{"id":16795,"date":"2013-01-17T00:01:03","date_gmt":"2013-01-17T05:01:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=16795"},"modified":"2013-01-17T06:54:01","modified_gmt":"2013-01-17T11:54:01","slug":"douglas-wynne-the-terribleminds-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2013\/01\/17\/douglas-wynne-the-terribleminds-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Douglas Wynne: The Terribleminds Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

A little while back a gent named wrote me and asked me to read his novel for purposes of potential blurbage. I was very clear with him as I am with those who ask that question that I am bogged down in the mud of my own my work and it’s not likely I’ll get around to it but send it anyway, blah blah blah. He sent me a copy. I read the first page. Then, next thing I knew, I was 30 pages deep. That book was\u00a0The Devil of Echo Lake<\/strong>, and that gent was Douglas Wynne. Here he is. Find him at his site here<\/strong><\/span><\/a>, or on the Twitters @Doug_Wynne<\/strong><\/span><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is a blog about writing and storytelling. So, tell us a story. As short or long as you care to make it. As true or false as you see it.<\/h3>\n

I\u2019ll give you a sequel to the story Margaret Atwood answered this question with<\/strong><\/span><\/a> when you interviewed her recently, but I\u2019m picking it up a few hundred million years later\u2026<\/p>\n

Once upon a time there were tribes of monkeys who hurled their own excrement at each other to declare territory.\u00a0 Sometimes, when the shit slinging failed to make the point, they would even stain the ground with each other\u2019s blood to mark territory. After many millennia of this sort of thing, one of these tribes acquired the magic of language\u2014probably by eating strange mushrooms that blasted open new parts of their brains\u2014and they started using words, symbols, and excretions of ink to declare their territory.\u00a0 We\u2019ll call this tribe, The Pen Monkeys<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Then, one day, under great pressure, the Pen Monkeys did something truly amazing; they used their pens to scratch out equations that enabled them to build a rocket ship. Within this gleaming phallic shaft, they at last escaped the gravity of their bloody little planet and ventured out beyond the finite resources they had always squabbled over.\u00a0 These brave, bold monkeys soared to the moon, a luminous orb that their ancestors had mistaken for a god.\u00a0 And upon landing, they planted a flag to declare it their territory.<\/p>\n

Why do you tell stories?<\/h3>\n

I probably have a narcissistic drive to defy death and leave a mark declaring my psychic territory.<\/p>\n

I tell stories because I love chasing an idea down the rabbit hole and seeing where it goes, and I also just seem to be built to play with words, to try and sculpt ideas with them. I suck at math, but words and me get along well. Most days.<\/p>\n

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:<\/h3>\n

Don\u2019t wait and don\u2019t stop.\u00a0 Okay, that\u2019s two.\u00a0 It\u2019s two-for-one day.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t wait for the perfect idea, don\u2019t wait until you\u2019re sure of how to tell it, don\u2019t wait until you know how it ends, don\u2019t wait until you\u2019re a better writer to start telling the story you want to tell.<\/p>\n

Work will inspire ideas.\u00a0 Work will find a way forward, and work will make you a better storyteller and a better writer. Waiting won\u2019t.<\/p>\n

And then, when no one wants what you\u2019re selling, remember that you are the only one who can stop you.<\/em>\u00a0 Keep working on something new while you keep polishing and pitching something you believe in. Don\u2019t stop, and don\u2019t wait.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the worst piece of writing\/storytelling advice you\u2019ve ever received?<\/h3>\n

Probably the idea, so popular today, that you should leave out or cut everything that isn\u2019t totally essential to the fast forward motion of your plot.\u00a0 Great stories, even very short ones, are enriched by some of the same details and sidetracks as real life. The advice is insidious because on one level, it\u2019s pretty solid, but taken too far, it\u2019s harmful.<\/p>\n

What goes into writing a great character? Bonus round: give an example.<\/h3>\n

A good character has to care about something, but a great character should care about more than one thing.\u00a0 That\u2019s where conflict comes from.\u00a0 I don\u2019t much care for the bi-polar conflict of what the protagonist wants vs. what the antagonist wants.\u00a0 I like characters\u2014even minor ones\u2014who have a variety of concerns, who need to make hard choices and figure out their values because they can\u2019t have everything and something significant is at stake.\u00a0 That\u2019s what life is like.<\/p>\n

A recently read example for me is the narrator from Stephen King\u2019s 11\/22\/63.\u00a0 He spends 700 pages fucking around in the 1950\u2019s and trying to help (but often hurting) all kinds of people he meets along the way toward possibly preventing the Kennedy assassination. He falls in love with the era, and he falls in love with a woman, but none of it felt tangential to me.\u00a0 It felt compelling because he\u2019s a guy who cares about things big and small.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s also made interesting by a character detail that contradicts all of that evident caring, and it\u2019s dropped in the first sentence of the book: he doesn\u2019t cry.<\/p>\n

