November 2003
Reviewed by: Jamieson Wolf
Bev Vincent Interview by Jamieson Wolf & Naomi de Bruyn
Recently Jamieson Wolf and Naomi de Bruyn had a chance to interview the illustrious mastermind behind “The Road to the Dark Tower,” a compilation of Stephen King’s series, and a masterful author in his own right. Not only was it informative, but immensely enjoyable. We hope you enjoy the interview as much as we do!
JW: Do you write because you want to or because you feel you have to?
Bev Vincent: I’ve always had a compelling urge to write. I started a novel when I was in my mid-teens, typing away on an old manual using mill paper. Never finished it, but I enjoyed myself, though I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. My grade eight English teacher told me that a story I wrote for a class assignment was good enough to be published, which was a great inspiration. It wasn’t true, but it was motivational.
I wrote short stories during my college years in the 1980s, but never did anything with them beyond showing them to a few friends. I liked making things up. The only one I sent out was an entry to a contest run by Twilight Zone magazine. A dreadfully amateurish story, and I’m grateful that a) no copies of it survive, to the best of my knowledge and b) the judge, Peter Straub, who is now a friend, has no recollection of it. The contest winner was Dan Simmons. I had no idea how far out of my league I was back then.
I didn’t write at all for a long period during the early 1990s after I moved to the U.S. No particular reason other than laziness. I wasted a lot of time doing unproductive things. Television is a great time hole. After I got married in 1995, one of the best things we did when we moved into our new house was rip the cable out of the back yard. All those mind-numbing hours in front of the TV are now replaced with family time and constructive work at the computer writing.
ND: Who inspired you to begin writing?
BV: Everyone I’ve ever read, including some terrible writers. I subconsciously learned a lot about writing through the thousands of books I’ve read in my lifetime. It’s an osmotic process. You learn what works and what doesn’t. You also learn that someone who constructs clumsy, awkward sentences and cardboard characters can also be a terrific storyteller. You overlook the flaws as you’re swept away by the story. Later, you can appreciate the flaws and they inspire you to think – I can do at least that well, if not better.
When I started writing seriously in the late 1990s, one of the biggest hurdles I had was inertia. I didn’t have an office or a desk, so each time I wanted to work, a lot of time was taken up clearing an area, digging the laptop out of its travel case, setting up, spreading out my notes and papers and just getting started. Sometimes it was easier to say, ah, forget it.
So, when my wife asked me what I wanted for Christmas one year, I asked her for a place to write. She bought me this terrific rolltop desk – complete with all the little drawers and cubbyholes. I could set my computer up, make as much of a mess as I wanted, and, at the end of a session, just roll down the cover and – poof! – it’s all hidden away. That got me going more than anything else, I’d say. I could no longer hide behind excuses and all of my productive work has been done on that desk in the past four years – though it has been located in three different rooms in our house during that time.
ND: When did you decide that you wanted to follow this particular career path?
BV: I’m only lately beginning to see it as a career path. For a long time I considered it a hobby. A creative outlet. I have a “day job” that is my primary career, and I have no intention of giving that up any time soon. It’s not something that I do to support my writing – if it was I’d probably grow to despise it for the amount of time it takes up. I’ve been working at the same company for fourteen years and I continue to enjoy the work.
I’m realistic enough to know that very few people can make a career out of full-time writing. I know a lot of authors and the vast majority of them have day jobs. Those who don’t are very successful – in that elite, stratospheric region we aspire to but few attain – are taking a gamble or have a partner who supports the family.
Lately, since I sold THE ROAD TO THE DARK TOWER, I’ve seen writing as a second career more than a hobby. For the first time I’m actually doing better than breaking even – but that’s just this year, this book. What happens next year?
JW: What is it that draws you to horror writing in particular?
BV: Here’s my guilty little secret – though a lot of people associate me with horror, I don’t write much in that genre. Or, rather, horror is just one facet of what I write. I’ve probably published more horror because there are so many markets available for short horror fiction. I write a lot of crime fiction – mysteries, police procedurals, things like that, but outside of Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock, there aren’t many publishing venues for this type of story. Especially not much for the beginner. EQ and AH are hard markets to crack and it could be discouraging for someone starting out in that genre. Fortunately, a lot of crime fiction can also pass itself off as horror.
