July 2016
Joe Hill is the author of the novels Heart Shaped Box, Horns, and NOS4A2, as well as the short story collection 20th Century Ghosts and the comic series Locke & Key. His fourth novel, The Fireman, was released in May. It’s a high-tension apocalyptic thriller that you won’t want to miss. Just before the book hit the shelves I had a chance to sit down with the author on the back of a fire truck and then over lunch at a riverside restaurant to discuss his creative process, the art of suspense, and mob psychology.
DW: Was there a particular moment or juxtaposition of ideas you can point to as the genesis of The Fireman, when you first glimpsed the potential of the story and knew it would be your next book?
JH: I can’t identify a single place where the idea for the story came to me. I know that I heard about spontaneous combustion when I was 12 years old and immediately became terrified of dying that way. It just seemed like such an unfair thing that you could be wandering around and your chemistry would turn against you and suddenly you become like a human stick of nitroglycerin and just explode into flames. And I was convinced from the age of 12 to about the age of 15 that I was going to die of spontaneous combustion and…I didn’t. I made it through, fortunately. So spontaneous combustion was a thing that was in my head for decades. And at some point about 8 or 9 years ago, I saw the first scene of the book. I saw in the opening scene, you have a young school nurse named Harper looking out the windows into the playground, and she sees a man stagger into the playground with smoke pouring from the sleeves of his coat. And I saw that whole scene play out very clearly. And I wasn’t sure what the story was, I just knew that I had an opening that I liked and wanted to write. But I can’t say at what point I knew that scene was going to be about a runaway plague that caused spontaneous combustion. At some point the pieces fell together and I thought: I could run with this. And probably I imagined it would be a novella, ‘cause almost everything I write I think will be a short story or a novella until suddenly I’ve got 350 pages and I think, “Oh, I guess maybe it’s not.”
DW: You wrote the first draft longhand in journals.
JH: Yeah, it’s a huge stack of journals.
DW: It’s a 700 plus page book. Why did you choose that approach? What were the advantages and challenges of working longhand?
JH: It’s the first book I’ve written that way, which has its advantages and disadvantages because it forces you to work a little bit slower, and I remember I spent all of one month writing this one scene where a character needs to get a message to someone out on an island, and she decides she’s going to do it by taping the message to an arrow and shooting the arrow out to the island because she can’t get to the island herself. And she sneaks past all of these sentries and gets up into a church bell tower, and she’s shooting arrow after arrow. It’s a tremendously suspenseful scene, and it took me 3 to 4 weeks to write. Fifty pages, this major action set piece, you know. And after I finished writing the scene, almost of the day after I finished writing it, I thought: or she could just have one of her friends carry a note over in secret… And so I never even ended up typing that scene up. It just became completely unnecessary and I dumped it.
So that was a little weird. There are moments like that when you’re working longhand when it almost seems like, is it really worth the trouble? But I think it is worth the trouble. I’m best friends with Gabriel Rodriguez, who is the artist on Locke & Key and from watching him create pages I was fascinated by the way a page of Locke & Key would start as a very loose rough sketch with just shapes placed on the page and the panels loosely framed out. And I had this moment, this sort of flash of insight, when I realized that’s what the first draft of a novel should be like, too. It’s just a personal sketch for yourself where your framing out where the big moment should come, and you are sort of getting a sense for how your characters look and act, and the whole overall movement of the story. And by writing it in long hand I’m really reinforcing that idea that the first draft is just for me, it’s not for anyone else, it’s just a sketch of the book to come. I don’t outline, but I do sketch, I do that sort of first draft sketch work where things are a little bit more skeletal and very open to change, and I’m just sort of getting a sense for how it should flow.
DW: Does that involve some stuff where you might literally be writing what might sound like stage direction or summary for yourself? Is it that sparse?
