Read A Writer's Tale Online

Authors: Richard Laymon

A Writer's Tale (39 page)

In
Savage,
the challenge was to breathe life into an “historical” story of such sweeping diminsions. In
Body Rides,
the challenge was to get inside people’s heads in a way that would make readers believe they are actually there.

As with
Savage,
I realized that the concept itself was so nifty that I
had
to give it a try. If I blew it, I blew it. Better to try and fail, than not to try… Here is a quote from a letter that I wrote to Bob Tanner:

Body Rides
seemed like a very exciting concept for a novel, one full of possibilities for visiting unusual characters, getting involved in odd events, and exploring many diminsions of human experience.

Having a magic bracelet allowing such excursions would open up whole new realms of experiences for a person.

If you could “body ride,” you could
be
anyone at least for a while.

And safely, for the most part.

But when you
do
enter someone, what do you find?

One of my main challenges in writing
Body Rides
was dealing with the questions: What goes on in someone,
really?

I wanted to reach behind the way that fiction usually treats the minds of characters. As we know or suspect people don’t think simply by having verbal discussions with themselves. A lot of other stuff goes on.

Our heads, it seems to me, are packed with a jumble of conscious thoughts, monologues, vague notions, images that float through, mind-films of memories, worries and fantasies, projections of possible future events, and always an awareness of the body its activities and physical sensations.

Though I’m fairly well read, I’d never encountered a book that described the minds of characters functioning in the way my own mind seems to function. That is, with such an array of stuff happening simultaneously on different levels. As far as I knew, I was breaking new ground. I had nowhere to look for guidance except into myself. I wondered if I would be good enough to recreate, in a believable way, what I found there.

And, actually, I wasn’t totally sure that everyone experiences the same kind of stuff I do.

I reckoned they likely did.

Hey, I was counting on it.

To do my research for
Body Rides, I
didn’t read psychology books. I have no idea what they might’ve told me. I simply looked into myself and paid attention.

And hoped for the best.

Apparently, I got it pretty near right.

Like
Quake, Body Rides
tells a lot of truth about life in Southern California.

It opens with the main character, Neal Darden, making a late-night run to the video store.

(His last name was intended as a tribute to Christopher Darden, a prosecutor in the trial of OJ. Simpson.) In Neal’s attempt to return the rented video to the store before midnight, he travels exactly the same route that I (and my family) have driven many times at the same hour.

And he thinks many of the same thoughts that have crossed my mind.

The tunnel is there. The strip of wilderness below the freeway is there. So is the video store (really a Blockbuster) and the fast-food joint (really an In and Out). The murders that Neal thinks about well, they were real, too.

A
lot
is real in
Body Rides.

The portrayals of Los Angeles, Brentwood, Santa Monica. The sounds of gunshots being ignored in the night. The bums and weirdos roaming the alleys. Nearly every detail about life in Southern California, including most of the street names.

What isn’t real?

Plenty.

I should mention that The Fort is entirely a figment of my imagination. Its location is based on an area I’ve visited, but there is no amusement park in the vicinity. The Fort seems like a pretty neat place, to me. If it existed, I would sure want to go there. But it doesn’t. Only in
Body Rides.

I finished writing
Body Rides
on September 27, 1995.

Mike Bailey, my editor at Headline, wrote, “Just finished
Body Rides
wow! It’s a trip and a half but we’ve doubtless already talked so you’ll know I think it’s great and your readers will just adore it.”

Headline published
Body Rides
in February, 1996. It was the main selection of the World Book Club and the Mystery and Thriller Book Club. The book club editions numbered 42,000 copies nearly doubling the amount they printed of
Quake
or
Island.

 

BITE

 

On October 17, 1995, I sat down at my computer. Here are some of the notes I made: I’m now done with
Body Rides
and it has been accepted. Have also written my vampire story for Poppy Brite’s anthology. Now is the time to come up with an idea for a new novel.

How about something truly noir-ish?

I toyed earlier with the idea of a guy being approached by a beautiful gal to help her with a dead vampire. In earlier version, she was an old girlfriend. This could be like a companion piece to
The Stake.

She comes to him. Tells him that she needs his help. Then she leads him to the scene of the crime a dead man with a stake through his chest. She confesses that she did it.

Says that he was a vampire. But the cops won’t believe that. They’ll try to nail her for murder. So she asks his help in getting rid of the body.

As in notes for other novels, such as
Body Rides,
I refer to an earlier version of the idea.

Here is what happened.

In my previous attempt, I began the story with the girl asking her former boyfriend for a favor, then taking him to her house and showing him the body of a man she has been killed. He is dead on the floor with a stake in his chest. She tells her old friend that the guy is a vampire, that she needs help in disposing of the body, etc.

As I wrote the first chapter, however, I realized that the story seemed to lie there, dead as a carp.

It had no zip, no “forward narrative thrust.”

I decided not to continue writing it, and went on to look for a better idea.

This sort of thing happens with some frequency.

Many times, I embark on a new novel, then quit. Why? Most often, it is because the story doesn’t seem to be going anyplace. I have a certain standard inside my head. It isn’t well defined, but I get a sense of when things are going well and when they aren’t. If a story
does
have a problem, I’d rather quit sooner than later.

But I save everything.

Because, just as I’ve quit certain projects, I have eventually returned to many of them and brought them (in one form or another) to completion.

If you’re a writer, be sure to keep track of your older stuff, the notes and chapters of unfinished novels, the manuscripts that you completed but which never sold everything.

You may find uses for them.