And I actually read very little horror these days. I went through a phase where I read every black-covered novel I could find, but now I’m much more discriminating. My time is more valuable and I don’t want to waste time with some poorly written slasher tale.
To address your question directly, though, what attracts me to writing horror is the challenge. It’s not as easy as it might appear. Creating a building level of tension and horrifying people is hard work. It’s far easier to plot a mystery, as it’s almost an analytical process. Sure, you have to build tension and suspense but the emotional impact isn’t the ultimate goal. With horror, you want to frighten the reader. Easy to do in a movie – just shock someone with something unexpected. Very, very hard to do well on the page.
JW: Do you derive inspiration from real life situations for your writing?
BV: Sure, I think all writers do. Our inspiration comes from something we see, do or hear. I can’t imagine just trying to come up with an idea out of the blue that wasn’t somehow related to my life’s experience. I think most writers go around with a kind of radar dish rotating discretely in the background subconsciously looking for something that makes them go, “Wait a minute, that’s a cool idea.” Usually it takes a couple of these things to come together to make a real story idea and then you go off in a different direction from real life. Sometimes it’s as simple as a sentence, a snippet of overheard conversation. I was working on a murder story that wasn’t going anywhere, and then there was the big power outage and I had my Eureka moment. The whole story, which is called “What David Was Doing When the Lights Went Out,” crystallized around that event. (It will be in the anthology Who Died in Here? from Penury Press in December)
It’s a mistake, though, to look at a writer’s work as autobiography because we take real-life situations as a seed but then run off in all different directions at once. “What if?” is our motto. But I think, too, if you dig below the surface of a writer’s collective works you will find things that are important to him or her in some fashion. We all have questions about life and the meaning of existence and we explore them through our writing. My father died earlier this year and some of what I’ve written since then has been part of the processes of dealing with that loss. But what’s real and what’s made up? Hopefully only the writer knows, because I’d hate to think how much of ourselves we are truly revealing through our fiction.
JW: Who are your favorite horror writers?
BV: The obvious one, of course, is Stephen King, who is probably the biggest influence on me as a writer. Not that I try to imitate him but because he inspires me to improve my craft and my art. I’ve often said that if he started writing romances I’d probably still read his books because at the heart they aren’t about the scare but about the people enduring the horror. The best books are about people. They’re the stories that stick with you. Some writers – and I won’t mention names – generate a lot of books that sell well and people enjoy them when they’re reading them but ten years down the road you look back at the ten or fifteen books and try to remember what they were about and just come up blank. That’s usually because the characters served the plot rather than the other way around.
Other horror writers I read regularly are Dan Simmons (though horror is just one literary neighborhood he visits), Peter Straub and Graham Joyce. Joyce is probably not as well known in North America as the other two, but he deserves to be read by more people because he is such a skillful and gifted writer. Peter Straub introduced me to his books several years ago and I’ve been a devoted follower of his writing since then. Doug Clegg is another writer who I’ve discovered recently. Though it’s hard to classify him as horror (the same is true of Joyce), Jonathan Carroll is a writer of surreal and occasionally horrific stories whose books I always read when they come out. Vancouver’s own Michael Slade, who writes the Special X procedurals, has been adopted by the horror community as one of their own, too, because he writes about such twisted characters who do truly diabolical things.
JW: Do you feel that your use of language contributes to your work?
BV: That’s an intriguing question. Where does a writer’s voice come from? I belonged to an on-line critique group a few years ago where we passed around short stories and then got feedback from a half-dozen or so other writers who were all at about the same level. Though we were nominally a horror group, I often sent around stories that were fantasy or light sci-fi or crime. One of the comments that pleased me most came from someone who said they would have been able to tell that a certain story was mine even if they hadn’t known I’d written it because of my voice. As tyro writers, we all struggle to find a voice that is unique and not a conscious or subconscious imitation of someone else. However, I was equally pleased when someone else told me that I managed to write stories that were vastly different, as if written by different people. What that said to me was that I was finding a voice, but I wasn’t always sounding the same. That was encouraging.
