By The Way...

Wednesday, February 14, 2007
11:10:00 AM EST
Hearing Rare Entertainment -- Timothy Bracy
This week the Wednesday Author Interview gets together with one of the fastest-rising stars in literature today: Joe Hill, whose debut novel Heart-Shaped Box is getting the sort of praise that most authors can only dream of: Publishers Weekly declares it "a truly memorable debut," while Time volunteers that it's "a top-notch piece of horror fiction." Personally I'll volunteer it scared the crap out of me, in the good "man I am so creeped out I'm going to sleep with all the lights on" sort of way. I dig that.

Now, Joe talks about his new book, the value of short stories, why it's good to have someone tell you that your writing stinks, why music matters when writing and more. Buckle in.

1. Quick! Tell us a little bit about yourself and Heart-Shaped Box.

I’m thirty-four, and I’ve been publishing fiction for about ten years, mostly in the small presses. Heart-Shaped Box is my second book – the first, 20th Century Ghosts, was a collection of strange and surreal short stories. I have a dog, a rabbit, a cat, a family, a beard. I think that covers all the important details.

Heart-Shaped Box is the story of a burned-out death metal rock star, Judas Coyne, who buys a ghost on the internet, almost as a publicity stunt. When we meet him, Jude is already more than a little haunted, by a lifetime of questionable choices, and by the spirits of people he’s put in the rear-view mirror: bandmates dead and gone, a girl he loved but mistreated, his abusive father.

The ghost he buys online, though, is no metaphorical haunt – he’s very real and very bad and has it out for Jude for reasons of his own. It isn’t long before Jude starts seeing the dead man everywhere. He’s outside Jude’s bedroom door at night, and waiting in the passenger seat of Jude’s rebuilt ’67 Mustang, when Jude heads out for a drive. And in the course of the story, Jude is forced to both deal with all his ghosts… both the one trying to hound him to his death, and all these other, more personal ghosts that have been swirling around him for years.

2. One of the things I really enjoyed about H-SB was the fact that when I first met Judas Coyne, I really didn’t like him – he seemed bitter, bored and contemptuous of everyone around him… just the sort of character who needs a knock upside the head, which he gets here, and then some. When you were writing Judas, how did you build him in your head before you put him on the page? Did you have to resist the urge to nice him up?

I didn’t have to do a lot of thinking about him at all. He seemed almost to already exist, from the moment I started writing the story. Jude has some hard bark on him, to swipe a phrase of Elmore Leonard’s. But he also has a secret, redeeming decency and happens to be resourceful as hell.

When I began the book, I originally thought it would be a short story, and that the bad ghost, Craddock, would do away with Jude inside of thirty pages. But a funny thing happened on the way to my neat little ending: Jude refused to lay down and die on schedule. And the more I wrote about him, the more interested I got in how he had wound up as this successful, angry, isolated, adrift person. I started to wonder who he had been before he was Judas Coyne – a stage name, obviously. The book is a mystery, in a way… not a whodunit, but a whoishe?

I thought it was important to begin the book by showing Jude – and his girlfriend, Georgia – at their worst and unhappiest. It feels like they deserve whatever they have coming to them. But as a writer and a reader, one thing I’ve always liked is a good reversal. Jude and Georgia aren’t as bad as they first appear – there’s hope for them. And the ghost, who initially comes on as a wry avenging angel, with good reason to snuff them out, isn’t quite as noble as he seems, either.

3. Although this is your first novel, this isn’t your first foray into the supernatural; you’ve been an acclaimed short story writer for some time now, and have released an award-winning story collection, 20th Century Ghosts. When it came time to write a novel, what things that you knew from writing short stories were you able to transfer over to writing in long-form? What things did you have to learn? And particularly in writing with supernatural elements, how do you maintain the frightening tension over the long haul?

Yeah, I think in a lot of ways, the short stories were the workshop where I learned the things I needed to know to write the book.  One thing I learned was to get the idea right up front. You can’t take five pages to get to the story… an editor is only going to give you five sentences. That goes for ordinary readers, as well. You’ve got such a short time to put the hook in the reader, to create that desire to find out what happens next. Because if you can’t hold their interest, there’s always something good on TV.

