Interview with F. Paul Wilson

Interviewed by Chris Kemp

FWOMP: When you began to write seriously, you had an established career as a physician. What was your strategy in regards to writing at the time? Did you think it was going to be a hobby or did you pursue it with the intention of being professional?

F. Paul Wilson: A little of both. My intention at first was to be a full-time doctor and a writer dilettante. Then I ended up being a full-time doctor and a full-time writer. By 1994 I was burning out. Now I'm a full-time writer and part-time doctor.

FWOMP: With that in mind, what was your initial strategy for actually getting paid to write? And how did your career build from there?

FPW: I went the traditional route: I made my bones with short fiction (science fiction, there was no horror market in the early 70's). After many, many rejections I made my first sale to Analog, [Leading science fiction magazine -Ed.] and adapted one of those pieces to kick off a novel (Healer) which I sold to Doubleday for a whole $2000. Then I simply kept on writing.

FWOMP: With that experience in mind, what advice would you have for others trying to get started? What common mistakes do you see fledging writers making as they try to get established?

FPW: I think trying to start off with a novel as your first work can be a mistake. It can be done, but many novels even by established authors are flabby things--a story that might have made a good novelette fleshed out to novel length with stretch marks all over the place. Short fiction drills you in constructing a story, in economic character creation, in assembling a dramatic progression of scenes. The extra elbow room of a novel can be a fatal temptation to a writer who hasn't learned how to focus his or her prose.

FWOMP: The current state of publishing seems iffy at best. What’s your assessment of the current market, and with what mindset should a writer approach it?

FPW: The small presses seem to be thriving, producing an amazing amount of high-ticket novellas and novels. I don't know where the money to buy all these books is coming from. Horror readers are either well-heeled or there are a lot more of them than estimated.
The general reading public still loves horror, but they don't seem to like the skeleton on the cover as much as they used to. For instance, Michael Crichton's Prey is a classic horror novel dressed up as SF.

FWOMP: You're a physician who has written material incorporating your experience in the profession. Is it harder or easier to write a good story using a background with which you are intimately familiar? Do you prefer it?

FPW: It’s easier, of course--there’s much less research. But prefer it? Not really. Writing has always been my golf game--how I get away from medicine. That’s why I haven't gone the Robin Cook route. I'll use it, sure, but I prefer the variety of multiple genres. I did a few medical thrillers but, although very lucrative, it’s a straitjacketed genre.

FWOMP: How do you plot? Do you write from an outline? Do scenes present themselves to you and grow into a story? Do you sit down with an idea, blast it out and see where it goes?

FPW: Sometimes a novel arises out of a character (Dr. Lathram in Implant); sometimes out of a theme (the vagaries of faith and belief in The Haunted Air); sometimes out of a single scene (the rooftop battle in The Tomb arose from a dream; I built the novel backward and forward from there). [The Haunted Air and The Tomb are both Repairman Jack novels. -Ed.]

I always outline. And I always deviate from my outline. I outline mostly to make sure I can end the novel satisfactorily--I believe in providing catharsis. I owe my readers an ending--not a Deus ex Machina and not a whimpering trail off. A payoff, damn it! Too many novels fall apart at the end because the writer thought he could simply wing it.

Right now I'm 300-plus pages into the new book and have strayed far, far from the outline. I will end up where I originally intended, but along the way I found a better road to take me there.

I start at “Chapter One” and go from there. That works best for me. I have key scenes visualized ahead of time, but I like to see events unfold in sequence because I can monitor motivation and causality as I go along, and make sure each scene builds from the last and reaches for the next. That way I often find that what worked well in outline doesn't hold up in fully fleshed text.

If I wrote scenes out of sequence and connected them later (as do some writers I know) I'd miss this, or find I can't use a scene I'd spent a lot of time on.

FWOMP: Do you prefer writing shorter pieces or novels? Why?

FPW: I started doing short stories exclusively--the idea of tackling a 70- or 80-thousand-word novel petrified me. Now I do 120,000 words without a second thought. These days I prefer the novel. I can do lots more neat stuff with multiple points of view, I can add more complications to the plot, more shadings to the characters.

FWOMP: What is the most difficult part of writing for you? The easiest?

FPW: The editing and proofing is the most difficult, especially the proofing and reproofing. By that time I’m sick of the book and want to be onto the next. The easiest--which I interpret as the most enjoyable--are the plotting and writing the first draft.

FWOMP: I know from your website that you try to write three new pages a day, but talk a little bit about how you schedule your day to accomplish it.

FPW: I’m out of bed at 6-6:15 a.m. to make coffee and at the computer by 6:30 where I check email and the website--providing answers to both when necessary--check the astronomy picture of the day, then settle down to work. After I’ve done my daily duty (at least 3 pages) I edit or revise whatever else is in the pipeline, answer interview questions, etc. I’m also a husband and a father and a grandfather and I try not to let those facets of my life slide.

