0:00:10 - Michael David Wilson
Welcome to the This Is Horror podcast. I'm your host, Michael Wilson, and today we're going to be reconvening with Josh Malerman for part three of our podcast interview. If you want to listen to part one and part two, then you can check out episode 35, where Josh Malerman talks about Bird Box, the horror label and overnight success, and for part two, you can listen to episode 37, where Josh Malerman talks about the film adaptation of Bird Box, where we actually envision what an ideal Bird Box adaptation would look like. That was a really fascinating discussion, and also story ideas and writers that Josh finds intimidating. Each episode works great as a standalone episode, so even if you haven't listened to them, then I really think you're going to get an awful lot out of today's episode. So, with that said, let's jump straight in to part three of our interview with Josh Malerman, and now for our horror interview.

0:01:34 - Dan Howarth
This comes back to something me and Michael were talking about. What story was it? We were talking about yesterday, michael Texting About a very simple story, but the way it was told, can you remember?

0:01:47 - Michael David Wilson
I think you're referring to when was? Wasn't this when we were talking about Ghastle and Yule?

0:01:47 - Dan Howarth
I think maybe it was actually and we were saying that it was more that the way in which it was told and what it and the way it was delivered was what really made it. Because if you look on the surface of Ghastle and Yule okay, maybe it's not really that original and the conclusion that you know both of the filmmakers come to is kind of what you would expect to happen if you were to take it to its natural conclusion. But it's the way that it's put together, the way that it's written, the way that Josh obviously is very much in love with the genre and has that expert knowledge, is very much in love with the genre and has that expert knowledge that takes it from being what, in lesser hands, could have been a kind of average unspectacular story to something quite remarkable yeah, exactly, I mean, the comparison I came up with was mr mer Mercedes, in that you know, that's a story that you've probably heard before by other writers, but Stephen King elevates it to something more than the sum of its parts through his telling.

0:03:13 - Dan Howarth
You know, all three of us could sit down and try and write the same story and it will come out totally different. You know it's, it's what we were saying is. You know, a lot of the time, a story and its successfulness or its success even if I'll stop making up my own words, uh, it's, it's down to the telling. You know, it's like the proof of the pudding is in eating. The craft of a story is in the telling and you know, Ghastle and Yule, as it turns out, is the perfect example of that.

0:03:40 - Josh Malerman

When I was working on Ghastle and Yule , I was worried, because when it starts obviously the lines are blurred between the movies. I was like, oh, like you said, that's the natural place for that story to go. And I was like, oh man, should I think of something different?

0:04:01 - Josh Malerman
or whatever. And then I was like no, no, no, it's fine, it's fine, just let it go there, let it go there, let it go there.

0:04:06 - Josh Malerman
And yeah, maybe if some lightning bolt idea had occurred or something, it would have gone somewhere else, but I did. I was a little worried about that while I was working on it, and then afterwards, especially recently, when I read it in the UK paperback, I was like no, no, no, yeah, this is fine, this is great, let's move on. So it's weird, though you brought up something that I had thought of before.

0:04:30 - Michael David Wilson
And have you had much response to Ghastle and Yule so far?

0:04:39 - Josh Malerman
Some. Obviously not like Bird Box, but some, you know, like people writing me online and it seems more like horror circle people versus like just any reader kind of thing.

Michael David Wilson
Yeah it's very much the horror readers horror story.

0:05:00 - Josh Malerman
Yeah, yeah, like my dad would not understand that story.

0:05:05 - Josh Malerman
It's almost. It's almost a bit like an in-joke, isn't it the story? Yeah?

0:05:10 - Josh Malerman
In a way you know, it's kind of horror genre's background knowledge.

0:05:14 - Josh Malerman
That adds another level to the story.

0:05:17 - Josh Malerman
You know, one of my favorite styles of book is like the nonfiction horror cinema history book. You know.

0:05:25 - Josh Malerman
Oh fuck, yeah, I love that kind of stuff, that guy.

0:05:27 - Josh Malerman
Kim Newman. And there's that guy I can't remember his name right now Brian. Oh man, he's great. Anyway, yeah, it's those kind of books, man, I can devour those books. The history of Italian cinema, you know, the history of Hammer, you know man, and you're just reading every single entry. It could be like the worst movie ever and it sounds so interesting, you know.

0:05:51 - Dan Howarth
Yeah, definitely. No, no Um if you read um, there's one by a guy called Jason Zimmerman. I don't know.

