How fantastic that such a gifted, hard-working, and popular author, the irrepressible Simon Bestwick, was able to give us time for an in-depth interview. Enjoy a fascinating interview with a truly unique talent!​

 

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? Do you write with a market in mind?​

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I heard of one writer who kept a sign above his computer saying “Okay, Universe: you take care of the quality and I’ll take care of the quantity.” And that’s largely my attitude. Get up early, before I’ve time to overthink, make a pot of tea and get to work. Once it’s written it can be fixed.

 

A friend gave me a couple of books in the early 2000s when I was going through a bit of a blocked period – Julia Cameron’s The Right To Write and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down The Bones. Both essentially promote an approach which isn’t far removed from automatic writing. Write for X amount of time, or till you’ve filled up a page, rather than stopping to second-guess yourself (nine times out of ten, I think, problems I’ve had with the writing have due to not being able to get out of my own head.) Just picture what’s happening, what the characters are trying to do, and the rest usually follows; if not, you might be forcing the story somewhere it doesn’t want to go.

 

Sometimes I plan things out, sometimes I have only the roughest possible idea. It varies – generally I try to start writing as soon as I feel sure I’ve got a good enough grasp on what I’m going to do. The thing I’m writing now is a very big book with several different storylines, so I had to do a lot of brainstorming/jotting plot-points down on index cards and shuffling them around before I had a solid enough grip on where it was all going. The book before that started with a one-word prompt from my spouse. I wrote a sentence that includes that word, then a paragraph that included that sentence, then a scene that included that paragraph, and so on. And then a story took shape, and it went from there. Both approaches work – it just varies depending on the story itself.

 

Normally I aim for about 1000 words a day. I’ll usually cut and paste the last paragraph I wrote in a day into a separate file; when I start again the following day I already have my first paragraph, and just need to retype it. It’s a trick, but it’s one that helps get me back into the groove with minimum delay.

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If there’s stuff that needs to be researched, or checked on, or that raises questions about the character or the setting, I’ll make notes to be followed up later, unless there’s no way of carrying on without answering those questions now.

 

Wherever possible, I’ll fix the notes the same day after finishing the day’s quota. I also try to edit as I go – write in the morning, edit the latest completed chapter in the afternoon – but it varies from project to project. It’s a lot easier to do this now I write full-time!

 

With that in mind, a novel can take between three and six months, depending on how much cutting and rewriting becomes necessary. As far as markets go, I try not to think of them too much: I seem to get my best results, for better or worse, by writing what interests and excites me. When you write for a submission call, you have to try and find something in the prompt you can use to write a story you want to do.

 

(This goes back to the creative writing essays I was given at school: “Write a story about moving house.” An incredibly boring topic, but if you make it a story about a guy moving into a house that’s infested with vampires, it suddenly becomes more interesting!)

 

Nearly every time you write a book you don’t know if anyone will want it or not, or if they do whether you’ll get paid much, so you may as well at least make it something you want to do, so you enjoy the process if nothing else! (I’ve just written my first tie-in book: keeping that maxim in mind actually made the experience quite fun, and got me out of a writing rut…)

 

What inspired you to first begin writing? Have you always wanted to write?

 

I honestly couldn’t tell you exactly where it started. Probably with movies and TV – I loved certain stories and wanted to make them mine. Which meant (initially) trying to rip them off, and later developing my own ideas. I wanted to tell stories, basically, for as long as I can remember. It’s a compulsion.

 

In terms of the writers who inspired me, two of my earliest influences were probably Terrance Dicks (who wrote most of the old Dr Who novelisations, which in those pre-VCR days was the only way to experience the older adventures) and Jack Higgins, who wrote The Eagle Has Landed and a lot of other excellent thrillers (A Prayer for the Dying, The Savage Day, Night Judgement At Sinos) that were full of pace, vivid characterisation and atmosphere. Deceptively plain-looking prose that would suddenly throw up sudden flashes of lyricism. although I was also lucky enough to read some big fat anthologies of classic horror – though they didn’t actually include any M.R. James or H.P. Lovecraft, who I didn’t get to read till a lot later!

 

I read loads of horror through my teens, then went through a snobbish phase of deciding all genre fiction was rubbish. I trained for a while as an actor, so my interested moved more towards plays and scripts, although I never quite lost interest in fiction.

 

A lot of my early stuff wanted to be films, but I didn’t know how to write a screenplay. Prose was only sort of writing I was familiar with, so I worked with that. It took me a while to develop the kind of commitment where I finished what I started, but I managed my first novel at fourteen. Although it was fucking dreadful…

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There was a period – mainly at university – where I thought scriptwriting was going to be the way to go, but in the end I preferred to write something which you could complete all by yourself, without a cast or crew or budget.

