S.G. Browne

When I first started writing more than twenty years ago, I was reading a steady diet of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Robert McCammon, F. Paul Wilson, and Peter Straub. So most of what I wrote from 1990-2002 was supernatural horror. Alternate realities. Things that went bump in the night.

And Stephen King is the reason I wanted to become a writer.

That thirteen year period from 1990-2002 produced three novels and about four dozen short stories, several of which were more dark comedy and social satire than supernatural horror and written in the first person point-of-view.

In 2001, I wrote the last of those darkly comedic stories, “A Zombie’s Lament.” The following year, while rewriting two of my supernatural horror novels, I realized I didn’t like what I was writing. Worse, I didn’t enjoy the process. Writing had become tedious rather than joyful. So after several months of this, I stopped writing.

Nearly a year later, in 2003, after reading Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk, I was inspired to take “A Zombie’s Lament” and do something more with it. That something more became Breathers. With Breathers I found a voice and a style that resonated with me and made writing enjoyable again and also allowed me to maintain some of my roots in the supernatural and the fantastic.

In addition to King and Palahniuk, I’ve been inspired by authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Christopher Moore, and Douglas Adams. I’m also inspired by films like Being John Malkovich, The Big Lebowski, Fight Club, and I Heart Huckabees.

I write social satire because I enjoy poking fun at human beings. There’s a lot to poke fun at. Including myself. And I write dark comedy because that’s just my sense of humor. Plus I have a lot more fun trying to make myself laugh than trying to make myself wonder what’s lurking in the shadows.

Admittedly my main protagonists aren’t your classic heroes. They’re not imbued with a sense of honor or altruistic motives. They’re not someone you would necessarily want to bring home to meet your mother.

They’re selfish.
They’re cynical.
They’re decomposing corpses.

In other words, they’re flawed. But even if they’re zombies, incarnations of fate, or genetic mutants who have the ability to steal luck, they’re very much human. And my challenge is to find a way to make the reader want to root for them or be their friend in spite of their shortcomings.

I’ve often heard others say that in order to write good dialogue, you need to write the way people talk. You need to listen to speech patterns and expressions and emulate what you hear. The problem with this is that most real life conversations require a good editor. Everyday speech is filled with repetition and fillers and unnecessary adverbs like “basically” and “really” and “very.” Not to mention that many conversations tend to be unfocused and repetitive and stray off on tangents.

One way to think of it is that dialogue in writing is good conversation, but conversation in real life is not necessarily good dialogue.

So in order to write good dialogue, the trick is to write the way people should talk rather than the way they actually talk. You want to write dialogue that sounds believable but in real life never happens.

To quote Alfred Hitchcock: “A good story is life with the dull parts taken out.” Good dialogue is very much the same.

So what’s one of the best ways to learn how to write good dialogue? By watching movies.

Movie scripts have to be crisp and efficient. They’re all dialogue and action without the fiction writer’s burden of having to fill in the blanks with narrative prose. Obviously not all movies are great examples on how to write dialogue, but those that are contain dialogue that has a rhythm, is filled with conflict, and moves the story forward. Some of the films that get it right include L.A. Confidential, The Departed, Airplane!, Diner, and The Graduate.

I’d also recommend watching a selection of films written by David Mamet, Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, Mel Brooks, and Joel and Ethan Coen. All of these writers have a flair for dialogue and do a great job of conveying the rhythms of speech and conversation. The Coen Brothers are especially adept at conversation.

Naturally, since we’re talking about writing, it’s a good idea to read dialogue, too. So read as much as possible and as many different authors as possible. Read mysteries, romance, social satire, and thrillers. And if you’ve never read any Elmore Leonard, Robert Parker, or Christopher Moore, you might want to give one or more of them a shot, if nothing else than to see how they handle dialogue.

I came across a blog post on Twitter yesterday via Publishers Weekly titled Shutting the Drawer: What Happens When a Book Doesn’t Sell? by Edan Lepucki. It’s a good essay about what happens when a writer has to admit defeat and give up on her first novel. To “accept the death of your first true darling,” to paraphrase Lepucki, who asks if she can “put my first book into the drawer and shut it?”

In Lepucki’s case, she’s talking about an agented novel that couldn’t find a traditional publisher, but it happens more often than you’d think. First novels by authors ending up in a drawer or in a box on the top shelf of your closet. Today it ends up in a virtual folder on your hard drive or on a flash drive rather than under your bed consorting with the dust bunnies, but the point is the same: eventually you have to accept the reality that it’s not going to get published and move on.

Of course, this was before Amazon and eBooks, when anything can get published now regardless of how many rejections you’ve suffered through. Or not suffered through. And with brick-and-mortar book stores folding like a bad hand in a game of strip poker, traditional publishing isn’t the same as it ever was. With apologies to the Talking Heads.