0:05:57 - Josh Malerman
Oh yeah, wait, wait, that's shock value.

0:06:01 - Josh Malerman
That's the one, yeah.

0:06:02 - Josh Malerman
Yeah, it's so good. And I bought that. I bought an extra copy of that for um my like the editor's assistant. When I was out in um new york to meet the editor at harvard collins, I gave her assistant, uh, shock value, another great one I can't remember his name. Real terror is the name of that one, that one's really good. And then if you start to go, there's like a press called, I think, mcfarland or something. You guys know that one, you know that publishing house McFarland.

0:06:33 - Michael David Wilson
You know the name sounds familiar, but I can't remember what they put out.

0:06:39 - Josh Malerman
You will be overwhelmed if you go to their website, because there's literally like a thousand books and they're all like the most like. It's all like minutiae subjects, right. So I have a book on the history of television horror hosts, right, for example. So if you start to like travel down that wormhole, you know be movies made between 1962 and 65. Made between 1962 and 65, you know it's really really exciting stuff and you'll definitely find a. Uh, you're gonna be overwhelmed. you're gonna find like 30 books that you want to read about

0:07:12 - Michael David Wilson
it's the kind of thing that's really cool for us as horror fans. But from from a business point of view, I'm thinking man, how do they market and then make the money to be able to put out? Yeah, I don't know that specific and I know justify it from a commercial point of view

- Josh Malerman
you almost imagine them like getting the order and then being like okay, we need to print up a another copy of Horror Host.

- Michael Wilson
I mean of course with with horror and with publishing generally. You don't really go in into it for the money anyway, if you do, then you're being misguided. There are other jobs that you can make far more money in. Just go into the stock market or finance. But you know, then you can't really justify locking yourself in your apartment with birds flying about and navigating around in a blindfold So swings and roundabouts, really,

0:08:24 - Josh Malerman
hey you know, in the book I'm working on now there's, there's I I don't want to say anymore, I shouldn't even brought it up, but there's strange elements like that too that include, like a very strange sound that's going on um and uh, and I was thinking for the next like, for the next like readings, you know to, maybe it would be amazing to have some sort of way where each person at the book reading had like their own pair of headphones and then we would be able to like, raise and lower, like to mix like sounds and their headphones while the reading was going on. You know what I mean. Something like that.

0:09:05 - Michael David Wilson
Yeah, I mean any anything where you can kind of mess around with the senses, like we said about altering the saturation in a cinematic version of bird box. I mean equally messing with the sound levels a little bit. Or, of course, now you've got me thinking—-this would be quite difficult to implement—-but if you could somehow put it together so that you're messing with the sound levels but ßit's slightly different for everyone. So someone's looking at his friend, thinking what the hell is happening now, and his friend's like, well, this is silence, what's going on like.

I guess it's a bit like those weird silent discos, isn't it, where you put on a pair of headphones and you decide what room you're going to to tune into and you've got different people dancing to different things.

0:10:07 - Josh Malerman
I love that idea, yeah, and like that. Oh man, that'd be like. You know, the one of one of the one of the things I think I failed at with this whole blindfold in the audience is that we haven't like, um, you know, I should have a friend going around like tapping people or something.

0:10:23 - Josh Malerman
You know, I don't want to say touching, that's not I should have my friends touching the audience yeah, but um, yeah, like I almost feel like I've dropped the ball in that way. If I was sitting there and reading blindfolded and a scary story and music and someone grabbed my arm, I'd probably scream

- Dan Howarth
It sounds to me, Josh, that you kind of need to, you know, make your fortune and then invest in some sort of fucked up weird cinema or theater where you can just have people in and just screw with them, you know, for the entire time in some sort of Bird Box related theme park attraction it'd be pretty awesome.

0:10:59 - Josh Malerman
We have known each other for, I think, under two hours and you just verbalized my like lifelong fantasy, which is to run a horror theater. Um, I mean, I, I talked to Allison about this all the time, about like man. I just, you know, once we get enough money, or if we get enough money, let's open a horror theater you know where, where it's really like plays and performances that are all all scary. You know, yeah, you just, you just pretty much nailed it right there.

- Dan Howarth
I look forward to being able to visit it in the future

0:11:31 - Michael David Wilson
Soyou could have the theatrical element, and then you could have a cinema component where you're screening classic horror films. But then, as Dan said, if you're messing with the audience's expectations, the kind of niche and the selling point here would be they never know when you're going to have distorted the sound a little bit or messed up the image. So it's like you go into that cinema.

