Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
It’s a great book about being a novelist. It’s one of the few works of fiction that actually explains how you write a novel but also what this strange disjuncture is between what goes on in your head when you write something and what a reader might take away from what you have written. You might actually be irrelevant as a writer to the reader. What they are interested in is the work.
He very much inspired a wave of writers like your next choice, Stephen King.
Absolutely. It’s no coincidence that his books are the ones that are being turned into films. Every couple of years someone makes a film of one of his novels and he is still alive and still writing.
And this is very much a theme with the books you have chosen – many of them have been made into films.
I suppose so. But then again in this particular field the good stuff is recycled endlessly. It may well be that there aren’t that many stories that you can do as movies. All these work. And most of them have actually been made into films several times. I think Dracula and Jekyll and Hyde may even hold some kind of record for the number of times they have been made into films.
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Kim Newman is an expert on horror and sci-fi cinema and a regular contributing editor to Sight and Sound and Empire magazines. He has published over 20 novels, plus many short stories and non-fiction works, and has won awards including International Horror Guild Award for Coppola’s Dracula and the British Fantasy Society Award for Where the Bodies are Buried. His work is often irreverently referential and he says that his novel Anno Dracula is literally a vampire book because it takes from other books and bleeds them dry.