JH: I do that in the margins. One of the things that I do, and it’s another reason why I love working in a notebook, is I’ll be writing the scene and I’ll put down one pen and get out a red pen and begin writing notes to myself in the margin. Like: this scene should actually come earlier in the book and it would be better if Harper was actually talking to this character instead of that character. And in first draft maybe Harper will be talking to Allie Story, say, and suddenly mid-scene she’s talking to René Gilmonton instead because I’ll suddenly realize it would be so much better if those were Renée’s lines and that Allie doesn’t belong in this scene. And you could do that working on the computer too, there’s no reason you couldn’t, but for some reason something about the nature of working longhand tricks my brain into claiming a freedom for itself that it doesn’t seem to have when it’s on a computer when I’m typing up a document.
Furthermore, there is no Internet on a notebook. There’s no Twitter, there’s no Instagram, there’s no Huffington Post. So your opportunities to be distracted are substantially reduced. And I do some other stuff, like I don’t keep the phone in the room with me. I don’t listen to my music on my phone. I have a record player, and if I want to listen to music, I listen to vinyl. Because the record player just does one thing, it just plays music. It doesn’t also give me text messages, and so I can’t get distracted by text messages when I should be creating a scene. It’s very selfish, but it’s very satisfying.
DW: Music plays an important role in The Fireman, and there’s a character in the book who lives in what’s referred to as “the House of the Black Star” because of a folk art ornament mounted on the front of it. At that house, we also encounter a minor character who resembles David Bowie. And yet I’m pretty sure the book was finished before his death and before the release of Black Star. Synchronicity or tribute?
JH: Um, you know, I’ve never even thought about that until just now. So synchronicity. It’s true Harper is at one point brought to the house of the Black Star where she meets a David Bowie like character. That is very peculiar. That makes me seem smart, you know I like that, that’s cool.
DW: A few years ago, in a blog post called Pour Me Another Draft, you offered a glimpse into your revision process, including the discipline of manually retyping the entire book because it forces you to be a more discerning editor than if you were just scanning through the text. When I read that you did that, I thought you were crazy. So, of course I immediately took up the practice. But I’ve found that after a few books, I’m writing more economical first drafts from that training. Do you still retype an entire draft in revision?
JH: Absolutely. Twice if possible. One thing is, when you have to copy a manuscript over from longhand, you literally have to retype every single sentence. In the process, you get rid of stuff you don’t need. You look at a paragraph that’s a huge paragraph and you’ll type in the first two sentences and then you be looking at the next 10 sentences and you’ll be like, “Eh, I don’t really need any of that. I don’t really feel like typing any of that.”
DW: Laziness is your ally.
JH: Yeah, being lazy is your ally. I got it all in the first two sentences, I don’t need the rest of that crap. Hit return, onto the next paragraph. And until you test each sentence by writing it again, you don’t really know which sentence is worthy of staying there, and I think when you’re just cutting and pasting stuff those sentences remain very unexamined. You know, it’s always been there and you just clip it into a new document and it hasn’t been forced to prove it deserves to stay.
DW: You seem to enjoy burning shit in your books. Did you go through a pyro phase growing up?
JH: Yeah…I mean there is a lot of fire in the books, a lot of fire. I’ve thought about this very carefully, you know and I do sort of wonder: if I wasn’t writing would I be in jail for arson? Would I be a firebug?
DW: You found a socially acceptable outlet.
JH: I’d be locked up in jail and every time someone lights a cigarette near me I’d wet myself with pleasure. I’d be like, “Ahhh, the sweet cleansing flame.” You know, I think it was David Mamet who said that when you write a screenplay for a film you always want to have at least one building explode. And the reason why, he said, is because the film crew really loves when the building explodes. It’s a big night when you’re shooting and everyone shows up, they got the explosives all set up, the building explodes…it’s awesome. Everyone has a great night. And I thought, you know, I write novels not films, but that feels right. Sooner or later you blow some shit up and everyone loves it.
DW: Your action scenes are fantastic, and I’ve noticed that part of what makes them so kinetic are what I think of as great auditory verbs. The sound of the word often contributes to the action. Do you make a point of collecting great verbs? (I hear you’re a fearsome Scrabble player). Or is that something you bring from your work in comics?