Let's say you're seeing The Shining, but you're going to see it in a way that you've never seen The Shining before. I don't know, if like I'm entering an area where there are legal kind of issues and people aren't gonna be happy with you fucking their films, but I guess then it kind of turns into a little society like Fight Club and you can't really talk about it and you pay your fee. I think we're on to something. I just wanted to jump back to something you said earlier, when we were talking about writers that intimidate you you said that Stephen King had said that his last three dark tower books were essentially rough drafts. I wondered if you remembered where you heard that and if you could provide some more context to it.

0:13:18 - Josh Malerman
I just read it within the last month. you know he had that interview, I think in Rolling Stone, but I don't think it was that. God man, where was that? I'll find it for you where he yeah, he wrote in this interview that I read he said that those were essentially like rough drafts with going over and like fixing, you know, like the spelling or whatever. But I don't think that those were, I don't think that those were, you know, thorough rewrite kind of situations. I think that that's. I think he just got those out there and I think that it's obvious too that he had a sort of desire to get them out as quickly as possible. You know, years went by before those volumes. And then he had that accident that we all know about and he talks about how fans were writing him letters like you have to finish the Dark Tower, you have to finish this before you have another accident, or who knows right. And it almost seemed like he felt like an obligation to get those done or something and get them out there.

And all of a sudden there's three like BAM! 700-page books all out in a couple years' time, which I mean that's not new for him. But yeah, like a quick return and sort of a quick exit, you know. So it would make sense. It would make sense that those were something close to rough drafts, but I'll find where it was. I don't remember it was...

I don't think it was a rolling stone article and I don't think it was a video I, I think it was something I read, that an interview with him, and I just—I follow him on facebook and twitter, like you know, whatever, like a fan or whatever, and it might have been on one of those, I don't know.

0:15:04 - Michael David Wilson
I guess in the context of stephen king, the accident and, of course, fans demanding the dark tower books were written, you could cut him a little bit of slack for producing essentially what are rough drafts.

0:15:29 - Josh Malerman
I actually, and I think you probably can- see this already.

I'm a fan of that kind of, I guess, behavior, that sort of procedure. I don't know. For me, the most important thing about a work of art is undoubtedly the spirit involved. You know, I'll take spirit over skill any day. I'll take a strange, unique songwriter over, like a brilliant, you know classic singer, just like most of us would, of course, with most things right? Like you would rather hear a, a weird experimental guitar player than than you Stevie Ray Vaughan, right? So you know, to me the idea of, like, the rough draft being published, like I'm a fan of that kind of thing.

0:16:15 - Michael David Wilson
Along the same lines as talking about writers that have intimidated you. Which books have genuinely scared you?

0:16:31 - Josh Malerman
It's one of the things about being like a fan of the genre. I think that you almost have to like some or have to be, have to somehow have some sort of arrested development in terms of I'm still able to read a horror novel and be legitimately scared. I'm reading, Allison's Downstairs and I want to get up and go near her because, like, I'm a little freaked out to be alone. But then I'm also a little freaked out to even cross my room and go into the hall and go downstairs, right? And I'm like, obviously a grown man and I can. I still have those experiences.

When I watch scary movies, I cover my eyes at parts. Allison is teaching me that you should cover your ears because once you remove the sound from a scary movie, none of it's scary, and she's right. The first thing that comes to mind are all the ones when I was like 13, you know, 14, that really, really scared me. I think the first horror novel I read was the Face of Fear, Dean Koontz, but he wrote it under a pseudonym, it was like Brian Coffey or something, and I mean that really legitimately scared me. And then Skeleton Crew, Books of Blood, which masterpiece Clive Barker, that one really scared me.

I read a Ramsey Campbell book recently called Dhe Doll who Ate His Mother, and I didn't love the book. But there was a scene like in this basement with these like clay figures and this sort of cult thing that I was really freaked out by. And I mean again, this is I'm 39 years old, you know, and I'm like out by it. And I mean again, I'm 39 years old, you know, and I'm like nervous from it. So you know if I've read a thousand horror novels, then probably 500 of them like legitimately scared me, you know, or maybe even more.