 

Outside that, two of the main factors that brought me back to prose horror – and horror – were Nick Royle’s anthology Darklands, which I’d bought in the early ‘90s, and… er…. Shaun Hutson. Not a writer, I know, that a lot of your interviewees would cite! I was very into Sam Peckinpah’s films in my final year at college, and in the spring of 1996 I was in a production that went to the National Student Drama Festival in Scarborough. There was quite a bit of time to kill, so I picked up a second-hand book – Captives, by Hutson.

 

What struck me was how full it was of Peckinpah-esque characters: screwed-up, damaged bastards who could elicit sympathy and revulsion in equal measures, wreaking havoc as they pursued their mad obsessions. And I couldn’t stop turning the pages. So I bought a load of his books and read more, and then dug up my copy of Darklands and realised just how big and broad a field horror could be. That led me to start reading as widely and extensively in the field as I could. Based on that, I wrote to two of the Darklands authors whose work I’d liked best – Simon Clark and Michael Marshall Smith – and they both wrote back with advice. That led me to the small press zines which were having their last big hurrah around the end of the ‘90s, which got me started. It was also how I first met the woman I later married. So Shaun Hutson is kind of to blame for both my career and my marriage…!

 

Do you use pen and paper, computer, laptop, typewriter? Do you work alone or in coffee shops?

 

Usually laptop these days, but I always have a notebook (usually one of those little red Silvine memo books) and a pen. I’ve recently rediscovered the joys of using a fountain pen! But working on computer usually suits me best – you can cut and rearrange and insert at will in a way that would be a lot harder and more time-consuming with pen and paper. But I’m adaptable and the writing’s a compulsive thing with me, so I’m sure I’d cope if I had to!

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I usually work in our spare room, but I’ll do both. One great advantage of a laptop is how portable it makes the work! Plug in a pair of headphones to shut out the outside world and you’re away. I love writing in the Last Inn in Barmouth when we go on holiday there; it’s got a lovely view of the harbour.

 

Do you work in silence or to music?

 

Music, usually. I’ll put the same album on a loop, usually with a pot of tea to hand, and get to work. Sometimes I use a couple of different albums – I started writing The Sound of the Dark with Dark Sanctuary’s L’Etre Las/L’Envers du Miroir as the soundtrack, but then they released their first new album in over a decade, Cernunnos (which is brilliant, by the way) so I switched over to that. (Dark Sanctuary are a French neoclassical band that I was turned on to by our late and much-missed mutual friend Rob Krijnen-Kemp.)

 

It sounds weird, but there’s usually a "right" soundtrack for whatever I’m working on, and playing it is all part of getting back into the groove each morning and picking up where I left off.

 

Do you keep a pad on your bedside stand, or rely on memory?

 

I’ve recorded voice notes, but I find a pad and pen is the best approach. My memory’s still pretty good, but if I relied solely on that I’d be bound to forget something essential! I scribble down story ideas, titles, bits of prose or description, to-do lists and stuff to incorporate or change in a book. At the moment, I’m also using them to write rough outlines of each chapter in the new book (a big beast with multiple storylines) so they’re filling up quickly! I’m also learning Welsh, so I jot down any new phrases as I go…

 

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

 

I love them all! I think some of my best pieces have been novellas – Angels of the Silences, The School House, The Narrows, Roth-Steyr, Jaeger and particularly A Different Kind of Light – but I probably love writing novels most. It’s great to be able to sink into a big, long-term project like that day after day…

 

And now the question of dread... what do you think of AI used for writing? (let me guess)

 

Fuck that shit, in every conceivable way.

Nicely put! What are your favourite movies/documentaries/inspirations?

 

So many great films! I wouldn’t know where to begin. One of my favourites is Monsieur Hire, starring Michel Blanc, which breaks my heart whenever I watch it. The Yakuza (with Robert Mitchum, Keiko Kishi and Takakura Ken) is another – god, I love 1970s films. I saw Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc recently and that was just astonishing – a silent film, but one that didn’t look even remotely dated. Maria Falconetti was superb. Derek Jarman’s The Last of England. So many others…

 

I’ve probably drawn some inspiration from the playwrights I studied at University. Edward Bond and Howard Barker, but – especially – David Rudkin, who among many other things wrote the brilliant Penda’s Fen.

What do you think of the opinion that horror has to be graphic to be labelled "horror"?

