

  If we think we know all the answers, we’re fooling ourselves.

  If a writer wants to avoid fooling his reader with superficial and possibly false explanations of the events in his story, he could do worse than to leave them…

  … if not in the dark, at least in shadows.

  It’s not only more realistic that way, but possibly more fun for everyone.

  Foes and Fans

  AS A MASTER OF STATING THE OBVIOUS, I WILL START THIS PIECE BY saying that every reader isn’t a fan.

  In my own case, some readers hate my books. They see my material as puerile, voyeuristic, distasteful, and dumb. “Blood and guts churned out for numbskulls,” as one critic put it. They seem to find my material not only simple-minded but deeply offensive.

  If everybody felt that way, I’d be in deep trouble.

  As things stand, however, I can afford to laugh about it.

  Laugh as I wonder how in heck such people came to read a book by Richard Laymon in the first place. Did they wander into it by mistake? What were they expecting, Winnie the Pooh? The covers of my novels are not misleading. The artwork and the written material should make it fairly obvious to anyone with half a brain that naughty things happen in my stories. So why do these people read them, anyway?

  Don’t they believe the covers?

  They must not.

  Often, book covers do tend to exaggerate. Though a cover might lead us to believe that a book will be thrilling, lurid, shocking, bloody, erotic, violent, etc., the story inside often turns out to be tame, predictable, trite and boring.

  Apparently, some people not only expect the cover to exaggerate (lie) about the book, but they prefer it that way. When these people get what they’re told they’ll get, they whine and scream, sometimes write nasty letters to me or my publisher, sometimes write vicious reviews.

  I still don’t get it.

  Say these people stumble into a book of mine because they don’t believe the cover or they’re simply curious or whatever… and suddenly they encounter a situation that deeply shocks and offends them.

  Perhaps, at that point, they should stop reading the book.

  Put it away and take out a Tom Clancy, for instance.

  Or a Mary Higgens Clark.

  Or a Franklin W. Dixon.

  If they don’t stop reading my book, then they deserve whatever they get.

  What sort of stupes are they?

  You don’t like spinach, don’t eat spinach. Most especially, however, don’t go ahead and eat it, then whine about it afterwards. “Man, I hated that spinach! God, it sucked! It’s GREEN!”

  So eat corn, moron.

  And leave me alone.

  As you might detect, I don’t find such people entirely amusing. I also find them stupid and annoying.

  And, oddly enough, flattering.

  Though they don’t realize it (I doubt that they realize very much of anything), their condemnation of me and my fiction is a high compliment. For one thing, I obviously didn’t bore them. More significantly, however, I managed to shock them.

  What could they possibly find so shocking in my books?

  I’m not sure.

  I write about nothing that is, in itself, any more horrible than what is found in the fiction of many other authors. Incident by incident, my stories are less violent and explicit and gory than much of what is being published. Even the sex is less graphic and extreme than you’ll find in other people’s stories. My use of “foul” language is minimal.

  This being true and it is why are some people so shocked by what I write?

  Apparently, it has to do with the way I handle the material.

  It gets under their skin.

  Which is why I am flattered by the vehemence of those who hate me and my work.

  Still, I would find my detractors extremely distressing except for a simple truth: what they despise, my fans apparently love.

  My fans are every bit as vehement as my detractors. And there are more of them.

  How do people become Laymon fans?

  Some stumble onto one of my stories in an anthology. Others may hear about me from a friend. Or I’m recommended by a book dealer when a “horror reader” asks for advice.

  (One Canadian book dealer recommends The Woods Are Dark and offers a money-back guarantee for any reader who is disappointed in it. So far, nobody has returned a copy.) I have fans who buy extra copies of my books and give them to friends who haven’t read me yet.

  If the new reader’s first encounter with my fiction
creates a sudden urge to read everything I’ve ever written, then that person has become a fan.

  It happens a lot.

  I am not a well known writer, especially here in the United States. Quite a few people in the publishing industry are aware of me. (They all seem to know that I’m big in the U.K. but that my books “just don’t sell” in the U.S.) Most “horror” readers are also aware that I exist the few, at any rate, who’ve gone past the stage of reading only bestsellers. For the most part, however, I’m unknown in America.

  In 1994, when I phoned Forbidden Planet bookstore in Manhattan about possibly having a signing, the person in charge of author appearances had never heard of me.

  Even a New York company that had just published four of my books told an inquiring publisher that they’d never heard of me.

  However…

  When Don Cannon arranged my first book signing back in 1989, I suddenly discovered that I had ardent fans. Sure, I’d received fan mail now and then over the years. But the letters had not prepared me for this.

  Customers were lined up to the back of the store. Many of them showed up with boxes or paper bags full of my books. They brought copies of old Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock magazines containing my early stories. They brought anthologies. They brought books that had been published in England. A few of these fans even showed up with bound galleys that I’d never seen before. Many had ten to twenty items for me to sign.

  It was an overwhelming experience.

  And only a few of them appeared to be drooling maniacs.

  True, there was a guy who bore a startling resemblance to Charles Manson. He seemed perfectly nice, however. Mostly, my fans appeared to be very clean-cut, normal people.

  There were men, women, teenagers, and even a few senior citizens (which really surprised me).

  Over the years, I’ve often asked my fans what they do for a living. Some are teachers and students, some are in the construction business. Others are in computer and aerospace industries. There are accountants, postal workers, newspaper reporters, film makers, special effects artists, animal trainers, musicians, and authors. One fan, Daniel, works in a morgue. Another, Roy Robbins, became a book dealer. Others, Del and Sue, opened Dark Delicacies bookstore in Burbank.