On Writing Style...(continued)

"People often ask me what advice I have for writers, and I reply that the most important responsibility I believe a writer has is to his or her personal truth. Don't be misled by the best seller lists. Just do what feels true to you. Speak your heart, however strange or revelatory it is. Don't be ashamed of how your imagination works. What a reader wants to discover in a book is what you hold uniquely in your head. "I keep a dream journal, which is a repository of images and ideas that spring to mind in sleep. I jot down any and every stray notion that pops into my head during the working day, however irrelevant they may seem. I am always waiting for the connections to occur to me. The threads of narrative which tie these disparate and unconnected notions and images together. "I think making stories which touch people deeply is always hard. I've been writing plays and books for 20 years and I still go to my desk every morning with a mixture of excitement and dread." AOL Appearance Transcript of on-line appearance 16 July 1996 "I map the story out, and then I change it. By the end of writing a book I have many dozens of changes. I am respectful of the fact that narratives change and should change. The period to write a novel is quite a long period, a year, year and a half. You have experiences, which change your point of view. Even though I am writing fantasy, I'm trying to write my own kind of truth. I'm trying to say something. I'm trying to express metaphor in heightened language, sometimes in a form of visual images or poetry, things which I believe about the world. Things, which we believe, change and so it's necessary that the story remains fluid. "I can't imagine ever starting a story with everything completely mapped out and just following that mechanically through for a year to a year and a half. On the other hand starting out with nothing, I've never done that. I've always started out with at least something to begin the journey." Confessions By [Craig Fohr], Lost Souls Newsletter, September / December 2000 (note - interview took place 25 August 2000) "I always do huge amounts of rewriting, but in Coldheart Canyon there was lots and lots and lots. For one thing, I lost my dad a week after I started the book. I'm a good Boy Scout in the sense of wanting to deliver a book when I've promised I will. But it was a stupid thing to do, because I was carrying, and am still carrying, a lot of completely unfelt-through feelings about my dad. So I kind of went and hid in the narrative, and you can't hide from those feelings. They come and get you wherever you are. So what happened was the first draft was this clotted, stupid pass where I wasn't dealing with anything about my dad. So I took a few weeks off and had some long conversations with myself and my husband, David, and then started the novel over using rather than avoiding my unresolved feelings. "I think it's an indulgence to [write] the other [non-linear] way. I think it's a kind of cowardice. There are places in anyone's books that are going to be easier than other parts. And if when you come to a part that's difficult and think, 'Hm, I'll skip that,' all you're doing is lining up these problems that are going to wait for you and kick you in the ass. So I'm very rigorous with myself. I won't allow myself to go on to a fun bit, like the sex. I think if you write big books like I do, and don't write in a linear fashion, something inevitably gets screwed up in the emotional flow. In Coldheart Canyon there are many characters, and each character has its own arc. The arcs start at divergent points, but they converge at roughly the same point. So what you try to do is induce in the reader an incredible feeling of excitement, because everybody's arcs are resolving because they're encountering one another, right? It's not that they're resolving in an abstraction. They're resolving because A meets B meets C and so on." Fuck the Canon By Dennis Cooper, LA Weekly, Literary Supplement, 31 August - 6 September 2001 "I've tried through my writing career to keep ringing the changes. (It's actually an English bell-ringers's phrase.) By which I mean that for me the pleasure of writing is in exploration of new territory. When I first began writing books, I made several volumes of short stories, and these were the Books of Blood. They were violent, visceral and erotic stuff. I then went on to write a Faustian novel, and then on to write the fantasy book Weaveworld. In other words, I've tried to surprise myself from book to book and hopefully kept my readers appetites sharp. Galilee is definitely a departure from previous books, both stylistically -- it's written in the first person -- and in terms of its content. "I, as you may know, love the short story form, but it's very difficult to sell short stories in the present marketplace. My short story collections usually sell about half as many books as my novels. "If you're writing fantasy novels I guess my only piece of advice would be to trust your imaginative instincts and not concern yourself with being like anybody else. I really believe that there is an enormous appetite amongst readers for an originality of vision. In other words, be true to your own dreams and they'll always be people who want to hear them. "I confess it: I'm a workaholic. I get very bored with my own company if I'm not travelling somewhere in my imagination. So the day after I've delivered a book, I'll start on something. [Re. writing longhand] I enjoy the act of writing, the motion of the hand across the page. It's very simple -- it requires nothing by way of preparation. It's also the way I've worked since I first put pen to paper. And it's been a perfectly acceptable working method through almost twenty books. I guess it's a case of: if it's not broken, why fix it?" People Online Appearance Transcript of on-line appearance, 30 July 1998 "I don't want to simply drive a viewer to nausea or repulsion, because at that point you've lost them. What I want to be able to do