JH: Actually, I was working on a comic the other day and I wrote an unforgettable line of dialogue. It was, “HURKKKKK!” And after writing it I just thought, “Damn, you just never get to write a line like that in a novel.” I just think the right verb tweaks a readers thrill centers, it pokes that excitement center in a way I don’t understand, but if you nail it with just the right verb, the reader kind of feels an interior shudder in response. Or at least I do.
DW: And it saves so many other words.
JH: And it saves so many other words. That’s right. One of the things I noticed when I was in high school and I read Louis L’Amour westerns—I was interested to learn how rarely Louis L’Amour described how things looked. Instead he described how things sounded. The sound of horses breathing. The sound of dry firewood snapping in the flames. And I thought it was interesting how immediate that made scenes feel. The visuals tended to be static, but the sounds tended to electrify the reader’s attention. So I’m always wondering how can I get away from the visual and get under the reader’s skin.
DW: Give them the right sound and they can see it.
JH: Give them the right sound and they can see it, right, exactly. The other thing to remember is you don’t want to be too controlling. You want to let the readers do at least half the work. Let them cast the movie. Don’t cast the movie for them. Let them decide what the characters look like. So I do try not to step all over what the reader might have the potential to imagine. With John Rookwood in The Fireman—one of the lead characters of the novel—I think there are three sentences where I remind people he wears glasses sometimes, and I described him as small and sort of sinewy, and that’s about it. Otherwise, I hope the reader will build their visual off of the way other people talk about him and his own dialogue, and let them sort of shape the image in their mind. Elmore Leonard said once, “I want to know how a character looks from what he says.” I always thought that was such an interesting idea. Why should the way a person talks suddenly give you a visual of what they look like? But it never fails. The right dialogue always makes you picture a character.
DW: This is your second book with a female lead, and you also included some Easter eggs that pay homage to female horror and sci-fi legends. My favorite was a little girl’s “cup of stars” right out of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.
JH: Yeah, I love that cup of stars. That thing in the Haunting of Hill House about the cup of stars is like one of the most beautiful passages ever written in an American novel. Don’t let them take away your cup of stars. I love that.
DW: It seems to me that we’re in the midst of a golden age of female horror authors who are bringing new perspectives and voices to the genre, particularly in short fiction. Who are some of your favorites?
JH: Karen Russell and Kelly Link have both done astonishing work. I really learned how to write short stories from studying Kelly Link’s fiction, in particular “The Specialist’s Hat,” which I think is a classic of horror—speaking of Shirley Jackson—on par with “The Lottery.” Just a total masterpiece of formal construction and imagination. And I love Karen Russell. St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is terrific. Recently I’ve discovered Seanan McGuire. She is a terrific writer, and more of a fantasy writer than a horror writer, but she does really incandescent work. Beautiful sentences, beautiful ideas. She has a really brave imagination that takes her into unexpected directions. So those are a few writers who come to mind, and they’ve all done some of their most exciting work in very compact form, in short stories or novellas or short novels.
And I would just say about that, as a guy who’s written two very long novels back-to-back, that I often think that mastery is revealed in miniature. When you’re seeing someone really at the height of their powers, it tends to be in short novels or short stories. And then I guess my defense at having written two long novels is that especially The Fireman is a series of short novels stitched together. Novels about the same character stitched together into one overarching narrative.
DW: In the dedication you thank J.K. Rowling “whose stories showed me how to write this one.” Is there a particular thing you learned from her approach to storytelling that you could share?
JH: Anyone who loves the Harry Potter novels—and I love the Harry Potter novels, I’ve read all of them twice and I guess I’ve read a couple of them three times and seen the movies multiple times and I just adore JK Rowling both as a writer and as a public figure, I love the stories—anyone who’s familiar with the Harry Potter novels who reads The Fireman might be able to see how the structure of The Fireman mimics the structure of most of the Harry Potter novels.
In Harry Potter you have a hero who’s coming from a very unhappy domestic situation and who is different. Different and strange. And then he goes away to a community where everyone is different and strange like him, and there he wrestles to learn to control unexpected powers, and is confronted with a series of mysteries. And also makes friends and makes enemies. And then each of the mysteries in the book are resolved in a series of escalating confrontations that will force Harry, the hero, to make use of his newfound education and powers, to take control of his own specialness, his difference, and use that to confront his enemies and to resolve these puzzles.
