Writing Style
For all you budding scribes, here it is - the nuts and bolts of it all, aka Barker's top ten tips for writing a top tale...
It's Alive
By John Hind, Blitz, No 80, August 1989
"I think anything you make, almost anything you make, you look back and think, 'I could have done that better' - I think that's right. But the lesson I wish somebody had taught me, at school, really, was that whether you're writing or painting or making a play or whatever, that there comes a time when you walk, you have to walk away. You're not going to make it any better, you're just going to make it different. [You've] just got to let go. And for me, the interesting thing, as I've got older, is that I feel more comfortable with those early, y'know, those early things that maybe one would have wished to have done a different way. And they're part of who I am, they're part of who I am.
[Re. Humour] "Anthony Breer, wandering around, putting on more and more aftershave 'cause he doesn't realise he's dead... In the horror stuff, and indeed in the fantasy stuff, I think it's important to mingle the humour with - and humanity - with the horror and the fantasy, and I think my feeling is on a Clive Barker book, hopefully when you turn the next page you're not quite sure what you're going to get next and that's what I'm always aiming for."
Transcript of interview on BBC Radio 5 Live, 9 November 1998
By Brian Hayes
"The rhythm of writing short stories and the rhythm of writing novels is completely different, and of the eleven books I've produced, six have been collections of short stories. Writing short stories is a series of brief love affairs. Writing a novel is a marriage. That's not my analogy; I think it's Norman Mailer's. And it's true. You really have to fall significantly in love with your subject to spend eighteen months with it. Imajica preoccupied me to that extent. Weaveworld before it was the same. The fact is that I've been possessed with these things and my obsession makes the process very engaging, all-consuming and satisfying. So, if I do work fast and turn out a lot, it's because of spending thirteen hours a day at it and loving what I do. But I don't produce as much as King or Koontz by any manner of means. I'm somewhere in the middle. I'm not as fast as Steve King but I'm faster than Peter Straub. I don't feel confident to approach a narrative until I have a shape for it. I sort of see it as a plan, as if the plot was a city, and I need to rise above and look down. Once I do that I can start. With a long novel like Imajica I need to know where each road in the city is leading because they're going to intersect, move off and divide. The plan may not be down to the last slip road and lane, but it's certainly going to have a general sense of where the major highways are. I see in pictures. I studied philosophy among other things at university and I was a terrible logician because I turned everything into images. They would set you these problems to solve, thing like 'Twenty-three pigs go to a trough, but seventeen of them only like to eat cabbages. Eleven pigs are grey, three are black and white...' On and on, and by the time we got to 'How many piglets are left?' my head was full of pictures of pigs and I would get horribly distracted by them. I cannot abstract. Everything in my books is in pictures, every metaphor. I need the picture, otherwise I don't comprehend what I'm writing. If it's not working in pictures then I stop and wait until it is. That's a major part of what has to happen for me."
A Strange Kind Of Believer
By Stan Nicholls, Million, No 13, January - February 1993
"Most horror fiction is about throwing the monster out, about the rejection of the strange, the rejection of the marginal. The vampire gets stakes, the mummy returns to dust, the monster - the thing which is ab- human, sub-human, in-human - gets fucked over, right royally. I don't write that kind of fiction. I write the kind of fiction where the monster has to be made peace with, one way or the other. Within the metaphysical world which I create, it's not possible to throw the monster out and assume that one's house has been purged, because the monster is part of the texture of our internal workings. It's the antithesis, in lots of ways , of Stephen King's fiction in which the monster is purged and destroyed and the status quo - though it may have been changed, people may be dead - will nevertheless be re-established in some substantial way. Even in the short fiction, in the span of 30 pages, I will attempt to do something which will throw the world over on its ass, in such a way that it won't be able to pick itself up and re-establish itself in the way that it was on page one. Horror fiction is uniquely placed to do that, because many of the things that it can talk about, by its very nature, do that to us anyway: like death or the loss of loved ones. The whole panoply of stuff which gives us the sweats, the stuff that can never be exiled from our lives. At best you can hold death at bay, you can pretend it isn't there, but to deny it totally is a sickness. And I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems and, perversely perhaps, to enjoy a vicarious confrontation with them. Simply scaring people isn't interesting. I think, in some ways, I'm writing a New Gothic. My characters tend to be a return to those marginals and outsiders and whackos and madmen and over-sexed visionaries that wander through the Gothic novels doing unspeakable things to each other. In fact, I think that the anti-Gothic - what I would call Bourgeois horror, is the kind of horror which is firmly rooted in the nuclear family, though it tends to show the nuclear family under threat... Creatures that appear in your kitchen and do unspeakable things to your steaks - the worst possible offence against the nuclear family ... Interfere with your TV, or take your child away and threaten not to give her back, or invade your half dug swimming pool - this is all terribly bad news. Here you are trying desperately hard to be upwardly mobile and the living dead are visiting you in your own kitchen. The people in films like Poltergeist are Mr. and Mrs. Normal and their response to the monsters is, "Get the fuck out of here!" They don't want to understand them; they don't want to relate to them, they just want to kill them. Or if they can't kill them, at least exorcise them. The monsters represent forces which are subversive to their status quo. Now, the characters in my fiction are very often dreamers, lost people, people who aren't quite at ease with the bourgeois, the domestic. And there can be lots of reasons for that. That's one of the reasons why there are a lot of female protagonists in my fiction, because a lot of women are pissed off with the status quo in some way."