0:18:44 - Dan Howarth
I was just going to say, if you want some validation, when my girlfriend was reading bird box, she woke me up at about four in the morning to tell me that she needed the toilet, but there was no curtain in there and it wasn't secure. So reading all these books is clearly um, you know, it's clearly found its way into your fiction as well. I uh, having to be in work the next day, I was less than impressed, it's fair to say.

0:19:08 - Josh Malerman
It brings up an interesting point like how do you know like what you're writing is scary? And then one, one way of maybe doing that is like you know, make sure that you're alone when you're writing, make sure I don't know scary music, just kind of be in a setting where you could get possibly scared. Lately I've been writing book two at a coffee shop, just because I don't know to get out of the house. But I worry sometimes, is this a controlled environment enough to know if this is scary? Well, I'll know either way in the rewrites. I know that the landmark scenes are definitely like uh, uh, have the potential to be scary. Maybe they already are, I don't know yet, but that that is.

You know, that's kind of it, man, if you get legitimately scared by a book and you're like 39 years old, like obviously hats off to the writer, right? I mean that that is a hard thing to pull off it's. It's like we were talking earlier. It's just as insane to imagine getting up in front of a room. All you have is a microphone and your job is to make the room laugh. That's insane, like the job of the stand-up comedian is wow. Does that sound scary to me, you know. Oh, brilliant, and like pressure cooked yeah.

I mean, you're literally like if you're not funny man, then to this room at least no one's going to laugh and you're just standing there making jokes. It's like oh shit. And then you have like 10 more jokes to make. It's like oh shit.

And so when you read a dude.

0:20:43 - Dan Howarth
I've got to be the best man at my friend's wedding in about six weeks. Oh God, so here wedding in about six weeks. So so now, yes, here we go. Thanks for that.
No, it's fine.
I'm going to sleep tonight thinking about this.

0:20:56 - Josh Malerman
That's funny, dan. I get so, so nervous for that stuff. But then you know what it's kind of like and you know what I'm about to say, that once you get started it's like, and you know. You know I mean no one, no one wants to see you fail. And even if you did quote unquote fail, nobody would they would you know your friend would think it was funny. You know what I mean. It's like it doesn't it's like a win-win.

- Michael David Wilson
so what morning rituals and daily routines do you have?

- Josh Malerman
You know, with Bird Box there was a real stringent one where I would like wake up at seven and I don't wake up that well, so I know that I need like an hour to just it's weird, it's almost like the darkest hour for me is that first hour where I really get like sort of like down on myself and I worry about, like my family and friends. It's almost like a bizarre like I don't want to say depressive, but it's almost like a really dark mindset for the first hour that I wake up and then it entirely clears up and then I become like the guy you're talking to right now. But that first stretch is always really hard. My mom tells me I've been like that since I was even like a little kid and so what I have been trying to do... well, what I did with Bird Box was wake up at 7 and by 8 I would get to writing.

And the reason I liked writing in the morning, it was almost like you know how you feel like oh, I don't have my full faculties yet or I'm not at my sharpest yet, but there was something I think good about that where it almost paced me, it almost forced me to move, in terms of the story, because one of the big things I always end up doing with rewrites is I'm like, oh man, I, this, this is moving too fast, or or it's too excitable or it doesn't have enough mood or something, but it seems like a real mood is easier to to to grab hold of, like early in the early.

It's like, no matter what you do, you're sort of in a fog, you know. And so with Bird Box I did that and with the book I'm working on now, that's pretty much what I've been doing, just different hours, waking up at like nine and get writing by like 10, that kind of thing. So I don't don't have any like super, you know... it's not like I go stand on the roof and you know it's not like I go stand on the roof and and you know, and pray to the Sun God and then get to work.

But there is a regularity with it that I think with writing a novel is probably necessary, in the same way that like a marathoner, you know, has to run every day you know, and if you want to get to that novel length story, you gotta you gotta kind of work every day at it, you know, and and I can imagine taking, like you, you gotta you gotta kind of work every day at it, you know, and, and I can imagine taking, you know, time off here and there, and but it's not just a matter of like the girth and the size of the of the story, it's also maintaining the enthusiasm for the original idea. And if you're anything like me, you're a different person year by year. You're already a different man than you were three years ago in many ways, and so I think it's somewhat important to get at least the rough draft of a book done within a couple months' time, that kind of thing. And the only way you're going to pull that off is with some regular everyday thing a routine, so I do have that.