One of the best things to come out of belonging to a couple of different critique groups – both live and virtual – is that I’ve become a discriminating editor, both of others’ work and, more importantly, my own. I probably don’t cut as much from my own as I should at times, but I do go over and over things and scrutinize words and sentences, tightening and deleting extraneous words and phrases. I’m trying to learn how little you can get away with. The reader becomes more of a partner in the creative process if you don’t overstate the obvious. Two or three lines of dialog and some brief exposition can represent an entire conversation. You don’t need to replicate the entire exchange – the reader can work the rest of it out.
Editing is hard work, though. As you can tell from the length of these responses, I don’t have any problem filling up a page. It’s cutting back that’s tough. There’s an old quote from someone famous who ended a letter by saying, “Sorry this is so long, but I didn’t have time to make it shorter.” That’s so true.
JW: In your short story “Harming Obsession,” the main character, Victor, is obsessed with not harming someone. Do you believe that obsessions are healthy? Do you think that obsession is a form of living?
BV: I’m a fairly compulsive person. Not to Victor’s extremes, not obsessive, but I like a certain amount of order and structure in life. I’m a slave to the clock. I don’t like to be late for things (as a consequence, I usually get there way too early). I don’t miss deadlines. Period. When I was in college, I used to get up on Saturday mornings, walk downtown, visit the same bookstore and the same record store, eat lunch at the same place. It was a comfortable routine, and sometimes you need that framework so you can handle the unexpected things life throws your way. However, I like shaking things up every now and then. When I go to a restaurant we visit regularly, I look for something new to order. When I go on vacation I often take along a book by some author I’ve never read before. Obsessions aren’t healthy because they blind us to all the other possibilities the world has to offer. But a certain amount of rigorous routine helps keep us sane, gives us an anchor or focal point.
JW: Your work tends to deal with real people in real life situations. Do you feel that things are made all the more horrifying when they are based in reality? Or, is it more frightening when things are based in a reality we don’t understand?
BV: I used to read a lot of science fiction, but I got bored with people making up arbitrary universes for no good reason. Unpronounceable names full of dashes and apostrophes and short on vowels. It became increasingly difficult for me to care about what was going on in these stories because of the disorientation factor. I spent a lot of time learning the rules of the setting when I really wanted to know about the characters.
I alternate between putting real people in danger from a recognizable source or making them cope when something that completely deconstructs their comfortable reality. My story “One of Those Weeks” which will be in BORDERLANDS 5 this fall, starts out with a guy who, one morning, discovers that his shoelaces won’t stay tied, no matter what he does, like they’re made of some perfectly frictionless substance. It simply doesn’t make sense. He can tie them in knots and they still come undone. It’s a little thing but it’s just the beginning, as everything he relies on – all those anchors to his reality – slowly disappear.
There’s something to be said for both approaches. What would scare you more? Some mask-wearing psycho outside your house wielding a chainsaw, intent on breaking through your door and hacking you up into little bitty pieces, or discovering that vampires are wandering the streets of your home town? One’s reality based and the other isn’t, but they’re both scary as hell.
JW: Your characters are vividly drawn, I felt connected to them right away. Do you feel that it is plot or characters that drives a story?
BV: I think you can do both successfully, but if you want people to remember the story and truly be affected by it, they have to identify with the characters and understand who they are and why they’re acting like they are. The best writers can even make you sympathize with the adversary. After all, everyone is doing the best they can at life and is working from their own set of rules and morality, incomprehensible to us though they may be. However, you can have the world’s best-drawn characters and without an interesting story, all you have is a bunch of fascinating people sitting around in a room.
I don’t plot stories out in advance, though – and I’m not saying that’s necessarily a good thing. Sometimes I’m stumbling along as blindly as the reader is without a clear picture of where the story is going. I may have a vague notion, but some stories I’ve written have been as much a revelation to me as to anyone else. “Harming Obsession” is an exception, I’d have to say, as I understood the entire story before I started writing. Given that it’s been one of my most popular stories – published three times and received honorable mention in the current THE YEAR’S BEST FANTASY AND HORROR – maybe that should tell me something.
