Author Q&A with Dean Koontz

July 25, 2007

First: In the e-mails you leave for me at the e-mail address given above, I'm being asked to send signed photos, books for charity auctions, and old socks for Old Sock Festivals. I'm happy to do all of that, but I must have a mailing address. Because of the popularity of "Author Q&A," I can't respond to every e-mail and seek addresses where needed. If you're asking for something that has to be sent by snail-mail, either leave an address where the snail can find you, or write to me at the post office box listed below:

Dean Koontz
PO Box 9529
Newport Beach, California 92658

 

This installment of "Q&A" features eleven questions from the Barnes & Noble readers' group for THE HUSBAND. Most of you visiting this site will not have seen them. Yes, including 11 questions is a profound violation of the protocols of this column, and I deserve a spanking.

Question #1

What is your writing process? Do you write inside at a desk? Or outside? Do you handwrite first then edit? Do you present ideas/chapters to trusted beta readers as you go along, or do you write an entire first draft first? -- Stephen P.,  Oceanside, CA 

Wow, that's a big and complicated question.  I am the kind of guy who works in an office. I'm not the kind of guy who can grab a laptop and go anywhere to work. I have to be surrounded by my stuff and feel comfortable and in familiar territory.  I arrive here between 7 and 8 a.m. in the morning and I'm here until dinner.  I don't eat lunch.  Some days I even have breakfast at the desk.  
 

I don't do a written draft. I work only on the computer and I do one page at a time.  I work on a page 20, 30, 40 drafts, whatever it takes, before I move on to the next page.  That way I feel that I've done as much as I can on that page and have left nothing to correct later. So that when I get a draft done, it has had so much reworking during the course of it that I don't need to go back and revisit things. I do this because I operate with a lot of self doubt and my way of handling the self doubt is to rework a page until I've got it as smooth as I can get it and then to move on. Then the self doubt starts up again on the very next page, but I deal with that page as a separate unit. 
 

When I finish a chapter, I print it out and pencil it up because what you see on a printed page is quite different than what you would see on the computer screen. You notice things you didn't notice on the screen.  And I pencil it up once, twice, three times. It just depends on the chapter.  Then the chapter is done, unless something happens later on in the book that requires me to go back and plant a line or two in an earlier chapter to cover something, but that rarely happens.  I don't release a script in chapters because I'm never 100% sure that I'm finished with anything.  Nobody reads it until I am done with it.  Then my wife gets it and my editor gets it.  Those, plus my publisher, are the most important responses that I get.

Question #2

Have you ever been blindsided--midbook--by a plot twist you didn't see coming yourself? Or do you unfailingly stick to an outline? -- Rebecca Going, Hillsboro, OR

I don't use outlines at all.  I stopped using outlines with a book called Strangersmany years ago.  Interestingly, that was my first hard cover bestseller.  I operate only with a hook, an idea, a premise.  Call it what you will.  And from that point, the story begins and I don't have much of an idea of where it is going.  The characters are more crucial to me than the plot.  If the characters interest me in the first couple of chapters, then the plot is going to take care of itself because the characters will drive it places I never saw it coming.

To answer the key part of this question, yes, I am constantly surprised by where books go because I never saw it coming.  The characters may have seen it coming.  This sounds rather strange.  It sounds like I don't create the characters.  And in truth, when you give yourself over to whatever talent you have, and you let it work, and you give your characters free will, it does become as if they are independent people from you.  Something magical occurs and you are along for the ride. You have to guide the ride where you need to for narrative purposes.  And you have to say "Well, wait a minute.  That's too wacky.  That isn't going to work."  But you also have to be careful if you operate this way.  You do have to trust in the characters.

I remember when I was doing Life Expectancy, I knew that the opening hook was going to be this lead character, the night he was born.  His grandfather was going to die in the same hospital and the grandfather on his death bed made predictions about five terrible days in this boy's life.  And he also predicted the boy's weight, height and various things about him at his birth.  When the minor predictions come to be true, the weight and height, then everybody assumed that the five terrible dates in his life would also turn out to be true.  And I started with that premise and didn’t know where it was going.  I knew it was going to be a suspense novel and a comic novel about family but I was in the first chapter when I had the boy's father return to the waiting room and say that it was a “comforting room except for the chain-smoking.”  

And I typed "clown" without any awareness that I was going to type "clown."  I assumed, originally, I was going to type "the other chain-smoking expectant father," but instead I typed "clown" and it seemed like such an insane idea to introduce a clown in an expectant fathers' waiting room that I almost cancelled it out.  But I said to myself, "Just trust the character. Go with it and see where it leads."  Well, as that book turned out, it would have been impossible to imagine it any other way but with the clowns, which became a feature, an essence of the story and a metaphor in a very serious way that I wouldn't have had otherwise.   So I just trust them.  I trust the characters and that's where the plot comes from.

