What great good fortune to be able to read an accomplished, hard-working and talented author such as Chet Williamson, either via his books, his audiobooks, and/or this interview, at which I felt like the late Paul O'Grady in the presence of Lauren Bacall* - privileged. Enough of me and on to the words from a Chet of several trades, master of all...

​

I would like to learn about your writing process. What is it that inspires you to start a work, and how long does it take you?

​

My actual writing has slowed to a crawl these days. It’s partly a lack of interest, the feeling that I may have said all I want to say. I only ever liked writing if I had a unique idea, something that hadn’t been done before, and those become much harder to come by. Add in the lack of markets (for the most part, the advances on genre novels are a fraction of what we were getting when I started in the 80s), and it makes more sense for me to spend my time narrating audiobooks and winnowing and selling items from my vast collection on eBay. I do the occasional short story.

But when I do write, I’m usually inspired by a sense of place. The village of Dreamthorp, the theatre complex in Reign, my old college apartment that launches the action of Second Chance. And there’s the wee Irish bookstore in Dingle that provided the spark of a story that’s just appeared in Gaby Triana’s anthology, Literally Dead 2, “...Haunt Me Then.”

It usually takes me a long time to write a novel or a story, since I outline in detail. The hard work comes in the plotting, getting the characters and incidents to mesh together properly. But when I do start the actual writing, I have a very good idea of what I’m doing and where the tale is going. I have a novel that I’ve been working on and thinking about for years now, but I just don’t know how to stick the landing. For me, the perfect ending is one that’s both surprising and yet inevitable, something that causes a perception shift in the reader. But those endings are very hard to create, and they can’t be done by simply pushing through without knowing where you’re going. And they are most definitely not just a “surprise ending.”

​

Although your style of horror is wide-ranging, from subtle to graphic, one of my favourite of your stories, "The Moment the Face Fell" (which haunts me still, perhaps because I struggled, trying to "make it" in Lost Angeles, for too many years), is "quiet horror", the type of literature championed by the much-missed Charles L. Grant. What do you think of the opinion that horror has to be graphic to be labelled "horror"?

​

I wrote that story for the Robert Bloch-edited anthology, Monsters in Our Midst, hoping that Bloch might like the film-writing setting, and he did, at least enough to accept the story. I also adapted it into a short play. What the protagonist does is absolutely awful, horrific, and shocking, but no blood is shed, no one is physically harmed. One can certainly do monstrous deeds using words alone. But readers don't understand the horror of it until they come to the end. I love that kind of story, and have written a number of them, so to me the genre of "horror" can include many voices, loud as a drum, soft as a whisper, and everywhere in between.

I am also very interested in the creation of your wonderful crime novels, co-written with your wife, Laurie. I think a crime novel is the most difficult kind of work to achieve. There's the plot for a start. There's also the planting of red herrings and leaving buried clues without giving the game away too early. How do you two manage it?

​

Laurie and I have done two books together: one crime novel, Murder Old and New, and a romance/suspense novel set in Ireland, A Step Across. We plot the books together, creating the characters and the omnipresent outline, and then I write the first draft. We then revise together until we’re both satisfied. Crime and mystery novels, more than any other genre, are dependent on that perception shift I mentioned. Once you have the basic idea, you have to start at the end and work your way backward, dropping the clues and red herrings as you go, and taking your reader down false paths. It’s great fun, but hard work to get it right!

​

Do you have a favourite length to work in e.g. short story, novella, novel?

​

For horror, novella length is wonderful. It lets you achieve the tension of a short story, while allowing you to expand your plot, create a true mood, and delve more deeply into characters, without having to rely on the padding that swamps so many horror novels. I can recall only two that I’ve written: “The Confessions of St. James” in Night Visions 7, and “The Story of Noichi the Blind,” a standalone from CD Publications, which are two of my favourite children, Noichi in particular.

​

A true innocent, sweet Noichi; I was quite pleased to see that, unbeknownst to the seller, the copy I'd purchased was autographed. On a less happy note, what do you think of trends such as AI to write novels?

​

Horrible. It could eventually create a death knell for authors, and already much of the business writing that writers used to earn some extra income has been replaced by bots. While there are still seasoned and perceptive readers, there are also a lot of readers who are happy to pay cheap prices to absorb the same recycled pablum, which is what AI can readily create, having “scraped” the works of real writers -- without their permission, I might add.

​

I reckon those same bots scrape titles, too. Do you use pen and paper, computer, laptop, typewriter?

​

When I started, waaaay back in the 80’s, I wrote first drafts with pen and paper and typed them up on my old Olympia typewriter, but in 1986 I got my first word processing computer, a Tandy 1200HD, and I’ve worked on computers ever since.