And that’s basically The Fireman. You have this hero, Harper, who is coming from an unhappy domestic situation. There’s something very different about her from other people, which is that she’s contaminated by this illness that could cause her to burst into flame at any moment. She goes to a community where people are different; like her everyone is sick with the same illness. It’s not Hogwarts, it’s Camp Wyndham, but it is a place where the strange is commonplace. There she makes friends, she makes enemies, and is confronted with a series of mysteries and puzzles. And she’s forced to grapple with her own difference, her strangeness, and to take possession of her own powers. Those mysteries are all resolved in a series of escalating confrontations that force her to use the things she has learned from the people who care about her. So it is in many ways a mirror, it is a weird mirror to the structure of the Harry Potter novels.
DW: You mentioned mysteries. One of the heroes in the book says, “Any writer who works by outline should be burned at the stake. Possibly with their own outline and note cards used as kindling.” As a fellow seat-of-the pants writer, I find the spontaneous approach is great for suspense but tricky for mystery. Do you forecast plot events at all? And I’m thinking of two revelations in particular from your books: the mystery regarding a thief in the middle of The Fireman and Merrin’s secret in Horns. Did you know in advance how those mysteries would be resolved, or is it a discovery for you almost as much as for the reader?
JH: Well, the interesting thing about the withheld information about Merrin in Horns is… One of the things people have mentioned is how surprised they were that I gave away who the killer was in the first hundred pages of Horns. Because it looks like it’s going to be a mystery and then actually at page 80 I say no, this is the dude that did it. And in that case I revealed who the murderer was because I didn’t think I’d fool anyone. I figured everyone would just say, “Oh, it’s this guy.” And so the job is to create suspense. You want to keep people turning the pages, to keep them excited. And Hitchcock once said the difference between surprise and suspense is simple. Surprise is when people are sitting at a dinner table and suddenly the room blows up. That’s surprise. Suspense is when you see the bomb ticking under the table and they don’t. So I thought, instead of keeping it a surprise who the killer is, I’m going to say it right up front and then I’m going to create suspense because we know he’s out there hunting our hero and that his powers might be overmatched by this guy’s resources.
DW: But then we find out something about Merrin.
JH: Right, we find out something about Merrin that we didn’t know right off.
DW: And it changes everything. I wondered if you knew that about her before you got there.
JH: Actually I didn’t. No, I didn’t. I discovered it as I went along. And I didn’t know who the camp thief was in The Fireman originally. But I began to suspect. Before that revelation came out, I began to suspect who it might be and why. But then, the beauty of doing five or six drafts is if something is painfully obvious in the first draft you can retrofit it to make it harder to spot. And, especially about the identity of the thief working in Camp Wyndham, in the last three drafts I was literally down to playing: can I keep this one sentence in without giving it away? Can I have this one thing, this one detail on this one page, or will it give it all away? And I would take it out and I would put it back in and I would take it out. I think I left it in. Were you surprised, or did you see it coming?
DW: I considered it, as one of several possibilities, but I wasn’t sure until I got there.
JH: Okay. I talked to one reader who said, “Oh, I knew who the thief was on page 250.” But then this reader said, “But I grew up reading Agatha Christie novels, and I’m impossible to fool.” And a couple of other people were surprised, and my dad said he didn’t see it coming, so I thought, “Well, I got my dad. I got someone.”
DW: One technique that makes The Fireman so suspenseful is how you buy yourself the space to develop characters and relationships by dangling high stakes consequences before stepping away, so that the whole time people are sharing their backstories or falling in love, I’m biting my nails about what’s going on off-screen. And that tension is often enhanced by how Harper’s rationality and concern for others gives her a blind spot to certain dangers. She continues, in many ways, to operate from a pre-apocalyptic mindset while everyone around her is going crazy. Did those strategies for keeping suspense in the red come intuitively in early drafts, or did you have to play with the story structure to strike the right balance?
