by Stephen Graham Jones

Everybody loves to badtalk the adverb, and I’ll usually jump right on that bandwagon. Except then, right in the process of jumping, I’ll realize I’m gleefully jumping, or blindly jumping, or some kind of –ly jumping — which is to say I hit a wall in my prose that I can only get over with that lolly-lolly adverb, as packing all the color into the verb’s going to draw just stupid amounts of attention to that particular sentence, when, really, it’s just one of those get-me-to-the-next-room sentences, no need for the spotlight, thanks.

by Chuck Palahniuk

Included with Advanced Readers Copies
Sent out with the UK edition of 'Haunted'

No one fainted the first time I read the short story, 'Guts'. This was on a Tuesday night, in the writers workshop where my friends and I have shared our work since 1991. Each week, I would read another of the short stories I planned to include in a novel to be called Haunted. My goal was to create horror around very ordinary things: carrots, candles, swimming pools. Microwave popcorn. Bowling balls.

No one fainted, in fact my friends laughed. At moments, the room had the silence of total shocked attention. No one scribbled helpful notes in the margin of their copy. No one reached for their glass of wine.

This was better than the Tuesday before, when my story called 'Exodus' sent a friend into my bathroom where she cried behind the locked door for the rest of the evening. Later, her therapist would ask for a copy of the story to help with her psychoanalysis.

by Stephen Graham Jones

The biggest lie I tell myself about revising is that I do it as I go. You've heard this, right? I don't think I'm coming up with anything new here, anyway. And, it's a seductive thing to believe-to want to believe, at least. And the finished products even tend to support it. Take a novel, say, and note how that first paragraph, that first scene, maybe even that first chapter, it sings, it gleams, it sets a standard which, if the rest of the novel could rise to meet it, or just keep up, man, that book, it would be a bulletproof thing. But nearly every time, that level of quality, that shine, that attention to words or loyalty to story or clarity of vision or whatever, it slackens and wobbles and wanes, until you've got a squid-ending: a big cloud of ink standing in for what might have been, what the writer was almost able to grab, hold out for you to see.

by Chuck Palahniuk

Twenty years ago, a friend and I walked around downtown Portland at Christmas. The big department stores: Meier and Frank… Fredrick and Nelson… Nordstroms… their big display windows each held a simple, pretty scene: a mannequin wearing clothes or a perfume bottle sitting in fake snow. But the windows at the J.J. Newberry's store, damn, they were crammed with dolls and tinsel and spatulas and screwdriver sets and pillows, vacuum cleaners, plastic hangers, gerbils, silk flowers, candy - you get the point. Each of the hundreds of different objects was priced with a faded circle of red cardboard. And walking past, my friend, Laurie, took a long look and said, "Their window-dressing philosophy must be: 'If the window doesn't look quite right - put more in'."

by Max Barry

"All first drafts are shit," according to Ernest Hemingway, and who would argue with someone who checks out by eating a shotgun? No, no, Ern was on to something here: when you finally crest that great mountain and stare "THE END" full in the face-when you, somehow, incredibly, have managed to complete a novel-length work-then you're about half-way home.

Unless you're like me, in which case you have further to go. Much further.

Maybe the idea of writing 90,000 words that bear some kind of relation to one another is daunting enough for you right now, and if so you don't want to read any further. It's best not to know what awaits. Better to think that once your word count (checked every ten minutes, and God damn it rises slowly some days) is high enough, it's all over. You've written a novel! Yep, if that's you, you definitely don't want to hear this.

by Stephen Graham Jones

Or, really, what is 'genre' in the first place, right? Without resorting to some dictionary of literary terms, what genre fiction is to me is a mode of storytelling which relies on convention to economize itself for mass consumption. What convention does is streamline the story; what 'genre' does is indicate to the potential consumer that this story they've just ferreted up from some random shelf, it's going to be somewhat like the last story they read in that genre. Which is comforting; lots of readers won't go into a book blind.

Defining genre like this, too, you can see that there's really no such thing as 'non-genre' fiction. Even the so-called literary stuff, it's still crutching along on conventions pioneered years ago in other 'literary' stories.

I'm not here to talk genre theory, though, or to chip away at the bastions of the academic tower, or to lose myself tirading against the absence of anything 'entertaining' anymore in what we're told is high-caliber fiction.