I also learned about economy. I wrote three other novels besides Heart-Shaped Box that I was unable to sell. There were good things in those stories, but what hurt them was that I still didn’t know how to streamline. If I could describe something well, I would describe it, even if it didn’t need describing. Over time, writing the short stories, I began to learn that part of being a good writer – maybe the most important part – is identifying the things in a story you can leave out, because the reader will imagine those things for you. Very often, what they’re imagining is better than anything you could’ve come up with anyway. An economical writer is a writer willing to trust the reader.

As far as maintaining tension over the long haul, to me a story is always an examination of a person dealing with some kind of threat. And when the threat is gone, the story is over. That probably sounds a little reductive  - circular logic at its finest – but what I mean is, you get a character in a situation where they have to claw their way to safety. The situation is what you’re writing about, and even when you seem to be writing about something else – say, the main character’s divorce, or their lack of interest in having children – it’s still better somehow be about the situation, or you need to find the DELETE key.

4. Share a piece of advice you’ve been given about writing.

My wife is one of my first readers, has been for years. Before we were married, around the time I got out of college, she was driving us somewhere, and I thought I’d read her this new story I was working on. I meant to read her twenty pages, but only got through about ten before she asked me to stop.

So I ask her what’s wrong, and she says, “what’s this story about, because I don’t get it.” And I said, well, it’s about this woman figuring out her husband is secretly psychic. And she said, right, but what’s it about? Besides that? The problem – which she had identified inside of ten pages – was that my story wasn’t about anything except itself. It didn’t ask any interesting questions.

At the time I was put out with her and I don’t think we were talking to each other by the time we got out of the car, two hours later. But eventually, I came around to seeing that she had put her finger on a real concern. A good story is one that takes the reader someplace interesting and unexpected, and asks interesting questions along the way. It doesn’t have to have answers – the readers will supply those.

So for example, in Heart-Shaped Box, we have this rock star, a rip-roaring success who’s had thirty years on the pop culture roller-coaster. But before he became Judas Coyne he was Justin Cowzynski, a lonely, depressed country kid, who finally, one day, couldn’t stand to be himself anymore, and so he climbed on a Greyhound bus for New York, and by the time he got off, he had reinvented himself completely. He slipped on the persona of Judas Coyne like a new pair of boots. So the story gave me a chance to ask whether anyone can really just leave their past behind clean. Does anyone ever really escape their personal ghosts?

In this same drive I took with my wife, she also told me my dialogue was crap – phony and painful to listen to. I got huffy and said, “It isn’t supposed to be realistic dialogue. It’s story-driven dialogue.” She smiled sweetly and said, “I don’t even know what that means. I just know it sucked.” So that was some good advice too – her way of advising me to work on the sound of my character’s voices. At the time I wasn’t a big fan of creating dialogue. Now it’s my favorite thing to write.

5. The reviews of Heart-Shaped Box have been excellent, the movie rights to the book have already been snapped up, and when this goes live, you’ll be on a book tour, including a few high-profile appearances on TV. Just between you and me and the several thousand people who’re reading this, at what point does all this start getting weird? And how are you working with it? And are you ready for the day when all the publicity is done, everyone goes away, and it’s time to, you know, write another one?

Well, the book has caught some good buzz, for which I’m grateful, and the publisher is giving it a hell of a push, which is what every writer hopes their publisher will do for them. But in the end, the book will rise or fall on its own merits. So we’ll just see what happens andhope for the best. I’m pretty new to the whole public relations thing. Hopefully I’ll manage to get through my TV appearances without throwing-up on anyone.

Some of the hooraw has been a little distracting, but I’m on the hook for a new novel over at William Morrow, and with luck I should be able to give them two new books by late summer. After I finished Heart-Shaped Box, I wrote a young-adult fantasy novel called The Bright Circle, which reads a little like Heart-Shaped Box for ten-year-olds. So that’s done and in first draft. And I’ve got 300 pages of a grown-up novel, a psychological thriller, because I was curious to see what I could do without the fantasy element.

6. It’s clear that music is an integral part of H-SB, from the aging rocker protagonist to the chapter titles to, well, the title of the book itself. Tell us about your own relationship to music, and how (aside from book and chapter titles) you incorporate it into your own creative process. Also, three songs you can’t get enough of right NOW (and no fair using anything off Judas Coyne’s iTunes list).

