 The author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day talks about his book, about the difference between writing short stories and writing screenplays, his inspiration, his editing and selection process, about genres, the value fo short fiction, and lots more.
How does writing short stories differ from writing screenplays?
Well, in some ways they don't differ at all: a story's a story, no matter how long it is. You structure and understand them in the same way; mostly screenplays just involve more characters.
The main difference is that the business is different. Screenwriting is collaborative; other people are involved. And all those people have their own ideas about the story, and as a screenwriter you're always low man on the totem pole. As a story writer, you're the whole totem pole, top to bottom, which is pretty nice. Except when you can't figure out how to solve a problem, and there's no one there to help you out. Basically, the upshot is, you have to have friends if you want to write short stories! I have about ten or twenty people I run things by and listen to, and who I couldn't work without.
Where do you draw inspiration from for your stories? What authors have influenced your writing?
Inspiration is a funny thing; I have no idea where it comes from. I think mostly it's a matter of inner conflict-- when I'm upset, I write stories; when I'm happy, I stop.
Influence is also hard to talk about. I don't consciously draw on other writers. But when I look at my stories, I see hundreds of things in them-- books and movies and TV shows, everything. Hitchcock, Roald Dahl, MAD Magazine, P.G. Wodehouse, Kafka, Philip K. Dick, Aesop's fables, The Twilight Zone, The Far Side, Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean Rhys, Stephen Crane, Henry James. Warner Brothers cartoons always loom large; I see a lot of Stephen King and Richard Brautigan. Salinger and Jim Thompson are in there, too, and Patricia Highsmith, and Scooby-Doo, and lots of comic books. I'm always amazed by the stuff that comes out, things I'd forgotten I'd ever read or seen. It's all in there somewhere, swirling around in my brain; I start writing and it all just floods out.
Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day was originally a 101-story collection, but you edited it down to 40 stories. What was that editing process like? Was it difficult to pick which stories to include?
It was more than hard, it was almost impossible! I'd spent years writing that book, and from the beginning it had always been conceived as a 101-story collection (it was an Arabian Nights kinda thing). I wrote and wrote-- hundreds of stories-- and kept adding and substituting and weighing as I went. It was only when I got to the point where the book was balanced, had a beginning, middle, and end, and all the stories seemed integral and equally important that I knew the book was done. Then I sold it and immediately found out I had to cut almost two-thirds of the stories! It nearly drove me insane, I had no idea how to do it, it seemed like an impossible task. In the end, though, my friend Maureen de Sousa came to the rescue... she's been my editor ever since I started writing short stories (she's edited every story I've ever written). She told me to concentrate on maintaining the shape of the book, and not obsess about which actual stories would be in it. So, as a result, I'm very happy with the shortened version; it's basically a scale model of the original. But it is, on the other hand, kind of a strange thing, as a great many of my favorite stories aren't in it. But I just tell myself that I now have a second book all ready and standing by, if anyone wants it.
Your stories include such fantastical characters as a Martian who keeps house, a moose that skydives and an Octopus that hosts tea time. Do you consider yourself a fantasy or science fiction writer?
I don't consider myself any kind of writer; I just write, and whatever happens, happens. Most of my stories tend to be fantastical, but I don't think I'm really "a fantasy writer." Fantasy as a genre tends to be pretty specific-- ironically, it's very realistic; only it's realism according to the rules of other worlds (it's actually pretty close to historical fiction). Similarly, though I'm interested in science, I'm definitely not a science fiction writer... my stories tend to take place in dreamlike places where physical laws don't always apply.
I think if I had to pigeonhole myself, I'd say I was a horror writer. Which might sound strange, as my stories are often funny, but they're always questioning the nature of reality. They never take the world as a rational place, where things are predictable and safe; they're always overturning it and tearing it apart, and finding strange things underneath. Plus their focus is always internal, on emotion and feeling and experience, and never on ideas or world-building. (Basically, I think I write for The Twilight Zone.)
Over the past few years, fantasy has become more accepted in mainstream and literary circles. What do you think has changed and where do you see the genre going?
I don't really know; I'm never up on trends, and I don't think much about genres and circles. I'm only ever interested in finding interesting books by writers who are doing different things. I've read a lot of fantasy in my life, a lot of horror, science fiction, mystery, crime... I've also read a lot of literary fiction, poetry, plays, and classics. The one thing I've learned is I don't care about subject matter-- I find good books in every so-called genre. But those books are always the products of individuals, working according to their own rules. In the end, "genre" is just another word for what is least original about any book. I don't know why anyone would care about that. I like it when things are different.
What attracts you to writing short fiction?
I write short because that's how I talk; I like clarity and I don't like being bored. I've never understood why written stories should be so long. In real life, people would walk away.
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