is drive them back in a completely contrary direction, then push them even further in the direction that they first went, and then further in the other direction. I mean, basically, I want to make squashballs of the audience. Rather than than simply active aggression against them, because my sense is that, uh, this is an old argument, but that particularly under present circumstances we have to do it from within. " Clive Barker : What Makes Him Tick By Tim Caldwell, Film Threat, No 19, 1989 "Short fiction is tough in a couple of regards…I think that one of the things you've got to confront when you do a piece of really outlandish fiction, like 'In The Hills, The Cities', is, okay, how long can I make this work for? I know that this is a dangerous idea, I know that this is a trapeze act. You just couldn't [suspend disbelief] for 300 [pages]. "I…think that horror fiction - at least good horror fiction - deals with adult anxieties and adult fears. I try real hard to marry up adult anxieties with this kind of fiction, rather than simply making it be about the monster in the closet. There's no reason why one can't write about these kind of fears and obsessions in an adult context. There's no reason why the freedom that literature has to address adult feelings in an adult way should not be exploited by the genre." Weird Tales Talks With Clive Barker By Robert Morris, Weird Tales, No 292, Fall 1988 "I don't like trick-ending stories. I've never liked them. They have the structure of jokes and I don't like joke-tellers. I never like stand-up comedians, I always like situational stuff. Or people who are a little off the wall. I think my trouble with the punchline story is that you spend half the time wondering what the punchline's going to be. You start the story in the full and certain knowledge that the last two lines or the last paragraph will contain a twist, and it becomes a guessing game. And I'm not very interested in that. I much prefer to give away everything at the beginning and then start to go to some new place. And then get strange!" Running With The Monsters By Gerald Houghton, Grim Humour, No 14, [Autumn] 1989 "I think one of the things I try to do is constantly try to do something different. If I constantly do something different I have succeeded. I don't like to repeat myself because I feel once I've got the trick of doing something, I'm certain that the second time I try to do the same type of material it would not be as good. Now that may not be true but I feel that the impetus that takes me to the page or the canvas in the first place, the sense of how can I shape this and solve it's technical problems, that passion and energy would be reduced if I was going through the writing or painting already knowing what the solution was. That means to me that I have to be doing something fresh. That's why I went and wrote a kid's book, that's why I wrote a novel with a gay hero; to see if I would be able to write that for a straight audience." Confessions By [Stephen Dressler and Cheryl Bentzen], Lost Souls, Issue 7, April 1997 "I don't [get writer's block]. I'm very lucky in that I do a number of things, make movies, paint pictures, and write. So, if something is troubling to me, rather than sit and continue to labor fruitlessly, I move on and paint or trouble a director who's directing something for me. Those things normally only last a couple of hours and that's a lot to do with the methodologies of my writing process ... systematic and disciplined. So, I don't allow myself room to get distracted from the simple business of writing." Chats From The Past Transcript of on-line Hollywood Spotlight appearance, 23 June 1998 "When my dad had passed away, I had just begun Cold Heart Canyon, and the beginning of a book is a time when you need that momentum because that's where all the doubts crowd in. They crowd in at the beginning and they crowd in at the end. At the beginning of a book, that's when I am thinking because I've got a lot of writing ahead of me, is this a good idea? Is this a bad idea? That's when I'm just a mass of doubts. My dad passed away and there was a month of organizing the funeral and then I came back to America for a week and then I flew out and went on tour for the Essential Clive Barker for three weeks in England, Scotland, and Ireland, which was an error. It was an error because I was emotionally exhausted with all that had happened and then I went on tour, which is also emotionally exhausting in different ways. Going on tour three weeks after your dad dies and being public is a dumb thing to do. I've always been a good boy scout about those things and I didn't want to disappoint anybody. I didn't want people thinking that, 'I was looking forward to seeing Clive and now he doesn't come out on tour.' I just didn't think it was right that I should make my personal problems, as it were, other people's issues. I thought it was my responsibility as a writer and as somebody who has readers who love me and readers who I in turn love, that I should be there for them. "It was a dumb thing to do because what happened was that when I got back I collapsed and there was nothing left. I lost the book for 5 or 6 weeks. I couldn't get back into it; it was associated with grief for me. It was associated with being exhausted from being with Dad in the end and very emotional things like Andrea [Winchester - Lost Souls member] and I have talked a little bit about. So I went and I wrote the first draft of the first Abarat book. Which was a completely different thing to do and was a wonderful escape. I went to a world which I was inventing, It was a world with some dark and tragic elements but actually a pretty up place to be. And then came back to Cold Heart Canyon in the early part of this year and now I'm about a month away from finishing. "So the answer is yes, I did lose momentum and it was retrieved finally, but it was a long period of removal, it was really hard to do and it was the first time it has ever happened to me, but the circumstances were very