The first group I ever saw in concert was KISS. I was eight. I think I got a good show, too: blood, fire, Gene Simmons going nuts with that grafted-on cow tongue of his (alleged cow tongue, I guess I should say). When I was in high school, if I was in my room, I was probably listening to AC/DC or Guns n’ Roses, as loud as I thought I could get away with. So heavy metal was a thing for me for a long time, and one of the pleasures of working on Heart-Shaped Box was that it put me back in touch with all this loud, nasty music I used to listen to.

With me, I’ve always linked certain stories to certain songs. It’s at the point now where I make playlists for each story, and that’s all I listen to when I’m working on that piece, with very little variation. The playlist for Heart-Shaped Box wasn’t all that different from Jude’s iMix.

Now-a-days, though, my musical tastes lean pretty redneck. If I was going to name three songs I can’t get enough of right now, they’d all be country songs. Johnny Cash’s “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” is a harrowing track, winnowed right down to the emotional muscle and sinew. I get chills every time I listen to it. Hank [Williams] III has a song called “Low-Down,” off his last album, and I think that tune is pretty much the perfect country single, from the lyrics, to the melody, to the soaring hillbilly harmonies. I just wrote a story for Postscripts magazine, called “Thumbprint” and while I was working on it, I must have listened to Shawn Mullins’ “Beautiful Wreck” at least fifty times. I named the bar in the story The Milky Way, because that’s the tavern in the song.

To go back to Hank III for a moment –he’s more heavy metal now than anyone in heavy metal. That is, if you accept that heavy metal is more about attitude than anything else. Did you know that Hank tours with a guitarist named Ass Jack, who likes to break beer bottles over his head, when he feels things are getting dull? I ought to try that in readings, see how it goes over. Tell you what, it would sure as hell keep people in the front row on their toes.

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(Joe Hill picture taken by Shane Leonard)

If you want to know more about Heart-Shaped Box, Joe's got a special mini-site which features information on the book, original music, the aformentioned iMix list from novel protagonist Judas Coyne and more. Joe also spent a week blogging over at the Powell's Book Store site; check it out.


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This entry has 3 comments: (Add your own)

• #3 Comment from monponsett 
  2/15/07 9:42 AM | Permalink

  I'll purposely (?) try not to think on the Whys of it, but this is the first author interview you ever did where I was like "I'd enjoy that book."
  
  That's more of a dig on myself than any of the authors you've interviewed. Again, I won't worry about the Whys. I rarely do, to be honest.
  
  I understand that all but the best will be knocked out by a beer bottle breaking over their head. I've seen one guy shake off a beer bottle to the head... my husband, during our "courtship." He wasn't even the one the bottle was aimed at, but that didn't matter once the blood flowed.
  
  This was also the only time I ever saw someone thrown over a bar, like in the old Western movies... and yes, this also featured the Colonel, although he was on the Give end of this relationship. I'll add that the Colonel is probably the strongest human being that I know personally, and that he threw the guy over the bar by the throat- with one hand- while holding the actual bottle thrower by the throat with the other hand.
  
  This fight also featured The Hardest I've Ever Seen Someone Struck, although that record fell once I started teaching in the city. The Colonel likes to recall of the fight that he "took 20 stitches, but gave out 50."
  
  I already wanted to marry him before that, but this solidified it. That's the kind of action I'd want applied if someone ever broke into our house or manhandled one of my daughters. It wasn't long after this fight (about the time it takes for a laceration to heal and become not visible, as I recall) that we became intimate.
  
  You have to think beyond looks, d*ck size and bankbooks, girls... although those three should all be taken into consideration as well. Life is a Shepherds Pie.
• #2 Comment from johnmscalziEntry Author 
  2/14/07 11:44 PM | Permalink

  All the chapter titles are rock song titles, so it's a theme; also, there actually *is* a heart-shaped box in the book, and it's critical to the story. So, in fact, it's not too bad he took inspiration from Nirvana; it's a fine thing he did.
• #1 Comment from ajandersonnotary 
  2/14/07 5:32 PM | Permalink

  Too bad he had to rip off the title from Kurt Cobain.  Sorry John, I don't have time to read the author interviews.
  
  AJ in SF