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I like Joe Lansdale. He was kind enough to drop by and chat a while back and since then Id wanted to have him back to pick his brain a bit more. Well, the opportunity presented itself and thankfully he agreed to come back. What followed was a great conversation about the art of writing, his new book, the South and addressing those pesky "Bubba Nosferatu" rumors. Kick back and enjoy! ****** |
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Joe: It's been a couple years since the initial interview we had. What's been going on?
Joe R Lansdale: I think the last book I had out was "Sunset and Sawdust" and that was at least a couple years ago. This new one is "Lost Echoes" and it's coming with Vintage. Im currently working on a new book for Knopf not to mention a bunch of film work and comics, the whole thing. I'm always busy.
Joe: No days off?
JRL: (laughs) No, no days off. Well actually I just took a few days off, my daughter opened for Ray Price. She's a singer and shes been the opening act for him the last three shows in Texas.
Joe: Thats sounds good.
JRL: Yeah, you bet.
Joe: Well lets start with the new book first, "Lost Echoes".
JRL: Yeah.
Joe: Why don't you give us a little bit of an overview?
JRL: "Lost Echoes" has to do with a guy that when he was young he has an ear infection. When it heals it leaves him with a strange ability. He finds that something has been switched in his brain, a sort of audio chronology meaning that if something violent has happened, maybe in house say for example somebody was thrown up against a door violently, if that door is slammed that sound for him, not for other people, but for him he not only hears the sound but it activates what's stored in the door. Sort of like a Manitou of the old Indian beliefs. He sees the images of that violent act. It gets to wherever he goes that where theres been some sort of violence and some kind of sound attached to it; if he hits a pothole and there's been someone thats bumped their head violently due to that and that sound is somehow trapped in that area, that sound is released for him. He has all of these images that he sees and sounds that he hears and eventually he has something that shows him about a murder that happened in the past. He can't see the future but he can see the past. And it leads him to try to bring this person to justice.
It involves a couple of other major characters that I think are interesting. There's Tad, a kind of washed-up old martial artist and the little girl he grew up with who he becomes someone he has a romantic interest in. The thing too is that alcohol is the only thing that seems to numb it for him so he develops an alcohol problem and so does the martial artist and the two of them try to get rid of the alcohol problem together and solve this crime. It's a pretty exciting book to tell you the truth. I think its very exciting I think; it's got elements of horror and a little bit of science fiction to boot.
Joe: Yeah and it sounds like an interesting character study on top of it.
JRL: That's right. Thats the stuff that really makes it shine.
Joe: Someone made an observation to me once that a good story the more outrageous and absurd it is the more truth it tells. I know in your short stories especially it seems to come out a lot.
JRL: Yeah, I think that's true. I think it's not only absurd, especially in novels and short stories not so much because absurdity becomes the character itself, but in a novel, more absurdity becomes the stronger and realistic the characters are the more believable the story is. People will accept almost anything if they believe the characters.
Joe: Youre kind of known for having really strange things happening--which is part and parcel with the sci-fi and horror genres, but you integrate it a lot better than a lot of people do.
JRL: Thank you.
Joe: Where does that strike you? When does an idea hit you and you think Wow, that's something I can turn into something.
JRL: It's hard to know. I knew, for example, this novel "Lost Echoes"--I was in a hotel room in Houston, Texas. A friend of mine, Terril Lee Lankford was having a book signing there and I went to see him and I ended up staying in this hotel room. In fact Lee and I traded rooms for some reason he ended up in another room and I ended up this room and I was too stupid to realize the window was open so I heard the traffic all night long. I could hear everything, furniture in the backs of things, people yelling and screaming and whatever and all night long I heard this stuff and this idea about these sounds, and imagine little stories spun off of those sounds and when I woke up the next morning the basic concept for the book was there.
So that's one example. You never know when it's going to come and sometimes I'll sit down to do something and its not really there. And then I'll be taking shower or taking a walk and bam, an idea will jump into my head and it's the one I really need to do.
Joe: For me it's funny because sometimes the one's you'll work on just won't go anywhere and then, like you said, you'll be out walking the dog or something and an idea will jump you and take your wallet.