particular. I'm very protective of the rhythms of my writing. I disappear for long periods when I'm writing, particularly towards the end of a book. It's very rare for me for instance to be talking to somebody as we are talking now, but we haven't talked and I owed this conversation and I wanted to do it but it's very rare for me to do that. Normally I would have head buried and nobody would even know where I was. I'm very nervous about losing momentum. I'm not nervous about this book because I enjoyed writing it. Once I got back into it I enjoyed writing this book immensely. It's coming to an end with a great feeling of satisfaction. So it's been very pleasurable. "Andrea is right there is a genuine danger and at the age of 47 going on 48 I am still learning about writing, I'm still learning about how to do it properly, not just writing, but all the creative processes. I'm still learning. And one of the things I'm trying to get my head around is that every project you work on brings a different set of challenges. There is never a time that enter a project thinking, 'Oh this painting is going to be great,' or 'Oh this book is going to be great.' I'm very excited to finish a painting and stand back from it and go 'Fuck, I love that!' I usually go away thinking 'Damn,' and maybe three or four weeks later come back thinking, 'Well it's not so bad.' But you are dealing constantly with the momentum thing." Confessions By [Craig Fohr], Lost Souls Newsletter, September / December 2000 (note - interview took place 25 August 2000) "Handwriting everything, for me, is psychologically useful because it keeps my writing economical. I think there are word processor styles emerging. Something does seem to happen to a writer's style when he works on a word processor. When you hand write a thing the size of Weaveworld (584 pages) you want to make sure every word counts because it's such a huge labour to get it down." Prince Of Horror By Vern Perry, The Orange County Register, 18 October 1987 "Well, I wrote this entire book [Galilee] – what I do for drafts is I write a book and don’t look at it; I mean, I handwrite everything, so I’ll write, in this case maybe a first draft is 3,000 pages and I get to the end of it and I haven’t looked at it at all, because if I look at it, I despair! So, I write the whole thing once, and then only when I’ve literally put the end on, do I go back and look at it again. Everybody has their different methods; that’s the one that works for me because it protects me from my self-doubt. What happened here was I wrote the book, and realised that there was so much in the book; so many elements, so many characters, so many – it’s set in Samarkand, which is way to the East, it’s set in Hawaii, it’ set in New York it’s set in North Carolina, it’s set in South Carolina, it’s set in all kinds of places. There was just so much going on in the book that what I felt I needed to do was stick it together. And the way I decided to stick it together was to do something I’d never done before which was to write in the first-person; the first person not being Clive Barker in this case, the first person being on of the Barbarossa children – Maddox Barbarossa his name is. He’s a cripple, he’s a drunkard, he’s a cocaine user, he’s not a very nice man and he’s wonderful to write – for all those reasons! I’d never done this before; taken on the persona of somebody else and said well, I’m going to live with this person for – I guess the last draft took me eight months or nine months – and allowed his personal doubts, his personal convictions and his personal anger to appear on the page. And one of the things it allowed me to do (and if you guys get to read the book, you might find this interesting) there are times in the book when Maddox says, ‘I’m lost. I don’t know where I am, I have so many characters here and I don’t know where I am and I don’t think any of this is ever going to stick together and I wish I’d never started.’ That’s exactly how I felt that day. And so, what I really tried to do is make Maddox’s voice my voice, so the book is probably more of a confessional, if you will, than a first glance would show. It’s a book which talks a lot about writing. But it’s also a book, filled, I hope, with magic and family stuff – a lot of genealogy and a lot of the Civil War stuff which I found fascinating. I’m very proud of the book." LA Times Festival of Books Transcript of an interview by Martin Smith at the LA Times Festival of Books, 25 April 1998 "I don't know what other people do, but when I write, I am so close to the material that I just let it pour out. I never write it for myself, I never think to myself, 'Oh, I mustn't do that.' So it pretty much comes out and I just let it be. And in this particular case [Coldheart Canyon] it was some pretty dark, strange stuff that came out. And I think I'd been holding in a lot of anger and resentment towards this town seeing that I've been here for 10 years, and it poured out in this allegorical form - not allegorical, but in some sort of encoded form I should say." Confessions By Craig Fohr, Lost Souls, 22 February 2002 (note - online at www.clivebarker.com) "25% of what appears in the first draft makes the cut in the final book. That's optimistic... 20%. "I do three drafts handwritten and then it's typed up... They are different from each other, they are hopefully improvements in the sense you're going back over something. The first time you write it, it's the first thing that you can think. The second time you're trying to shape the dialogue, helping the characters. The third time you're doing it because you want the words to sound nice, hopefully making the prose better, making it more fun to read, making the jokes funnier and the scary bits scarier." Loveline Transcript of radio appearance on Loveline with Dr Drew & Adam Carolla, 21 October 2002 The World According To... Index | Home page This page has been created for information and entertainment purposes only. All quotes remain the copyright of the original owners.