Clive Barker
By Nigel Floyd, Samhain, No 4, July 1987
"I believe in what I write - not literally in that I believe with the right incantations I could step through into the Imajica, but I believe in the philosophies that underpin my work. Obviously in the case of Weaveworld, because it was set in Liverpool, it had large autobiographical slices in it. I mean, I know all those places very well. I stayed in the hotels that are mentioned in Imajica... I've kept company with the same kinds of people as Gentle and Judith. Obviously, when you step into the worlds of the imagination - the Imajica and the Fugue - you become even more autobiographical, curiously because when it is all invention, it really is yourself that you are putting down in writing. All this material is pouring out of you subconscious and onto the page."
Imajiman
By Jon Gregory, Hellraiser, No 2, 1991
"In order to get through a big novel like Imajica, both as a reader and as a writer, you need mystery - and you can't have one mystery, you need to have many. There's a pulling away of the veils constantly. What I've tried to do to the reader is say, "There isn't the solid moral clarity of Lord of the Rings". I do the reverse of that. Imajica's characters are human beings like you and I who, of course, discover a larger purpose for themselves. But in discovering a larger purpose, rather than becoming more themselves - like the hobbits out there in the wilderness becoming more Hobbity - my characters skin themselves. The lives they have fall away. In my fiction I am trying to reflect the fact that we are living in a world full of ambiguities, questions and paradoxes. Perhaps the same was true for Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and the rest of the Inklings as they sat discussing fantasy in the 1940's. They'd recently lived through a just war against a great evil, so maybe they also occupied a morally ambiguous world, but I don't think it was anything like as ambiguous as the world is now. Whether that's good news or bad, I don't know."
A Strange Kind Of Believer
By Stan Nicholls, Million, No 13, January - February 1993
"I don't find myself terribly interesting and that's one of the reasons why I write in the mode of trying to escape from the coral that is me. The removal of the limitation that is the self into the place that is the image are things that are boundless, this is the mystical heartbeat of what I do. It's always been that. Over and over, characters in my fiction seek after an experience in which they are released from themselves in some way or another - released from the idea of self or an experience which is limited and the consequences are quite terrible, very often than not. The forgetting of self and remembering; two examples are Cal Mooney and Gentle. Both of them are very screwed up heroes who have experiences in other worlds which are resolved by their remembering in some way or another. Cal is brought back from a no-man's-land or almost being physically erased by remembering himself, by seeing his own reflection. Gentle goes to the Imajica to realize that the villain of the Imajica is himself. The rememberings are in a sense about the self but more importantly about being taken out into the landscape of the imaginative world. For me, who I am, I am only a vehicle for that journey. What's being seen on that journey is more important than who I am. I'm not being self-effacing about that, it's just that I don't find the view, when I look at myself, very interesting. It's very familiar to me until I start to look at the places where I think that some of the things that have happened to me might be useful to other people in the way that I tell the story. Talking about being gay in Sacrament through the character - talking about depression in Chiliad and talking about middle-age in Chiliad as well. Talking about getting to the place where the certainties that take you through your thirties and drive you on. You think if only I had this or if I only do that, everything would be all right and then discovering that I've already got all these things and it still shows. I wanted to express these things truthfully about myself because I only become interesting to myself when I disappoint myself. If everything is just chugging along just fine, why write about it? There is nothing remotely interesting about that. What is interesting is to be troubled and screwed up and to be dealing with being troubled and screwed up. Out of that period, that rush through the first ten years of my career, everything was actually falling into place with an uncanny accuracy. I'm in a place now and I'm looking at who I am and saying I don't get it. How can I express that I don't get it in a way that is useful to other people and helps me get it? Fiction for me can only be a means to say how can I understand what is going on in my life better? It's the only thing that I can say, without question, helps me get to the page - this puzzle that is unsolved; why the fuck am I alive? I don't find myself any more ready to answer that question now than ten years ago."