Some writers compare the act to archeology or sculpture, uncovering something hidden beneath. That’s exciting to me. It’s like tightrope walking without a net. Sometimes you crash – and believe me when I tell you I have a lot of splatter-marks on my hard drive, stories that started out with promise and then petered out because I couldn’t figure out where I was going. But when it works – man, what a rush. You turn on the computer, reread what you’ve written already and then words just start flowing and the story reveals itself to you as if it was waiting to be uncovered…but only up to a certain point. At the end of the session you turn off the computer, satisfied with what you’ve accomplished but completely mystified about what comes next. I think that works best when you understand your characters well so that their reactions to certain events becomes intuitive and they take the story where it must go based on their natures.
JW: Why, in your opinion, do people like to be scared?
BV: Why do people like roller coasters? I don’t. I hate the out-of-control sensation and I can’t wait for the ride to end. There are different ways to generate that adrenaline rush and horror books and movies is one. I had a friend in high school who always hid his face at a horror movie when he knew something dreadful was about to happen. He was like me on the roller coaster – couldn’t wait for that scene to end. Most of the people in my life aren’t big fans of scary movies, so I tend to watch them alone, which takes away some of the fun. I remember watching some campy horror movie in college, the only guy in a lounge at the women’s dorm. Part of the fun of the experience was scaring other people between the movie’s scary scenes. Grabbing an ankle under a table or saying “boo!” during a quiet moment.
Do we truly like to be scared? I’m not so sure we do. I think we like the anticipation up to a certain point, but then we all tend to hide our faces in one way or another. We know there are scary things in real life from which we can’t hide. Our parents die. Our friends are in car accidents. We say horrible things that can never be unsaid to the people we love and we face crises in our relationships. Perhaps reading and watching horror is a way to familiarize ourselves with the emotion in controlled circumstances.
JW: In “The Road to the Dark Tower,” you compile all seven books of King’s landmark series. What inspired you to do so? Did doing so help you to understand King better as an author?
BV: I’ve been reading King for almost a quarter of a century and have followed the Dark Tower series since 1984, when I got one of the second printings of THE GUNSLINGER. Some of the more rabid Dark Tower fans have been chomping at the bit for the next installment over the past two decades. I’ve been content to take the books as they appear and be thankful for them when they do. It’s the only series that I’ve been that patient with. Typically I won’t start a series until I know I can read the whole thing beginning to end without having to wait for the next installment. For me it’s been as much about the ride as the destination and with the Dark Tower I’ve been a patient traveler.
I have a bit of a reputation as a King expert – I write a long bimonthly column in Cemetery Dance magazine that is mainly King news, reviews and discussion – and I’ve been asked over the years when I’m going to write a book about King. I always responded saying I had no plans to write about him. I know his opinion of biographies and other things that concentrate more on his life than his work, and I didn’t think I had anything to add to the body of material out there already that looks at his books and stories.
However, the Dark Tower is different. People have written a bit about the earlier books in the series but couldn’t look at the whole thing for good reason – because half of it still hasn’t been published. I woke up one morning with this vague idea that I could write a book about the series and by the time I got out of the shower (where I do some of my best brainstorming) I had pretty much decided to proceed with the project. I bounced the idea off a small press editor friend of mine to see if it was viable and he gave me a lot of encouragement, even offering to buy the book if I couldn’t sell it anywhere else. You have to understand that I was looking at a long-term project. This was in late 2002 and the final book in the series wasn’t scheduled to be published for another two years. I envisioned something that I’d be working with off and on for the next two or three years.
The first thing I did, though, before continuing any further with the idea, was propose it to King. If he hated the idea then I was prepared to “cry off” and move on to other things. I didn’t ask for his endorsement, but I didn’t want to alienate him with yet another book that he might consider exploitive. I gave him plenty of ammunition to torpedo the project if he was so inclined. However, mostly in jest, I closed my proposal by saying that “in my wildest dreams” the Fed-Ex truck would pull up in front of my house with the manuscripts for the last three books and I’d be able to tackle the project right away rather than waiting for them to be published. Much to my delight, King both approved of the project and supplied the manuscripts, which I consider a great honor considering the security under which these three books are being guarded to keep their secrets from leaking out prior to publication.
However, it meant that all of a sudden I had a timely project rather than a long-term one. It would be a huge advantage to get it done and published concurrently with the final Dark Tower book. I had a leg up on anyone else who wanted to write about the series and leapt on the opportunity. If you’d asked me two years ago if my first published book would be non-fiction, I would have laughed, because I was devoting my writing energies mostly to novels and short stories.