JH: That’s really why the book took three years to write. I’m not a fast writer and often times I’ll encounter a problem somewhere in the course of writing a book that’s like this. Here’s the problem that had to be solved: Harper arrives in Camp Wyndham where suddenly the book opens up with a huge cast of characters and an interesting setting with a lot of mysteries and puzzles and big ideas to wrestle with. Somehow you have to provide all that and anchor the reader and introduce all these characters, introduce the setting, introduce the problems, but you still have to keep the gas pedal down. Because if it becomes expositional, if it becomes information, the reader begins to flip ahead and say, “My God, is anything good going to happen in this book again?” So you can’t slow down. And the process of the work in the book was tuning and tuning and tuning so that when Harper gets to Camp Wyndham we learn about who these people are and we get to love them, we get to care about them, but still there is suspense, the pressure is still on, there is still danger, people are still dropping dead left and right. You know, Harper is always still scrabbling for resources to survive, scrabbling to escape the next dire situation. Maybe I wouldn’t feel the need for that if I wasn’t so insecure. But I am very insecure about the reader quitting the book, losing interest and then saying on Goodreads or Amazon, “I gave up after page 250 because not enough was happening.” So you have to accelerate, you have to keep the danger coming or people lose interest.
DW: You expanded on NOS4A2 in the Wraith comics. Do you have any plans or see any potential to revisit the world and characters of The Fireman in other media?
JH: I don’t know about other media…The Fireman is the first book I’ve ever written where I thought there was a chance that there might be another book about those characters. Although, I think if I were to return, I probably wouldn’t return for maybe a decade. But I could see 10 years from now writing another story about some of those characters because I can imagine a little bit more, and I’ve given some thought about what might happen next. Also, the rights to The Fireman were bought by Temple Hill and 20th Century Fox, and they’re developing it as a feature to be directed by Louis Leterrier. They’re talking to a screenwriter right now, so fingers crossed that something happens there.
DW: Cool. What book would you rescue the last copy of from a burning building?
JH: Well, that assumes that there are no more copies anywhere in the world. I think this is like, if you were going down into the bunker and knew we were going to have to start civilization over, which books would you bring with you? I think that you’d have to bring The Riverside Shakespeare because it’s got all of the plays in it. It’s a little bit of a cheat because it’s got all of the plays, it’s got the complete poems, and some academic analysis. I just don’t think you could rebuild a humanistic society without Shakespeare. Probably Shakespeare over the Bible, really. And I don’t say that to bash religious people, but given the world’s track record with religion, I assume if you’re going down into the bunker to escape the apocalypse it’s because of some kind of religious war, so maybe you leave the Bible behind and just take Shakespeare because that would make for a better fresh start.
DW: On Facebook, Christopher Golden—a champion of your work since long before he knew you were writing under a pseudonym—called The Fireman “the novel in which Joe seems to have both fully embraced his legacy and fully processed it, successfully moving beyond it in a way a lesser writer never could.”
JH: Chris has a good heart.
DW: The Fireman seems to especially have some DNA from The Stand blended into it. Of course, most apocalyptic novels do, but I think I detected intentional references in the naming of certain characters.
JH: Oh yeah.
DW: For me as a fan, it’s fun to see, and it feels sort of like recognizing little ornaments in the craft of someone like a woodworker, who learned the family trade and then in many ways surpassed that foundation by making the work uniquely his own. Is your father’s influence something that you feel you can acknowledge more comfortably at this point in your career without it being a distraction?
JH: I retrofitted a lot of the Stand stuff in the second and third drafts because, to be honest, when I was writing the first draft I didn’t really think about The Stand that much, but at some point very close to the end of the book I thought, you know, this has a lot in common with The Stand. And my joke about it, when I’ve talked to people about it, is to say that this is basically my version of The Stand soaked in gasoline and set on fire. I mean I did make this decision, when I started out writing, to write as Joe Hill. Not as Joseph King. And to keep it a secret for as long as I could. And I did that because of insecurity and because I wanted to have a chance to learn the craft, and when I finally did publish, I wanted to get published because people were genuinely excited about my fiction and not because I had a famous last name. I was worried that if I started writing as Joseph King, and if I was writing stuff that wasn’t very polished or very good and I was getting published because of who my dad was, people would say he only got published because of who his dad was and he’s riding on his coattails. And so I did write as Joe Hill and I was able to learn some things and publish some stories, get some stories accepted by people who didn’t know, and that was a big confidence booster for me and it was a very useful period of my development. You know, that said, I love my dad’s books and I’m a huge Stephen King fan, and my mom and dad are always the people who look at my first drafts. Actually, they don’t usually look at the first draft, they look at the third drafts—I don’t want anyone to see the first two drafts. But they are my first readers and still the best writing teachers a guy could want.