Confessions - An Artistic Escape
By Stephen Dressler, transcript of a interview by Douglas E. Winter at DragonCon, Atlanta, 29 June 1997, Lost Souls, Issue 8, July 1997
"Do I still have the buzz? Now more than ever! It's what I do. I love the art of storytelling. When I've finished with the European promotion for Illusions, I'm off to see my publisher to plan out the next five years of my life."
Lord Of Illusion
By [ ], Home Cinema Choice, September 1996
"I also think that there are a lot of images that you should leave people to make up their own minds about, and so one of the reasons why in the horror fiction I describe things so graphically is that I don't want to make a judgement about it, I say, 'Here is the image.' I tend not to say, 'The thing was revolting, putrescent , filthy,' I tend to say, 'This is what it looked like, this is what colour it was, now you make up your mind whether you think that is disgusting or putrescent or filthy.'"
Clive Barker In The Flesh
By Dave Hughes, Skeleton Crew, III/IV, 1988
"What's important, I think, is to be fresh, and also I think to feel as though you're breaking personal ground, because I do very strongly believe that the best sort of fiction is written from personal concern. Those concerns have to be fresh in your head, and if they're not fresh in your head, then they're dead. I write out of anxiety and obsession, I write out of hope and passion. I don't write out of stale marketing ideas because someone paid me a million bucks. Finally, all I can do, I believe, is hopefully deliver material which is not only fresh to my audience , but fresh to myself. I mean 'Weaveworld' was a very distinct change of pace from 'The Books of Blood' and 'The Damnation Game' and indeed 'Hellraiser'. My new novel [Great and Secret Show] will also be a fantasy novel, but it will be again a distinct change of pace, and I think it's a course one continues to surprise oneself, because there's nothing I hate more than formulaic writing of various kinds - you know, the kind of thing where you feel the author has just basically put his brain on hold and has just filled the spaces."
Weaving Words With Clive Barker
By Leigh Blackmore, Terror Australis, No1, Autumn 1988
"I like to keep things in flux for as long as possible, and one should always strive, particularly with horror fiction, toward the limits of a particular story. I don't want to send people to bed happy, or out of a cinema feeling they have only been entertained. I want them to be on their guard. I hate 'safe' horror fiction that leaves the reader content. I want to get inside the reader's head and make some trouble! Keeping in flux allows one the chance of using last-minute inspiration. And I do that rather a lot."
Meet Clive Barker
By Philip Nutman & Stefan Jaworzyn, Fangoria, No 51, January 1986
"The underpinning of a lot of fantastic fiction - horror , science fiction, fantasy - is metaphysical. They're the tales of the collective psyche, the fundamental metaphors of confrontation with things that may devour us or may offer us transcendence, and may be offering both in the same moment. At its best, fantastic fiction creates an immensely sophisticated, metaphorical language about very basic human issues. I'm not denigrating entertainment, but I hope that good horror fiction can be more than that. For me, it's only going to make sense if it somehow liberates you into a new truth of some kind. A lot of horror fiction is about individualism and the loss of individuality. That has a great deal to do with how much each of us possesses our own body, and how much it's outside of our possession."
