Before you go…
by morgan on Oct.23, 2009, under James Enge and Matthew Sturges
James, Matt and Bill,
You’ve spoken a lot about influences. What might developing writers find to be most influential in your own new books? Can you speak to how or why Midwinter, This Crooked Way and Peter & Max might prove influential on impressionable young minds?
Related posts:
- Next guests & IO9 Book Club Our next guests at Babel Clash are Matthew Sturges and James Enge. Matthew is the author of the novel Midwinter and is also the writer for comic and graphic novel series House of Mystery and co-writer of Jack of Fables. James is the author of Blood of Ambrose, and its...
- Thank you, and our next guest is… Thank you to Bill, James and Matt. It’s been a great conversation. Peter & Max didn’t get its fair share of time as a featured title, so I want to take a moment to recommend it. If you’re a fan of Fables, then you’ll love Peter & Max. That’s a...
- Our surprise guest I’m pleased to announce and welcome our third guest. Bill Willingham, writer of Fables and author of new novel Peter & Max, joins James and Matt. Bill, thank you for joining us! ...
- Telling the Tale Bill’s and Matt’s posts about reading really struck home for me. I like to think of stories (anyone’s stories) as a script for a performance. And I’ve learned the most about storytelling by telling stories (without any script) to live audiences, starting with my kids. A live audience has a...
- Influences and categories James and Matt, For aspiring fantasy writers out there, would you recommend that they first read broadly within the fantasy category to become an expert, or would you recommend reading the best writers from a diverse mix of genres? ...
October 26th, 2009 on 1:10 am
This is a good question, and I’ve delayed answering for so long primarily because it’s hard to know what will grab people about a book, particularly one’s own.
One thing might be this: every story is in a tradition, and This Crooked Way—-pretty obviously in some ways, more sneakily in others—-weaves together parts of older storytelling traditions. I’d hope it would encourage people to go back and seek out those older stories. (Starting with Blood of Ambrose of course!)
One of the things that people really like or really hate about my fiction is the mix of humorous and horrific elements. It’s not exactly a choice; I can’t seem to help it. It seems to me that these things come from the same dark place. But if readers hate this stuff it will probably influence them to buy someone else’s books. If they like it, it might start them thinking about the links between humor and horror… and maybe someday they can explain to me what’s going on in these stories.