Although I don’t have any numbers to back me up, I’d venture to guess that the majority of “first” published novels aren’t first novels at all. They’re second or third of fourth. Maybe more. Lepucki lists a few in her essay. But it’s rare that a writer’s first attempt at writing a novel ends up on the bookshelf at your local stores.

I have three novels in my closet. Literally. The manuscripts are printed up and stored in Kinko’s boxes stacked one atop the other. My first novel is titled The Circle, followed by Mar Vista and finally Obsession. All three of them are straight supernatural horror novels and are devoid of the social satire and humor found in Breathers and Fated, which are technically my fourth and fifth novels.

I never had representation for the first and third novels, and my second, Mar Vista, had a short-lived relationship with an agent who closed up shop six months after taking me on. So my first three novels for the most part ended up in my drawer as studies on the art of novel writing. Six-hundred and four-hundred and three-hundred page exercises that helped to teach me how to write.

While it’s possible I could end up doing something with Obsession, my other two novels will remain in their boxes, gathering dust on my shelves.

Today it’s my pleasure to welcome author and novelist Steve Hockensmith to the inaugural entry of my Author Q&A series. Of course for it to be a series, I need to do this on a monthly basis or something. Great. Now I’ve just committed myself to something else.

Steve Hockensmith is the author of seven novels, including the New York Times bestseller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls and the Edgar, Shamus and Anthony Award finalist Holmes on the Range. He is widely admired within the writing community for his lion-like mane of thick, dark hair. His posture, on the other hand, is shockingly bad. Every once in a while, he updates the blog you can find here.

I met Steve at ZomBcon in Seattle last October during a signing at the Barnes & Noble booth. I told him why I thought zombies were so popular right now and he told me he liked what I said so much that he was going to claim my ideas as his own. We’ve hated each other ever since.

Where do you get your ideas?

From my brain. Specifically, the frontal lobe. What’s not so easy sometimes is finding them in there and dragging them out. I do a lot of research before I start work on a novel, then I lock myself in a room for two weeks and think. And think. And think some more. Sometimes I yell, too. Things like “Why doesn’t this make sense yet?” Or “What happens next, dammit? What happens next?” Or simply “AAARRRRGGGHHH!!!” Eventually, I manage to squeeze enough ideas out of my head to fill a book. Or so I like to think.

What’s your daily writing ritual?

I wish I had one. I have kids, though, and my wife has a work schedule that varies day to day and week to week. So nothing’s consistent. In a perfect world, my daily ritual would look like this: I arise at 9; go back to bed until 10; drink coffee and reply to e-mails till 11; eat lunch and surf the Internet until noon; write until 5; hang out with my family until 9; go for a run until 10; read until 11; drink bourbon and watch old movies until midnight; sleep until 9; repeat. Wanna guess how close that is to my real life?

What’s the first story you ever had published?

Well, if we’re going to be sticklers here, I don’t even remember what it was called: I was first published in a literary journal when I was a sophomore or junior in college. The story was about a guy who decides to go to work naked, but no one notices. My first paid story was called “Arnold the Conqueror,” and it appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in 1997. So I guess I can pretend I’ve been a professional for 14 years. Woo-hoo!

What started you off on the path of being a writer?

Reading. Then discovering that I actually enjoyed writing assignments in grade school. I think I started creating my own magazines and comic books around sixth or seventh grade. From then on, writing just seemed like my thing, and I always assumed it would be my career one day. Looking back, I almost wish I could tell myself “Hey! Dummy! Those ‘computer’ thingies people keep talking about? Learn how to use ’em!” But I guess things worked out O.K.

Are you a plotter or a pantser?

I’m a plotter writing-wise and a pantser in my day-to-day life. Meaning I outline everything, but I do so while wearing pants. Usually sweatpants. Sometimes jeans. Khakis every once in a while. But very rarely shorts, for some reason.

What’s your favorite word?

No contest: lugubrious. It’s so fun to say. Try it. Lugubrious. Lugubrious. Lugubrious. It’s especially satisfying if you stretch out the second u. Lou-gooooooooo-bree-ous. You can’t say it that way without feeling like Vincent Price. I also like the word because it encapsulates an approach to art that I like to make fun of, but that’s a whole other conversation.

What’s your biggest fear?

I’d say failure and death run pretty much neck and neck these days. I think my fear of failure might diminish over time, though. As a writer, I’ve failed a thousand times already, with more failures to come. All writers fail, in big and small ways. It’s part of the gig. Death, on the other hand, doesn’t strike me as the kind of thing you get used to through repetition…although, come to think of it, once you’ve experienced it the thought of going through it again isn’t likely to bother you.

Who’s your favorite author?

It’s the classic old story for me: I stumbled across Slaughterhouse-Five in my high school library, and nothing was ever the same. I don’t think Vonnegut would have much use for what I do, to be honest, and I certainly don’t sound like him. But I like to think that his outlook on life and writing is in there, in some way, if you look for it.

What music inspires you?

I can’t listen to most music while I write. Even instrumental stuff is too distracting if it has a melody. So when I need to crank something up to cancel out the sound of a 5-year-old having a tantrum downstairs, I turn to “New Age” music. There’s one CD in particular — Oneness by David and Steve Gordon — that I listen to again and again and again. It’s perfect because it’s basically just waves of sound, and I can completely block it out of my consciousness and focus on my own words. I have used music to try to get in the mood for writing, though. Bernard Herrmann is my go-to guy when I’m thinking about something dark or creepy. But if I put on his score for Citizen Kane or Vertigo or whatever while I was trying to write, I know what would happen: I’d stop hearing words and start hearing music.

If you were a comic book superhero, what would be your superpower?

I would be Dismissiveman, able to dodge any question at will.

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Well, thanks for answering these questions, Steve. And remember, if you want to keep up with all of Steve’s shenanigans and writings, you can follow him at www.stevehockensmith.com.

I’m not a big fan of long chapters.

I prefer my chapters short and manageable. Chapters that give me some dialogue, some action, some character building, some plot movement, and don’t screw around with excessive description or weighty exposition or ten-page flashbacks.

Call me a product of Hollywood movies.

Plus short chapters give me a definite place to stop. With long chapters I always feel like I’m being forced to keep reading to the end when sometimes I just want to roll over and go to sleep. At least give me a break in the middle of the chapter, a space or a line of asterisks or some fancy little symbol so I don’t have to pick up the book mid-scene and try to remember where I stopped and what was going on. It’s like stopping in the middle of a conversation while you’re at a bar and trying to remember what you were talking about before you did another shot of Jagermeister.

Writing a chapter is like giving a speech. You really only have 3-5 minutes before people lose their interest. But because I’m being generous, let’s say you’ve got 10-15 minutes. Tops. After that, eyes are turning glassy and people are wondering where to take their next vacation and what to have for dinner and and how to kill their boss without going to jail.

Book chapters should be governed by the same rules. 10-15 pages, max. You exceed that and I’m flipping forward, wondering how much longer it’s going to take me to finish this damn chapter so I can feel like I have a sense of closure.

Yes, I’m a little bit obsessive compulsive. But so are you. Admit it.

Right now I’m reading Look at Me by Jennifer Egan, which at 415 pages and 20 chapters averages nearly 21 pages per chapter. To make matters worse, the book is written in 10-point Times Roman so there’s more than 400 words per page. Come on! That’s a good 100 words per page more than Carl Hiaasen’s Star Island, which is written in 12-point Times Roman and, at 354 pages and 31 chapters, comes in at a much more reasonable 11.4 pages per chapter.

Bing, bang, boom.

In this age where e-mails and text messages and Facebook status updates have replaced hand-written letters and phone calls and actual conversations, where in another generation Twitter will have made it impossible for anyone to have any kind of interaction that’s longer than 140 characters, I think short chapters are definitely going to be in demand.

Fortunately I’m already ahead of the game, as Breathers, with 310 pages and 58 chapters, comes in at 5.3 pages per chapter (PPC), while Fated (352 pages and 54 chapters) has a PPC of 6.5.

Ka-ching!

After going through a random sampling on my bookshelf, I discovered that the majority of my favorite novels have short chapters, with The Great Gatsby being one exception to the rule with a PPC of 20. And nearly every novel written by Chuck Palahniuk, Christopher Moore, and Kurt Vonnegut comes in with a PPC of less than 10.

True, Slaughterhouse Five has only 10 chapters and a PPC of just over 20, but each chapter is broken up into as many as 80 separate sections and some of the chapters even have pictures. Bonus! So it’s still technically in the club. And then there’s Cat’s Cradle with 191 pages and 127 chapters for a PPC of 1.5, which is by far the lowest PPC of any novel I’ve ever read and sets the bar for ADD readers and Twitter-philes.

Can I have a hallelujah?

Conversely, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has nearly 35 pages per chapter for the entire trilogy, which probably explains why I never made it past The Fellowship of the Ring. You ask me, it needed more pictures.

Here are some other notable books I own and their PPC quotient (based on the copies on my shelf):

• The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger (214 pages / 26 chapters / 8.2 ppc)

• Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk (218 pages / 31 chapters / 7.0 ppc)

• Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (309 pages / 36 chapters / 8.6 ppc)

• The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (231 pages / 32 chapters / 7.2 ppc)

• Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (288 pages / 23 chapters / 12.5 ppc)

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (143 pages / 35 chapters / 4.1 ppc)

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (322 pages / 43 chapters / 7.5 ppc)

• High Fidelity, Nick Hornby (323 pages / 35 chapters / 9.2 ppc)

• The Stand, Stephen King (817 pages / 66 chapters / 12.4 ppc) *The original version, not the complete and uncut version, which has a PPC of 14.8

So where do you sit? Long chapters? Short chapters? Tequila shots instead of Jagermeister? Have at it. Or not. It’s a free country.