Oh, yeah, and I still work a day and a half a week (Monday and Tuesday) stamping out disease at my group’s office.

FWOMP: Now that you’ve established Repairman Jack as a franchise character, is he stifling you? Do you feel pressured by publisher’s expectations (whatever those may be)?

FPW: Not in the least. I used to see a series as a trap. Now I see it as freedom. You see, I’ve never been able to settle into a groove of writing one kind of book. The Tomb is nothing like The Keep and neither is it like The Touch and nothing in the world is like Black Wind. And then I did a few medical thrillers like The Select and Implant, switching publishers like I switched genres. The marketing departments didn’t know what to do with me. Every time I built up a following for one type of book, I’d switch to another genre. I have a hard core of devoted readers who read anything I write, but there are less loyal groups attached to certain types of fiction that I lose when I switch.

I brought Repairman Jack back in Legacies and the response was terrific. It was a fairly straight thriller with a science fiction Maguffin. The next book I wanted to do was going to deal with conspiracy theories and finding the ultimate conspiracy at the heart of them all. It was going to be wild and somewhat supernatural. Wait. Why not make it a Repairman Jack book? Jack’s fans will gladly follow him into Conspiracyville.

So Conspiracies was born. And then came All the Rage which is at its heart a medical thriller. But with Jack there, it’s a Repairman Jack book. I’d found the solution to my genre-hopping and genre-bending and genre-blending: make Jack the protagonist.

As a result I can write the novels I want without worrying about leaving my readers scratching their heads. It’s not horror, it’s not SF, it’s not a medical thriller, it’s a Repairman Jack book. The marketing department is happy for the same reason.

It looks like a perfect solution. Of course I’m still going to throw curves every once in a while like SIMS, which is pure SF, and Midnight Mass, which is a purebred horror novel with vampires, no less.

FWOMP: You list your favorite writers on your site, but in your formative years, who were the first to grab you?

FPW: I’m old enough to have read the EC Comics fresh off the newsstand [Fifties comic books known for their unusually literate, albeit, ghoulish approach. Source of much controversy in their day. -Ed.], and while they were fun, they never touched me. And guys in tights--please. So stupid. I liked Batman (despite his tights) and The Spirit the best because they had no superpowers. For me the only superhero worth reading is the old Plastic Man: witty, fun, and amazingly inventive.

In print I read Rick Brant and Tom Swift Jr. Juveniles. Then came an anthology called Space, Space, Space edited by William Sloane. It contained a story called “Dear Devil” by Eric Frank Russell. I remember thinking it was absolutely wonderful. I still recall the catch in my throat at the end.

When I was eight or nine I saw The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms [Based on a Ray Bradbury short story -Ed.] and became a monster movie fan.

I discovered H. P. Lovecraft at 13, and read Bradbury’s The October Country at about the same time. That was it: I was going to be a horror writer.

FWOMP: Let’s talk about Lovecraft for a moment. You’ve written in the Cthulu Mythos and list him as an influence. I’ve been revisiting him lately, trying to give some of the writers in my group exposure to him. He went over surprisingly well (although I was choosing the stories) and I’m wondering, given his tendency to overwrite and give second shrift to characterization--what makes him so effective even three-quarters of a century later?

FPW: HPL perfected Cosmic Horror and, since Cosmic Horror is timeless, it prevents his stories from being dated. His plots don’t depend on social conventions or gimmicks; they show the horror of looking into the abyss and not only realizing that it’s looking back, but that it’s hungry as well. Hungry for you. And that doesn’t get old.

FWOMP: Though you call yourself a writer of thrillers, you are obviously attracted to the supernatural. What is it about the genre that appeals to you? What do you see in current supernatural/horror/fantasy (writing) trends that you don’t like so much?

FPW: You know, I feel it would be kind of presumptuous of me to comment on the current state of the genre. I used to be on top of everything in the field, but with the explosion in the small presses, who can keep up? Truth is, I don’t know the state of the field.

As for the supernatural, I’m wired for it. Maybe it was my Irish-Catholic upbringing. Whatever chills me,  that’s what I use to chill. The sicko-slasher-serial killer stories turn me off. They’re so…mundane. They generate no sense of wonder, and wonder is very important in horror fiction. It lifts it above the earthbound genres. I want to go “Wow!” instead of “Ugh!”

FWOMP: Any general advice for writers or anything in general you’d like to add?

FPW: Write everyday. And when you’re not writing, read. Read the kind of fiction you want to write. Read about writing too. I read grammar books for fun. I can always pick up some tidbit. My favorite is Woe is I--more entertaining than a lot of novels I’ve read.