|
 |
Find interviews by: | ||
| | |
Joe R Lansdale (Part 2) Go back to Part 1.
"I don't get them so much anymore because I have to watch my diet more and more and work out more and more. See, it used to be that when I didn't have an idea and couldn't come up with a story my wife would brew up some popcorn. 'Brew' is the word I use; it doesn't sound right for popcorn, but when it's hers I think it's correct. It's a special blend that she would put together and it would give me bad dreams. And I would get up in the night and remember them and the next morning I would write them down and I sold them! A lot of the stories I have written are based on dreams I have had through over-indulgence in popcorn." I get the impression that some of your stories come to you in a flash of inspiration. "A lot of the stories in Bestsellers Guaranteed did. Those stories came in a flash, and certainly a few others have come that way. Most have not come quite that fast; they have taken a little more time and gestation. Some have been with me for years and I couldn't find a handle on which to hang the story. I just had the germ of the idea. And with some I would just go to bed, have a popcorn dream, wake up - there it was - and I would sit down and right it." What about the novels? "Something will strike me that I like - a scene or an idea or a concept - and out of that the ending will come, and the beginning will come, and maybe I'll have some idea of something in the middle. I let things free-flow, I always have. I think that's mostly good for me. I've only painted myself into a corner two or three times. Usually I find that my subconscious is working very heavily on it." Do you re-write? "No, I don't. First draft is usually damn close. What I do is I tell myself that if I have the opportunity to go back and re-write then I won't write as well as I did the first time. So I'll write three to five pages a day, very slowly, very carefully, tell myself I won't have any opportunity to re-write it. But when I get through I cheat, I give myself one more time to go through it, but it doesn't make a lot of difference. It's more like polishing."
"Bob's sick. He's been leaking air, he's lying on my floor. I've been thinking about folding him up, sending him out to David Skal, let him give him a burial out in the desert." Was he part of the inspiration for The Drive-In? "No, but he was certainly the inspiration for 'Bob The Dinosaur Goes to Disneyland'. That's really the only thing he was an inspiration for. The Drive-In was a popcorn dream. It kept coming to me and coming to me, and I wrote an article about it for Twilight Zone magazine, one of the first non-fiction pieces they did. It's called 'Hell Through a Windshield', which is in By Bizarre Hands, and that developed into the novel. What happened is Pat LoBruto read that article and said, 'Boy, that would make a great novel.' I said, 'Sure, I'll give it to you.' He said, 'Go ahead, send me a proposal.'" It's a very odd pair of books. "They don't even fit together in a strict way. There's a third one in progress. It'll be done by a limited press if I can get the damn thing finished. But time has been a real constraint because I have so many things I have to do that I enjoy doing just as well but are considerably more profitable." Your dialogue and narrative comes across in this Texas drawl. Is that deliberate? "That's naturally the way I write. When I first started out, if you look back through some of the stories in Bestsellers Guaranteed, some of those are not Texas-sounding. I think that's because I was learning to write and I wasn't aware of my own voice. And as I began to write, I began to have more success when I wrote about East Texas and in an East Texas voice. It was not as painful to do, and yet the result was considerably better. When I first started out I was a tremendously affected mimic. I could write like anybody. If I could read it I could write like it, which is not always a good thing, but it's the way you learn. Most of those stories I wrote I tossed away, but I could also retain the echoes of certain writers. As time went on I found my own voice and I stuck with that, of course." Are there any books out there that you think, 'Goddam, I wish I'd written that'? "Everything James Lee Burke has written! Everything Neil Barrett Jr has written!" How much say do you have in your covers? "I have a lot more say than I used to. Bestsellers Guaranteed was sold to the publishers. I talked to them about the cover, my agent talked to them about the cover, they didn't do a thing about it. Since that time I've been considerably more adamant about having say-so in the cover. I can't demand a certain cover, but they're going to pay more attention to me. I love the covers in the States on the Mysterious Press releases of Savage Season, Cold in July, Mucho Mojo and Two-Bear Mambo which is coming out. They all have a thematic similarity and I'm very fond of those covers. I'm really very fond of Mysterious Press. They're the first publisher I've had that have treated me with respect beyond just one book." A lot of your stuff is very difficult to get over here. Does this annoy you? "Yes, it annoys me. A lot of people enjoy being a cult figure and that's all well and good. I think that maintained my career in the States for a long time, but you want to grow beyond that. You want to be available to the people who want to read you and to let people who might not know they would like your work have the opportunity to explore it. We're working on that right now. One of the reasons for my visit here - apart from vacation - is to pursue that side of it. Two-Bear Mambo is coming out here next year. We're talking to them about Savage Season, we hope something will happen there. If possible, Cold in July. I can't make any promises, but I'm hoping to establish a solid publisher here that will publish my stuff, including the back catalogue." Do you think part of the problem is the difficulty in categorising your work? "There's no doubt that that's a problem. I know for years people said, 'Your career's going to be a mess because you'll never have an identifiable label.' What is happening in the States, one of the things that I most want, is that I'm being identified as 'Joe R Lansdale' rather than as 'horror writer' or 'crime writer'. I hope to transfer that same sort of thinking to here. I think it'll take some time. I don't know if I'm the sort of writer that the British audience is going to latch onto. I may be a bit too American for them, I don't know."
"A lot of people think that Norman Partridge is very much in my vein, and I think Norman will tell you that my work has influenced him. Norman Partridge to me is about the most exciting writer right now, coming up.' Your children are now 13 and 9. Have they read much of your stuff? "Well of course, my younger one hasn't. My son's read some of the short stories, but most of them are probably for when they get older. It's not a big censor thing, I just think that a certain age makes those things more powerful and you can more understand what they're about." There's very strict censorship in this country. Do you think you'll have much problem with that? "Censorship I've never had much problem with. The current novels I'm writing are not as violent. They're a bit more suspense-orientated, and that's purposeful, not audience-wise but boredom-wise. I feel like the really gory stuff has had its day. Not that there's anything wrong with it. I was one of the people who helped promote it and bring it about, because I wanted to shake things up. But now that's been shook and I think it's old hat. Millions of new writers coming out, and in truth I don't like the stuff because it looks like bad copies of the things that a number of us were doing in that time, and I've just seen it all." Given that a lot of our readers won't be familiar with your work, where would you suggest that they start? "That's a hard one. I think By Bizarre Hands if you can find it, is a good place to start. I think it shows me doing a lot of different things. And if you can get hold of Writer of the Purple Rage. There's also another collection in the States which is a good one to get because it's kind of a 'best of'. It's called Electric Gumbo: The Lansdale Reader." Go back to Part 1 where Joe discusses dark crime vs supernatural horror, Jonah Hex comics and Batman: The Animated Series. Website: www.JoeRLansdale.com | ||
| | |
Tell me about popcorn dreams.
Do you still have Bob the dinosaur?
Is there anybody being touted as 'the new Joe R Lansdale'?