But with Bird Box it was sort of a flawless routine, and with some of the other ones it's been like that too. But then you know there's somewhere it just can't be like that. You got to be here. You got to do that, you got to do this you know spoken for, and so this one's been a little bit of both the one I'm working on right now about half regular routine and then half, like you know, broken up.

0:24:52 - Michael David Wilson
Is there anything at all that you can tell us about the novel you're working on now, or are you kind of contracted to not say anything at all?

0:25:03 - Josh Malerman
No, I'm not, I'm not contracted. I can tell you that one thread of it is it's 1952, and members of the United States Army Band are sent into the jungle to sort of locate the source of a very strange sound. These are guys who hadn't really planned on being quote, unquote out in the field. Their job is to sort of entertain the troops. So if you can imagine these sort of well, musician foe soldiers out in the woods with with big 1950s recording gear, pointing at the deep, dark woods and trying to find out where the sound is coming from, then you, you have an early sort of a mood for at least one thread of of this book so far.

- Michael David Wilson
That sounds interesting and I'm certainly intrigued to find out more as and when it's available.

- Josh Malerman
Sweet, good and you know what that and I think you'll agree that sounds like another episode. It's like not that bird box definitely could not, or isn't you know, uh, an homage or a ripoff or anything like that. But there is something episodic about these there really are, and I enjoy that it almost. I guess something episodic about these there really are and I enjoy that it almost. I guess I'm the kind of guy that really believes in the canon overall, like, once all is said and done, you're going to have a whole tapestry of works of art and some will enhance others, some will. I don't think that anyone can really detract from others, but they all sort of add together to create a more like big, colorful picture.

As you can tell, I'm a big Woody Allen fan. I brought him up like three times and you know, yeah, does he have some lemons? Sure, you know. Do you love every Stephen King book? No, or every Guided by Voices album. But these are. And Hitchcock, same thing. These are all artists and Rod Serling, these are all artists that have so many installments in their canon that it becomes like, not only do you get the joy of like, oh, there's more, I can read more or watch more, or whatever, there's also this sense of like, this sort of? You know, this quilt, this giant like quilt of madness or quilt of. You know, this quilt, this giant like quilt of madness or quilt of. You know, colorful, kaleidoscopic sort of tapestry of all their works put together. And that that to me, you know, as a guy who has 20 books written, it almost feels strange to me that only bird box is out there.

0:27:43 - Michael David Wilson
Do you know what I mean, yeah, and I think this episodic, almost tapestry-like effect is one of the reasons I really like the TV series American Horror Story, because it's a completely different story every season, but then you've got common themes. You've of course, got almost the same cast for every series, and whilst they're completely different, there's something instantly familiar.

0:28:14 - Josh Malerman
Yeah, I only watched one episode of that show and I should watch more. Allison loved season one, but the point is I know what you're talking about in terms of its setup and how it's and how they're doing it. Yeah, absolutely, that's the same thing. It's like I don't know you know who seems like really good or was really obviously great at that was Kubrick. Where it's not so much genre hopping. It could be mistaken as genre hopping. Uh, what's his name is like that, uh, Tarantino, you know, you could be like oh, he's hopping from genre to genre. He's gonna do a kung fu and then a western and then this, you know, but it's not really to me, that's not really what's happening, as much as it is like serial installments of a career and I hope yeah, I hope to pull off the same thing, man.

0:29:11 - Michael David Wilson
Throughout the podcast, we've spoken a lot about the great things about writing, we've talked about some of the writers that inspire and intimidate, and we've spoken a lot about the positive aspects generally. But what I'm wondering is what do you find, in terms of writing and the creative process, to be the biggest challenges, and do you believe in writer's block, as it were, and if so, is that something you suffer from ever? Or are there any other things that are obstacles? Perhaps self-doubt? I mean, it sounds like in a lot of the books that you create, you, if you go through them quick enough, then you don't have room to self-doubt, because you've put them out and then you know you write it and it's like well, I've got the first draft nailed at this point, because I think I think probably the doubt creeps in at the early stages for a lot of writers. So perhaps the key is to nail that first draft as quickly as you can.

0:30:29 - Josh Malerman
Again I think that has to do with sort of that maintaining the enthusiasm for the original idea.