Question #3

What kind of child grows up to write the scary books Dean Koontz has? And I mean that in a good way. -- Diana Raabe, Minneapolis, MN

A very benign child. I was raised in a very poor family. I had a violent alcoholic father. I've talked about that a little bit before. But I was always an optimistic child. We never knew if we were going to have a roof over our heads. My father frequently threatened to kill us all because life was too hard, that sort of thing. And I took him seriously at the time and yet I remember being a happy child. I always sort of felt in childhood that every day mattered, maybe because I didn't know how many there were going to be and so you always looked around for what was fun, what was beautiful and that attitude still is with me.

Though I can write "scary," I don't see "scary" as the essential part of the book. It's the hopeful parts of the book. It's the human interaction, the love stories, the friendships between the characters that interest me more.

Question #4

As a newbie writer, I'm always curious about how established best-selling authors got started in this saturated industry. I'm curious as to how long it took you to get your first novel published, and how you went about finding an agent/editor? -- Julie G., the Midwest

My first four novels never sold and that is pretty daunting.  But I had sold the first short story I ever wrote.  I wrote a number of other short stories and I sold those, but I didn't have much luck with novels for a while. And partly, that had something to do with the aforementioned self doubt.  I would start second guessing myself so much during the writing of the story.  I hadn't at that point learned to work on one page at a time. 

So I was doing things that didn’t have sufficient coherence.  Eventually I started selling what I wrote in any format, long or short, and I operated without an agent for a couple of years.  In those days, you could do that.  Nowadays, it is very difficult. Although, strangely enough, I have been without an agent for two years now and have negotiated my own contracts and have been doing better without an agent than with one.

That isn't an option for a beginning writer.  You have to have that finished script and you have to have the hope of getting an agent.  How did I get an agent?  An editor that I had been selling to said to me, "You know what?  You're not getting the advance that you should get.  You need an agent.  I work for the publisher and I can't just give you more.  I offer what I have to offer.  If you have an agent, you will get more from me."  So he recommended somebody.  That first agent passed away long ago so I can safely say, without threat of lawsuit, that he was, from one degree or another, a crook.  And I only stayed with him for a year. 

Then I moved to another agent who was a wonderful human being and I liked him immensely.  We were friends.  I was with him for a few years.  And then at one point, I started to submit different types of ideas to him.  I was writing suspense novels under a pen name and a comic novel under my name.  I was trying to find my way and I thought that I had found a way to write for a much larger audience that still had all the values that I was trying to bring to fiction.  I sent some of these outlines to him, when I did outlines, and he kept rejecting them.  And finally one day he said to me, "Look, I'm not going to market these larger ideas by you because you are not going to be a bestselling writer.  You are always going to be a mid list writer. You're going to do very well.  You're going to have a long career.  But not a bestselling writer."  And I said to him, "Look, I'm twenty something.  I don't like being told as a twenty something that the rest of my life is outlined for me.  I've got to try this and I've got to feel my way toward some greater level of success.  I'm not satisfied with where I am."  And we parted ways, in a friendly way.  I moved onto another agent with whom I became a bestseller. 

It's a tougher thing nowadays because publishers are picky and it all really comes down to the script that you are writing and whether it has a sufficiently strong concept to make people sit up and pay attention.  And then to the query letter, which has to be very, very carefully written and not full of self praise about how exciting the manuscript is or how clever it is. It has to be a succinct letter of 100-150 words that hooks the reader really sharply with the premise of the book. 

And that is the only way I know of to get an agent these days.

Question #5

Is there anything that you feel you haven't accomplished yet as a writer? -- Greg C., Greater Boston

I don't think that you are ever satisfied.  For years, I've had the problem….Most of my career, I've had the problem that I don't write the same book time after time and most publishers prefer that you do.  So with Putnam, I would have arguments with my publisher that would sometimes drag on for two or three months over a manuscript that I delivered that she felt was going to wreck my career because it was too different.  Eventually, I moved to Knopf thinking that I wouldn't experience the same problem, which I did.  Only at Bantam have I found that not to be a problem.  I've been able to do anything I want to.  And since I've always sort of moved as I want to, some novels will have a lot of comedy in them while some won't. Some will have love stories.  Others won't.  They mix genres in different patterns.  And that allows me an awful lot of latitude for challenging myself.

With The Good Guy, which just came out, one of the challenges for me was that I wanted to tell a story in which no standard techniques of background revelation were used with the characters.  I wanted you to have no idea what the background of these characters were and to be puzzled about them, and know them only from what you saw them do and from their dialogue.  I wanted to wait and reveal the full back stories very succinctly only until the end of book. It was an interesting challenge.  In fact, my editor was doubtful that it could be done. It was a lot of fun and in the end, it added to the suspense of wondering "Well, what is the secret behind these characters?" and what is each of them hiding from the other?

So that setting that bar for yourself, there are always different bars you want to reach with each book, gives you a lot of opportunity to remain challenged by what you do.  Plus I love the English language.  It is hugely flexible and beautiful.  And you could spend a hundred years working in it and never test all its possibilities.