Did my work on the book make me understand King better as a writer? I think it’s the other way around, actually. My understanding of King as a writer made it easier for me to write this book. I have a fairly good memory – though a lot of it is crammed with useless bits of trivia – so I was able to see connections and interrelations among not only the Dark Tower books but his entire body of work as I was reading the series and the directly related novels. I could see thematic elements that originated in other works and also how the Dark Tower series spread out like tentacles into just about everything he’s ever written. It’s been an amazing experience – I don’t think I’ve ever studied such a vast amount of material in such depth before (and I have a Ph. D. in chemistry), at least not as extensively over such a short period of time. There were times when I felt like my head would burst because it was so full of Dark Tower, like I’d uploaded the entire 4000 pages of the series into my brain.
JW: In the horror genre, how hard is it to stay fresh?
BV: I think it can be fresh as long you write honestly from your own experience and reality and try not to follow what seems to be hot right now. The reality of publishing is that if you spot a trend, it’s already too late to catch the bandwagon. The best thing for writers is to write what comes naturally and try not to be worried about what sells, what’s popular. Write from the heart.
JW: They say that every story has already been told. This seems to be especially true of the horror genre. How do you make your stories so different and diverse?
BV: This relates to the previous question, I guess. I’m not writing with any genre in mind. Ideas for stories come to me out of the ether and they are what they are. Sometimes they’re horror, sometimes they’re fantasy or suspense. It’s hard to believe that there are new ways to imagine vampire stories, but every now and then someone comes up with a novel twist. New light through old windows, as they say. I’ve never written a vampire story, but I’m considering one and I think I have a subtly different approach to the sub-genre.
ND: What would you say is the biggest hurdle you’ve had to face in the literary business, so far? How did you manage to overcome it, and what kind of impact did it have on your writing?
BV: I wrote a novel in 2000 that I thought was pretty good. Not great, perhaps, but accomplished. I was pleased with having gotten all the way through it and in a decent period of time – nine months. I tried to get an agent or a publisher for it and I was met with a resounding crash of silence. Some markets asked for sample chapters, some even requested the entire manuscript, but ultimately I ended up with about fifty rejections. One agent – bless her soul – took the time to explain the book’s deficiencies to me. I wish someone had done that much earlier in the process.
Pretty standard fare for a writer, though – but here comes the hurdle. One agent offered to represent the book. However, it was one of those subtly shady organizations that asks for a couple of hundred dollars up front to cover the cost of photocopying and postage. It’s a reasonable enough request on the face of it, but it’s not the way things are done in the industry. The agent should be so enthusiastic about your book that they work on spec and don’t get any money until they’ve sold it. But after having looked for an agent for so long, the offer of a contract was a serious temptation. I thought about it long and hard. I did my research. I contacted other clients of the agency. Everything I learned set off warning bells. My subconscious knew it would be a bad decision. But it’s only $200 a niggling voice from somewhere else told me. This might be the only shot at an agent you ever have.
I think there’s a quiet desperation in beginning writers that makes them susceptible to offers like this. A profound lack of confidence that leaves them open to any type of positive feedback. Fortunately, I listened to the voice of wisdom, that gut feeling that tells you that something is wrong and you’ll be sorry if you ignore it. I turned the agent down. Can you believe it? A writer with four dozen rejection letters turning down an offer of representation. Best choice I ever made. They might even have managed to get the book published by some dismal little unknown press to stroke my ego and make me feel “accomplished,” but it would have been an empty victory. The book is, quite simply, not up to professional standards. That’s what the other agents were telling me, though often in form letters.
The impact of this experience? It taught me to not be too desperate to get published. A long list of credits in markets no one has ever heard of that pay nothing and have negligible distribution isn’t equal to a single publishing credit in something like Cemetery Dance or BORDERLANDS. The rest is just vanity.
ND: What is the one question you have always wanted to be asked, and never have been? And, of course, what is the answer?
BV: Q: Can we buy the film rights to your novel for an absurd amount of money?
A: Of course!
ND: When you first began writing did you ever see yourself where you are today?