Barker's Searching For A Higher Plane
By Bob Strauss, The Fresno Bee, 25 October 1987
"I couldn't be a neo-realist, however hard I tried. It's very important to me to make the motivations accessible , not to have people just succumbing to uncontrollable urges. However fantastic the story may be, the horror is still rooted in human desires. I'm just not interested in the kind of horror film where virgin girls are pursued by men in ski masks. There are no virgins in my movie [Hellraiser]. And no ski masks either, come to that."
Hellraiser
By Tom Pulleine, Films and Filming, February 1987
"His [King's] stories are healing stories in a way mine aren't. All horror heals; it opens some wounds and shows you how to close them again. But King heals to a great extent by dealing with monsters as though they were alien. I heal by having characters realise that the monsters are part of themselves. My characters comprehend, 'Oh I understand now why that works, how those creatures operate, and they are part of my instinct, my desire, my heat, my sadness, my loneliness, my fear of old age, my madness. They're part of me.'"
Barker vs The King
By Matt Roush, USA Today, 22 August 1986
"I like to work. I don't like bars; I don't like clubs, I like to be at home working. I love my housemates, I love my dog, I'm pretty dull. And I do think that the writing of a large imaginative work takes a kind of obsession, an immersion in its reality to the point where the life lived outside its pages seems duller."
Lord Of Illusion
By Charles Isherwood, The Advocate, 21 February 1995
"The idea is clearly to introduce into the culture some ideas which really come from the trust deep-seated mythological places. So, yes, I value that more and more highly, the more we become an MTV culture, the more we are trivialised by the culture we feed upon, the more important it seems to me to value doing that, and, at the same time, seeking a populism which is the only democratic expression of that. That's the tough thing. I mean, Shelley was actually a popular poet. I mean, everybody knew who Shelley was; he was a figure of his age. Blake wasn't, of course. Wordsworth certainly was. The thing which infects our culture is the idea that populism, the desire to make democratic statements in fictional or poetic form, is somehow or other a receding from genius, which is so much to do with a kind of nineteenth century attitude to art.
"On 'The Great and Secret Show,' 'The New York Times Review of Books' said if you don't like the new Thomas Pynchon try the new Clive Barker, which was one of the nicest things anybody's ever said. And it was kind of interesting, they were talking about the new Pynchon and saying, you know, if this doesn't suit you, here's a guy who's doing something similar but doing it in a different area, which I found kind of interesting. Pynchon doesn't have popular appeal, truly. We're talking about a literary writer who is extremely difficult, in truth. I don't know, I didn't see the 'I-D' piece you're making reference to, so it's very difficult to make any informed judgement on that. But on the observation you make, it seems to me that what Pynchon does, as a cultural magpie, which is very interesting, is, nevertheless, unrelated, in truth, to the real democracy of writing. I am much more interested in getting to the parts Pynchon doesn't reach you know, and there's a lot of 'em. I think you've got to have an ambition for your work, and part of my ambition is that I mingle the popular form and the high-art tradition, but bury the high-art ambition so deeply that it never bothers the reader. The reader doesn't think, "Oh God, this is hard work!"
The Edge Interview
By David Alexander, The Edge, 1991
"Whether you are a good or bad writer is an irrelevancy when you first begin. What's important is that you write, you get up in the morning and you say, "I'm going to treat this like a job and I'm not going to just do this when I feel like it. I'm going to really get to work on making this the best I can make it, and work hard to achieve something" . You can't sit around waiting for inspiration to strike like lightning , cause you'll wait around for a long time. Maybe once every blue moon a piece of lightning will strike, but most of the time you'll wait around twiddling your thumbs. What you have to do is just get on with it, and write whatever comes out and not worry over much about whether the punctuation is right or the spelling is right or even if the order of the words is right, but just get on with it.