But I will say no, I do not suffer from writer's block. I never have, and I don't mind even saying it. I'm not worried about jinxing myself, even though I am sort of superstitious. At some point I made a decision that I don't believe that myself inspired is any better than myself "uninspired". Meaning you know, if I were to write every day for a month and star the days that I was inspired, go back and read that month's work, I don't think I'd be able to tell the difference. I really firmly believe that I would not be able to tell you which days I was like, oh, I was rolling on that day, you know or there was a star next to that one so I should have been rolling. I don't think it'll be any better, is what I'm saying. So what does that leave you with? Well, that leaves you with just write every day, then, because if you're, you know, if you believe that you're, as you're, always as good or not, you know, no matter how you're feeling about it well then, why not just write every day? And, as we know, you know a novel if you do a little bit every day. Let's say, you write 2000 words a day. You know, my gosh, two months you have like 70,000 words.

That that's you got something right there, you know, and that seems like a sort of you know, my dad is an accountant and I wonder sometimes if, like that sort of numbers side of things, that really logical side of things, is from him and it seems like an unartistic approach oh, just write 2,000 words a day and you'll have a novel. It's like paint by numbers. But that kind of philosophy really does work. For me, where I worry, there's people like oh, I don't feel inspired or that kind of thing. But part of "being inspired" is your writing.

So instead of sitting there and trying to imagine, you've got a man that gets out of work at five, he's walking, he goes to the bar in the corner and you know, and that's all you have. But you want to write that story. So I don't know what happens next. Well, I don't know what happens next. I don't know what happens next, so I'm never going to. I never wrote that idea about the man walking to the corner bar, right, but about the man walking to the corner bar, right. But if you start writing that story, well, now you have a description of the man. Now you have a description, probably of his workplace, probably the city he's in or something like it, as he's walking towards the bar and the type of bar he's going to. Maybe he thought of his family on the way. In other words, even just getting the man down the block can give you enough information and enough like fodder and enough energy to write probably the next, three, four chapters. And then, well, what happens in those chapters? That births more chapters and more chapters. So to me it is a matter of sit down, write it and it'll start to unfold on its own.

Now I have written myself into a corner before. I made it 45,000 words, into a rough draft in about 2008. This book called Marbles Made it 45,000 words. I just wrote myself into a corner. I couldn't get out of it. And six years later, in 2014, I rented an office in Michigan's Albert Peninsula and I wrote Marbles again from scratch and finished it. I sort of conquered that one moment where that everything I'm talking about right now kind of failed on me, you know. But, I still got through it, whatever.

But the point is like I don't know, I just have friends who are, or a specific friend maybe, who seems like he could be this brilliant writer, but he just gets very stuck on like like the actual, like series of events, character names, things like that, and I'm sort of like saying like, hey, use your own name, go on tangents. And if you write every day, like by the end of it, it may not be what you set out to write, but man, you're going to be excited and I definitely believe that I'd rather have a situation where the rough draft is done and I say, okay, I can fix this, versus the rough draft's not done and I don't know if it's ever going to be written at all.

0:35:06 - Michael David Wilson
I find it remarkable how, when you're talking about writing advice, so often you have to repeat just write. You know formula for being a writer right, yes, right, every day. That's it and you know it. It's almost unique to to writing. You wouldn't have a plumber or a lawyer, you know wonder like, oh, what on earth should I do? It's like you do. What did it? You know you, you kind of become what you decide to do. So if you say you're a writer, then write every day. Okay, now you are a writer. If you say you're a writer and you're not writing every day, then what you're saying and your actions aren't really aligning.

0:36:01 - Josh Malerman
I do think that if you want to be an artist, you have to finish works of art, you know, and so it's not just a matter of you know, I write every day, which, yeah, you know, then that's amazing, you know. But I do think there needs to be one step further than that, which is like I actually need to finish stories and finish—-iff you're writing novels, you need to finish novels--that kind of thing. And once that happens, one time, just one time, that happens, then yes, yep, you're there, you're an artist, you're like, you're there, now let's do another one.

0:36:36 - Michael David Wilson
As I said before, so many people do say and I I would certainly agree with this with my own writing that it's that first draft that is the toughest. So just power through. And also I mean, for goodness sake, Ernest Hemingway said, the first draft of anything is shit.

I think the problem is that probably where people fall short and perhaps your friend you were mentioning, too, is that you're almost intellectualizing the process or thinking about it at too deep a level at the early stages. That's what the redraft is for, that's what the edit is for, and after that that is what your literary agent and your editor is for. Just write the story. Then you can redraft it and worry about the technicalities at that point but if you don't get a first draft done and you never finish your work, then there's no point worrying about these technicalities anyway, because you don't finish things. So what's the point?