DW: But the Stand related material actually came in as finishing touches?
JH: There is a character, a child named Nick, who’s deaf. And of course, one of the heroes of The Stand is a deaf man named Nick Andros. Actually, the kid was named Travis in an earlier draft and it was only when I was two thirds of the way through the book that I remembered there was a deaf character in The Stand.
DW: Your Harold also reminded me…
JH: Yeah, he was named something else as well, and I thought, you know, this character is so much like Harold Lauder. So one of the things I started to do was, I thought: so this book does have echoes of The Stand in it. What do you do? Do you try to distance yourself from The Stand or do you embrace it? I thought, you know, as an artist I always think it’s better to be loud and proud and embrace what you are about than to run from it. This is why when someone directs a horror movie and it gets time to release the preview to theaters, you show the chainsaw. You don’t pretend you made an art film. Embrace what you did, okay? And so then, instead of running from The Stand I kind of went back to the book and said, “Where can I strengthen the notes? Where can I strengthen the echoes in interesting ways?”
DW: Bring it up in the mix.
JH: And so I kind of look at it as its own song that at some point in the song has some musical references to a pretty good song that we remember from a few years back.
DW: It kind of harmonizes with The Stand.
JH: Yeah, it kind of harmonizes with a different song, yeah.
DW: In the book, you refer to the hormone oxytocin as the “social media drug.” This real neurotransmitter plays a key role in how the fictional Dragonscale spore is either transmitted or kept in a state of equilibrium. And one quote that I love is: “A chorus or a firing squad: either would serve to satisfy the ’scale.” You do a very deft job of showing us both sides of that coin, how the social bonds that give us civilization can also fuel mob violence. It’s a theme that feels very prescient in foreshadowing the energies of our current election cycle. But the book was written before things got so crazy. Did your own social media observations inspire you to explore those themes? And when you look at the crowd psychology on display in this election year, are you optimistic that our better natures will prevail?
JH: Well, I spent years on Twitter as a guy who spent an hour a day every day on Twitter. I’ve backed off from the social network quite a bit over the last year, but I was really into that community, and I had some really great times there. I had all these great conversations and had a chance to talk with artists I admire and fellow bookworms and people into the same kind of weird historical stuff that I’m into, and I just, I had moments when I thought: this is a very inspiring place for bringing people together and sharing joy and really all geeking out together about the stuff we love. And so that was very inspiring and moving. But then you also see all of the stuff around Gamer Gate. And the hideous way women were persecuted by mobs of trolls in a really horrible way, essentially for daring to have an opinion about video games. And those two things exist together. The Gamer Gaters who were savaging women are in their way embracing their own community. It’s a vile community, but you know… And I think about when you see the Bernie Sanders rallies, and you see this outpouring of joy and humor and people are essentially geeks for Bernie and they’re wearing funny Bernie Sanders T-shirts, and then you contrast that with the Donald Trump rally where there seems to be this seething rage, this desire to break something, to spread some hurt around. And on the one hand, the two communities are clearly very different. On the other hand, both are demonstrations of group dynamics. You have the beautiful and the hideous very closely paired together.
DW: Chemically, people may be getting a similar experience.
JH: Almost exactly the same experience, right. And so one of the things I did want to explore in the book is I wanted to show the way communities can heal and support and love…but the problem with having a tribe is it gets tribal. And people who are not of the tribe, you have an excuse to hate, demonize them, be cruel and savage, and sort of have the safety of the crowd, too. And you know, if I could change just one thing in the book, if I could go back and add one thing, I’d give The Marlboro Man a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat.