A Writer's Tale (13 page)

THIS IS A LIST OF WRITERS WHO HAVE WRITTEN EITHER ONE GREAT PIECE or a body of work that I have found to be exceptionally wonderful and frightening.

Remember, this is not supposed to be a list of “the best” horror writers: it is a list of
my favorites.

1.
 Peter Benchley

2. Ambrose Bierce

3. Algernon Blackwood

4. William Peter Blatty

5. Robert Bloch

6. Ray Bradbury

7. Gary Brandner

8. Michael Cadnum

9. Wilkie Collins

10. John Coyne

11. Michael Crichton

12. Roald Dahl

13. Charles Dickens

14. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

15. Larry Dunbar

16. Ed Gorman

17. Davis Grubb

18. H. Rider Haggard

19. Nathaniel Hawthorne

20. James Herbert

21. William Hope Hodgson

22. Shirley Jackson

23. W.W. Jacobs

24. M.R. James

25. Jack Ketchum

26. Stephen King

7. Rudyard Kipling

28. Dean Koontz

29. Ira Levin

30. Bentley Little

31. H.P. Lovecraft

32. Brian Lumley

33. Graham Masterton

34. Richard Matheson

35. Robert R. McCammon

36. David Morrell

37. Edgar Allan Poe

38. Seabury Quinn

39. Ray Russell

40. John Russo

41. Saki

42. William Shakespeare

43. Mary Shelley

44. Dan Simmons

45. Michael Slade

46. Robert Lewis Stevenson

47. Bram Stoker

48. H.G. Wells

49. F. Paul Wilson

50. Cornell Woolrich

My 51 Favorite Non-Horror Authors

MY LIST CONTAINS A FEW NAMES PREVIOUSLY MENTIONED AS HORROR writers. I’ve done this in cases in which a writer has also distinguished himself or herself in writing “non-horror” fiction.

1. Sherwood Anderson

2. Lawrence Block

3. John Buchan

4. Tom Clancy

5. Mary Higgins Clark

6. Joseph Conrad

7. Pat Conroy

8. Michael Crichton

9. Charles Dickens

10. Franklin W. Dixon

11. Feodor Dostoevsky

12. William Faulkner

13. Jack Finney

14. F. Scott Fitzgerald

15. Ian Fleming

16. Brian Garfield

17. William Goldman

18. David Goodis

19. Ed Gorman

20. Winston Groom

21. Joseph Hayes

22. Ernest Hemingway

23. Evan Hunter

24. Stephen Hunter

25. Nikos Kazantzakis

26. Jack Kerouac

27. Dean Koontz

28. D.H. Lawrence

29. Jack London

30. John D. MacDonald

31. W. Somerset Maugham

32. Larry McMurtry

33. David Morrell

34. Charles Portis

35. Flannery O’Connor

36. Ayn Rand

37. Bob Randall

38. Harold Robbins

39. J.D. Salinger

40. Mickey Spillane

41. Glendon Swarthout

42. Robert Lewis Taylor

43. Jim Thompson

44. Trevanian

45. Mark Twain

46. Leon Uris

47. Joseph Wambaugh

48. Thomas Wolfe

49. Stuart Woods

50. Cornell Woolrich

51. P.C. Wren

Laymon’s
Rules of Writing

Rule 1

“Write the book that you would like to read.”

I don’t know where I first ran into that idea, but I think it’s great. And it contradicts advice that writers often encounter, especially when they are starting out.

Writer magazines, how-to books, teachers and even many agents and editors (who should
really
know better) suggest that the road to success runs through the Land of Imitation.

They advise you to write “more like” someone else.

More like Mary Higgins Clark, more like Sidney Sheldon, more like John Grisham, etc.

Deal is this…

Why try to write a book that is “like” what someone else has written?

Someone else is
already
writing that sort of stuff.

The last thing the world needs is another cheap imitation.

But you’ll likely be told otherwise.

If you jump on someone else’s bandwagon and do a fair job of appealing to an established audience, you might get a publisher to hype your novel, and you might end up rich and famous.

You could then be a rich and famous hack.

Chances are, though, you
won’t get
rich and famous.

In which case, you’ll just be a poor, unknown hack.

If you want to be something more than that, walk away from the well paved road and blaze your own trails into unknown territory.

Here’s how to do it.

Sit down and ask yourself this: If I could read a book about
anything,
what would it be about? Where and when would it take place? What would the main guy be like? What sort of gal would I love to read about in a book, if such a book existed? What might happen to these people that would be really
neat?

And so on.

Find the answers to those questions.

Then figure out if such a book
already exists.

Which means you need to be well-read.

If your ideal book already exists, you would be ill-advised to go ahead and write your own version of it.

If it
doesn’t
exist, you’re in luck.

Write it.

Write it
your
way.

As Polonius said, “To thine own self be true.”

As Ricky Nelson sang, “You can’t please everyone, so you’ve gotta please yourself.”

Set out to please yourself. With a little luck, you may end up pleasing others, as well.

Rule 2

“Learn How to Write.”

I have always been a master of stating the obvious.

The obvious, however, is quite often undervalued and overlooked.

I find it astonishing that a great many writers pursue their craft and sullen art without having a halfway decent grasp of language, grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc.

Just about everyone has daydreams about being an author.

We all like to tell stories. Most of us are able to read and speak English reasonably well.

We have even written things, now and then: letters, thank you notes, maybe reports of various kinds at school and work. So it seems a simple matter to write a story.

Easy as pie. Anyone can do it.

At a cocktail party, a famous writer (possibly George Bernard Shaw) was told by a famous surgeon, “When I retire, I plan to write a novel.” Said the author, “When I retire, I plan to operate on people.”

The author’s comment may seem like a wisecrack, but it is dead-on accurate.

Learning to write well is probably no easier than learning to remove a kidney or replace a heart valve.

It requires years of study and practice.

Some aspiring writers think they don’t really need to know proper usage of the language.

They think that whatever miserable errors they make will be fixed by an editor.

Wrong.

Most editors (especially here in the U.S.), know less than the writers.

If your story
should
somehow end up on the desk of a
good
editor, he isn’t likely to fix the writing for you. The rare, good editor would be so disgusted by your crappy writing that all you’d get is a rejection slip.

Chances are, however, that your manuscript will be read by a
lousy
editor. Such an editor might accept badly written material simply because he doesn’t know any better.

If that happens, you can be certain that
nobody
will end up correcting it. The mistakes will be over the heads of the publishers, just as they were over yours. Your book will be published in all its pathetic glory.

Full of mistakes that would win you a flunking grade from any good high school English teacher.

Even if all editors were masters of the language, no writer should ever submit a piece of work that is not written well enough to earn an A+ in any English class in the country.

We have a responsibility to use the language better than anyone else.

A writer submitting a careless, error-inflicted manuscript is like a police officer robbing a bank. It just shouldn’t happen. It should never be tolerated. It’s a perversion of Nature.

This is not to say that liberties cannot be taken. Rules broken. Experiments conducted.

Tricky stuff pulled.

But manipulating the language in order to create special effects is not allowed for people who can’t pass “bonehead” English.

And this is not to say that all mistakes can be avoided. The language is so complex that nobody can get it right all the time.

Mistakes will happen.

They are
inevitable.
Even if the writer somehow throws together 150,000 words without a single error, the
printer
is sure to blow it here and there. Errors will slip by.

All the writer can do is try…

Strive for excellence even though it may be unattainable.

Rule 3

“Write.”

The famous science fiction writer, Jerry Pournelle, once told me, “All you’ve got to do is write one page a day. In a year, you have a novel.”

A short novel, at any rate. (By current standards.)

But the point is this… If you want to be a writer, you
must
sit down and turn out pages.

Even as little as a single page each day can result in a full novel over the course of time.

How long does it take to write a page?

For some writers, a page might be composed in a couple of minutes. (He is more typist than writer.) At the other extreme, a person might spend two or three hours laboring over one page. (Such a person is probably
not
a great artist. More likely, he’s either a prima dona or doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing likely both.) For most of us, a page might take anywhere from fifteen minutes to half an hour. Maybe a full hour if we’re trying to compose a very special effect or having a problem.

To write a single page per day, then, is a task that should probably take no longer than one hour.

If an aspiring writer is incapable of finding one hour per day to sit down and work on his craft…

Well, let us suggest that he give up the pretense of being an aspiring writer.

Because he ain’t one.

Because
anyone
can find time to turn out one page a day if he really wants to.

Now, I don’t want to seem like I’m getting hung up in semantics here. A person doesn’t have to write a page
every
day. Things happen.
I
don’t write a page
every
day. I don’t write at all, for instance, when I’m traveling. Now that I’m reasonably successful, I take a day or two off, each week, for activities with my family.

However, I usually
do
write 100-150 pages per month. That averages out to a lot more than a page per day. My daily goal is five pages. Sometimes I go over, and sometimes I don’t make my five.

Before I was a full-time writer, I held full-time jobs but still managed to turn out a large amount of fiction. (See the Autobiograpical Chronology.) Having a job is no excuse for not writing. My goal in those days was three pages per day.

How did I do it?

Not easily.

I sometimes wrote for an hour before going to work in the morning. I often wrote during my lunch break. I wrote another hour or two each day after work. And I usually devoted large portions of my days off (weekends and holidays) to writing.

I often hear aspiring writers talk about what they are “going to write” if they can ever “find the time.”

With that attitude, they are probably never going to accomplish much.

You don’t
find
time. It is there. Twenty-four hours of it each day. If you want to be a writer, you only need to make the decision to use at least one of them for the writing.

Turn out that page. Or skip a day, and turn out two or three the next day. But get them done.

Or forget it.

A few helpful hints on how to turn out pages:

1. If you can’t find an uninterrupted hour, it’s hardly worth bothering to get started on real writing. So use the fifteen minutes, half an hour, or whatever to proof-read, revise, or play around with ideas for new stuff.

2. For best results, find a block of two or three hours in which you’ll be able to write without interruption. With this much time, you can get
into
the piece and really cook.

3. Start each writing period by re-reading what you wrote yesterday. Revise it as you go. This will not only improve yesterday’s material, but it will pull you back into the story, making it easy to continue where you left off.

4. Write the material well, but don’t spend great amounts of time trying to get it “just right.” Don’t spend your whole hour working on one or two sentences. Keep moving. Turn out a page or two or five. Polish them some other time.

5. Follow Hemingway’s advice and stop the day’s writing at a point where you still know what is coming next. This will help you start up again easily the next day.

6. If you are serious about being a writer of fiction, then be wary of foreign entanglements. For example, you might be better off writing your own fiction than trying to edit an anthology or publish a fanzine or run a web site or organize a fan convention, etc. Sure, such activities may gain you some recognition and possibly important connections. But it is more important to make books and stories than contacts. You won’t have any
use
for the contacts if you don’t have a product to sell them.