I have to admit, I was a little afraid of horror writer David J. Schow before meeting him at Fantasy Comics in Tucson, where he was signing with Bernie Wrightson, Tim Bradstreet, Steve Niles and Frank Deitz. Despite my preparation, I didn’t feel well versed enough to have a good discussion with him and the thought of him making a casserole out of me and feeding it to his dog kept running through my head (yes, it is a scary place in there and having 110 degree heat beating down on it that day didn’t help. God, I need to move. Or go back to therapy. Moving would be cheaper).
Because Schow was willing to talk at length at my questions, it went really well and I found myself wishing there was more time to talk. He has a lot to say on all aspects of writing, and new writers would do well to listen.
Schow On Loving What You Do
PRG: When you do have a concept for piece, how do you get from the concept to the finished product?
DS: Its mostly a matter of that old work ethic of ass to chair, fingers to keys, don’t leave the room until it’s done. But, some things take time to percolate. I’ve had short stories that took ten years to write. So, you’re certainly not doing that for the money. Other short stories took a day to write, subsequently got optioned for a teleplay and made far more money than they should have.
I think I have an added advantage. A lot of people that I know despise what they do. They hate their jobs.� They’d really rather be doing something else. Even at its worst and most frustrating, I still love doing this. You have to maintain that affection for what you do.
Some people approach writing from the wrong end of the telescope. Maybe they got into it because some writing, like writing screenplays, can be lucrative, but there are a lot of people writing screenplays for movies nobody ever sees. Its a great way to turn a buck every once in a while, but after a while, you want to get something out there with your name on it that gives you a feeling that you have an audience -even if it might only be six people. Also, if you can diversify your writing, and a lot of people can’t, every additional thing you do stands a good chance of cross-pollinating to someone else.
This is a perfect example. We’re sitting in a comic shop and I have nothing to do with comic books. A lot of movies I’ve worked on have been adapted into comics.� I worked on some movies that originated in comics. So you start seeing all these threads of connective tissue. A comic adaptation might be someone’s way in to your body of work. Next thing you know, they’re reading a short story collection of yours. Which is really my stealth goal because I’m most happy with my short story collections.
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Schow On Taking a Road Trip with Bernie Wrightson, Tim Bradstreet, Steve Niles and Frank Dietz
DS: I forced all these guys to come here today. I was talking to Tom [owner of Fantasy Comics in Tucson] and got into one of those weird conversations where he just lit up in the middle and said “you know Bernie Wrightson? You know Tim Bradstreet?” I had all these guys cornered at dinner about a month ago and I said the only way this works is if its a road trip. We’re constantly inventing these circumstances where we have to go hang out on foreign ports. So, I cornered them and to my surprise everybody said yes. It was all for Tom, though. I’ve known him since he opened Fantasy Comics in Tucson. It’s cool to be able to do him a favor.
PRG: How was the drive?
DS: The drive was a walk in the park. Bernie did most of the driving and will probably drive most of the way back. He’s become our pilot. It’s like we’ve become the cast in a weird science fiction movie where its’ like Bernie is the pilot and Frank is the co-pilot. If it’s a weird science fiction movie, then all of us in the back of the van are looking at each other thinking “we’re the ones that are going to get killed”. We don’t even have names, just positions and jobs.
Schow On Working Alone vs. Working on Set
PRG: Do you approach screenplays and short fiction differently?
DS: It’s two sides to the same seesaw. You use some of the same skills on each one, but the difference that I’ve found is that sitting alone and working on prose, if it’s not written to order for an anthology and I have a relatively free hand, I’m the director of it and have complete control over it and nine times out of ten, no one is going to second guess what I send them. In film, everybody has input. So it depends on how social you want to be.
If you get tired of being alone you can go and work on a TV show or a movie and be surrounded by people. The cost is they all have input and you have to compromise every line of dialogue and action. But, sometimes it’s a lot of fun. I did Masters of Horror episodes for the first and second season and I got to work with Larry Cohen and Tom Holland. It was fabulous to watch Cohen work. It was like going to director school. The guy is independent film personified and I watched very carefully and was his shadow for the whole shoot. The show directed by Tom Holland was completely different from working with Cohen, but equally cool.
There’s part of that social aspect of working on a show or movie that’s very refreshing because you’re in a community of people who are on the same page as you. Everyone is there for the purpose of making that movie. It’s lots of fun, but it’s equally fun to be by yourself and make your characters do things just because you can. I ruthlessly manipulate my characters. And the people around me as well.
Schow On Writing Environment
PRG: I have a very specific type of environment I have to write in or I have a very hard time working. Is that something you have, and if you do, what is it like?
DS: A friend of mine walked into my office and said “your office is exactly what your apartment was like a decade ago.” In the office, I’m able to have 360 degrees of shelves that go all the way to the ceiling and they are packed with books and little monsters and bookends and stuff. The desk sits in the middle of the room like that. It makes it a comforting environment to work in. If I hate my working environment there’s no place else for me to go.
It’s gradually become my entire house, ever since a six foot tall fiberglass statue of the Creature of the Black Lagoon showed up in my foyer as a gift from a friend. The office that was originally the one bedroom apartment has spilled out into like fifteen rooms, but its still organized. It’s not like the “team bedroom” organizational aspect; I just have that librarian gene that makes me alphabetize and put things of the same size on the same shelf.
Schow On Being Remembered
DS: That’s a tough one. If you work in- I don’t want to be pretentious by saying “artistic pursuits” – but, if you work in any craft like this, you really want to feel like you connected on some level with some audience. People have walked up to me today with copies of books I wrote twenty years ago that, for whatever reason, had some kind of lasting value to them.
The tragedy of doing this is that you don’t get to pick the stuff that you’re remembered for. Other people get to pick it. When we were making a Chainsaw sequel fifteen or sixteen years ago, we thought it was going south on us. Ten years later, some guy walks up and said he really like it. I can’t tell him he’s wrong.
I was fortunate enough to be a part of The Crow, which I’m proud of for many interlocking reasons. One of which is because a very high percentage of what we worked on made it to the screen and that’s not normal in the film industry. I’m equally proud of my novels although fewer people have heard of them. Although a guy came up today asking if there was a German translation of my second novel (there is, they just did a third printing in Germany). I couldn’t actually pick because that’s like choosing among your kids for your favorite. And these books are my kids.
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Lisa Fary's earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She's angry that it's 2011 and she still doesn't have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram. 