"You have to go after, seek after the things which are truthful to you. And I mean truthful. If you don't believe in Christ, then don't have a hero whipping out holy water when it suits him, because you're not telling the truth about what you believe about the world. If you don't believe that the image of Christ is ethicasy in the world, then don't have your hero use it in such a way. All you doing is accessing a series of cliches from somebody else's work. If you're gay, write about gay characters. If you're straight, write about straight characters. If you're straight and confused, write about straight and confused characters. If your passion is about painting and football, write about painting and football. Write about your mother, write about your father, write about things you know, and then let your imagination lurk on those things and develop them into something new and fresh even for you. Surprise yourself, astonish yourself, and tell the truth. "
Confessions
By [ ], Lost Souls, Issue 2, [September] 1995
"One of horror cinema's great lines: it's from Videodrome. 'Long live the New Flesh!' It's so perfect. The New Flesh will transform. A new evolutionary step is taking place. But David [Cronenberg] sees the transformation as a repulsive thing... revolting. In my written fiction, they enjoy or come to enjoy the transformations that happen to them. They see it as a good thing... I obviously do drafts. But I seldom come to the end of a piece and decide that it's wretched. Probably 97 percent [of what I write] gets out there. [I write] 2,000 to 2,500 words before I'm allowed to get up from my table. Every day, that much at least."
The Clive Barker Interview
By Mike Lackey, Marvel Age, No 107, December 1991
"Almost everything in my fiction, believe it or not, has a root in something I've experienced. I really believe writers are a kind of journalist. That is to say, I need to feel something deeply - something that moves me profoundly - before I can communicate it to my audience. Now, on occasion, the root idea can be very remote from the finished article, but however outrageous the final, fantasticated tale may be, somewhere in my history lies the real inspirations for it...
"I've never read any books about the writing process which I have found particularly useful. That isn't to say that such books don't exist; I've simply never encountered any of them. One of the reasons why I'm talking to you today is because I'm presenting a lecture about the unleashing of the creative process next Saturday (Aug. 23) in San Francisco. I think that the chance to speak one-on-one with writers is probably more useful than anything that can be put down in a book. Certainly when I've done such lectures previously, those who have come along, whether they are just beginning their careers or already have something published, seem to find the exchange of views very useful."
AOL Appearance
Transcript of on-line appearance, 18 August 1997
"Even today I keep a Dream Journal. It's whatever's going on in my subconscious, or things from dreams or even interesting items that pop into my head. I have thousands of pages of notes which I hope someday will turn into stories, or movies...Being on the road gives me breathing time and the opportunity to think about what to do next. In fact right before I came down for lunch today, I was writing down notes about my feelings. Things that I need to do to keep motivated. I need to be motivated if I am to going to devote fifteen months to writing another book. And I couldn't write a book just because it's a commercial idea. I need to have a compelling reason."
Clive Barker
By Timothy Nasson, In Step Magazine, Volume 13, Issue 14, 25 July - 6 August 1996
"I think that, in a way, ['to thine own self be true'] is the only certainty I have as a creative person, because I'm definitely not going to trust the reviews - one person likes the book, another person hates it, so what am I going to do with that? All I can do is sit at my desk and be as clear headed about what I want to express as I can be. Of course, when you look back at your books you always wish you had been more clear headed, but what matters is doing it in the moment of writing. What am I trying to express her? Can I express it clearly and economically and evoke a response from the reader? And having done that, you want to take it through the editorial system and use those notes from the editor that make sense and ignore those that don't and hopefully you will end up with something which communicates strongly and clearly with the reader.
"I don't think that the despiritualised, dehumanised culture in which we live, the McDonalds and Disney culture, does our internal lives, our mythological lives, any favours at all. In other words, to be an Outsider in this culture now is to be looking inside at a plastic world, and I think it's easier to critique that world if I don't belong to it… In Hollywood where I live now, there's a lot of having lunches, a lot of going to parties… and I will have no part of that. I'm certainly not very good at it, I don't like it and I feel a little weird about it. I don't want to be part of the problem, I want to be a part of the solution, and the only way I can help solve the problem of the plasticity of our world is by writing, by painting and by making my work, so I stay where I can do that, which is at my desk, in my studio. I will venture out when I need to sell a book or exhibit my paintings, but the rest of the time my job is to be here and imagine."
Addicted To Creativity (Part 1)
By Bill Babouris, Samhain, No 70, November 1998
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