BV: Certainly not when I started writing in the 1970s, nor during the 1980s, nor even when I started again in earnest in the late 1990s. My new years resolution in 1999 was to get something published in 2000. I certainly never expected that within four or five years after that I would have a book coming out from a major publisher – and in translation overseas – and that I’d have a story in an anthology with the likes of Stephen King and Bentley Little (BORDERLANDS 5). I guess I’d say it was another of those “in my wildest dreams” things. My wife tells me I live a charmed life and I find it hard to argue with that.
ND: Out of all of your own tales, which one is your favourite and why?
BV: One of my all-time favourites is “Something in Store,” which was published in August in the anthology SHIVERS II from Cemetery Dance. It’s a longish story, nearly 8000 words, but it was a pure joy to write. It was hard to market because of its length, but I had some encouraging positive feedback on it from editors even as they were rejecting it. Part of the reason I like it so much is that it’s set in a used bookstore in Halifax where I used to spend a lot of time when I was in college – the bookstore I mentioned above that was part of my Saturday morning routine. I discovered a lot of new authors within that old Victorian building, including Stephen King. I picked up a copy of SALEM’S LOT there among a stack of other books at the end of my first year in college and once I read it I was hooked. But I also like the story for its unwavering optimism. Even though strange things are happening, inexplicable and subtly terrifying, the entire process represents an awakening for the protagonist. Keep your mind open to the possibilities… who knows where they will lead you? I’m proud of the tale and very happy to see it in such a wonderful home with great company in SHIVERS II.
The other one that has a lot of personal meaning is called “Unknown Soldier,” which will be published in All Hallows next summer. All Hallows is the Journal of the Ghost Society, published in British Columbia, and it’s a case of a story finding the absolutely perfect venue because “Unknown Soldier” is a Canadian ghost story. My uncle was killed in December 1941 when the Japanese invaded Hong Kong on the same day they struck Pearl Harbor. A lot of Canadians don’t know that we had supplied reinforcements to Hong Kong even though the territory was really indefensible. Those who weren’t killed were taken POW for the rest of the war. My uncle is one of the unknown soldiers whose name is on a memorial wall over there – his body was never found or identified. I was in Hong Kong on business about ten years ago and my father mentioned the memorial to me, so I made a pilgrimage to see it. That got me wondering about the history – why were Canadian forces in such a remote place in 1941? I researched it for a couple of years, planning to write an essay but ultimately ended up with a short story.
ND: What are your hopes for the future where your writing is concerned?
BV: Only that I have a long future of writing ahead of me, that I can continue to develop as a writer, accumulate fewer rejection letters and more acceptances in quality markets.
JW: What do you plan to write next?
BV: When the Dark Tower project came up, I was working on a private detective novel. I was about a hundred pages in but I had to set it aside because of my deadline. The book was going along very well, I was excited about it, and I plan to return to it very soon to see if it stands up after nearly a year. My agent read what I’d done with it so far and encouraged me to see if I could pull it off. We’ve also discussed the possibility of doing another critical study, but we’re waiting to hear back from my editor at NAL before we make a proposal. I’ve been working on short stories and a couple of essays in the month or so since I turned my manuscript for THE ROAD TO THE DARK TOWER in and it’s good to be back writing fiction again. I had to put everything else on hold during the first half of 2003. I think it was a good break – I’ve written a couple of stories that I’m very pleased with in the past month and one of them, “Kane’s Mutiny,” has already been accepted for publication in an anthology called FEDORA III, edited by Michael Bracken, which will be published in late 2004.
ND: Did you move from Canada to the US for career reasons? If so, has it made any difference?
BV: After I got my doctorate in 1987 I moved to Switzerland for a couple of years to do postdoctoral research. From there I was hired by the company I work for in Texas, so, yes, it was for career reasons. I’m a big believer in expanding your horizons through travel. Living in the US has opened up the country’s perspective to me. We Canadians have an outsider’s view of America that is tainted by television and news. When you live among people you get a different point of view. Not better or worse, necessarily. Just different. Has it made any difference? Only the biggest difference you could possibly imagine. I met my wife of eight years here, and that would never have happened if I hadn’t moved here. From that springs everything else, including my recent writing successes.
Thanks for your time Bev, we really enjoyed this opportunity to interview you and learn more about both yourself and your work.