JRL: Right. Yeah, there are variations on it. I've had some things I've worked on and slaved on I didn't think were any good ended up being some of my best work. Sometimes you know--writing has its own way of handling things. I work on a steady schedule. I work everyday roughly around three hours a day or at least three to five pages whichever comes first, Monday through Friday, that's what I try to do anyway. Occasionally I'll work something different than that, I just find that you have to keep working because you have to keep working those muscles, so to speak. It's like lifting weights, the more you lift weights the bigger the muscles. Well the more you use your brain and your writing skills the easier it becomes--or it's easy enough, it's never easy.
Joe: Well when it is it's nice, but those are few and far between. You wait for those you're not going to get anywhere.
JRL: That's right.
Joe: "Lost Echoes" was just released last week?
JRL: Yeah, last week. I did a signing at Murder by the Books at Houston, Texas last week.
Joe: You said there was another coming out through Knopf?
JRL: Yeah, I'm working on that one now. I think that'll be next year.
Joe: Of course there's a lot of buzz generating on the prequel to "Bubba Ho-Tep".
JRL: It may be a prequel, it may be a sequel, I don't know. I'm not writing that. I keep hearing rumors that I'm writing it but I'm not. That's something Don [Coscarelli] is doing, Don and Stephen Romano. So I don't know where that project is. I talk to Don every now and then. I just know that he's working on it. When or if it comes out I just couldn't tell ya. I don't know enough about it yet.
Joe: I know a lot of the sites out there said you were working on it.
JRL: I think it was because at one point Don said he wanted me to write it but we could never get out timing together. That's the problem. I had other projects or this project or whatever.
Joe: If that was an opportunity you have done it though. I know you have a thing against doing sequels or prequels--which I don't blame you.
JRL: I really didn't want to do it to be honest. I told him I didn't think there ought to be a sequel. But he was really determined and I thought, well if he and Bruce were going to do it and if they wanted me to do it--and they did--but if the time had allowed I might have done it. Who knows, it could circle back to me yet. On another hand I just think I've kinda done that. Even though I didn't write the screenplay I've done that story. I just don't know it needs to be rehashed again but on the other hand if it's going to happen you always think you'd like to have some protection over the thing if I could but it just might not work out time-wise.
Joe: Do you feel like you have a kind of relationship with your characters as far as a protective mother hen feeling?
JRL: I do up to a certain point and I think some more than others. There's some books I'm much more protective of. Anytime, if you're talking about film, anytime you sell to film it's somewhat out of your hands and if you take the money you have to go away. The other side of the coin is that I try to pick people who are really excited about the project and want to do the project as close as possible to what I meant for it to be. In some cases I've written the screenplay. I did the screenplay for "A Fine Dark Line"--I'm also co-producing that film. I did the screenplay for "The Big Blow" but I'm not co-producing that one, that's Ridley Scott. I don't know if they'll do it or if they'll keep my screenplay or what. I know they liked my screenplay and I think its the best screenplay I've ever written but you only have so much control. Some of the smaller companies can give you more control. Of course they have some limitations in the kind of actors and special effects and things like that but just like "Bubba Ho-Tep" sometimes that's the best kind of film.
Joe: I'm a big fan of the do-it-yourself independent films
JRL: Me too.
Joe: Last time we spoke we talked about what influenced you and you had mentioned Edgar Rice Burroughs
JRL: Edgar Rice Burroughs is my sentimental favorite author. Probably the author that influenced my style the most--there's not a single one but there's several, like Flannery O'Connor and Ray Bradbury and Hemingway, Robert Bloch to some extent, Mark Twain--there's a lot of authors that have influenced me.
Joe: I know especially with Twain and O'Connor they have a very local flavor to them. They were very much from where they were at. And that's something that also comes through in your work.
JRL: I follow after that. I sure do.
Joe: And maybe its a bias of mine, but it seems Southern writers have sense of mythic proportions about their environments that's lost with northern writers.