 

Utter bollocks. What I love most about horror is that be almost anything. It can be graphic, quiet, cosmic, folk – and it come out of any other genre, too. The Western, SF, fantasy, crime/thriller, even comedy – any one of those has the potential to morph into a horror narrative. Horror doesn’t "have to be" anything. That’s its biggest strength.

 

Do you ever write in a different discipline, say, a play, or poetry?

Now and then. I haven’t written actual poetry in years – though it might be worth returning to, just to hone my prose skills better – but I’ve written a few stories in verse. I suppose they’re technically poems, but first and foremost it was just another – often sparer, leaner – way of telling a story. I wrote some radio plays – nearly twenty years ago now – but they weren’t very good. I have made a few attempts at writing stage or screen plays, but without much success. I’ll probably keep trying, on and off.

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Do you think your books would make good movie adaptations? Any ideas on actors? Directors?

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I think The Hollows would definitely make a great film. As for casting, I could see Holly Aird as the protagonist, Ellie Cheetham. Beyond that... well, I always try to "cast" my characters when I write them so I can visualise them and imagine what they sound like, but they're just as likely to be people I know or actors who died years before. A Different Kind Of Light would make a genuinely frightening horror film too, I reckon: Riz Ahmed and Amy Bailey (Kwenthryth from Vikings) would be great as Ash and Danie, the protagonists of that one. 

 

As far as directors go - Ben Wheatley's films are never less than interesting. Colin Minihan and Andy Mitton are two other directors whose name on a film immediately makes me want to see it. I know there are others, but they refuse to come to mind right now!

Favourite writers and/or inspirations?

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​I still love Jack Higgins – I got into the habit of reading a chapter a night to my spouse when she had cancer a few years ago, which help her relax. Others – old favourites and new – include Ramsey Campbell, Paul Finch, Joolz Denby, Robert Aickman, the late great Joel Lane, Hailey Piper, Gemma Files, Adam Nevill, Thomas H. Cook, Lynda E. Rucker, Trevanian, John Linwood Grant, David Sodergren, Simon Louvish. And yes, Stephen King. Those are just a few. Ask me tomorrow and there’ll be more. Recently, I’ve been rereading some early Michael Moorcock… and, yes, quite a bit of Shaun Hutson. What can I say? My tastes are broad. :)

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I believe it's always good for your own work to read across a spectrum of writers - possibly the best horror editor ever, the late Karl Edward Wagner, had catholic tastes in fiction, running from Jamesian ghost stories to graphic horror - and in different genres or literary fiction, too. 

 

Upcoming writers to look out for? 

 

Oh God, there are so many! Leaving aside those of my own generation like Gemma Files - or Cate Gardner, my better half - there are writers such as Hailey Piper - I'll read anything by her in a heartbeat - Usman Malik, Paula Ashe, Priya Sharma and Sarah Gailey. And I've been reading a remarkable folk-horror novel set in Birmingham called At Night, White Bracken by Gareth Wood. 

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You mentioned earlier our mutual friend, Rob Kemp. Can you tell me a bit about the collection of his short stories you've put together and for which you're trying to find a home?

 

I always loved Rob's writing and I know he'd hoped to put together a collection of short stories, set in his invented city of Bruckestadt. And he'd also written a number of earlier stories, like "Volk", "Green Faith", and "Shuffling Off", which now only existed in the small-press zines that had published them, but which I thought deserved to be preserved and more widely read. Also, I was unable to attend his memorial service, so I felt it would be the least I could do to try and collate Rob's stories and see if I could find a home for a posthumous collection.

 

Rob's son Raphael was able to extract the Bruckestadt stories from a thumb drive and I was able to get an electronic copy of "Volk" from Gary Fry, who'd reprinted the story in a later anthology; the rest had to be typed up from the published text. There was also an unpublished story, "Before A Fall", which Rob wrote for an anthology I'd planned that sadly never materialised. He said it was the fastest writing he'd ever done: "It was written in a fortnight, and it was written on absinthe." Which sounds like Rob.

 

Rob said his planned title for the Bruckestadt collection was "A Prosody of Shadows", but whether that was the one he'd have eventually used I don't know: a lot of his stories started out with very ornate titles and ended up as simpler ones ("Thoughts to Rive the Heart", for example, became "Exhibits") so the title of that section is simply "The City of Bridges". The title of the collection as a whole is from a line in one of his other stories - that way it's sticking with Rob's own inventions, at least. It's a slim volume, but a very good one nonetheless, and I hope I can find it a home. Rob wanted to produce at least one book with his name on it, at least; he deserves to have that wish granted. 

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Thank you, Simon, for your time and generosity. I wish you all further success, in fact, complete world domination! Thank you for your time and for an enjoyable and informative interview.

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