Where does The Devil of Echo Lake come from? Why that book?<\/h3>\n

After playing in bands and then working as a recording engineer, I knew I had things I wanted to say about music and the music business. \u00a0I wanted to explore the tensions and temptations that musicians often deal with: egotism vs. empathy, art vs. industry, and even the fine line that a creative person might straddle between paranoia and the truly paranormal. \u00a0It helped me to sort out some of my own unresolved issues in an entertaining way.<\/p>\n

The book feels, for lack of a better term, very authentic — you were a musician, yes? Got any good rock-and-roll stories?<\/p>\n

Yeah, they’re all in the book. \u00a0Seriously, I threw every rock and roll anecdote I’ve ever heard or lived through at the wall in writing Echo Lake. \u00a0Then I cut a lot of it out to focus the story, but there’s still a fair amount of dark rock humor in there.<\/p>\n

After my band broke up, I decided to infiltrate the music biz by going undercover as an assistant engineer at a big studio, hoping to meet A&R guys and producers and give them my song demos. \u00a0It didn’t work out, but I got a great book out of the experience. \u00a0There were some Spinal Tap moments. \u00a0My first day on the job, I got to watch a fresh faced British rock band light up with glee when they arrived at the studio and were handed a wad of cash by their producer. \u00a0Their unanimous reaction was, “Greenbacks! Right, let’s go buy a motor bike and a gun!”<\/p>\n

Describe the road that Devil of Echo Lake took in terms of getting published.<\/h3>\n

I thought the book might be ready for a publisher after the fourth draft (WRONG), so I spent a couple of years sending out query letters to agents, and collecting rejections. \u00a0It can be weird trying to asses a book’s weaknesses when people are rejecting on the basis of maybe the first five pages, maybe the first fifty. \u00a0But I do recommend that first time novelists go through the grind rather than rushing to self publish. \u00a0For me, the process really refined the manuscript, especially the opening section. \u00a0I kept polishing and trimming it until there were more requests for the full manuscript, and more rejections with detailed notes. \u00a0That really helped.<\/p>\n

Then I started submitting to a few small presses. \u00a0JournalStone was open for submissions to their 2012 Horror Novel contest, and I liked that they just wanted the full manuscript without any awkward query or synopsis in which I try to demonstrate that my story isn’t a cliche without spoiling the plot twists and secrets that make it unique.<\/p>\n

The Devil of Echo Lake<\/em>\u00a0tied for first place, and they signed me to a three book deal. \u00a0Ironically, right before signing with JournalStone I finally had an agent interested, but by then I didn’t really need one.<\/p>\n

You seem to want to write across multiple genres — what is the value of that, and what is the danger?<\/h3>\n

I guess I’ll soon find out.<\/p>\n

I’m pretty confident that most of what I want to write will fit comfortably under the horror umbrella. \u00a0But I don’t want to repeat myself, and I think the value of trying different sub genres is that I won’t get bored. \u00a0Hopefully, neither will readers, but the danger is probably that if you like what I did last time, you might not get more of the same.<\/p>\n

However, as a reader, if I like an author’s voice and vision, then I don’t really care so much about genre, I’ll follow them. \u00a0China Mieville is a great example of that. \u00a0He has written steampunk, detective noir, weird western, sci-fi, etc. \u00a0But it all has his indelible stamp on it because when he plays with a genre, he never does the predictable thing with its tropes.<\/p>\n

Recommend a book, comic book, film, or game: something with great story. Go!<\/h3>\n

I can\u2019t believe I\u2019m going with a TV show, but for my money there is no better story banging around out there right now than Breaking Bad.<\/p>\n

Favorite word?<\/h3>\n

Maybe \u201cephemeral.\u201d<\/p>\n

And then, the follow up: Favorite curse word?<\/h3>\n

I like \u201ccunt.\u201d I like how the sound of it has a concave quality with a bit of suction and punch that mimics the meaning.\u00a0 And I like that it might be the only curse left in American English with such power that it\u2019s still used very sparingly.<\/p>\n

Favorite alcoholic beverage? (If cocktail: provide recipe. If you don\u2019t drink alcohol, fine, fine, a non-alcoholic beverage will do.)<\/h3>\n

Guinness! And yes, Wynne is an Irish name.<\/p>\n

What skills do you bring to help us win the inevitable war against the robots?<\/h3>\n

I wish you had asked about the Zombie Apocalypse because I have a few years of training in Samurai sword under my belt. True fact. But if it\u2019s robots, don\u2019t look at me\u2026 we\u2019re fucked. \u00a0Maybe I can convince them that they need humans to produce rock n roll.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s next for you as a storyteller? What does the future hold?<\/h3>\n

My next book is almost finished. It\u2019s a crime thriller with some historical elements related to WWII and the Japanese American internment camps.\u00a0 It features a really scary serial killer, a family in jeopardy, and much higher body count than my first book.<\/p>\n

After that, I want to write something that\u2019s firmly rooted in the dark fantasy end of the spectrum.\u00a0 I have a notebook full of big, intimidating, controversial ideas I need to grapple with for that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A little while back a gent named wrote me and asked me to read his novel for purposes of potential blurbage. I was very clear with him as I am with those who ask that question that I am bogged down in the mud of my own my work and it’s not likely I’ll get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-16795","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-4mT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16795"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16891,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16795\/revisions\/16891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}