JRL: Yeah, I think Southern writers have a real sense of place and the people and there's a kind of Lovecraftian feel underneath all that. Even people who haven't read Lovecraft--I mean I read Faulkner and it's almost like there's something out there scratching to get through. That's one of the weird things I notice about Southern writers. There's this strange cosmos where real things are happening but there seems to be some sort of warped vision.
Joe: Is that an intentional thing, or is that just something that comes through from being there?
JRL: I think it comes through from being there. I think that probably you're seeing new Southern writers will be less of that. I think some of that comes from having grown up in a rural environment that puts you in contact with nature and things of that kind. The day to day life is different. With cities, all cities are alike and urban feel is different than rural feel and I believe that's part of it. I think the South was so rural for so long, and it still a lot of it is, but it's changing a lot and you're seeing a new South which to me, it's the way the things go, but it's not nearly as interesting to me.
Joe: Kind of the difference between Old Vegas and New Vegas on some level.
JRL: Yeah, I guess that's true. Somewhat similar.
Joe: In regards to that, I ripped through High Cotton a few years back, the collection of short stories. I ate it up; I loved it.
JRL: Thank you.
Joe: A couple stood out. One was part of an introduction you had done, an autobiographical piece about your father.
JRL: Yes. I think that was in "The Good, the Bad and the Indifferent" but I won't swear to it. It was talking about my father. Yeah, I've written a few things about him.
Joe: I know it varies for different writers, but have you thought about doing a more full kind of autobiography?
JRL: Yeah, I really have. I've thought about it. It's something that I think I may do. If I don't do a novel length I think I may do a long piece that I'll include in some collection. I've really thought about it a lot and I think that it's something I'll eventually do. I hope so. I've actually been asked to do my own memoirs a couple of times and I've thought "Duh, why would I do that?" but I may breakdown and do that as well.
Joe: From reading that story, and it gets back to the idea of the South, there seemed to be a real affection for both the place and the memory--it was nostalgic without being cheesy. And that's really hard to do. I think I've read enough to where you see some writers will just paint an extreme of something and not realizing that the warts and all approach is more dignified.
JRL: And it's more believable and it's more acceptable. People will accept that, you know. There's always somebody--I know I wrote a piece on my mother, and my mother's a great person, but I think it was a very much a warts and all kind of piece. I remember somebody saying that he made a Madonna of his mother, and I thought, "well I dont think so." You never know. It doesn't mean I don't think highly of her. We're very, very close; she's a very fine woman. But I think I painted a very realistic portrait and I thought, man, if they think this is a Madonna piece than they must have had the childhood from hell. I didn't have a bad childhood at all, but my mother she had some hard times and different things of that nature. She was a helluva good person, but it's funny how people view things.
Joe: How much of that experience between your family, growing up in the South and the literature you liked growing--and this might be kind of a silly question to ask, affected where you're at now.
JRL: Tremendously. I would think that Southern writers, and muscular writers like Hemingway and to some extent Twain I even think, Jack London and writers with a lot of humor and writers with a lot of humor and writers that dealt with anything fantastic or weird and stuff and were always attractive to me so I read everybody I could get my hands on. I still do. I think it stimulates me and keeps me excited and interested in writing the books. Sometimes when I'm writing a crime novel, even if it doesn't have any weird or horrific elements, there's a feel to them that makes you feel some of those same feelings that you get from those things that have a sense of wonder or this feeling that theres something else going on beyond where we are. I don't personally believe in the supernatural. I'm not religious or anything like that, but for the feel, the sort of spiritual feel in the sense of nature or in the sense of doom or whatever, it's a feel I like to put in the books to give them an extra boost to the reader.
Joe: You mentioned humor, too. I'm always curious to hear people's theories on writing humor because it's not easy to do, but I think anything that's good, whether it's horror or drama or romance, it has to have some element of it just make it believable.
JRL: Oh sure. I see a lot of things as funny. Sometimes you need to see things as funny to keep from going insane. To me, there's a lot of humor in a lot of things. It's like anything else. Some days or some books, some stories, I'm seeing things much more humorously that day. Sometimes I see them in a much darker vein and even when I see them dark I tend to see them with a gallows humor a lot of times. Humor is very important to me; I love it. It's funny, I'm not a person who likes stand up comedians, I can watch them, I like some of them, but that's not my kind of humor. I tend to really like the kind of storytelling humor like Mark Twain had. That's the kind that really appeals to me.
