Authors: Richard Laymon
I read the manuscript again, this time trimming it drastically eliminating every word, sentence, paragraph and page that didn’t seem right.
Then I typed the revised version into my computer, fixing it more as I went along. I kept working on the story until it seemed as good as my current stuff.
During the revisions, I reduced the manuscript from 275 pages to 170 pages which seemed like a good, solid length for the lead story of my collection.
I changed the title from
Ravished
to “Fiends,” which would also become the title of the collection.
With 170 pages of original material, I felt fine about filling the rest of the collection with reprints. Besides,
Fiends
was to be published in the United Kingdom, where very few of my short stories had ever been published.
I began the selection process by printing up
all my
short stories. I found that I had enough of them to fill at least three volumes.
For
Fiends,
I eliminated the five stories that Headline had published along with
Out Are the Lights
in 1993. I chose to use only a few of the stories that had appeared in
A Good, Secret Place.
I separated my stories into piles. One pile would be for material I would include in
Fiends.
Into the other pile would go all the tales I intended to save for future collections.
The decisions weren’t easy. Stories made a lot of trips back and forth from pile to pile.
For
Fiends,
I tried to come up with a mixture of new stuff and old. A mixture of serious and rather humorous stories. Also, I was careful not to load it down with more than its share of my best (or best-known) stories. I didn’t want it to be a “best of” volume, just a good sampling.
After I’d finally decided which stories to use, I needed to figure out some sort of order to put them in. I certainly didn’t want them arranged in chronological or alphabetical order. I decided to arrange them by content, so that there would be a lot of variety: a scary story here, a darkly humorous story there, a long one, a short one, a new one, an old one, and so on.
Though I made major revisions in
Ravished
to come up with “Fiends,” I did not change the other stories to any significant extent. (If you start
really
revising, where do you stop?) I corrected a few spelling errors, changed a punctuation mark here or there, and made a few minor fixes (very few) to clear up the meaning of a confusing sentence.
It took me a few weeks, working part-time while I was writing
Bite,
to transform
Ravished
into “Fiends” and to prepare the accompanying short stories. I mailed the manuscript to Bob Tanner on January 5, 1996.
I decided not to tell anyone, including my agent and editor, that the anchoring novella was actually a revision of a novel that I’d written more than twenty years earlier.
For one thing, I figured that a previous knowledge of the situation might create a pre-conception about its merits. For another, I wanted to see whether anyone would notice a difference in quality.
Could “Fiends” stand on its own two feet?
It did.
For me, the publication of
Fiends
had special meaning. It wasn’t just a collection of short fiction; it also marked the resurrection of
Dark Road, He’s Out There in the Night,
and
Ravished,
a novel that I’d spent a long time writing and revising back in the days before the sale of my first novel… in the days when I was an aspiring writer, and pretty much of a failure.
To have the story published was like recovering several lost years of my life. Those years hadn’t been a waste of time, after all. I hadn’t thrown them away writing worthless crap; I’d spent them on a novel that would be published more than twenty years later.
At some point after the deal had been made for Headline to publish
Fiends, I
was talking to Dean Koontz on the phone. He mentioned that a small press publisher had asked him to write an introduction for a special limited edition of my novella, “Wilds” (which would eventually not be brought out by that publisher). I said to Dean, “Hey, if you feel like writing an introduction, how about doing it for
Fiends,
instead?”
He agreed to that, and wrote a splendid introduction for my story collection. While much of the introduction was tongue-in-cheek, he wrote a lovely little piece about my daughter, Kelly. For me, what Dean wrote about Kelly was the highlight of the introduction.
Headline published
Fiends
in 1997, and Book Club Associates printed 14,000 copies of it as a double-book with
Bite.
AFTER MIDNIGHT
I finished writing
Bite
on May 1, 1996. On May 6, I once again embarked on the third book of the Beast House series.
Once again, I experienced a false start. On June 9, however, I came up with an entirely new concept for the
The Cellar III.
I called my new version,
The Midnight Tour.
I worked on it until September 4, then stopped again, this time 180 pages into the manuscript.
Why did I stop?
Because I was informed that, due to scheduling problems, the book club intended to postpone publication of
Bite
and print it as a double-book with my next novel.
My “next novel” would have been
The Midnight Tour.
And I didn’t want the third book of the Beast House trilogy to be brought out by the book club as a double-book with
Bite.
So I decided to stop working on
The Midnight Tour
and write a book specifically designed to accompany
Bite.
The result was
After Midnight.
When I made my first notes for
After Midnight,
the story was about a teenaged boy who sees a mysterious young woman in his back yard in the middle of the night.
I wasn’t completely happy with that.
I thought, “What if I turn it around?”
What if a young
woman,
late at night, looks outside and watches a mysterious young
man
come wandering into the yard?
This seemed like a much better idea.
But there was a hitch.
The nature of the story required for it to be told in the first person viewpoint. If I made the main character a female, I would need to write the novel as if it had been written by
her.
A woman.
I’d already written a couple of novels,
Savage
and
Island,
entirely in the first person viewpoints.
But the viewpoint characters had been
guys.
This would have to be gal.
Could I do it in a convincing way?
After giving the situation a little thought, I realized that I’d been writing large portions of many novels, over the years, in which I depicted female characters: how they acted, how they talked, how they thought and felt about what was going on. Those books had worked out just fine.
So why should I let a little word like “I” get in the way? (In fact, it’s my policy to let almost nothing “get in my way” if I think there’s a good story to tell.)
If I went ahead and wrote the book from a woman’s viewpoint, however, I figured that I would be opening myself up for criticism along the lines of, “How dare you, a male, presume to have the slightest clue about what goes on inside the mind and body and heart of a female?”
Again, I’d been making such presumptions for years though never in such a straight-forward way. Every time I write about
any
character, male or female, I’m using my imagination. I’m no more a mad scientist or serial killer than I am a woman.
Besides, I could point to the examples of Stephen King
(Dolores Claiborne)
and Charles Portis
(True Grit)
Both authors were males who wrote novels in the first person from a female’s viewpoint.
If they can do it, why can’t I?
No good reason.
As with
Savage,
I began by experimenting with the character’s voice. I came up with this:
Hello.
I’m Alice.
I’ve never written a book before, but figured I might as well start by saying who I am.
Alice.
That’s not my real name. I’d have to be an idiot to tell you my real name, wouldn’t I?
Identify myself, then go on to write a book that tells more than anyone should ever know about my private life and adventures and passions and crimes.
Just call me Alice.
Sounds like ‘alias,’ doesn’t it?
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.