0:37:53 - Josh Malerman
That's exactly how I feel like it's almost like, in a sense, because we've all had that moment where a story sort of slipped away or whatever, and it's like, well, man, it's almost embarrassing that I'm worried about the story that doesn't exist now. It's not real man, until I finish it or something I don't know. I understand that it's hard, definitely. I understand that it takes work, but I sometimes wonder if it's a matter of you know how some people are like, they hear a voice singing in the radio and they it's almost like they don't think it's human, they think it's like some other kind of person that can do that kind of thing.

And I wonder if some people think that way about writing a book. You know like, oh, I couldn't possibly do that. Well, yeah, you actually could if you just write every day and bring it to a sort of an end and slap a title on it, then you wrote a book. You know what I mean. And I think that there's a sense of like, wait, that's not a book. What do you mean? You know, no, that that's a book now. Now that you have it, now, let's start working on it.

0:39:01 - Michael David Wilson
Yeah, exactly no, I think that's great advice. So let's just finish, then, with one fiction recommendation and one non-fiction recommendation. They don't have to be genre, just anything that has had an impact on your life, maybe something that you would gift to another writer.

0:39:23 - Josh Malerman
Okay, let me think for one second. I don't know if it's considered non-fiction, but you ever read that fella. What's his name? Jon Krakauer or something like that. You ever read him? He did Into the Wild.

0:39:36 - Michael David Wilson
I haven't read it no.

0:39:38 - Josh Malerman
Okay, he wrote a book called Under the Banner of Heaven.

0:39:42 - Michael David Wilson
Okay.

0:39:43 - Josh Malerman
And I love it because it's sort of like Norman Mailer's executioner song, in that it's like kind of a true crime, I guess, but Under the Banner of Heaven. What it is is that these two sort of Mormon extrem like extremists murder someone, right, okay, and then the. Then there's more or less like saying that, like our God told us to. So then it's like the. The book becomes a case of like how far is, how far can freedom of religion go? Right, it's really really something else, man, and it's one of those nonfiction books that I don't want to say read like a novel, because that always that I sort of steal something from it. It's just as exciting. You know, it's like, have you? I'm sure you've noticed how like. When I was a kid, the documentary was the most boring like you know, thing you can imagine. It was like oh man, we're going to watch a movie about like trees, you know. And now the documentary is like oh, my.

God, it's so exciting that we actually kind of don't believe a lot of them.

You know we're like suspicious and they're so good. I mean I think a lot of nonfiction books are the same way that like smaller, sort of more like minutiae events or a court case, or you know a man who wants to make the perfect piece of sushi. You know, it's like these tiny little things are like very, you know, very interesting if they're like told the right way and there was some sort of breakthrough in that way. So, yeah, I would say loved Under The Banner of Heaven. And then, and for the fiction, I'm going to say The End In All Beginnings.

Man, I mean, I would hand that to any horror, new horror fan or non-horror fan and be like, hey, this book, like we were talking, this will bring our conversation full circle. This book may help expand your idea of what horror is. And it's not all the same sort of things that you think, it's not all the things that you think of when you think of horror. It's more expansive, it's wider, it's rich as hell and the voice is 100 percent original. So I would, yeah, right now, if I met somebody on the street, I'd be like, hey, the end and all beginnings, check that one out okay.

0:42:08 - Michael David Wilson
Well, thank you very much. So that's under the banner of heaven and the end in all beginnings. So it is, you know. Thank you for joining us and for taking so much time out to talk with us about Bird Box and about Ghastle and Yule and just about the creative process generally. I definitely think this is an episode that our listeners are going to get so much out of. And it's just been a fascinating discussion for me and, yeah, I've really enjoyed spending some time with you.

0:42:48 - Josh Malerman
Hey, same here, same to you and dan. That was, that was awesome.

- Dan Howarth
I just wanted to say, Josh, thanks for taking the time to come on, um, we've really enjoyed everything we've read from you, um, and it's been great talking to you today.

0:42:58 - Josh Malerman
Hey, thanks to you, too. This has been amazing. We've been going for over, and it's been great talking to you today. Hey, thanks to you too, this has been amazing. We've been going for over three hours. This is kind of amazing actually.

0:43:05 - Dan Howarth
Yeah, it's been brilliant.

0:43:12 - Michael David Wilson
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