Joe: Thats probably the most difficult type to do. It's not the one-liner type of punchline. That kind of humor, as we noted before, really thrives on the sense of character. When you have a feel for who the character is it gives it a context.
JRL: Nearly all humor has a basis in darkness. That's why Twain said there's no humor in heaven.
Joe: You can always get great observations like that from Twain.
JRL: Oh yeah, he's the best.
Joe: We've talked about the South versus the North, how do you look at being an American writer? Do you view it in a context like that?
JRL: Well, even though I write regionally I don't think of myself as a regional writer anymore than I think of myself as a horror writer. I know that region is a big part of what I write and horror has affected what I write even though I've probably written less horror than anything which is interesting. Most of my stuff has been crime or off-beat or suspense or whatever you want to call it or mainstream. I've borrowed some of the sensibilities from horror and I love horror. And I've borrowed stuff from science fiction, S.F. I tend to call it--what our generation called it. And I've borrowed tropes from all those things but I consider myself just a writer, an American writer.
I think that when I go overseas I think that's a big thing that I'm very much recognized as being an American writer--really big in Italy for example and considered a major novelist and short story writer there in the vein of anybody you can think of. Thing is they recognize that Americana and they feel that I'm in touch with that. To me, that's the way I think of myself, as a writer, as an American writer because I really never know where I'm gonna go next. I'm doing crime now but that doesn't mean I'm married to it forever. And I'm really not doing pure crime; I'm doing what I'm doing.
Joe: As far as the Americana sense I think its strange because I think a lot of Americans actually miss out on that. It's like Chinese food in China: they just called it food.
JRL: That's right.
Joe: If you had to explain the differences between an American feel versus something else, how would you classify the primary differences.
JRL: That's kind of a hard one. I think it's a legacy of hope and disappointment. I think that's what America has always been about. More hope than disappointment I like to think, although lately I've sorta felt the other way. But I just think that there's this feeling that there's something better or another way to do it or that better things await and I feel like that's always there. I think that for those people who don't get it, it adds to the sense of hopelessness to a story and for those people who get it, it gives that sense of great achievement even though it sometimes it may have nothing to do with their own efforts. To me America is always trying to be better or smarter, at least in our minds, it doesn't necessarily mean it's true, but it means were always trying to look for some new horizon. That's what I characterize as American fiction.
Joe: I think that's a pretty good sum up, actually. I know your tastes change as far as what you like to do. I think last time we talked you were enjoying the novel writing.
JRL: I'm still writing novels, but I've gotten interested in writing more short stories again and screenplays. I've done several of those and I've gotten back into doing some comic work and stuff. I think sometimes you do that so you can rejuvenate and come back to another kind of writing with a fresher outlook. That's where I am now, anyway.
Joe: Its the process of forgetting something so you can do it again. The process of being a writer is a lot more difficult than most people give it credit for.
JRL: Oh yeah. It beats working at the aluminum chair factory, but it is harder than people imagine, yes.
Joe: If you had to describe the processes you go through as a writer, whether you're transitioning from one form to another or whatever, is there a rough road map you could give for something like that?
JRL: The only thing I can tell you that you gotta do is to read a lot, put your ass in the chair in front of the machine and write. There really is no secret other than doing that. It helps if you understand what you read and learn from it and have some modicum of talent. Those things are there. And you just to have a dedication and real love for it.
I know people who have certain word skills but they dont have a true love for it. They're not always reading. They're not picking up books. They aren't running their hands over books. They aren't the ones at libraries or bookstores or whatever. To me, they shouldn't be writers. Or they're not reading anything that wasn't written this year or the year before. They have no sense of history of the things that have been written in their own field if they choose a particular field, or like me choose many fields or sort of make my own field, which is the Lansdale field. They just don't have any sense of time. They don't have any sense of history. They don't realize what's gone before and that they can learn from it. I think that aggravates me is a handful of people read a handful of popular horror novels and thought they want to be a horror writer and yet they never go back and never really learn, and it shows in the work, too.