More often than not, when I start considering ideas for my next novel, I think about some of my earlier attempts. “What about giving
that
one another try?”

Usually, when a story doesn’t seem to be working, there is a very specific reason for it.

The reason isn’t always easy to recognize, especially during the first try. By the time you take another look at the idea, months or years later, the problem
and solution
may be obvious to you.

In the case of
Bite,
I decided to give it another whirl because I really liked the basic idea. I needed a way to give it some energy and forward movement, but I still wasn’t sure how.

That’s why I made extensive notes about possible ways to go with the plot.

Eventually, as I made the notes, I discovered the
specific
problem with my earlier version: at the beginning, the “vampire” was already dead on the floor with a stake in its chest.

The easy fix?

This time, write it so the vampire hasn’t already been dispatched. The girl won’t ask her old boyfriend for help in disposing of the body she’ll ask him to
kill
the vampire for her.

And that made all the difference.

Suddenly,
Bite
was off and running.

In fact, it ran away with itself. By the time I’d finished making my notes on October 17, I’d written seven pages (single spaced) and developed a very involved plot. As I wrote the book following my general ideas for the plot one thing led to another. I followed where they led. Eventually, it became obvious that I couldn’t do
Bite
the way I’d planned.

If I followed my notes
and
allowed the story to develop in the full way that seemed appropriate, it would be over a thousand pages long.

I wasn’t ready for that, and neither was my publisher.

(For one thing, I had a deadline that wouldn’t allow me to spend so much extra time on a novel.)

As a result, I had to choose between developing the story properly or following my intended plot to the end of the line. I couldn’t do both.

I chose to dump the second half of the plot.

Under the circumstances, that involved little more than
not
continuing the story after my main characters disposed of the vampire’s body.

I don’t think I’ll tell, here, what I had planned for the second half of the book. Because maybe someday I’ll want to use that plot. Maybe I won’t. But it’s never a good idea to shut off options by giving away a story that might come in handy someday.

A few little asides about
Bite.

Ann asked me to name the vampire Elliot. I don’t know why.

I’d already given him another name, but she wanted Elliot. So I changed the vampire’s name. It’s easy to do with a computer.

Perhaps to reward me for letting her choose the vampire’s name, she suggested a weekend trip in which we followed the exact route that my characters take in
Bite.
The trip allowed me to take extensive notes about details of the areas. The notes came in very handy. The book would’ve been quite different if we hadn’t taken that trip.

My outlaw biker would’ve
looked
quite different if I hadn’t known Del Howison. I needed to come up with something unusual about the character’s physical appearance, and decided to give him long, flowing white hair like Del. I then named the character Snow White.

Del and his wife, Sue, are the owners of wonderful shop of horrors (including books) called Dark Delicacies. The resemblance between Snow White and Del stops with the hair. Del is a terrific, friendly guy. To the best of my knowledge, he’s not a homosexual pederast or a murderer.

Two months into the writing of
Bite,
I took time off to prepare my first Headline short fiction collection,
Fiends.

I spent about one month on
Fiends,
then returned to
Bite
and finished it on May 1, 1996.

It was published hardbound in September, 1996. The book club later combined it with
Fiends
and published a 14,000 edition of the double-book.

 

FIENDS

 

Though small presses are usually eager to publish collections of short fiction, most major publishing companies have a strong aversion to collections.

Apparently, the things don’t sell as well as novels.

For years, Headline resisted the idea of publishing a collection by me. They even rejected my Stoker-nominated collection,
A Good, Secret Place.

Eventually, however, Bob Tanner convinced them to do one so long as it would be anchored by a novella.

I anchored it with a piece of fiction called “Fiends.”

I’d started writing “Fiends” at my parents’ house in Tiburon, California during Christmas vacation, 1971. I finished that version of the book in the summer of 1972, but it came in at a meager 50,000 words. Despite its brevity, I sent it out to a few agents under the title,
Dark Road.

And had some interesting responses. In a letter dated November 10, 1972, agent Julian Bach wrote to me, “The story certainly moves, and there is a lot of tension in it. I suspect you will find an interested agent and that he or she will find a publisher. Our vote finally went not to take it on. We found it just too sadistic in subject matter but good luck with it elsewhere.”

On March 12, 1973, agent Max Gartenberg wrote, “It’s a gripping enough story. The problem for me was that the characters seem flat, without dimensions, and therefore hard to get caught up with. Good luck with it elsewhere.”

Soon afterward, I wrote a couple of new versions of the book. One, called
He’s Out There in the Night,
was written entirely in the first person, from the girl Marty’s point of view.

(A precursor of
After Midnight)
Another was in the third person, about 60,000 words, and called
Ravished.

I believe that, in 1975, I did a major rewrite of
Ravished
and sent it to agent Dick Curtis.

But nothing came of my efforts.

I finally put all the drafts into a box. It must’ve been quite a large box, because at present count I seem to have seven different versions of
Dark Road, He’s Out There in the Night,
and
Ravished.
In all, I probably spent more than four years writing and rewriting the thing though it’s difficult to know exactly when I did what, because in those days I didn’t date my material very well.

Having put the book behind me, I went on to other things.

When moving all my stuff in preparation for the demolition of our old garage, I took another look at some of my old, nearly-forgotten material. And I reread a few of the unpublished novels.

I liked
Ravished.
Parts of it seemed clumsy and slow and silly. A few parts were outdated.

Also, at 275 manuscript pages, it was too short to be a novel (by current standards) and too long to be a novella.

When I needed a good-sized piece of fiction to anchor my Headline story collection, I realized that
Ravished
might be perfect. If I could fix it.

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