Joe: I think thats a good observation. You've said you're working on screenplays again recently. Is there a difference about how you write a screenplay in comparison with a novel?
JRL: Well you write all of them as well as you can. That's always the same. But they're all different. They all have a different voice. They all have a different attitude. They're all trying to do a different thing. A short story is my favorite thing to write. I've always loved short stories. I've really gotten interested in writing novels and I like those well too, those are my favorite two kinds of writing. But screenplays--there are things you can do, you can sketch out something that you don't have to get in the characters heads in the same way. You should be in the sense of knowing what they're doing, but as far as when you show something on screen there are a few exceptions you'll see where they have an inner dialogue that you'll hear in film and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't work, but most of the time it's a totally different medium, it's what you see not what you think. In a novel you can tell what a character thinks, you can spend more time on them. You could develop side characters more strongly and you can spend a lot of time. One thing a movie can do is it can do scope pretty well. It can look over the Great Plains and mountains and things of that nature and really give you a feeling of scope. One of the things that always kills me is that even a good actor, you always know who they are and they carry some baggage from some other role they've played. When you read the novel you invent that character. You can't read a book or a short story without inventing 50% of it yourself. For me that's the big appeal.
Joe: That ties into reading in order to be a writer.
JRL: Yes, if you don't read that's it. A lot of people watch movies and try to write books based on movies and things and it's okay, but it's not real writing. Screenplays to me, and I say this with all due respect, aren't real writing; they're real sketching. I write them in such a way that they can be read, I hope in an entertaining way. I don't see them as just a blueprint or an outline. Ultimately they're not going to have some of the benefits as the novel. I believe a good screenplay, you should be able to open a book of screenplays and read them and they just jump out at you and you can tell the difference. There was a book called Screenplays and I had "Dead in the West" in it and I'm real proud of that screenplay and I think it's a good example of a screenplay. William Goldman screenplays are great to read--Robert Towne. And there's some I've seen that I just think "Why bother?"
Comic books are the same way. A comic book is a different kind of writing and you have to know how to write in such a way to inspire the artist. It can be very lean, it can very clean and very simple. Some comic book writers are very, very descriptive. I try to be lean and simple and bring some of the elements I use in novels and short stories to that same medium, but I also have keep in mind that I can't show actual movement but I have indicate that movement or give the artist the inspiration for making these things look the way I think they should feel.
Joe: Kind of like one of those old parlor games where you have to describe something and have someone else draw it for you.
JRL: Right
Joe: Part of the fun is just seeing how different it is from what you originally imagined, but I can imagine that can be some of the frustration.
JRL: Yeah, sure can.
Joe: As far as things you're reading now and things you're interacting with?
JRL: I'm reading more than one book right now to tell you the truth. I'm reading a collection of Thom Jones short stories called "Cold Snaps"--it's real, real good. I'm reading a Robert Parker novel as sort of my relax book called "Hundred-Dollar Baby". So those are pretty far apart.
Joe: And you have the website where you have weekly stories released for free.
JRL: Yeah, that's right. Those short stories are old short stories that they just reprint and recycle there. It's fun though.
Joe: You've almost mentioned a few times that your daughter is singing out there.
JRL: That's right. She was the opening act for Ray Price, country legend, and she's got her own band the Daletones and they play everywhere. And they're always looking for that good connection. (chuckles) You can go to her website kaseylansdale.com to learn about her or you can go to my website joerlansdale.com and learn about me.
Joe: Writing notwithstanding--I realize that's a huge part of your life--but with your family and everything it sounds like things are going pretty well for you.
JRL: They are. It's busy but I love it. It's a great life. I couldn't have asked for anything better.
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Be sure to drop by the Joe-Mammy.com Shop for some Joe R Lansdale-related goodness. Also drop by his website, joerlansdale.com for absolutely free short stories, news and links. Also "Shadows, Kith and Kin" is due for release from Subterranean Press this spring. Check em out!
